Measuring satisfaction at Bloom and Wild
In the early 2000s, the Management Consultancy company Bain & Co. came up with a scientific method of measuring customer satisfaction. They called it Net Promoter Score. It works like this: you ask a set of customers to score their satisfaction out of 10. All scores of 9 and 10 are classed as Promoters, scores of 6 and under are Detractors and anything else is deemed Passive. Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors. The maximum score is 1 (or 100%) with a score close to or below 0 indicating low satisfaction levels.
While not without its critics and cynics, NPS has been widely adopted. This is especially true at Bain & Co. where they’ve used it across multiple industries and have shown that a high NPS directly correlates with higher revenue growth.
Bain and Co. is also where Aron Gelbard went to work once he finished his degree and MBA. Aron has the kind of academic background that makes him very employable amongst the top consultancy firms. What made Aron different from most of his peers was his entrepreneurial heritage and a burning desire to make other people happy.
So when, a couple of years into his stint with Bain, he uncovered a massive industry with a consistently low level of customer satisfaction (measured by NPS of course), opportunity beckoned. Aron realised this was his chance to follow in the footsteps of his two grandfathers and his father, who had each previously set up their own very successful businesses - one side of the family in chocolate, and the other in plastic recycling.
The industry in question was Flowers and Floristry. The market was huge, but there was dissatisfaction from multiple angles: selection, shelf life, delivery issues, and substituted products, to name a few. The industry was trying to react, but this resulted in higher costs, more waste, and more complexity to overcome these hurdles.
Aron Gelbard, CEO & co-founder of Bloom & Wild
I knew very little about this industry before I met Aron, but it turned out there was no better person to talk me through it. I was very grateful when he agreed to share his approach to dealing with the pain points that helped build his business.
Aron explained “the industry had been running this relay model, which relied on lots of smaller florists that had to rely on these long supply chains and were also expected to stock hundreds of types of flowers. As well as resulting in poor product quality, flowers had also become very expensive due to the middlemen needed to put the products and customers together.”
Price was the main reason people stopped buying flowers from their local florist and instead started picking them up from the supermarket. At the supermarket, costs may have been lower, but selection and quality were still a problem.
This left the whole industry right for disruption and was why, in 2013, Aron left his well-paid consultancy job and co-founded Bloom & Wild, the DTC flower business.
Along with consolidating supply and demand, Aron also saw DTC as a fantastic way to fix the delivery issues he’d identified. Traditionally bouquets were big, bulky and delicate. This generally meant they had to be hand-delivered directly to the recipient, preferably upright and in water. Aron and his team soon found a way around this.
Aron explained, “The perception was that flowers always needed to be kept hydrated, but we learned the flowers were not hydrated further back in the supply chain. If this was the case, we started to question whether having flowers in water was due to customer expectation versus what actually needs to happen”.
Aron worked out you could deliver non-hydrated flowers that were still in bud, in a cardboard box, and they’d still have a long shelf life. Thus the Letterbox Bouquet was born.
Flowers through your letterbox. Who knew?
This idea was novel, and of course, Aron initially feared that customers would not like it. He needn’t have worried. “It was a radical idea, and we were fortunate that it was even more popular than we expected”. As well as not worrying about whether the recipient was going to be home when the flowers were delivered, the addition of hints and tips in the form of a style guide, meant they could be arranged easily too, which was an added bonus.
According to Aron, it was the introduction of the letterbox flower concept that grew the business. He explained, “We were very differentiated, and the novelty appealed to people. We also really cared about the things that our customers desired, which generated good review scores and advocacy”. The demand and positive feedback were the fuel that attracted both customers and investors, meaning today the business has over 100 employees and more than 2 million customers, to whom they send hundreds of thousands of bouquets each year.
Overall, the business has been an enormous success. However, not all the initial assumptions Aron and his team made proved to be correct. Initially, they thought they would be a flower subscription business when, in fact, the core customer need was gifting. The technology requirements also turned out to be way more significant and complex than initially imagined.
“The cost of building the technology needed was much higher than expected. We tried to outsource a lot of the tech build, but this turned out to be expensive and inefficient. In the end, we raised some more cash and invested in an in-house team.” This investment has since paid back, and Bloom & Wild has grown from a relatively green business when it came to tech, to one that’s recognised as experts in technology. They even have a tech blog on their website, which both helps with recruitment, knowledge, ideas and is a free resource for insight and inspiration for the whole DTC community.
The move to gifting rather than subscription was not directly as costly, but it did bring its own set of challenges. If not subscription, they had to look to other ways to generate repeat purchase. The first trick was to deliver high customer satisfaction; without this, no amount of marketing would motivate customers to buy again. Then to create repeat sales, Bloom & Wild would rely heavily on emailing their customers. The purpose of these emails would be to primarily remind them how lovely it is to receive a bunch of flowers as a gift. There were even handy tools on their website, including setting reminders for birthdays, for example. Bingo.
Of course, they also send out more general emails, especially before occasions like Mother’s Day. While this is a very useful nudge to many customers, mentions of specific celebrations can also pose as a painful reminder to some. This undesirable consequence of email marketing led to a new initiative, pioneered by Bloom & Wild, called the “Thoughtful Marketing Movement”. The general idea is to give your customers the ability to easily opt-out of emails tailored for events such as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, and to do so forever.
Their customers appreciated the concept. The feedback was so positive, Bloom & Wild were inspired to share their experience and process with other brands, and encouraged them to do the same. In less than a year, brands and organisations including Paperchase, The Telegraph, Marie Curie, Wagamama, Naked Wines, and many more were active participants in the movement.
The ability to opt-out of specific campaigns has gained Bloom & Wild even more fans
The Thoughtful Marketing Movement, the tech blog and the core activity of great flowers through the letterbox are examples of a ruthless desire to make people that bit happier than before they had discovered Bloom & Wild.
NPS is maybe just a number, but for Aron and his team, it measures happiness. When you have a deep-rooted desire to please people, it is a number which motivates. The brains at Bain & Co. will also remind us that getting NPS right is also good for business. Whatever the motivation, the result is a growing bunch of happy customers. Everyone should be satisfied with that.