Brooklinen, home of “The Internet’s Favorite Sheets,” is one of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer startups in the United States. Founded on the philosophy that everyone deserves simple, beautiful home essentials, Brooklinen bypasses traditional bedding industry middlemen such as wholesalers and designer licensing to offer luxury sheets and home goods at a reasonable price tag. Expanding beyond the bedroom in 2018, Brooklinen has introduced bath goods, loungewear, accessories, and more, as well as opening its first store in early 2020, with plans to expand throughout the U.S. and internationally. Along with its innovative sourcing and supply chain model and high-quality products, Brooklinen’s brand identity hinges on a curated customer experience and personal service.
Despite Brooklinen’s emphasis on superior service, there was a gap in the customer experience: Once a tracking number was generated for shipment post-purchase, customers interacted directly with the carrier, not Brooklinen, to receive delivery updates. Email links took customers to the carrier’s generic delivery status page, where they were advised to contact the carrier with any problems or delays.
Brooklinen didn’t know whether orders resulted in successful, timely deliveries – and given that more than two-thirds of customers won’t return to brands after a poor shipping experience, that lack of visibility meant the company was flying blind for a crucial portion of the customer journey. If customers made the effort to contact Brooklinen with shipping feedback or complaints, following up required time-consuming manual research.
The lack of visibility also hindered Brooklinen’s ability to track the effectiveness of its fulfillment operations. The company relied on resource-intensive processes to retrieve shipment data from its two nationwide carriers, then knit the information together by hand to create a comprehensive report.
There was no way to derive timely insights or real-time status updates, or to head off problems that might be developing in the delivery ecosystem due to bad weather or other issues. During the 2019 holiday season, Brooklinen’s Customer Care team were reactive to customer inquiries amidst winter storms in the Northeast and record-high volume, logging thousands of staff hours in the process. After that harrowing experience, Brooklinen realized it needed to own the end-to-end customer experience.
“We pride ourselves on keeping our ear to the ground and really listening to what our customers are looking for and what they want. We’re here for our customers and want to make their lives more comfortable. With project44, we’ve gained vital insight into post-purchase engagement and behaviors, including what customers are looking for in terms of whether we’re over-communicating or not communicating enough, and we’ve been able to develop an effective last-mile strategy that we never had before.”
— Lindsay Keys, Senior Manager, Logistics | Brooklinen
In 2018 Brooklinen turned to Delivery Experience Management (DEM) leader project44 as a solution partner, and implemented the Engage and Recover products. Convey’s DEM platform integrated easily with Brooklinen’s existing systems, quickly giving them better visibility into the last-mile delivery customer experience.
Through the Engage product, Brooklinen’s team now uses a single dashboard to monitor the company’s delivery network, with information updated automatically in real-time. The reduction in manual labor to extract information gives the Brooklinen team more resources to devote to its customer relationships, rather than wrestling with back-end systems and spreadsheets.
The information gathered and presented by project44's platform feeds reporting that gives Brooklinen a new level of insight and accountability for deliveries. The team regularly obtains data on transit times and carrier performance, and analyzes the information to identify regional slowdowns and make decisions about alternative routing; they also track whether carriers are delivering up to the standards promised in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Brooklinen is able to track the post-order experience from carrier pick up at the warehouse through to delivery.
This heightened visibility also benefits customers, who are able to sign up for status alerts and notifications via mobile devices as well as receive email updates. Additionally, thanks to the exceptional handling capabilities of project44's Recover module, Brooklinen can proactively contact customers when orders are delayed or go astray. Using Convey’s new Bulk Alerts feature, Brooklinen can group customers at risk of delays and send a templated message to them all in one fell swoop, rather than one by one. The ability to deliver accurate delivery information helps streamline customer service case management, resulting in cost savings.
Brooklinen’s new capabilities were put to the test during the 2020 holiday season. Already facing delivery challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had to contend with a surge of seasonal orders that would have overwhelmed the Customer Care team with manual work prior to implementing project44's solution. Instead, thanks to proactive monitoring and flagging of potential exceptions, the team was able to use Recover in tandem with Bulk Alerts to efficiently send more than 1,000 batched messages apprising customers of potential delays.
Brooklinen has also gained new opportunities to promote business initiatives, such as its loyalty program, the Comfort Crew. Using data collected from the tracking page, Brooklinen’s retention team can monitor how often customers opt-in to receive notifications and derive new strategies for re-engagement. These new post-order insights have been invaluable during the pandemic when Brooklinen worked harder than ever to keep its delivery promises amidst shipping slowdowns and other supply chain challenges.
The Brooklinen team is now contemplating further new initiatives with project44 to continually improve its offerings in 2021 and beyond.
“project44 offered a streamlined solution that we could basically plug and play while integrating very easily with our WMS, resulting in a near-instant, immense improvement in end-to-end delivery visibility, coupled with great reporting.”
— Julia Babina, SVP, Operations & Customer Experience | Brooklinen
Thanks to its partnership with project44, Brooklinen has realized significant improvements in its delivery experience.
