Quality. Affordability. Convenience. These are the three pillars upon which D2C furniture-maker Burrow built its thriving business.

But in 2021—amidst the continuing chaos of the pandemic—quality, affordability, and convenience were impossible to find within the supply chain. 

“We were facing a lot of supply chain issues, including delays and split shipments. We were initially using AfterShip, but it couldn’t provide package-level visibility or notifications to customers with the limitations we had,” explained Abhishek Vijayakumar, Product Manager of Engineering at Burrow.

As a business that holds convenience as one of its core principles, Burrow understood the gravity of the situation. Delays and split shipments inject friction into the customer experience—that friction damages brand value and reduces loyalty, leading to revenue loss.  

“It became a problem that we knew we had to address,” said Abhishek.

“Finding a way to show customers item-level visibility was the only way to reduce the call center inquiries hurting our customer experience.” 

Abhishek Vijayakumar, Product Manager of Engineering at Burrow

Scarred CSAT and NPS scores

“Our goal at Burrow is to make it radically easier for people to settle in,” said Abhishek. “That’s why we use consumer behavior to influence the design of our products and experiences we’re creating.”

“Our core principles are to make it easier for our customers to shop, ship, live and move with our products. Unfortunately, while we were excelling in the shopping, living and moving experience, the shipping experience wasn’t up to the mark.”

A long-time BigCommerce merchant, Burrow became frustrated with AfterShip’s inability to fully integrate and provide its customers with package-level visibility. 

At a time when split-shipments ran rampant due to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, the lack of package-level visibility fueled a surge in “Where is my order?” inquiries, damaging CSAT and NPS in the process. 

Alarmed by complaints and sour customer reviews, Burrow decided to gain more end-to-end control over their post-purchase experience and started their search for a new partner.

“[Our post-purchase experience] wasn’t making it easier for customers.” 

Abhishek Vijayakumar, Product Manager of Engineering at Burrow

Solving a battery of needs with a single solution

In a sea of potential post-purchase solutions, Abhishek and the team and Burrow knew they’d need to be patient, thoughtful, and thorough in choosing the right partner for their business. 

“To find something that really worked for all stakeholders, we knew we’d need a detailed plan. So, we got the Marketing, Ecommerce, and Customer Experience teams together and created our collective list of requirements, weighing those demands against our priorities so we could be as effective as possible in evaluating new post-purchase solutions,” outlined Abhishek.

What were those priorities? 

‍1. Lower WISMO, increase CSAT, and boost NPS 

Burrow needed a platform ready to:

• Handle a complex shipping setup
• Send granular, omnichannel notifications
• Provide package-level visibility to customers during split shipments

‍2. Better inform their CRM and loyalty efforts

By working with a solution capable of feeding post-purchase event data into Kustomer, their CDP.

‍3. Work smarter, not harder

By finding a partner who could deploy the pre-designed notification templates meticulously built by the Burrow marketing team in Iterable, their cross-channel marketing platform. 

“We wanted a solution with webhooks because we didn’t want to be stuck using out-of-the-box email templates…We wanted to be able to log webhook calls from shipment events to better inform our analytics, ” Abhishek remarked. 

All these needs and requirements allowed Burrow to narrow their search to two vendors—Convey and Narvar. 

So, what tipped the scales in Narvar’s favor?

While some others came with capable webhooks and a presence in both the United States and Canada, they couldn’t match Narvar on price, scalability, or international reach. 

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“In addition to being more affordable, Narvar provided the sophistication we needed, and with our long-term plans for global growth, Narvar was better positioned to support any international expansion,” explained Abhishek. 

“Narvar…provided the sophistication we needed.” 

Abhishek Vijayakumar, Product Manager of Engineering at Burrow

A budding relationship that’s poised to thrive

While the relationship is less than a year old, it’s clear Burrow is pleased with their new post-purchase partner—WISMO inquiries are down and overall customer satisfaction is up. Best of all, the improvements are taking place in a shorter timeline than Burrow imagined possible.

“Going into this partnership, we knew WISMO, CSAT, and NPS were the three metrics to track and measure our success. NPS and CSAT are both trending upwards since launch, which is great,” says Abhishek. 

“In fact, we’ve had two of our best WISMO-related months in company history since launching with Narvar, which is super promising.” 

Though things are still early days, as long as this upward momentum holds, so will Burrow’s commitment to powering their post-purchase experience with Narvar Track and Narvar’s Notification Webhook—a webhook of curated, shipment-related events that allow Burrow to send granular shipment-related notifications, inform future marketing and loyalty efforts, and round out their business intelligence. 

"Narvar allows us to set expectations early…and customers are happier at the end of the day as a result.”

Abhishek Vijayakumar, Product Manager of Engineering at Burrow