This rugged apparel brand puts a lot of work into ensuring the quality of its gear, promising its customers comfort and protection whether they’re fishing in a busy river or preparing to take on Everest. The award-winning company revolutionized the retail category with its innovative and inventive creations, and built a huge global network of brands that span over 100 countries. But it’s never lost track of what’s at the heart of its business: delighting customers who love the great outdoors.

To elevate its online shopping experience, the team began thinking about how to keep buyers engaged with its products and messaging after checkout. “We wanted a post-purchase solution that could get up and running quickly,” says the company’s cross-functional business process owner. “The time-to-value that came with Narvar Track was a huge factor for us during the decision-making process.”

A new messaging channel encourages repeat purchases

With Narvar, the company was able to open up a new channel that not only surfaced accurate estimated delivery date (EDD) information as soon as an order is shipped, it also extended brand communications beyond the “buy” button and drove consumer loyalty by inspiring more interaction and trust. The company sees about a 13% click-through rate from their Narvar tracking pages back to their site, with many customers buying more during those additional visits.

Since launching with Narvar, the company has enjoyed a high ROI on its consumer post-purchase experience. The business process owner says, “Our investment in Narvar has absolutely paid for itself—and then some.”

Greater visibility and ROI with Return reason codes

After Track delivered so much value, the company jumped at the chance to see even more benefits with Narvar Return. “We were very excited to get the returns operation up and running—we knew it had the potential to be huge,” he says.

And the implementation didn’t disappoint. Features such as required reason codes and product recommendations that drive traffic back to the website have helped to reduce costs and improve efficiency at every stage of the returns process. The positive returns experience has also helped inspire more customer loyalty, increasing the amount of repeat purchases made within 90 days by 9% year-over-year.

“Our investment in Narvar has absolutely paid for itself—and then some.”

Business Process Owner

Previously, the company sent a returns slip with its packages, and a customer filled it out and shipped the product(s) back. But customers didn’t always include the reason for returning an item, and the process left plenty of room for human error, whether in the form of a misplaced slip or a lost return package. Because of this, they are very happy with the recent changes. “We’ve gained even more visibility into our U.S. returns because we’re now able to schedule warehouse labor more efficiently, which is a huge cost savings,” he says.

Streamlining CX around the globe

To better serve its large customer base in the EU and around the world, the company keeps its innovative post-purchase experience consistent globally. The team implemented Narvar Return in Europe, and was able to start tracking return reasons and better respond to the market’s penchant for “bracketing,” or buying multiple versions of an item (a parka in different colors or sizes, for instance) with the intent of sending some of them back. “Bracketing is the business model in Europe,” he says. “People buy a large quantity of products, keep what they want, and return the rest. Return rates can be as high as 40%.”

By implementing Return in the European market, the company was also able to take its fulfillment operations—previously run by a third-party logistics company—into its own hands, and build a new internal customer care team that can address its buyers’ needs more directly, with more customer data at their fingertips.

Tackling its European operations was no easy feat, as it involved two brands, 10 countries, and five languages as well as multiple currencies. Ultimately, the Narvar team developed a scalable way to manage localization of the platform to accommodate this complexity. Today there are at least 40 experiences that consumers can interact with to easily return their purchases.

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