How SuitShop reduced CX ticket volume by 80% with Loop

Learn more about SuitShop:

Co-founded by childhood best friends Diana Ganz and Jeanne Foley in 2016, SuitShop’s mission is to provide a curated collection of high-quality and size-inclusive suits for men, women, nonbinary folks, and kids at a budget-friendly price point, with most suits under $200. Starting as an online-only shop, SuitShop now offers showrooms in seven cities around the United States. Since joining the Shopify Plus program in 2020, the brand has seen average year-over-year growth of 117%.

The Challenge: Responding to rapid growth

In 2020, SuitShop came to a tipping point due to continual year-over-year growth. While they’d previously relied on a manual returns process developed in-house, they knew it was time to level up.

“It was one of those moments where we had to decide, ‘Do we hire X amount more people to manage all of these return requests, or finally partner with a solution that will help take care of all of that work for us?’” says Katy Eriks, Director of Customer Experience at SuitShop.

In 2018 the company had just invested in a fulfillment center, after years of processing orders and returns on their own. “It was a good point in our growth where things were expanding and we needed to make some decisions.”

SuitShop started looking at options for automating their returns, narrowing their choices to Returnly (now defunct) and Loop. After conducting a competitive analysis, they chose Loop based on its more robust feature set, which they hoped would help them enhance their operational efficiency as they continued to scale the business.

Loop turned out to be a great bet for the growing brand.

Maximizing CX team efficiency with automation

SuitShop’s customer base was growing fast—but they wanted to scale their operational growth by adding efficiency, rather than headcount. That’s especially true when it came to customer support: “[We were] having to manually process all of those return and exchange requests, creating labels for people,” says Eriks, which took a disproportionate amount of the CX team’s time.

After implementing Loop, customers were able to easily initiate their own return requests through a seamless self-service platform. Because Loop took a lot of the burden off the CX team, SuitShop was able to grow its team more sustainably. “We were able to keep our team small,” says Eriks, by using automation to handle previously manual processes so that the core team can focus on higher-priority concerns.

Drive efficiency for your CX team with automated returns

Returns

Instant Exchanges protects against fraud

Most customers who buy products from SuitShop are purchasing items for a special occasion, like a wedding or black-tie event. That means they need the product by a specific date—and if the product doesn’t fit or look right, they need access to an immediate replacement.

SuitShop has always been committed to customer satisfaction—even at the expense of their brand’s profits. “Before Loop, we were processing exchanges immediately, without payment on file, which, of course, is a risky way to do business,” says Eriks. As a result, some customers would engage in returns fraud, and keep both the original and replacement item, leaving the brand responsible for the expense.

But with Instant Exchange, SuitShop is able to ensure the customer’s payment card is on file before processing the exchange—and if the shopper never returns the original item, they’ll be charged the full fee for the replacement. “Having that safety net with the instant change, and being able to capture payment, has been really fantastic for us,” says Eriks. “The majority of our customers do take advantage of that feature.”

Instant Exchange has helped improve the brand’s exchange rate, with 42% of shoppers choosing a variant exchange rather than a refund. Before implementing Loop, their exchange rate was 24%.

Reduce risk of policy abuse during the exchange process

Instant Exchange

Point of Sale drives foot traffic to stores

SuitShop now has showrooms in seven cities nationwide as well as a robust online presence. That enables shoppers to try on suits before purchasing them, whether they choose to buy online or in-store. And, in the event that they need to make a return or exchange, they also have the option to return the product to a nearby physical store, even if they made the purchase online.

With Loop’s Point of Sale tool, the brand’s associates can easily process returns purchased online in-store. Returns data syncs instantly with the online shopfront, giving the brand full visibility into each customer’s omnichannel shopping journey. By facilitating offline returns, even for purchases made online, SuitShop is able to drive additional traffic to their retail showrooms, creating new opportunities for upsells and exchanges. The brand is also able to eliminate return shipping fees on products returned to their retail stores, boosting their profit margins.

“I really love the Loop feature where it can tell, based on address, where someone's located, so we can encourage them to return in-store,” says Eriks. “That definitely helps reduce multiple exchanges, as we're trying to convince them to come in-store to try on, so that they'll nail their fit and not have to be sending products back.”

Reduce return shipping costs and drive foot traffic with an omnichannel returns strategy

Point-of-Sale

The impact: Scalable growth and an enhanced CX

From online-only to omnichannel, Loop has been a solid partner for SuitShop’s rapid growth, helping them streamline efficiencies and bring order to chaos at every phase of their journey.

Seamless integrations

“It's very easy to manage the Loop dashboard,” says Eriks. ”We don't need a lot of training to figure out how to do our daily tasks. It also integrates with probably every other solution that our company is using. That's really big for us, being able to integrate with Gorgias, which we use for customer service. We use Klaviyo and Malomo for emails so we have Loop deep links in our order tracking, which is awesome. It's nice when all of the brands that you're using work well together and natively integrate.”

Optimized CX efficiency

Pointing shoppers to a self-service returns portal, rather than manually processing returns and exchanges, has drastically reduced the amount of requests that come into SuitShop’s CX team. In fact, when they implemented Loop, they were able to reduce their customer support requests by an astonishing 80%. “It was a crazy shift for us,” says Eriks.

Customers are able to resolve the majority of their issues instantly through self-service, choosing either a refund or exchange. And, for the shoppers who need extra help with a bigger issue, the CX team now has the time available to go the extra mile with personalized support.

In growing from five to over 50 employees in the space of 5 years, making the move to Loop has helped SuitShop easily manage their growing pains and scale their brand seamlessly.

Eriks recommends that for brands on the verge of needing a returns management solution, the best time to make the move is the present.

“It's nice to start when things are manageable, so you don't get to the point of being overwhelmed, or needing to hire 2 more people to manage the work flow,” says Eriks. “I think that timing was good for us, rather than waiting until orders were 10x what they were.”

Optimize your CX efficiency with streamlined returns.

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