Bev is an LA-based DTC wine brand that’s redefining the male-dominated alcohol landscape as a women-led company. Since the start of COVID-19, their product line has grown to encompass ten SKUs and over 55% of DTC revenue is driven by subscriptions.

We sat down with Olivia Peabody, Bev’s Head of Customer Experience, to dive into:

1. Leveraging Skio’s superior UI to create a much simpler and better experience for subscription customers
2. Improving conversion and retention thanks to streamlined checkout and subscription self-management
3. Resources drain behind managing Recharge subscriptions

“As a company, having Skio in our stack makes us feel far more confident: in the interface and experience we’re providing customers, in the newfound flexibility we offer, and in the continued growth and retention that are sure to come.”

The Early Days: A Sinkhole for Labor & Capital

Before Skio, Bev ran subscriptions through Recharge — and quickly encountered a number of obstacles with the non-Shopify-native platform.

Faulty UI, For Users & Admins

As Olivia recounts, virtually any action on the Recharge dashboard required extra clicks and effort to navigate its unintuitive design, for both subscribers as well as the Bev team.

To make adjustments to a customer’s subscription, since users often couldn’t decipher the UI themselves, the internal team would need to manually update details, like address changes, not only within the Recharge app, but also on Shopify.

Clunky Subscription Logins

To create a subscription account with Bev, users had to navigate two signups and logins, on both Recharge and Shopify, which more often than not resulted in users completing half the process — and thus the onus being placed on the subscriber.

Naturally, this led to customer login issues, a recurring issue among Recharge customers, which needed to be rectified to maintain a strong customer experience.

In Olivia’s words, rather than being able to teach subscribers to navigate a sensible UX, the team simply had to handle users on a case-by-case basis, meaning less efficiency across the board.

Support Tickets: A Major Time Drain

As users continued to grapple with Recharge’s UX, consistent volumes of support requests became a greater strain on available resources.

Over half of inbound requests were subscription-related. As a result, the 5-person support team required staffers to work on tickets at all times of day.

“At least 60% of customer support requests were subscription-related. Simply put, the platform that should’ve simplified our work was instead placing a burden on the team, just to keep up with the inbound volume of tickets.”

Onboarding with Skio: The 24-Hour Migration

Once they realized there was little likelihood of functionality improving, the Bev team began searching for a new platform that could properly support current subscribers as well as drive conversions of new ones.

After all, more than half of their DTC business exists in Bev’s subscription base.

Bev was eventually connected to Skio by Geoffrey Miles, Bev’s VP of Marketing.

According to Olivia, the Skio team provided transparency regarding timelines and thorough guidance throughout a personalized onboarding process, also helping the Bev team test certain platform features and ensured thorough platform understanding, which was importantly conveyed through an educational drip email campaign to existing subscribers.

The best part? After a soft launch in August, all prior Recharge subscribers were migrated over to Skio in December, without need for intervention from the Bev team — and within just one day.

“It took no more than a day to change over. The actual technical migration was maybe a few hours. We started on a Friday and by that Friday night, I could have a drink. It was no big deal at all, in the best way possible.”

Moving Forward: Northstar Growth Metrics

Since making the switch to Skio, Bev has experienced a number of improvements in metrics, on the back end as well as the subscribers’ front.

Subscriber churn decreased by 10% from one quarter to the next. Within 6 months, subscription issues related to customer support inquiries decreased by at least 30%.

As Olivia tells it, inbound requests have also become less complex, allowing team members to work through tickets far more efficiently.

As such, Bev’s customer support team has shrunk from requiring five staffers (including Olivia herself) to one full-time team member.

With Recharge, the Bev CX team worked from ten subscription-geared macros and FAQs (on logins, account activation, etc.) to answer frequent questions.

With Skio, they’ve cut this down to two macros, more educational than technical.

Skio’s Big Selling Points: Why It Works

As for the features which were both key selling points for the Bev team and pivotal to bringing about these areas of growth, Olivia highlights three:

Passwordless login

Roughly 80–90% of Bev subscribers engage with their account dashboards on their phones, meaning a seamless mobile flow for login and account management was crucial.

Not only does Skio’s passwordless login permit simplified mobile access and subvert any need for login-related support requests, but the Skio dashboard itself (both desktop and mobile) is also intuitive enough for users to self-manage their preferred SKUs, shipments, payments, and more.

SMS modifications

While running on Recharge, Bev saw relatively low open rates for account setup and upcoming order emails.

As such, Skio’s text alerts about upcoming order fulfillment and billing, plus subscribers’ new ability to text in to modify or delay shipment, have removed the onus from the consumer and reduced friction throughout the customer experience as much as possible.

Easy referrals

Empowered by the solid foundation laid for Bev subscriptions, Olivia is most excited to continue growing the Bev Club community, particularly through Skio’s referral functionality.

As ad spend and broader CACs continue skyrocketing, being able to continue retaining loyal customers as well as attract new ones through existing social networks will likely be the low-cost, high-return solution that’ll establish Bev as the beverage community to beat.

“Skio has really freed us from getting caught up in the weeds of support tickets. We’re able to put our time and energy into looking forward, driving conversions, building a brand and a community — the stuff that really matters.”