How Haydenshapes solved the ultimate customer pain point

Surfboards aren’t cheap, a new board comes in around $1k USD. It’s a big purchase that surfers have often spent a substantial amount of time researching. Each board has unique attributes, for different conditions and comes in different sizes - the size you order depends on your weight, height and ability. Often the board a surfer needs isn’t available off the shelf and needs to be made post order. In many ways it’s probably one of the most complex of products to purchase.

Traditionally surfers would speak to a surfboard shaper and they’d order a board, at which point their order would disappear into a void. Months later the customer would receive their board (although we’ve also heard of it taking over a year) and this still happens with a lot of large surfboard manufactures. But Haydenshapes is different. The Sydney based manufacture of innovative surfboards has a unique approach that has solved for the biggest customer pain point of them all - when will I get my product?

Through a combination of third party platform Shopify and their own website Haydenshapes is able to constantly manage the customers understanding of the arrival of their board. The typical pain point in a surfboard purchase is a lack of understanding of when it will arrive, but also whether it is even currently being worked on. They’ve alleviated this by creating transparency into their manufacturing process. Through a unique board ID, each purchase can be tracked through the journey. Customers are able to log in and see at which stage of construction their board is currently at, establishing credibility for the brand and negating any negative sentiment. At the same time they are able to predict a delivery date and whilst this may change, they use their CRM channels to proactively communicate it to their customers.

Whilst this should cover most issues proactively, they still enable customers to communicate to them directly through a chatbot or email. Post purchase they deal with another major pain point of the online buying surfboard process, ordering the wrong size. It happens a lot, which is why second hand marketplaces are full of boards that didn’t work for the person who first ordered them. To solve for this Haydenshapes offers a swap for their customers who have ordered the wrong size for a board of different dimensions.

Surfboards are designed to handle immense ocean pressures of waves and forces through turns, but they don’t survive a Fedex delivery man throwing the box around (trust us we’ve seen the consequences). So alongside some of the best packing in the industry, Haydenshapes leverages Shopify’s platform to communicate the exact delivery to their customers so they can be ready and available to intercept the package before it’s thrown on the steps of their building.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Deep dive into your customer pain points, they will likely be product and audience specific.

• Leverage your Brand Strategy to develop how you can deliver relevant Customer Experience touch-points on brand.

GO DEEPER

• Watch Haydenshapes founder Hayden Cox talk through their manufacturing process from start to finish here.