Market Expansion Through CX

When you look at consumer brands, even the most durable struggle to reach a market share that looks—on paper—like complete ownership. 

Take Nike and Lululemon, for example. In 2018, they combined to own 30% of the athleisure market (Nike: 20%, Lululemon: 10%). A number, at first glance, that feels like it should be remarkably higher. 

For newer brands, then, it’s remarkable when they catapult to market share in that range. FIGS, for example, is estimated to have already reached 10% of the healthcare worker market in the US. But that massive adoption also raises a question: What happens next? 

We decided to talk with Michael Bair, FIGS’ SVP of Customer Experience (and an advisor/consultant to other brands), about what that means for 1:1 interactions, how CX paves the path to market expansion, and more.

It’s the first CX-focused conversation we’ve had in Contributions, but also one of the most strategic. Read on.

You’ve had a lot of experience with brands at an inflection point, including an IPO with FIGS. 

If you think about it from the perspective of brand growth, it's probably a good heuristic for when a brand needs to be again thinking about things other than what got them to that point. That to me seems like it might pose an interesting tension between how CS is run and then how you go and serve that new audience. I've always done things this way for this group of people. Is that a accurate read at all from the outside?

A couple things come to mind. The first thing probably depends on what market does your product or service serve? 

So, FIGS and ServiceTitan were unique in that they serve a very specific customer base and that determines the type of expectations people have of the TAM for your business. Before you go public, specifically, you have to have a very clear story of what your business has done and what it will do in the future, and that is all very documented and thought out. At FIGS, we had a very clear story that we put out to the market in 2021 about where the business was going to go and we were very clear that we were for healthcare professionals at that point in the business. And so that was very different.

But, obviously, public markets are largely based on future cash flows and those future cash flows are going to be looking for TAM expansion—new verticals that you're going to go into, new product lines…

And so a lot of questions are related to what's that next big unlock for them? 

How does that begin to impact the way that you actually execute from a customer service standpoint?

I think one of the tailwinds that a business like FIGS or ServiceTitan has is when you can use the exact language your customers use when you speak directly to them.

When you're talking to mass market customers, you somewhat have to—I don’t like to use this term—but dumb down the language, because it's got to apply to everyone.

So, a really easy example of this would be if I'm writing a help center article for healthcare professionals, I can use very specific terms that I know all healthcare professionals are going understand

You can also do fun things with your marketing and with your CX copy. For example, the email handle at FIGS is stat@wearfigs.com. It's not support@

Is that distinction between the two market types—mass market or vertical-specific—where CS gets a kind of bad rap of being a “cost center” when you’re not able to pull the brand through as specifically?

I don't think the type of market is related to whether people view it as a cost center. 

You can think of the Zappos, the Chewy’s of the world. Those are mass markets and those are the best customer experience companies in the world. 

If you run an e-commerce company where your team's just getting bombarded with “Where’s my order?” tickets and “cancel order” tickets all day, it's going to be really hard to justify that that's not just cost. And, honestly, I think most consumers don't want to be contacting a CX team about that.

To me, that's much more a signal to the business that you don't have fast enough shipping or you're not strong enough in your communications to help customers. 

But I think the whole cost center thing is more an opportunity for CX leaders to, honestly, probably have better strategy and better narration of the value that they create for the business and those interactions than it is a function of the market or any vertical or anything like that.

In the case of, say, FIGS, does great CX actually help expand the market?

So if you think about where people wear scrubs, it's in hospital settings.

These are not remote work jobs. They're all together. So, you walk onto a floor and you have 15 nurses and half of them are wearing FIGS and they all look great. Everyone's like, “What are you wearing?” This is a very real thing in hospital settings, doctors offices, clinics around the world. And that is a massive Tailwind to that business, because people love talking about clothing already.

I think there's one level to that, which is “have you made your product remarkable so that people want to tell other people about it?”

That is certainly very aspirational, but I don't think it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. 

People love to talk about things that went really well in their lives. That's just fundamental. There’s  just some industries that people are going to be less inclined to talk about, so your barrier to making it more remarkable is a little bit higher.

If there's something I've taken away from the last five years that I probably didn't get before that, it’s that having a physical location where customers are discussing your product is the best marketing in the world.

And, maybe, to use aPhilly reference, which I don't think it's so much the case anymore, but why did Comcast have a terrible customer experience?

They were a complete monopoly. They had no competitors. So, why would they invest in something that didn't move the needle in their business?

What you're seeing now, though, is a narrative of “we’ve invested a lot in this over the last 10 years.” And that’s because even if you have a monopoly, your monopoly will not live on forever. 

I'm sure Comcast had a moment where they're, like, “Shoot. We're not just going to be a cable provider, because cable's not going to exist 20 years from now.” and that's, basically, the case. They're more an internet service provider at this point than anything else. They have an entertainment part of their business, they have all these other verticals that they want to go into.

But if you have hosed customers for decades, you will never get the right to make the offers. 

If you do brand marketing, you largely do brand marketing for the future. It's never to close someone today or to get a sale today. CX can be similar. 

A lot of companies in ecommerce will spend 15 to 20 percent of their revenue on marketing. They could literally be spending less than 1 percent to have great customer experience, and have a reputation as a company that really cares about customers and I think that is one of the best investments you can make from a brand standpoint.

How does that translate to, kind of, boots-on-the-ground CX interactions?

I'll give you one positive and one, I guess, negative.

There were a lot of situations where we could use policies or procedures to enhance a referral motion. For example, if we sent someone the wrong product—and this is going to happen when you ship hundreds of thousands of orders a month—say a medium instead of a large … rather than having that person send it back, you can have them give it to a friend.

It's not a situation where I bought a product where I'm like, “None of my friends are gonna use this.” They're going to walk into their hospital setting and be like, “I know a bunch of people that can have this.” So, you can use these policies and procedures to actually enhance the referral motion.

On the flip side, when you have a highly engaged, highly connected community, whatever you tell one person, you better be sure that you're okay with them telling everyone about that.

So, lost orders maybe are a good example. If you have a really friendly lost order policy where you don't ask people to provide proof, you're going to have to deal with that.