To stay alive, online brands need to stay dynamic and adapt to the various needs of their shoppers. Staying stagnant and sticking to a one-size-fits-all customer experience in any part of your funnel could cost you some customers.
Understanding that the same standard for flexibility applies not only to your typical DTC experience but also your store’s gifting experience, we got to work and built Concierge.
Concierge is our latest feature empowering brands to continue offering white-glove service to customers who still want that devoted, high-touch interaction while gifting, but without the time-consuming tasks to make it happen.
“Our goal is to help e-commerce brands unlock this (surprisingly overlooked) growth opportunity. With every new feature, we move closer toward being a comprehensive platform that supports every type of gifting interaction," says Alex Ingram, Zest's CEO and co-founder.
Concierge gifting turns Zest from a self-service gifting tool into a fully unified online gifting platform. Is Concierge just what you’ve been looking for to help scale your store’s gifting channel? Let’s find out.
Adaptive Ecommerce Applies to Gifting, Too
Zest’s self-service gifting storefronts have played a key role for brands hankering to streamline their processes and grow their gifting channel through a hands-off approach. With the power to let shoppers pick out, customize, address, and pay for heaps of gifts in one swift checkout, brands that have added Zest to their tech stack have seen an impressive uptick in gifting traffic.
It’s no surprise, though. When a brand has both wildly giftable products and a ridiculously easy way to gift them, sales (ahem, pure magic) happen.
Last holiday season alone, Milk Bar leveraged Zest’s automatic order processing to cut gift processing from 2 weeks to just 2 days. Meanwhile, Brightland beefed up its corporate gift sales by more than 50% all while investing less time and manual tedium for each order.
But while Zest’s self-service gifting storefronts have finally yanked corporate gifting into the 21st century, the fact remains that no two gifters are the same. While self-service strikes a chord with digital-first shoppers, there are still those who prefer being guided through their gifting experience step by step.
The drawback to this level of white-glove service? The time it requires.
If your gifting department is spending all of its time on a handful of concierge gift orders, hammering out and double-checking every detail, the channel is impossible to scale.
Concierge was made to streamline the most time-consuming parts of high-touch gift orders, adding items to a gift order, address collection and validation, invoice creation, order processing, and post-purchase tracking updates. With less time stuck in the weeds of order spreadsheets and docs, gifting teams can spend more time communicating with clients and winning over new ones.
5 Ways Your Brand Can Streamline Concierge Gifts With Zest
Concierge is a feature made to perfectly complement self-service gifting so your brand is fully equipped to give every customer the gifting experience that fits them. For customers seeking out good ol’ fashioned contact forms or phone numbers to kick off their bulk gift orders, Concierge will make them feel right at home. But for your brand, you’ll notice the difference behind the scenes right away.
1. Capture more gifting traffic by catering to every use case.
Brands using Zest for self-service consumer, corporate, and event gifting know that it’s a well-oiled machine converting gifters day and night. After all, it looks and feels like shopping for yourself, and even the backend processes these orders automatically.
The self-service crowd rejoices in the idea of not having to pick up a phone or start a long game of email tag, but not every gifter likes going it alone.
Before the launch of Concierge, brands were able to capture self-service gifters and let Zest automate those gift sales. But when it came to people writing in or looking for a hand, brands were still left to their own ad hoc tools and processes to intake, assemble, manage, invoice, and track (did we get everything?). This left brands with two gifting systems — the modern Zest platform and, well, the time-sucking method impossible to scale.
Instead of foregoing white-glove gift requests altogether and funneling every gifter to a self-service storefront, Concierge strips away the tedious parts and lets brands continue to offer person-to-person service to capture all types of gifters.
2. One gift platform to rule them all.
Like I mentioned, before Concierge, brands using Zest still had to rely on go-to methods of yore to manage and process any gift orders that came in through their contact form. Shuffling between spreadsheets and apps is no way to scale.
Zest is now the only platform brands need to save time and scale all of their online gift orders whether they’re totally touchless or entirely hands-on.
Concierge is live for all brands that use Zest. It lives in the Zest Partners dashboard, just a quick click away from self-service features. From there, Zest users can start a project, add products, customize pricing, and more in just a matter of minutes (or roughly the time it takes the average person to launch Excel, scan past customer logs, make a new spreadsheet if it’s a new customer…get the gist?).
3. Collect recipient addresses with ease.
A crucial part of getting any gift order out the door is an accurate list of addresses for each recipient.
In today’s world, family, friends, and coworkers are spread all over the place and moving around quite a bit. This means an increased need for shipping gifts directly to multiple addresses — and an increase in shipping errors and delays when info isn’t exactly 100.
Zest streamlines one of the most arduous parts of any concierge gift order. In their dashboard, brands can share an address upload link with clients. All they have to do is click, toss in their address list, and upload the completed list.
Upon upload, each address is automatically verified. Addresses that can’t be verified are pointed out so edits can be made well before the gifts are shipped out the door.
4. Create and track invoices inside Zest.
Spin up invoices in seconds right from a customer’s gift order. Include discounts, extra line items, tax rates, and more. Submit invoices without leaving the page, then keep tabs on invoice statuses and whether a project is all paid up or not.
This is one more way to keep all your gifting ops in one place and reduce the risk of error that comes when toggling between tools.
5. A source of truth for gift statuses at a glance.
When you’re juggling hundreds, nay thousands, of high-touch gift orders, updating their statuses in spreadsheets is an hours-long task in itself. With Zest Concierge, brands can log in and scan the status of orders and invoices at a glance.
Bonus: Speaking of tracking, shipping updates are automatically sent to gifters and recipients, too, so you have way fewer “Where is my order?!” tickets lingering in your support queue during the holidays.
One Gift Platform, Unlimited Ways to Grow
Concierge may seem like just a nifty new feature, but its impact runs deep. Concierge unlocks an entirely fresh way to process and expedite the most time-consuming gift orders, making room for unlimited scalability.
Beyond what brands can leverage with Concierge, this feature also turns Zest into the only platform an ecommerce brand needs to start growing their gifting channel. With the ability to work with modern consumer behavior, tackle more use cases, and reach the widest audience of shoppers sending gifts, the potential is unreal.
Are you ready to unwrap it?
.png)
