LooLoo is the touchless toilet spray helping consumers automatically eliminate bathroom odors. For every refill purchase, the company donates a year of clean water to someone in need.
We sat down with Bryce Johnson, CEO at LooLoo, to dive deep into how PDQ transformed the brand’s fulfillment and operations flows. Conversation topics include:
- Why shipping transparency is crucial to customer satisfaction
- PDQ’s unmatched platform for thorough error handling
- How PDQ drove down LooLoo’s fulfillment costs
“The PDQ team is uniquely capable. Their love for their product and investment in customer success are palpable. Honestly, I’m jealous of what they have.”
The Early Days: Lackluster Vendors & Unhappy Customers
LooLoo launched its first software stack on Shopify with ShipStation — a fulfillment tool Bryce recounts as “a vanilla program.”
It’s reasonably priced and gets the job done, but it failed to optimize shipping in two major ways.
1. The Ramifications of Transparency Bottlenecks
The ShipStation process comprised the LooLoo office staff checking and printing the relevant information for every order. The job was somewhat simple, but it wasn’t very transparent.
The system failed to make shipping options clear for each order. As a result, LooLoo frequently couldn’t use their most cost-effective, speedy carriers.
ShipStation also failed to make clear to customers when they’d receive their orders, leading to many negative reviews for the brand during this time period.
People complained about broken delivery promises, but the LooLoo team were essentially powerless in trying to fix this, seeing as:
- They just couldn’t see when orders were slated to arrive on their end
- ShipStation was not communicating accurate delivery tracking to customers
2. Receiving the Bare Minimum of Vendor Support
When Bryce eventually spoke to ShipStation client support about these issues, he found they seemed to simply not care past a certain level.
They’d answer customer service calls, but weren’t planning to tweak their products to improve performance or customer experience.
In other words: ShipStation was decent, but it’d likely never help LooLoo gain an upper hand or impress users. Its lackluster fulfillment flows also harmed their value prop:
LooLoo promises customers that, once they try their product, they’ll be hooked. Of course, it’s hard to hook a user if they lose interest in your company before their package ever arrives.
“Before PDQ, we worked with a vendor who didn’t care much. They did their job, but they clearly were not working to make their product better for us.”
Switching to PDQ: The Value of Efficient & Intuitive Tooling
LooLoo made the switch to PDQ shortly after Bryce was introduced to Avi, our CEO.
Since onboarding, Bryce summarizes the interface as both user- and merchant-friendly, since it provides comprehensive insights into the fulfillment process. He also highlights PDQ’s:
- Rapid workflows — Whether that’s speediness in getting packages from warehouses to customers’ front doors or easily customizing a placed order whenever possible
- Countless shipping options — While Bryce hasn’t seen many users leverage their $25 overnight option, it captures the breadth of shipping timelines available
Even more, while his team at LooLoo has seen high turnover, onboarding new hires with PDQ has been straightforward, so he’s always confident they’ll be trained and ready to go quickly.
As an example: One significant issue with fulfillment in the past was simply making sure all the items for an order were correctly boxed together.
The PDQ platform can carefully walk staff through each stage of this workflow, so orders are executed correctly and less time (and revenue) is wasted on small errors.
With this, Bryce is eager to introduce several of his startup investments to PDQ and its allowance for client brands to regain control over costs and the end-user experience.
“The difference in experience between ShipStation and PDQ is like night and day. I can’t imagine not wanting to sign on with PDQ at the first opportunity.”
Benefit #1: Improved Customer Relationships
When it comes to client care, Bryce emphasizes that PDQ is genuine in its support of startups — always swiftly answering user questions and addressing potential bugs.
He’s also confident that, as PDQ scales, the team will be able to keep up this caliber of customer service, seeing as it’s clearly a priority for them.
After all, PDQ already frequently checks in with the LooLoo team to ask how they can assist.
For instance, anytime they’ve reached out to Avi to ask for a particular platform capability, they’d find out the feature already existed and was ready to implement.
Bryce chalks this up to PDQ’s dedication to innovation. It’s a part of their company ethos: constantly trying to improve their core product while creating equally valuable feature upgrades.
Rapid Troubleshooting = Happier Customers
Along these lines, the PDQ team is dedicated to ensuring LooLoo can then make their customers as happy as possible. One major role fulfilled by PDQ tech is error handling.
It’s more graceful across the board since it can troubleshoot from the very onset of a shipment flow. The interface lists any small snags like:
- When an address is inaccurate or totally invalid
- If there’s an issue with an order and its package structure
This enables the brand to troubleshoot issues before the customer ever catches wind.
Optimal Delivery Speed and Order Tracking
After fixing potential order blockers, PDQ allows brands to optimize delivery performance.
The program determines optimal outcomes to benefit the end consumer (i.e., by selecting the quickest, most cost-effective routes) and keeping them in the know at every step.
That transparent tracking also extends to LooLoo, which is a game-changer for two reasons:
- As mentioned, the team is unfortunately accustomed to totally opaque delivery tracking
- They’re in control of high-priority packages and samples sent to influencers or partners
In the latter situation, the brand needs those shipments to arrive in prime condition because their marketing success rides on a prompt delivery. Here, PDQ absolutely delivers.
“With PDQ, we see higher-quality outcomes at every stage. Our decision to onboard with PDQ was a no-brainer for us.”
Benefit #2: Driving Down Fulfillment Costs
Finally, Bryce highlights the downstream savings enabled by PDQ.
The platform automates and optimizes shipping functions for more efficient decision-making, such as by indicating the best carrier options for both the consumer and the business.
For instance, UPS and USPS could likely deliver an order to a user’s doorstep in the same amount of time, but one could cost a dollar less.
By making that more cost-effective decision several times a day across many months, the savings add up to notably improve LooLoo’s margins.
Since switching to PDQ, their shipping costs have gone down — and only continue to do so.
