Crew Clothing Company is the go-to British lifestyle brand for classic style with a coastal twist. Specialising in casual wear, shoes, and accessories for men and women, Crew Clothing sells its wares via stores across the U.K., mail order, and an e-commerce website. 

As Crew Clothing grew its e-commerce presence, the team realised they needed more control and visibility over the post-purchase process. For example, Cora McDonnell, projects manager for Crew Clothing, sought to swap the brand’s existing returns process—including a prepaid return label in the outbound box—with an automated, easy-to-use platform. And, she needed a better understanding of actual courier performance versus Crew Clothing’s 2-4 working day delivery expectations.

“We were challenged with getting better reporting for the business, particularly logistics, and a more streamlined, scalable returns process.” 

– Cora McDonnell, Projects Manager and Business Analyst at Crew Clothing 
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Creating a Seamless Returns Experience With Narvar

In 2022, Crew Clothing selected Narvar Return & Exchange as its return management solution. With Narvar, Crew Clothing increased its visibility into the entire returns process, including: 

• Giving the warehouse team insight into inbound returning parcels
• Providing return data to the marketing team for a deeper understanding of customer lifetime value (CLV) 
• Getting accurate data on return reasons. In the past, many customers would improperly mark “other” as the return reason on their packing slip.

Further, Crew Clothing is able to automatically enforce its return policy window, ensuring customers are adhering to its 28-day return window for full-price items. 

Finally, Narvar helped improve Crew Clothing’s customer experience. Now, customers can initiate a return via Narvar’s easy-to-use portal, automatically generate a return label addressed to the correct distribution centre (DC), and follow the item’s return journey via customer notifications. Narvar also helped Crew Clothing expand its return dropoff methods to three options: Evri, Royal Mail, and Parcel Collection. 

“Narvar has allowed us to streamline and automate much of our e-commerce returns process, making it easier to adhere and enforce our return policy while also enabling an exceptional customer experience. And, with the increase in visibility and reporting, we’re able to better recognize trends in our returns program and act on the insights we uncover.” 

– Cora McDonnell, Projects Manager and Business Analyst at Crew Clothing

Increasing Visibility and Customer Communication With Narvar Track and Notify 

Crew Clothing also leverages Narvar Track and Notify to increase visibility into its logistics performance and improve the experience for internal teams and customers. 

“Prior to Narvar, we had no way of knowing whether a courier was delivering parcels on time. We took advantage of Narvar’s flexible, powerful parcel tracking capabilities to get aggregate data on courier performance, measured against our posted delivery window.” 

– Cora McDonnell, Projects Manager and Business Analyst at Crew Clothing 

Narvar Track and Notify give Crew Clothing customers greater visibility into the status and whereabouts of their order, helping to decrease “Where is My Order?” (WISMO) queries and reduce the workload of the customer support team. 

With Narvar, the Crew Clothing team now has the tools to upsell and re-engage customers, sharing seasonally-appropriate messages on the Narvar Track and Notify pages.

Finding an Innovative Partner in Narvar

Cora appreciates collaborating with the Narvar team, because, “People working at Narvar are super friendly, efficient, and knowledgeable. It’s unusual for an entire company—from account management to technical support—to deeply understand the product, and want to do a good job for its customers.” 

Above all else, the Crew Clothing team values Narvar for its innovative leadership as a post-purchase experience platform. 

"When it comes to innovating on the post-purchase experience, Narvar is steps ahead of us! Usually the Narvar team comes up with an idea and we always think it makes perfect sense. Narvar is great at finding ways to help businesses retain some of the money within the returns process while ensuring the best customer experience."

– Cora McDonnell, Projects Manager and Business Analyst at Crew Clothing