From Paper to Pixels: How 3-D Instructions Are Transforming Customer Experience

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“At-home assembly required.” These three words can easily kick off some major customer frustration. Consider a backyard play set, which could have over 600 pieces and take three or four people eight nights to assemble. Not to mention the risk of incomplete or vague assembly instructions that can discourage consumers from the start. As a result, a newly purchased product—even one known to work very well—may either get returned or remain in a box unused for a while before it finally gets assembled.

But Nate Henderson, founder and CEO of BILT, devised a solution. BILT, a customer experience platform that provides 3-D interactive instructions with voice, text, and animated guidance for thousands of products on its free app, is transforming consumers’ traditional product-assembly processes and delighting them along the way.

“We have computer graphics all around us. Why are we still working with paper instructions?” Nate asks. The response to that question was BILT, which replaces the traditional paper booklets that frustrate many consumers with responsive technology that improves the postpurchase experience.

And walking consumers through an assembly process, Nate says, empowers consumers.

“It’s about enabling people wherever they are, at the moment they need it, so they can be successful and move on to using the product,” Nate says.

Enablement is critical, as many consumers pass on purchasing or even return a product if the installation or assembly process is cumbersome. Consumers need the confidence and the right resources to assemble products themselves.

Although for Nate, it’s not just about empowering consumers, but brands too.

“Our measure of success is: Are we creating promoters of the brands we serve?”

Raising a brand’s Net Promoter Score and improving customer sentiment, he says, is about increasing a company’s ability to build loyalty among the customers they serve—both after purchasing, in the assembly process, and beyond.

In this episode, Nate and I discuss how to create a consumer experience that delights, how brand behavior evolves through consumer analytics, and some of BILT’s biggest NPS lessons so far.

In the following excerpt, we discuss how to quantify consumer success and acquire customer feedback organically.

Rob: A lot of the impact you have on the brands you work with is rooted in the impact you have on their customer relationships, repeat purchases, service costs, and so on. What's your selling point to a brand?

Nate: We start at the top and say, “How do we measure success?” We’re enriching people's lives by providing an experience that’s so empowering that they're successful at the task that they have, and that creates promoters of the brands that we serve. And so that’s the NPS piece of it.

Yes, you're going to have an increase in sales as a result of higher star ratings and far better reviews. We also collect reviews at almost five times the rate you would find through other mediums because people are really excited. Or when there is an issue, we're grabbing it at that very precise moment when it's fresh in their minds.

Rob: On the incidence of response to surveys, one of the biggest challenges brands face today is that customers are oversurveyed. They’re busy. But I heard you say somewhere that one in eight customers who use the BILT app provide feedback, something like 12%.

Nate: It depends a lot on the type of product. Some lend themselves more toward it. But the average response rate—at least that we've seen documented, and what brands tell us that they get—is about a quarter of 1%, all the way up to maybe a third of a percent. Whether they're using a third party to find that or are just organic ones that come through. But most businesses and retailers have to go out and prompt reviews, right? Which is not a good practice, I don't think.

We have some response rates north of 20%, for some products. Most of them are a lot lower than that, but they're usually five to seven times higher than the normal rate would be for these products.

Rob: And why do you think that is?

Nate: We make it very easy for them to give feedback. There's just a greater level of confidence that, because we've taken the time to make sure they have a great experience, there’s a bit of reciprocation in it, saying, “Hey, thank you. Let me return the favor.”

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