Leader Spotlight: Making the customer feel like a regular, with Judy Yao

Judy Yao is Head of Ecommerce at Wulf’s Fish, a boutique seafood distributor. Earlier in her career, she worked as an assistant manager in restaurants such as Clover Food Lab and trained as a butcher at Savenor’s Butcher & Market, before building Savenor’s first ecommerce site. Prior to her most recent role at Wulf’s Fish, she worked at Toast and co-founded Open Hearth Gatherings, a food experience designed to bring people together.

In our conversation, Judy talks about creating a digital experience that makes customers “feel like a regular” — as if they were repeat, familiar customers in a physical store. She discusses how her team works to leverage new and powerful technologies to provide customers a personalized, high-touch experience. Judy also shares how her team aims to inspire customers via education through images, recipes, and stories.

Committing to a direct-to-consumer business

To start, would you like to say a bit about Wulf’s Fish and its history?

Wulf’s Fish started as a retail market in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1926. The focus was the old-school way of buying fish for a consumer — going down to the dock and negotiating the best possible fish and price. In 2016, we permanently closed the retail shop as consumer shopping patterns for seafood changed and we pivoted to focus on wholesale. Then, during COVID, we introduced direct-to-consumer, initially, as a way to alleviate wholesale pressures.

The entire restaurant industry was disrupted, but it was a perfect opportunity for us to re-engage our customers who used to come into the retail shop. That’s when our ecommerce side of the business took off. We started in New England, but now we now have customers across the country — including several Michelin-star and James Beard Award winning and nominated chefs.

What are some complexities you’ve found in expanding your customer base beyond New England?

The majority of our customers are still on the East Coast, but we do have a good amount of customers in landlocked states that don’t have access to fresh seafood.

One of our ever-existing challenges is that we ship a very perishable, very expensive product. That’s a challenge that we’re constantly trying to solve. How do we make this more affordable for our customers, as well as for us, so that we can reach more people?

Providing high-tech, personalized experiences

Your career path is very interesting because you have a background in butchery and restaurant management. How did those experiences influence your approach to marketing and ecommerce?

I studied political science in my college years, but I also felt so deeply in love with food. It started with the love of eating, really, but I was very interested in both food and the food industry, and so I kind of followed that interest. I started working in the restaurant industry — butchery, specifically — and that naturally led to ecommerce because it has become such a necessity in that space.

During COVID, the ecommerce business around food started to grow more urgently. There are a lot of different aspects of food, but the fundamentals have always been about customers. Customer service and understanding the customer experience come first, whether it’s in-person in a restaurant or a brick-and-mortar retail specialty food space.

We need to understand where customers come from, and what’s important to them, and then shift that to the ecommerce side. How do we maintain that kind of experience throughout and make sure that people are feeling like they’re getting the same premium experience as if they’re talking to a fishmonger?

What do you consider to be the most important elements of a high-touch customer experience?

I think that the most important thing is being proactive, following up, and making customers feel like they are a regular — as if they’re in a shop. Our landscape has become more reliant on automation and self-service. It is important for us to straddle between the scalability of that service, so using the technology that’s available to us, while also applying a bit of old-school methods.

For example, we collect the data we need, whether it is quantitative or qualitative, and then make that personal outreach as much as possible using the tool that’s available to us. For our CRM programs, we track and tag customer issues, solutions, and what they’re reaching out about. From there, our CRM will reach out when appropriate or as a prompt from our tagging system if there is a delay with shipping, for example.

Our goal is to provide a really high-touch and personalized experience, so the customer feels like they’re part of a humanized ecommerce digital experience rather than just an automated email.

Inspiring customers via education

It sounds like that approach helps you surface problems that customers might be experiencing. What are some challenges that you’ve encountered in translating the high-touch customer experience into digital?

When I first started building an ecommerce site at Savenor’s Butcher Shop & Market, I realized that the most straightforward problem is not being in person with the customer. You’re not there to greet them with a smile and provide value in that one instant. My job was to figure out how we could make that happen digitally.

To handle this, we implemented a popup based on customer education. We tell our story and then collect some initial survey information on new customers. We ask things like, What’s important to you about your seafood? What are your hesitations? At the end of the survey, we reward them with a discount code.

The whole point is that we get to be in front of the customer in a digital way of asking the questions, as you would a fishmonger or a butcher when they enter the shop. It’s also important for us to invite and encourage customers to try new things with our products. Our customers are food lovers — they want to experiment. They’re not just there to buy a filet of fish. They want to know what to do with it and cook their favorite recipes, so when they land on our site, that’s what they see.

We have lots of pictures, recipes, and inspiration for them to go off of. We’ve all heard the expression “we eat with our eyes” — that’s true in both a restaurant and a shop, and we want to provide that online as well.

You mentioned having recipes and images on your website to inspire customers. Do you have an in-house department that creates that content or do you partner with a local chef?

We initially partnered with several chefs to create the content, recipes, and dishes. But, nearly everyone at Wulf’s has a restaurant background, so we’re all very knowledgeable. We create the majority of our content internally today. We’re a very small team, but honestly, it helps us understand the product a little more.

At the beginning of COVID, one innovative thing that we did was to create chef-curated boxes with recipes inside and all the right ingredients. We’d ship those to customers; there was a lot of collaboration between our wholesale and ecommerce teams.

Leveraging AI for personalized recommendations

What’s your approach to leveraging customer feedback?

We do this through our support channels, new and returned customer pop-up surveys that I mentioned, online reviews, and more. Obviously, quantitative KPIs are super important to understanding the big picture pain points that the customer has, but collecting qualitative feedback is what enables us to dive deeper into the whys behind those behaviors.

We found that, for example, the top three most important things for our customers are chef-quality ingredients, variety of offerings, and sustainability. So, we make sure to hit those points in different parts of the website, our segmentation, and emails, and provide customers with the information that they need. We improve our digital advertising through that as well. For example, we found that the majority of our customers are averse to a subscription box. They’re more into the idea of a self-curated experience or ordering as they need, so we make sure that one of our ads speaks to that. It’s been one of our most successful campaigns.

Do you have an example of an innovative personalization technique that you’ve implemented to mimic personal interaction?

The biggest advantage, often when we shop at a specialty fish store, is to get a recommendation from a fishmonger. If something’s not available, then what’s a good substitute? Or, what do you have that’s special? In our office, and especially in such an older industry like seafood, there’s a bit of suspicion and hesitation about using AI. We’ve taken advantage of the technology, however, to utilize AI to make personalized recommendations based on search.

For example, if a customer can’t find a certain type of fish our website will make a recommendation for a fish that is similar. We also leverage AI based on shopping behavior, so if someone consistently buys, for example, Japanese hamachi, then we can assume they’re interested in sushi-grade fish. They’re then put into a segmentation where we can make fun recommendations to introduce new products they might be interested in, like kampachi for example.

Combining technology with a high-touch approach

You’ve mentioned that promoting a sense of community is important to you. Could talk about that in the context of a campaign?

I think the most successful campaigns are the ones where we leverage the various parts of our business with a community flywheel of chefs and consumers. We would announce a series of chef-curated boxes to drive our consumers’ passion toward being great home cooks. They’d get to know the chef that they’re getting the box from, for example, and their recipes.

Now post-COVID, we are partnering up with chefs to host in-person events for our local customers. At the same time, we have something coming up for an oyster club campaign, for example, that highlights different oyster producers that we work closely with. Usually, those are what we see the most engagement with because our customers are heavily premium and food-motivated. They love creating their own recipes or trying some of the interesting ones from our site.

From your perspective, what innovations or technologies do you predict will shape the future of ecommerce?

I think the future is going to be about leveraging new technologies while also maintaining that personal, high-touch approach to the customer. We’re going to see a lot of automation, and I foresee almost a tipping point of what may feel too automated. Yes, machine learning and AI might become so good that it’s not obvious, but we don’t want to ever lose the human aspect.

Ultimately, consumers know, and that’s where we want to make sure we’re in the right spot. We want to be straddling using the right amount of new technologies while taking a customer-first point of view as a business.