This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Stephanie Ouellet, the Customer Experience Manager at Earth Rated, a leading brand in the pet industry known for their eco-friendly dog waste bags and dispensers. Our conversation delved into how Earth Rated has built a customer-centric culture from the ground up, the challenges of scaling a personalized customer experience, and the innovative ways they're leveraging customer insights to drive product innovation and delight their customers. Here are the key takeaways from our discussion:
Q: Can you give us an overview of your role at Earth Rated and the key challenges you were brought in to address?
Stephanie: When I joined Earth Rated, the company had experienced significant growth, particularly during the pandemic, as our products are essential for dog owners. But with that rapid scaling, there were some challenges to maintain the same level of personalized experience that customers loved.
My role was to come in and help the team build the structure around what had already been done in a more scrappy way up until that point. We were a small team of just three people handling a good volume of customer inquiries, so a big part of my initial focus was creating a strong foundation - documenting processes, identifying opportunities for automation and optimization - so that we could free up resources to focus on more elevated initiatives like our Voice of Customer program and Surprise and Delight.
Q: You mentioned that consumer obsession is part of Earth Rated's DNA. How has that customer-centric mindset been instilled in the company culture?
Stephanie: One of the things that really drew me to Earth Rated was how evident their customer-centric approach was, even just from the job posting and interviews. It was clear that understanding and prioritizing customer needs was deeply ingrained and drove everything they did, even before I joined.
A lot of that stems from our CEO and the way he founded the company - he started Earth Rated because as a dog owner himself, he was frustrated with the products on the market and believed he could create something better. So that mission of solving real customer pain points has been there from day one, as is still a key driver of everything we do.
It's also something that's reinforced through our core values and hiring process. Across every team, one of the key things we look for when hiring is: do you get it? Do you understand the lifestyle and needs of our consumers? We want every employee to have that empathy and customer-first mindset, not just those in customer-facing roles, because that’s how we create better products.
Q: As you've scaled, how have you approached maintaining a personal touch in your customer interactions?
Stephanie: This is something we've had to get really creative and intentional about as we've grown. Early on, we were doing things that were super personalized but ultimately not scalable, like sending huge packs of swag to every customer and even engraving the dog's name on tags.
So a lot of my work has been figuring out how we can keep that spirit of personalization alive in a more sustainable way. That’s how our Surprise & Delight program came to be. Rather than a one-size-fits-all insert in our replacement packages, we empower our team to choose an additional product to include based on their interaction with the customer.
So if the customer mentions they have a new puppy, we might add in a starter pack with a variety of our products. Or if the customer has been struggling with messy cleanups, we could throw in some of our wipes. It allows us to leverage those personal details that come up organically in conversations to create a really tailored experience, without requiring a huge lift on our end.
Q: How are you leveraging customer insights to inform your broader business strategy and product roadmap?
Stephanie: This has been a huge area of focus for us for the past several months. When Earth Rated was smaller, our innovation and leadership teams were really close to the customer and had a direct pulse on their needs and pain points. But as we've scaled, it's become even more important to maintain that tight feedback loop.
Our customers are super engaged with our brand and are always reaching out with ideas, suggestions, and requests. We realized we weren't effectively capturing and leveraging those insights to drive our product strategy. So a key goal of our Voice of Customer initiative is creating a clear pipeline to funnel that input back to our innovation team to inform our product roadmap.
We're looking at both the quantitative data around product issues or requested features, and the qualitative feedback around how customers are using our products and where they see room for improvement. It's all about keeping the customer needs at the heart of our innovation process as we grow.
In Conclusion
Our conversation with Stephanie underscored the power of a deeply ingrained customer-centric culture and the creative approaches that allow even rapidly scaling businesses to maintain a personal touch. A few key themes emerged:
- Customer-centricity has to start at the top and be reinforced at every level, from executive leadership to frontline employees. It's not just about process, but mindset.
- Personalization at scale requires empowering frontline teams with the autonomy and insights to customize experiences on the fly, rather than defaulting to rigid, one-size-fits-all approaches.
- As businesses grow, maintaining a tight feedback loop between customer insights and product innovation is critical, but takes intentional effort and cross-functional alignment.
Earth Rated's journey offers valuable lessons for any business striving to scale with a customer-first mindset. By staying true to their core values, finding creative ways to operationalize empathy, and keeping the customer voice at the center of their decision making, they've managed to grow rapidly without losing the personal touch that defines their brand. Stephanie's passion for customer experience shines through in her work, and we look forward to seeing how she and the Earth Rated team continue to delight their customers in new and innovative ways.
