About

TruWood is an eCommerce wooden fashion accessories brand with a clear vision... 

PLANT TREES. FEED FAMILIES. CHANGE LIVES.

This vision started in 2016, when TruWood’s founders knew they wanted to provide as much value to the world as possible by building a brand that gives back. Both founders had a love of watches, but knew there were a ton of options on the market. In order to stand out, they turned to mostly hand-making their products from wood, bamboo, and reclaimed lumber, aiming to provide top quality at affordable prices. 

 For every order placed, TruWood plants ten trees. This helps feed and increase income for families, as well as helps restore biodiversity. 

“We didn’t want to take more from the environment than we were giving back. Our motto is to connect people with nature, make them more appreciative of it while wearing a piece of jewelry to remind them of that every day,” - Bishoi Khella, Co-Founder

To date, Truwood has generated $10M in revenue around the world, and has helped plant over 725,000 trees in Africa.

“We’ve generated over $10 million in revenue to date with a fairly small team and we’ve managed to do that by utilizing various tools such as Gorgias and SMSBump that make our lives easier.” - Bishoi K, Co-founder

The Challenge

Creating exceptional customer services is a key focus for the TruWood team. Their co-founder, Bishoi, thinks of their approach to customer service as the same way you’d approach your own family. For example, if you gave your uncle a watch and he told you it wasn’t working, you’d want to respond quickly and personally, and help them resolve that as soon as possible. 

But as TruWood scales, it became harder and harder to keep up with customer support tickets and provide a family-like experience. They had a “bootleg” system in place that needed adjusting. They only had one full-time customer service representative, and used Gmail with a bunch of categorized subfolders for different types of emails they’d receive. For example, they had folders for customers, business inquiries, marketing requests, etc. Whenever an email would come in, it’d land in their main inbox, and then once it had been addressed, it would be filed under one of those folders. 

For templates to reply to emails, they set up Gmail drafts with the subject line as the Draft Name. Their customer service team would then have to go to the drafts folder, find the template they’re looking for, go back to the email and copy paste the response, then make any order specific edits as needed, and click send. This manual effort was costing their team hours, and sometimes led to fatigue that was noticeable in their responses.

“Gorgias has been a godsend. Looking back, I can’t believe we used to handle customer service emails the way we did. It’s cut the time it takes to answer emails by over half. The small monthly fee is a no brainer for a company looking to focus on growth and make efficient use of their resources.” - Bishoi Khella, Co-Founder

They also needed a more direct marketing channel to create a community of happy customers at scale, feeling that Facebook and Google were more focused on mass interactions.

The Solution

In order to continue to provide excellent customer experiences and streamline their processes, TruWood turned to Gorgias. Now, all their emails and customer tickets across channels are funneled into Gorgias, and they leverage macros and machine learning to reply quickly and personally. 

“Now the customer service team, with a click of a button, can find the right template and have all the order specific details such as order number, tracking number, and the customer name, and auto populate responses.” - Bishoi Khella, Co-Founder

With all that extra time, their customer service agents are able to work on more meaningful interactions and projects that have helped the business grow. It also helped TruWood quickly onboard new-hires, as they only have to learn one platform and all of their templates are in one, easy-to-find place. 

Once they had this new system in place, they were ready to find the marketing channels that would help them personalize experiences throughout the customer journey - which is when they tried SMSBump.

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“SMSBump has helped our company tremendously. It allows us to build relationships with our customers and encourages communication through whatever medium they’re most comfortable with. It’s 2021, people don’t email anymore, texting is way more convenient, and whatever way our customers prefer to talk to us through, I want to be there,”- Bishoi Khella, Co-Founder, TruWood

TruWood tested SMS with their audience first with a 3-step abandoned cart flow, which turned out to be a “money printing machine”. They also use MMS and discounts with precisely targeted audiences, creating hyper-personalized experiences that really resonate with their customers.

Read more about how TruWood uses SMSBump here.

The Results

“This year to date, our abandoned cart flow is sitting at a 35x ROI and an average click-through rate of 18%. To put it into perspective, our Facebook / Google Ads ROAS for retarget traffic sits at about a 3-5x. The results have been phenomenal,” - Bishoi Khella, Co-Founder

In total, the flows TruWood has used with SMSBump have generated an ROI of 62x, or more than a total of $120,000 in revenue. They've also seen up to 40x ROI on one-off SMS campaigns. 

For customer service, their labour costs have been cut by over half. Agents are taking less than a minute to answer most customer service emails, which is a big improvement from their previous method. With all the saved time, they're able to get their team to work on other tasks that help grow the company.

With the Gorgias and SMSBump integration, TruWood is able to create a personalized experience for all customers by responding to SMS messages through Gorgias quickly and efficiently. 

“With the Gorgias and SMSBump integration it’s truly a win-win situation - we get what we want, which is efficiency and ease of use, and the customer gets what they want - to receive their communication via SMS. Being able to provide these better experiences through integrations will inevitably foster loyalty," - Bishoi Khella, Co-Founder