About Plutosport: the largest online sports and lifestyle store in the Netherlands

Plutosport is the largest sports and lifestyle online store in the Netherlands. The company was founded in 2005 and has been operating as an online retailer since 2010. 

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They offer the best deals in sports and lifestyle, ranging from clothing to shoes and other accessories, for women, men and kids. The collection now consists of two hundred premium brands and over 22,000 items at extremely competitive prices.

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The team at Plutosport is young, energetic and responds to market demands as much as possible. The purchasing team travels all over Europe to find the best collections. They offer excellent and swift deliveries by having many items in stock, enabling them to deliver the products to the customer the next day.

Huge number of customer inquiries, lack of clarity and no exchanges

Selling products was not a problem at Plutosport. That was already going well; very well in fact. However, there was still room for improvement in the area of order returns. Plutosport was facing a lot of customer inquiries about the return process because it was quite unclear.

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We spoke with Henriette van Dam - Janssens, Senior Team Leader Customer Service at Plutosport about the partnership with Returnista and how it came to life.

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Plutosport did not send return labels along with orders, which led to a huge number of customer inquiries and problems. For example, customers had to keep the shipping packaging to return the product. These packages often had already been thrown away before the customer even wanted to request a return.

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"We used to advise customers to purchase multiple sizes because exchanges were not yet possible" van Dam - Janssens tells us. In the past, customers first had to re-order the product in a new size and then register the undesired product for return. All in all, this caused a lot of confusion for customers, which resulted in customer service working overtime.

Enhancing the customer experience by implementing Returnista

Plutosport wanted to solve the challenge around returns while enhancing the customer experience. They started looking for a suitable solution and soon came across at Returnista.

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The first step taken was to make exchanges easier and actively encourage customers to make exchanges. Customers are now much less likely to have to go to customer service with questions about an item they ordered in the wrong size. 

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In addition to helping retain sales that would otherwise be lost, this also provided a more pleasant experience for the customer. Furthermore, by using Returnista, Plutosport is now able to offer return labels. This has made the return process much easier.

Within days, there were 80% less customer inquiries over the phone and 25% more exchanges

Plutosport was already seeing positive results within a few days of using Returnista. By making the return process clearer and simpler, customers did not feel the need to contact customer support for help.

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About reducing the number of customer calls, van Dam - Janssens said: "At first I was quite skeptical whether it would be so much easier, but after a few days there were already about 80% fewer customer calls to customer service. We really noticed that".

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"This obviously saves the customer service team a lot of time. We can now start spending this time helping customers with other questions even faster. With this, we can enhance the customer experience even further."

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In addition to the time savings in customer service, by implementing Returnista, Plutosport now has 25% more exchanges each month, which means they retain much more revenue.

Return rate further reduced by insights into return data

After these successful first steps, there certainly still is room for improvement in the return process. Reducing the return rate is a good example of this.

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Plutosport is currently working on a business case to further optimize collaborations with service points. This way, they are also improving the touchpoints customers have with third parties such as service points, where return packages can be dropped off. 

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Offering exchanges also brings the opportunity to collect different types of return data. Thanks to this returns data, Plutosport now has much better insights into why certain products are often being returned.

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For example, van Dam - Janssens tells us, "If customers often indicate about the same item that the size falls differently, we can respond by adjusting the product information, for example." 

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Thanks in part to these insights from Returnista's returns platform, returns can now be prevented as much as possible. And this contributes to an optimal customer journey.

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Plutosport looks forward to continuing to make great strides with Returnista in further optimizing the entire returns process in the coming period.

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