1. Know Your Niche & Audience: To improve targeting, have a thorough understanding of the product and the consumer. Lev thinks it helps anticipate demands and customize the experience.
2. Invest in Efficient Support: Provide quick, multi-channel assistance. According to Lev, prompt reactions are essential for a flawless experience, particularly in a specialized sector.
3. Maintain Post-Purchase Engagement: Continue communicating with clients after they have made a transaction. This guarantees retention and offers insightful criticism for development.
4. Adapt & Innovate: Keep your marketing and offers up to date. Lev asserts that innovation is essential to being current and preventing stagnation.
5. Community Building Matters: Building a robust fan base facilitates natural expansion. Lev highlights that establishing a rapport with your audience may result in effective, cost-free advertising.
Meet Lev Glushkovskii, Founder of SabersPro!
SabersPro, a global business originally founded in the United States, was created by two Star Wars fans who lived the fantasy for a long time. After spending many years as part of the fandom, they realized they wanted to contribute more to the many fans just like them. It came to their realization that nothing says Star Wars more than the iconic Lightsaber. SabersPro offers high quality, collectable sabers backed by a strong commitment to customer service, design innovation, and fandom community support.
Lev got his start in e-commerce in high school when he started a clothing brand. While his brand only lasted a year and half, the experience was insightful and prepared Lev for his next enterprise, SabersPro. “With my business partner, we applied our skills from previous ventures and developed the company, going from ground zero with no funding to where we are now.”
Lev credits early success to creating a product targeting a niche market with a connection to one of the most iconic film franchises of all time. “Selling light sabers is extremely smart,” he explains. “As fans, we were thinking about a market with a small number of competitors, but with a large audience. It is a perfect fit to start a company, which we would be able to scale very quickly.”
The team at SabersPro consists of Lev and his business partner who are based in New York City, and 16 remote employees in the US and offshore with specified roles ranging from customer service and marketing to management. Lev describes the team structure, “It’s easier and cost-effective to maintain a remote company, especially after COVID. We also wanted people who were knowledgeable about our niche market. This meant expanding our selection beyond the United States.”
SabersPro’s CX Philosophy
SabersPro aims to make the CX journey seamless from the moment people start thinking about making a purchase. “Having a customer service team that knows the industry and how the product works is critical,” Lev maintains. “We make ourselves available by phone and 24/7 chat. We want to make sure the customer has the best experience, and their questions are answered in literally minutes.”
Evolution of Customer Service
At the beginning, SabersPro supported customers by email only. Lev quickly realized this wasn’t enough and notes, “waiting days for an answer could negatively impact their experience.” They’ve since taken measures to better serve customers incorporating live chat, phone support, and AI to answer basic, often repeated questions.
When Going the Extra Mile for CX Pays Off
In the competitive world of e-commerce, a brand committed to superior service stands out from the rest. And in extraordinary cases, those efforts go viral. Telling SabersPros’ story, Lev recalls, “A customer had some issues with the functioning of their saber, and we shipped them a replacement within a week’s time. The customer, it turns out, was a YouTuber with 300k followers. They created a perfect video about our product and showed it on their channel. This is why we always put the customer first, providing them with an optimal experience.”
Driving Revenue and Customer Retention
Lev sees business growth and revenue as being directly related to retention. “While we are a very niche product, we have a lot of customers making repeat purchases because their first purchase went so well. Additionally, new films, TV series, and cool information related to the franchise are consistently being released, which keeps customers in our circle whether buying for themselves or a friend.”
Lev believes that SabersPro’s customer retention relies on ongoing customer care post-purchase. “If customers have issues or questions about their saber, we are available to provide and explain information,” he says. “That’s crucial – they have a positive experience and come back.”
Establishing and maintaining a positive brand image has been critical to SabersPro’s growth and success, Lev reveals. “Good reviews and word of mouth play a major role in marketing. Just because your paid Ads are performing well doesn’t mean your company is going to grow. You want people to promote for free by telling their friends, colleagues, or anyone else about your product.”
Balancing Reinvesting in the Business and Drawing Profits
Like many e-commerce companies, SabersPro’s business is seasonal with Christmas being the peak period – upward spikes also occur during film and series franchise releases. “We aim to reinvest most of it within the company itself, but when the growth stagnates, we try to profit from it,” Lev says.
Revenue Strategies in a Global E-Commerce Landscape
As e-commerce focuses on user privacy, SabersPro is moving away from paid Ads, understanding that less customization is now being allowed to target the right audience. Instead, the brand is concentrating on establishing its presence within the community of fans (a goal from day one) and driving traffic organically.
Peak-Season Strategies
Lev says that inventory management and marketing campaigns (prepared a month in advance and scheduled to stimulate sales) are high priority when entering a peak season.
Providing exceptional customer support during busy periods is also key. Lev elaborates, “In the winter, we see a lot of gift orders. While in the off-season, we have more fan orders. Questions and concerns differ depending on the season, which means we need to make sure our customer support representatives are able to provide the correct responses as needed.”
To foster innovation, Lev looks at his company from two main perspectives: marketing and product development. He encourages designers working on creatives to implement their own styles, experiences, and to try new ideas. “We don’t want to do the same thing repeatedly just because it works. We want to make it better each time.” he adds.
For direction in product development, SabersPro looks to its customers. In addition to customer feedback, SabersPro conducts polls on Instagram asking followers which saber design they would like to see next. “We listen to our audience and then create a real product,” Lev notes. “This was the case with our Quantum saber, which has since been reviewed by a number of influencers.”
Key Priorities and Goals
SabersPro is working on creating a community where people can ask questions and share their experiences customizing their sabers along with what’s going on in the Star Wars realm. “It will allow us to maintain a brand presence while connecting with and understanding our customers more. Because we can’t just keep selling the same products for the years to come.”
Lev advises aspiring entrepreneurs in e-commerce to “select the right niche and go with a product that you know and experience yourself. This allows you to better understand the customer profile so when you bring it to market, you’ll know how to locate and target your audience. Maintaining the right growth for the company is also important. For e-comm, you don’t want hyper growth, nor do you want stagnated growth.”
Gorgias “We use Gorgias. It’s integrated with everything – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, email, and phone.”
What Excites You Most About E-Commerce? The ability to serve people the product that they really want.
Can’t-Live Without-Tool? Google Analytics. It allows us to better understand the customer journey, especially in terms of optimizing your conversion rate which is crucial for optimizing platforms.
Key Hiring Trait? Adaptiveness. The ability to adapt to certain situations and think independently. I look for someone who learns and grows on their own and has ideas to implement.
AI or No AI? AI. It helps with the most basic things for customer support. However, I’m opposed to AI when it comes to writing blogs and website copy.
Recent Book or Podcast? “The Art of Not Giving a Fuck” by Mark Manson. The book really describes how people act in certain stress situations and how to manage it.
Favorite Thought Leader in E-Commerce Space? To be honest, it really depends on the niche. Regarding e-comm in general, I don’t believe people who advertise their own skills and talents, especially for money, always know what they are doing.
#1 Challenge as a Leader: Leading a team, the tasks that you do are the ones no one can do or wants to do. That’s a challenge because these tasks are not always enjoyable and are usually stressful. Because you know all the working parts of the company, you’re often picking up the slack behind everyone.
Advice for CX Leaders: Interactions with customers post-purchase are important and insightful. Ask them for their feedback, product reviews, and to rate their overall experience. Additionally, aim for quick and proficient response rates to ensure a seamless CX journey.
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