Travelpro®’s Story

Travelpro® is a leading manufacturer of luggage and suitcases, founded in 1987 by former Northwest Airlines pilot Bob Plath, who invented the rollaboard luggage. Over the years, Travelpro® has become one of the most popular luggage brands in the industry due to its focus on innovation.

Travelpro® is constantly seeking ways to improve its products and make travel easier for customers. One example of this is its patented PrecisionGlide™ system, which combines three innovative features to provide superior mobility and effortless rolling.

Return requests began to pose a problem for Travelpro® as they did not have a professional system in place to manage them. This caused a bottleneck for the customer service team and slowed down their response time, ultimately limiting the company’s growth. In order to improve the returns process, Travelpro® implemented ReturnGO in February 2022.

The Challenge

Despite Travelpro®’s dedication to providing excellent customer service, its manual returns process was causing difficulties for both customers and the customer service team.

Before Travelpro® implemented ReturnGO’s returns solution, customers would need to request a return on the website, and a customer service team member would manually generate a return label using FedEx Ship Manager and send it to the customer by email.

Travelpro®’s Director of eCommerce Operations, Mark Costigliola, evaluated several well-known returns solutions, and found that they had extremely long implementation times (in some cases up to three months) and high upfront costs.

This posed a challenge for Travelpro®, as they never before sent labels to customers without first communicating with them. Travelpro® wanted to try a small test to see how the return solution would work before rolling it out to all of their customers. However, the other solutions would not accommodate this kind of test.

Another unique challenge faced by Travelpro® was the lack of multi-label printing for returns  when selling large items that are shipped in multiple boxes. This made it difficult for customers to return an entire order, as they would need separate labels for each box. Although Travelpro® conducted a limited test to address this complex problem, no other return solutions on the market have yet been able to effectively solve it.

Why Travelpro® Chose ReturnGO

The ReturnGO onboarding process took only 48 hours, during which Travelpro® could already generate labels and make adjustments. This was a significant improvement compared to the three-month implementation process of some of the other solutions they evaluated.

During the first phase of testing, Travelpro® conducted a small manual test with a segment of customers to assess the customer experience with ReturnGO. The test involved limiting the use of the app to customer service agents, who received returns requests by email and then used ReturnGO to email a return shipping label to the customer for printing. This initial test enabled Travelpro® to evaluate the ease of use and effectiveness of the returns solution before rolling it out more widely.

By eliminating the need to log into FedEx Ship manager, type up a label, and email it to the customer, ReturnGO’s shipping integration abilities helped to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to process a return.

ReturnGO’s seamless shipping integration also enabled Travelpro® to observe how customers interacted with the return label and gain valuable insights into the customer experience.

How Travelpro® Uses ReturnGO

Using ReturnGO, Travelpro® has fully automated its returns process, eliminating customer service agents’ involvement in sending return labels and other tasks.

Travelpro® has made its returns process fully customer-centric, since customers can complete return forms online and use the ReturnGO portal for self-service returns.

Travelpro® and ReturnGO share a commitment to innovation and have partnered to develop new features that address a specific need for companies like Travelpro® that sell large items.

Thanks to this innovative approach, Travelpro® will soon be able to offer multiple return shipping labels for each order, enhancing the returns process for customers.

Customer satisfaction is important to Travelpro®, and ReturnGO helps make the return process more convenient and encourage repeat business. ReturnGO’s streamlined return process enables customers to easily get a pre-paid return label by simply entering their order number and ZIP code. This makes initiating a return quick and convenient.

Travelpro® processes a high volume of returns, especially during the holiday season when there’s a rush of customer service requests.

Before implementing automated refund processes, issuing a refund could take several weeks, often resulting in a backlog of requests in the months following the holiday season.

Automating the refund process has made it easier to efficiently issue refunds on a daily basis, even during peak seasons.

The Results

• Reduced Time to Market.
  The ReturnGO onboarding process took only 48 hours, significantly reducing Travelpro®’s time to market compared to the three-month implementation period required by some of the other solutions they evaluated.

• Reduced Customer Support Time & Costs.
  Using automation, Travelpro® was able to significantly reduce the amount of time it took to process returns, from 20 minutes of manual work down to zero. As a result, customer service is no longer involved in the process. This time reduction ultimately led to cost savings of thousands of dollars.

• Increased Customer Satisfaction & Customer Retention.
  Customer polls conducted by Travelpro® found that easier returns lead to higher customer satisfaction. The company’s focus on making returns easy for customers plays a key role in retaining customers. These findings highlight the importance of the return process in the customer journey.

• Scaling.
  Travelpro® initially started using ReturnGO for its online store at Travelpro.com and later extended it to its professional site.
  Travelpro® Canada plans to implement the ReturnGO solution in early 2023, and then scale the solution to all of its sites, with a total of seven instances.

  In the future, Travelpro® plans to continue expanding the use of the ReturnGO solution across all of its sites.