Retention Edge E29: The Ops Metric That Actually Drives Retention

Most brands measure retention with the usual suspects. Repeat purchase rate, LTV, cohort curves.

Kira Waite measures it with on-time shipping.

This week I sat down with Kira Waite, who leads operations and CX at Artifact Uprising, a premium photo goods brand.

We talked about why operational excellence is the foundation of retention, why pre-purchase CX might be the most underused growth lever in ecommerce, and what happens when you stop treating your support team as a cost center.

I’m a big believer in this topic too - and it’s only going to get more important as more brands automate their CX to death.

Now let’s jump into the top takeaways we got from the convo with Kira.

On-time shipping is a retention metric

When I asked her which retention metrics she watches most closely, she didn't say repeat purchase rate or NPS. She said on-time shipping.

Getting the order out the door when you told the customer you would.

Her logic is straightforward. We're all conditioned by Amazon. Customers notice every date they see in cart, and they don't forget it.

If you promise Tuesday and ship Wednesday, you've already lost trust. Even if the order arrives on time.

When Artifact hits their shipping targets, everything downstream improves. Fewer WISMO tickets. Higher CSAT. Better sentiment scores. The correlation is strong enough that they treat it as a leading indicator for retention, not just an ops KPI.

The practical takeaway here: the date you show in cart is a promise. And you want to underpromise, overdeliver. And if your ops team and CX team aren't looking at the same shipping data, fix that first.

Pre-purchase CX

Most brands treat CX as reactive and post-purchase. It's the team that handles complaints, processes returns, answers "where's my order." Maybe 60% of the time, that's accurate.

But there's this other 40% that almost nobody is investing in.

Artifact started offering live chat in cart and in their editor, so customers could talk to a human before they bought.

The take rate blew their minds. They had no idea how many people had questions before checkout and were just... leaving.

Customer confidence was the bottleneck, not the product. They weren't doing anything wrong. People just needed a nudge. A customer who feels supported pre-purchase is a customer who comes back.

CX as a growth engine

Most companies fall into the trap of treating CX like a checkbox, and making the goal to keep costs as low as possible.

Kira's team does the opposite. They look for ways to drive revenue through CX, especially during slow months:

• Text outreach to customers who abandoned a project

• Email follow-ups offering design services

• Proactive project reviews where an agent looks at your photo book and gives feedback before you order

Not all of it works. But the project review offering has been a hit, and it directly drives conversion.

Your CX team talks to more customers than anyone else in your company. If you're not using that as a growth input, you're sitting on a goldmine.

Proactive vs reactive CX

Artifact runs a huge chunk of revenue through a five-week window between Thanksgiving and December 18th. So Kira's team started sending proactive deadline reminders: “Hey, it takes a day or two to build a book, and your shipping cutoff is coming up.”

Simple. Not pushy. Just helpful. And the retention impact was real.

They also flag customers who had a bad experience. If something went wrong for you last year, they know about it, and they make sure it doesn't happen again.

That’s a major point of difference to many brands, who prefer to sweep this thing under the rug and pretend it never happened.

Phones aren't as critical as you think

Kira used to believe strongly that phone support was essential: customers want to talk to a human, pick up the phone, have a real conversation.

Well, they tested it. And the take rate wasn't there.

The economics don't work for most brands - expensive to staff, you can't see what the customer sees, and resolution times are worse than chat across the board.

Kira's not fully against it. If a high-value customer says "I need to talk to someone," they'll pick up the phone.

But if you’re agonizing over whether to add phone support, the answer might be: invest that budget into making your chat experience genuinely great instead. Meet customers where they actually are.

Summing up

The big takeaway from our conversation is the impact of operations on retention.

It’s not just a marketing problem. The more you’re able to ship on time, talk to your customers, and fix (or ideally prevent) problems, the better your retention metrics will be.

And these things usually move the needle more than the greatest email copywriting or ad creative.

Catch the full episode on YouTube or. Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.