Case Study
Background on Vori
Vori is building the B2B operating system for the grocery industry. A crucial part of our society, yet extraordinarily underserved when it comes to technology, grocery stores have been making do with a patchwork of systems, bandaid solutions, and analog methods. The vision behind Vori is to be a trusted data layer within the global supply chain and the standard for multi-player trade, communication, and prediction within society's foundational B2B industries. By streamlining orders and communication between grocery retailers and their suppliers, Vori is walking out its mission to unite the supply chain to ensure communities have access to the goods they need and love in order to live, work, learn, and play – starting with food.
Ops at Vori
As Vori quickly expands from a nascent startup to serving thousands of customers, the Operations Team’s scope of responsibility includes a wide range of functions that allow the company to run and scale:
Onboarding & launching new stores and new vendors
Customer success
Ensuring data integrity across all partners
Maika Koehl, Vori’s Head of Operations, recognized early on that her team needed to consolidate data and standardize knowledge.
“Vori has been live for 24 months, and we’re well beyond our first set of beta customers,” Koehl explained. “We’re a scaled team and we’re growing very quickly. As a result, we’re pulled in a dozen different directions. When I joined a year ago, I knew we needed someone — or something, like Avenue — to tell us what we should care about so we can focus our attention on what’s most important, when it’s most important.”
Growing Data Piles with a Growing Company
Similar to many operations teams, Koehl and her team were carrying out manual checks, building out massive Excel spreadsheets, and running to catch anything falling between the cracks.
“We would review the data in aggregate, but when you do that it can mask what’s happening, and you’re getting the information at a time when it’s not necessarily most impactful to reach out.” Koehl’s team was stretching their bandwidth, from manually checking orders placed on Vori’s platform to physically dropping into their customers’ stores and warehouses.
We were at the point where we knew our customers by heart and intuitively sensed when a customer was less engaged. As we went beyond our first couple dozen customers, we knew that wouldn't be sustainable - intuition doesn't scale.
That's when Vori brought in Avenue.
Implementing Avenue
Koehl set up a collaborative process to come up with the use cases for Avenue. With a list of pain points and manual checks, her team came up with a shorter list of main categories for the first use cases. Koehl was then able to quickly deploy Avenue alerts for her team: “What’s nice about Avenue is that I’m able to create my own signals, or pass them along to our intern to help us with that.”
A guiding principle for Koehl and her team is to maintain the highest levels of customer support for the ultimate customer experience. They set up Avenue as the omniscient, omnipresent observer to trigger alerts to the team for customers that needed attention. One of the monitors Vori set up is to alert when a customer is at risk of churning or goes a certain amount of time without engagement, both at the store and user levels. Avenue also sends pings when a customer signs up or places their first order.
Before Avenue, the Vori Ops Team was scrupulously checking several Slack channels that constantly received pings. Now, those alerts have been cut by over 50% due to Avenue’s prioritization mechanisms. And those large spreadsheets? Koehl confirmed that all alerts have moved to an Avenue and Slack combination: “We got rid of the spreadsheets.”
What’s Next?
Vori is growing quickly. With new product rollouts and pilot programs, there will be several launches at a time. “We're scaling nationally this year,” Koehl shared. “Being able to have not only Avenue’s granular pings that indicate success or failure, but also having the birds eye level view with the Avenue Dashboard is going to be a game changer.”
Does this sound like your team?
Operations teams have been the group that works on the edge of a business. They pick up everything that slips through the cracks, and they tend do so with a patchworked and insufficient toolkit. Instead of focusing on preventing fires, they have to figure out where the fires are coming from while they fight them.
It’s a new day for operations teams. Avenue provides all the alerts, monitoring, analysis, and escalations you need, in one place.
Don't wait! Get started today.
Happy alerting 🚀
