Overview

Mulberry allows any ecommerce retailer to seamlessly embed product protection offers throughout their customer journey. This opens a new revenue stream for retailers while delivering comprehensive coverage and a great claims experience for customers. Mulberry delivers both the technology and the service. This includes customizable integrations that work with common ecommerce platforms like Shopify as well as custom sites, and handling the customer warranty claims experience end-to-end, from filing to resolution of free repairs and replacements.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

The insurance industry is outdated -- not built for ecommerce-first businesses, with integrations often taking months if a retailer even meets the high revenue threshold for insurance companies to work with them. And the insurance industry is not customer-first -- the hoops customers have to jump through to file claims and get a response, followed by gotchas in the fine print to avoid payouts, leave customers feeling like product protection is a scam. Mulberry set out to build an ecommerce-first product protection platform that would deliver a great customer and retailer experience.

The Solution

The first issue to solve was technical integration. Mulberry was built from the ground up for ecommerce retailers, with easy yet customizable integrations for major ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento. Another key challenge with the integration was the manual effort to map each retail product to a protection plan, a process often done in massive spreadsheets. Mulberry’s technology leveraged machine learning to detect products onsite and map to protection plans dynamically, cutting down initial integration work and eliminating ongoing maintenance. The other big issue to tackle was the warranty plans themselves. Most warranty companies partner with insurance companies to underwrite the plans offered. But this leaves retailers with limited options or slow launches. Mulberry built the insurance infrastructure to be able to underwrite our own plans, opening up product protection to more verticals and sizes of retailers, enabling us to own and improve the CX end-to-end.

The results

1. Technical integration time is cut down from months to days. Traditionally, product protection programs take months to map plans to products and integrate into a website. With Mulberry, this process can take a matter of days due to the out-of-the-box dynamic -- yet customizable -- ecommerce integrations.
2. Management resource requirements are nearly eliminated. Enterprise product protection programs can require teams of 5+ full-time employees to continuously map plans to new products and coordinate plan purchases and claims with the warranty partner. With Mulberry, this is eliminated because of the dynamic nature of the integration and Mulberry taking on the end-to-end CX.
3. Product protection programs are available to more retailers. Traditional product protection companies will only work with the top-tier enterprise brands, leaving other retailers without this revenue- and loyalty-building benefit. Mulberry is making this available to the rest of the market.
4. The customer experience is leveled up. Traditional extended warranty companies may still require you to mail your claim, along with a paper receipt. And even then, there are so many gotchas in the fine print, many consumers are left without a positive resolution. Mulberry has moved the entire experience online - from filing, managing, and approving claims (and no registration necessary). And because we underwrite and adjudicate our own plans, our claims approval rates are far above industry averages.

Metrics

1. Technical integration time is cut from months to days.

2. Management resource requirements are nearly eliminated - from teams of full-time employees to zero internal dedicated resources necessary.

3. Product protection is now available to the universe of ecommerce retailers with revenue below $1 billion.

4. Claims approval is guaranteed to be >90% and no longer requires registering, mailing, etc.

The Technology

Mulberry’s platform offers out of the box integrations with ecommerce platforms including Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. Mulberry also has customizable widgets that can be implemented on any ecommerce site, allowing retailers to embed product protection offers across product pages, carts, and post-purchase experiences. This is in contrast to other platforms that require fully custom implementations developed by a retailer’s development team.

Disruptive Factor

Building the insurance infrastructure was quite a long process, handling the many legal requirements to make sure we could offer compliant product protection plans across the country. But doing so opened up many opportunities for us to innovate on the plans and coverage offered, as well as the customer experience for any shoppers buying those plans.

Building the ML-enabled dynamic integration was quite the technical undertaking and required processing an enormous amount of data - initially and ongoing - to turn that into a tool for ecommerce offerings. No one else in this industry - from the traditional warranty companies to the emerging startups - is leveraging a dynamic integration, built on machine learning, like Mulberry’s.

Shining Moment

Being able to serve our hundreds of thousands of customers has been great validation that we are offering something of value. We consistently hear great feedback from our customers about their experience and have even had customers ask us about where else they can shop to get Mulberry plans along with their purchase!