Mabel's Labels Turns 20,000+ Responses a Year Into a Quarterly Voice-of-Customer Engine

Mabel's Labels Overview

Mabel's Labels started in 2003 with four moms in a basement and a universal parenting problem: kids' stuff leaves home and never comes back. Daycare sweaters, camp water bottles, school lunch boxes, all vanishing into lost-and-found bins while parents fought back with masking tape and marker. Their answer was a waterproof, ultra-durable, personalized name label cute enough that kids actually wanted them on their things.

The solution stuck, in every sense. The business grew exponentially, was acquired by CCL Industries for its Avery North America division in 2016, and is today the number one personalized label company in North America, selling across the US and Canada, in both English and French.

It is also a fiercely seasonal business. Camp season and back-to-school compress a huge share of the year into one summer surge, and the customer experience team grows from five permanent members to nine to absorb it. Since 2022, that team has run its customer feedback program on Retently, and turned it into something few ecommerce brands manage: a feedback loop that reaches the leadership table every quarter and changes what the company builds.

Mabel's Labels' Challenges

When Eryn Chesney took over the CX team in 2022, the team was excellent at support, but support tickets were the company's only structured listening channel.

Tickets tell one story. Only customers with a problem worth a support email ever reached the team. The silent majority, happy, mildly disappointed, or drifting away, was invisible.

No structured feedback owned by CX. Signals about how customers felt about the brand, not just their last order, had no home and no owner.

Feedback had to live where the team works. Any new program that made reps swivel between tools would die in the summer peak. Feedback needed to land in the same inbox as everything else.

My support ticket volume tells me one story. The feedback we get post-purchase in our NPS surveys, and right at the moment of the web experience in our customer effort score surveys, paints the broader picture, and puts data behind our claims when leadership meets on the voice of the customer.

Eryn ChesneyHead of CX @ Mabel's Labels

The Solution

Eryn started with NPS in Retently, then added a Customer Effort Score survey right after checkout, covering the two moments that matter most in ecommerce: how hard was it to buy, and how did the whole experience land once the order arrived.

What made Retently the fit, in her words: the dashboard was easy to read, every survey's feedback lived in one place, and it integrated painlessly with the support software the reps already live in every day.

Here is Eryn on why the program exists and what the team does with every response:

The team's rule for what happens next has no fine print:

Nothing necessarily went wrong. They're saying: I got my order, it's okay, I was a little disappointed. Those customers are exactly the ones at risk of never purchasing again, so they're our biggest opportunity to impact retention. We respond, we dig into it, and the team has carte blanche to do whatever it takes to make it right.

Eryn ChesneyHead of CX @ Mabel's Labels

That responsiveness compounds. Customers regularly answer the team's same-day follow-ups with some version of "I didn't know anybody was actually going to read this." A brand known for answering is a brand people keep talking to, which is how a five-person team ends up with one of the highest response rates we see in ecommerce.

Results With Retently

A quarterly Voice-of-Customer engine. Every quarter, Eryn convenes the entire leadership team and presents a report built from feedback across all channels, with survey data as its backbone. Leadership picks the problems, agrees on solutions and priorities, and ships the changes. Then the CX team does the part almost nobody does: it goes back to the customers who complained and tells them, "we listened, we fixed it, let us know if it's better."

The scores follow. An NPS of 85 against a 60 ecommerce benchmark, a CES of 88% and climbing since the redesign, and 20,000+ responses a year with nearly half of surveyed customers responding, many of them writing out what they think rather than just tapping a score.

For a brand founded by four customers solving their own problem, the feedback program is less a new capability than a return to form at 20,000 responses a year: stay close to the customer, and let what they say guide the brand.