For the past nine months, I haven’t left my house without my gold Oura ring. It sits inconspicuously on my finger and looks like a bold, signet ring to the untrained eye. However, to the initiated, wellness-loving techie, the Oura ring is evident, and I get many questions about whether the wearable is worth the money or better at tracking than its competitors. As someone who is both a data science nerd and is very invested in my personal wellness (i.e goes to hot yoga 3x a week, makes homemade ginger shots, takes probiotics and magnesium everyday without fail, exclusively uses a red light after 9 PM.), I may be biased when I say this ring makes wellness an fun optimization game. I love analyzing my health trends over time to investigate patterns, and checking my sleep, activity, and readiness scores is a part of my everyday routine without fail.
For this week’s assignment for the Fung Fellowship, we were tasked with identifying a health organization and a problem that customers are expressing about the organization as an exercise in innovative problem-solving. As a loyal customer and user of the Oura ring, I believe I am in a unique position to analyze its biggest problem among customers: Oura’s customer service is notoriously unresponsive and slow.
They have faced various criticisms regarding warranty claims, returns, and exchanges. Customers frequently report frustrations with delayed responses, lack of phone support, and issues with the chatbot, Finn, which is used to handle many inquiries. While Finn is designed to assist with most customer concerns, users often find that it struggles with complex issues, leading to lengthy delays before escalation to human support. Many have noted that Finn's troubleshooting can feel repetitive and inefficient, particularly when it comes to hardware defects or warranty replacements. Common complaints include delays in refund processing after returns, exchanges being difficult due to incorrect sizing or defective products, and the requirement for excessive back-and-forth communication to resolve problems. Some users have experienced problems with obtaining a timely refund even after following the required steps for return. Additionally, there's frustration around warranty claims—customers report needing to repeat troubleshooting steps with multiple agents despite having already submitted the necessary evidence of malfunction. These concerns have been sourced from Reddit, Trustpilot, and the Better Business Bureau.
While some customers have expressed recent improvement in Oura’s customer service, Oura’s customer service is still handled through an email-only format, which may not be available in a timely manner to all users. In dealing with customer service chatbots, most people express frustration in the fact they are not talking to “a real human” and the formulaic mode of interaction may cause users to feel like their issues are not being addressed with empathy nor understanding. To imagine a better solution to Oura’s customer service issues, it is important to deconstruct their mission, vision, and goal as a company to first establish their position in the landscape of health wearables.
What is Oura’s mission?
The mission of Oura is to empower individuals to better understand their health and wellbeing through advanced sensors and personalized insights through a sleek and sophisticated wearable in the form of a ring. Oura appeals to those who want to improve their health through better sleep and reducing stress without wearing a conspicuous health wearable like a watch.
What is Oura’s vision?
To create a daily ritual of health for their loyal customers by fostering an environment of unity, innovation, and personal growth. They aim to deliver accurate and personalized data that encourages users to strive towards better scores by making informed, data-backed lifestyle changes while assuring users that their privacy is maintained.
What is Oura’s goal?
Oura has formed key partnerships in expanding its original goal from monitoring sleep health into cycle tracking and other biometric data analysis that are key for women’s health, making it a marketable device for those trying to prevent pregnancy or conceive through temperature tracking. Oura’s key growth drivers in 2023 were B2B sales, launch of retail partnerships with Best Buy, Amazon, and Target, and its continued growth of the subscription offering. The Oura ring’s functionality presents a significant opportunity in the preventative healthcare space as its key features such as sleep tracking, activity monitoring, readiness score for recovery, temperature sensing for illness detection, and heart rate variability allows users to attain agency over their personal health habits to work towards longevity and healthy aging.
What is the desired outcome?
An improved customer service experience through faster response rates and increased human-customer contact by introducing a hybrid support model.
How can Oura improve and change its current customer service strategy?
Oura’s current approach of using Finn to flag complex early issues early on should act as an efficient funnel for escalating to human support agents. Introducing increased human touchpoints by incorporating phone support or real-time human chat interactions for urgent or critical issues should be available to users. Additionally a smart ticketing system that allows users to track their claims and see their place in a virtual queue in real time could reduce anxiety and ensure transparency in the customer service process. To visualize the stakeholders involved in this process, I created a FigJam board to demonstrate the improved customer service experience flow.
