What If Your Wine Club Members Needed You Less?

The manager spent release season personalizing shipment messages, reaching out to members, and making sure nothing fell through the cracks. If members could handle more of those tasks themselves, she wondered, what happened to the value she brought? Her concern has stayed with me. She had put real care into making memberships work for people, and a proposal to make that work easier could sound like a dismissal of her contribution.

I recognized the other side of that work from managing my own memberships in several wine clubs. I had joined for the wine, but acquired a small administrative portfolio: shipment dates, customization cutoffs, which club was pickup or delivery, etc. Often, the easiest solution was to call or email the winery. And while I greatly appreciate the person who fixes my problems, as a member I still wish those problems didn’t exist.

High-touch membership administration is not the same thing as a high-touch member relationship.

I’ve spent much of my career working on this tension in subscription businesses. During my time at Dollar Shave Club (if anyone remembers that video), I worked alongside the support team, built the software they used to serve our 3.4 million subscribers, and later owned the systems behind billing, accounts, and upcoming orders. Leading Product, Design, and Engineering at the global toilet paper subscription business Who Gives A Crap (yes, that’s really the name) gave me another view of those decisions: how the member experience affected both the people we served and the cost of serving them. If you had told 18-year-old me that selling razor blades and toilet paper would be highlights of my career, I would have told you to kick rocks. But I digress.

Working alongside the DSC support team taught me how much effort getting help could require. A member might start in chat, move to email, and go through several turns before an issue was resolved. The team worked hard, but so did the customer. Guided by data we had at the time, our goal was to make those encounters easier without making the service feel less human. That approach is consistent with a 2023 Salesforce survey, which found that 61% of customers preferred self-service for simple issues. We improved self-service and made the support team’s own tools easier to use, and observed meaningful improvements in retention and reductions in support workload.

The same team also had discretion to offer “Random Acts of Awesomeness,” responding to something a member had shared about their life with a thoughtful gesture beyond resolving their issue. Those moments depended on an agent’s judgment and willingness to notice the person behind the request.

When I think back to that wine club manager, it is this kind of attention I hope easier membership management can protect. I value someone who remembers my tastes, introduces me to a Mourvèdre I might never have chosen, or helps with something I cannot sort out myself. Being able to handle an ordinary change when and how I want leaves more room for personalized engagements. Research also points to the value of that personal connection: a meta-analysis in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, drawing on 224 papers, found that confidence and social connection were among the relationship benefits most strongly associated with loyalty.

Now the goal isn’t to automate the relationship, but to automate everything that gets in the way of it. I built tanniq to give members less work to do and winery teams more time for personal attention. For Commerce7 wineries, tanniq lets members see upcoming orders across their clubs, customize orders, add wine, and manage shipping and payment details in one place. When their club offers it, they also have the option to pause their membership instead of simply canceling. In my experience, giving members the option to take a break instead of canceling is one of subscription commerce’s most undervalued retention levers.

And all of this shows real commercial opportunity. In observed releases, tanniq-edited club orders were up to 70% more likely to include added bottles and had an 8% higher average order value than orders edited directly through Commerce7.

That is the opportunity for wineries: a better experience for the people who already care about them, with more ways for those members to participate, purchase, and keep the relationship going.