Overhauling Your Customer Service for the Better with Daniel Rodriguez

Yeah, and it’s not even just what Amazon’s offering. I think it’s the expectation it’s put in our heads that I now go and just view the world this way. That’s why it’s kind of ruined us in many ways. But you’re right. The example you gave about hours—it’s such a brick-and-mortar concept.

So many companies are experiencing so much more of their revenue online than they used to. Some companies are only online. But there’s still this holdover of holding hours, as if your website is a storefront, as if there’s the possibility that you can put up a “Hey, we’re away for lunch” or “We’re out for the day, see you tomorrow” kind of thing. People are shopping all over the place, all over the time zones of the world, and people shop in their pajamas, anytime of day. It’s such a strange phenomenon that we’ve been conditioned to think, as business owners, “Well, I’ll just kind of put up my sign,” or effectively turn my back on people in the store.

But yeah, you joke about it, but really, I think it’s such a struggle for brands to figure this out. And there’s a little bit of an ostrich effect here. They’re basically like, well, this is kind of as good as we feel like we can do. And we’re going to bury our morning when we come in with a backlog of people having emailed us or tried to chat with us and we weren’t available. We’ll then try our best to respond and hope we didn’t lose customers or upset too many people so they don’t go and give us bad reviews. It’s this exhausting hamster wheel a lot of people are on. And of course, we as consumers can’t stand when those things happen. And when we bounce, we do leave. We go and find something else sometimes.

I think a lot of people realize they need to be there for their customers in some capacity. And then they want to optimize that presence around cost. The model squeezes out any of the actual helpfulness you’re referring to. People like to talk about white glove service—we want to have this white glove service for our customers. In reality, very few brands can pull off true white glove service. What brands should instead be aspiring to is just for there to even be a hand there at all.

Forget the glove covering the hand. In many ways, there’s no hand there—or we’ve put up a robot mannequin in place of people. That’s what people have done. There’s such a rush to say, well, we need to have chat, and because it’s impossible for us—well, not actually impossible, but we think it’s impossible—to staff chat, then we need a bot. We’re so focused on driving down costs that we forget what the benefit is to begin with. So we have bots that maybe answer 10% of the questions, but leave people feeling like they’re not important. Once I know I’m interacting with a bot and it can’t respond the way I want, then I’m just stuck. I’m like, where is the help?

So in many ways, forget personalization—I just want to feel like I matter. The bar is actually very low for a lot of companies. If, instead of focusing on pie-in-the-sky aspiration—which ultra luxury brands need to invest in—if we just invested in not sucking, then we’d be doing ourselves and our customers a major service.

Yeah. We kind of talked about it, but a lot of customer service leaders measure CSAT scores as their bread and butter. The funny thing about a CSAT score is the way it’s actually constructed. It’s like an NPS score, where you’re throwing out the stuff in the middle and averaging out the top and bottom. There are different ways to make that number go up, and it is important. But one thing we don’t focus on enough is the unforced errors happening at the bottom. What are we really talking about when somebody is super unhappy?

A ticket backlog is a great example. You and I have probably both experienced this. I email or chat with a brand, they’re not there, and then they say, “We’ll get back to you in days.” That probably means there’s a backlog. And how do you feel when that happens? I feel terrible. I’m angry.

It does. I mean, we did a mystery shop—we went out just a couple months ago and mystery shopped about 800 e-commerce retailers. And the average response time on an email inquiry to a brand was two days. It was like 48 hours. I mean, that is a long time for the now demographic to sit around and not shop elsewhere.

Yeah. I mean, so I mentioned that we work with—we call our customers partners, because we do believe it’s a partnership. And our technology and our people are an extension of their team and representing the brand. So we take that very seriously. We kind of mean that when we’re talking about it.

So Anine Bing is a luxury retailer—women’s clothing—and like many companies, they experience different seasonality. So there’s the calendar year seasonality around, hey, we’ve got the holidays coming up, or some brands have different peak seasons based on the type of products they sell. And they need to make sure that they’re being really responsive for their customers around these peaks and valleys. That’s a real challenge for a lot of companies, and that’s a challenge that we solve with our model.

So Anine Bing has that challenge 52 times a year because they do a Tuesday release—kind of like in that Rue La La group-style thing, although it’s not about flash discounts—but it’s like, hey, new fashion, new thing, coming out Tuesday, coming in hot. And so they have a weekly peak. That makes it very difficult for them to service their customers because the volume—people can’t see us here, but I’m doing this spiky thing with my fingers—the volume is coming in and going down. It’s a really difficult situation.

They have people at the company to try to mitigate this. They’ve got people. It’s a Scandinavian brand. They’ve got a big house in L.A. They’ve got people spread out in a few places. But it was a really difficult staffing situation just to receive all the inquiries. So 24/7 for them was needed by their now demographic of customer, but they couldn’t do it with their people.

So we came in, and we took their email first response time down by 86%. They had a live chat functionality, but it was really difficult for them to stay on top of that all the time. We came along and reduced that time by 95%, with the majority of their chats being answered in 90 seconds or less—which is an expectation again of this generation.

We say these things as if we’re patting ourselves on the back, but I actually think it’s kind of meeting the minimum requirements that customers have. And I’ll say the last thing that we do, because again it’s a partnership with our partners, is that we’re part of their team. We’re interacting with their own customers, and we’re providing that feedback back to the company.

So again, an example—hey, we’re seeing inquiries coming in that are talking about some of these items that need to be restocked, and that’s not showing up yet in your backend, like if you’re using Shopify or something, and they’re not seeing that yet. So we’re bringing these insights proactively so they can get in front of and optimize that customer experience. Because at the end of the day, you don’t want to just be playing defense with the support function in your business. You really want to be able to see what’s going on and then turn that around so you’re kind of playing offense.

That’s exactly an analogy we use when we talk to people. And we haven’t even talked about that—you and I—and that’s exactly right. We are trying to align our own model that we’ve built to disrupt this space to what is best for our partners and customers. You’ve got to solve for the customer pain.

But of course, a lot of people know they’d like to solve for this customer pain, but it’s completely impossible cost-wise. It becomes a cost equation. They’re not like, “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.” Well, here’s what I’ll tell you—you don’t have to waste all of that money. Like AWS comes in and says, you have all of this fixed cost in your model that you don’t need. All you want to do is just pay for what you’re using. You don’t want to pay for training people, ramp times, physical buildings, the managers of those people, the forecasting—people spend money and time just figuring all this stuff out, and then it’s wrong. Then you’ve got too many people or too few people, and all of that is waste in the system.

I think so many people—because it’s like The Matrix, you’re in this system—they only think there’s one system, only one way. So they view their job as CX leaders as “I need to find the incremental improvements.” I need to tweak the incremental improvements. And we’re just coming in here and saying, you should eliminate them completely. Full stop. 100% eliminate every one of those inefficiencies.

If you have a customer that needs something, that is the only time you pay for something. As a matter of fact, you only pay when that situation is resolved. So you’re not just paying for somebody to stand there in place of someone who can actually help. You’re only paying for somebody to actually help. We have a per-resolution pricing model for this exact reason. You can’t blow this whole thing up like we’re trying to unless you meet people exactly at the point of efficiency for their business. Because that’s the real underlying challenge in many ways.