Customer Service Personalization, Voice, and Retention

Introduction to Customer Response Time

0:00I think for me from my point of view it's response time I feel like it makes or breaks a customer interaction in my opinion if you're not responsive if you're not able to give them that I hate to say it that dirty word but Amazon experience if you rely on them to go dive through frequently ask questions to find something that you could easily ask in chat I think it's a huge mistake so to me that's you know we're shopping it's just like walking in a store I walk in I want to buy a pair of pants I walk and someone walks up and says how can I help you and then you say I'm looking for these pants they literally help you find five other pairs like there needs to be that type of experience for customers and that is also part of response time it's recognizing that someone is virtually walking through your store and how are you helping them how are you being of assistance to them so to me she'll dive into a million

0:44metrics but from the brand side it's being responsive and making sure you're there to meet that customer at the [Music] door we have a full panel it's as big as

Panel Introductions

0:59it can get oh am I unplugging myself starting from crowd In Crowd starting from my left sliding all the down this way please give me an introduction and you guys got that brisk I can barely hear you I think you're saying you want an introduction yes yes please introductions for the I'm Doug baa founder CEO of red Apple Fireworks I'm Chris Carter I'm a co-founder and CEO of Forge 4x4 which is part of rest mods group with freedom Street Garage rest mods and forch 4x4 I am lacer I'm the director of client success for event we are a customer service Outsourcing agency with clients like dude wipes BTS bees hexclad and some that you see here on the panel red Apple Fireworks I'm Zoe Khan I am the VP of in of retention and customer experience at audian hearing and also a founder of inevitable agency a CX agency that I accidentally started I'm Kelly Stacy I'm a fashion and lifestyle business Expert former former CEO of aventus so this is a space that I was not really

2:04needing to get into but now all of a sudden CX is a huge deal for me because of all the products we sell but it's still really difficult I've had these conversations with a couple people here like how am I measuring this so my first

Measuring Customer Service Impact

2:15one I'm going to throw it to Doug and I probably want to go down the line here is how am I measuring like the impact of customer service to the actual Val like Revenue that can be coming in to my brand yeah it's a great question right now for for my company it's really easy because we've gone through this transition where we had a bunch of people that I found out were largely redundant and now our team is like a third the size that it was last year and we're accomplishing so much more with so many fewer people and so in terms of customer service we went from a team that was mostly ineffective to a couple of people that are super effective so it it has directly to the bottom line you can just look at the salaries that you were paying before compared to what you're paying now what about you we have a a sweep Stakes driven business that primarily has members that pay monthly so we have subscription based business that is predicated off of a giveaway

3:10that we do every 3 months for each one of our Brands so for Us customer service was kind of an afterthought we didn't really put that much time or effort in into it until 2 years ago we reinvested into it and saw a direct return on investment from the attrition curves dropping once someone calls in to cancel we now have an opportunity to sell them educate them on what's going on and that was like nday difference for us it was like the trash man before it was like just as long as the trash doesn't smell it could just keep on get taken out and now it's a profit Center for us that's paying for itself because we just reinvested in the right reps and more of

Customer Service Strategies and Demographics

3:45them what's the demographic of your buyer it ranges so each brand is different restomods is all Baby Boomers and Millennials Forge 4x4 is more like younger gen Z to Millennials and then Freedom Street Garage is all over the map so we have a range it depends on what car we're giving away yeah cuz I think this space is like the different means of communicating they want to talk to you on the phone they want AI they want a text message so it's been for me trying to get my head around it cuz all the demos are so different I don't I'm still trying to figure out where am I investing my dollars into whether it's going to be an actual phone service or is it the the platform I'm using how do

Optimizing Customer Support Channels

4:21you kind of I'll still to Zoe how are you like steering people into where to put their time effort and dollars into beefing up a specific section of the customer support team well I actually used to be kind of anti- phones because I think I thought that it was really really efficient to answer an email get their answer or their question answered but now I'm actually very very phone based because Audi and hearing is a over-the-counter hearing aid company and it's really hard to troubleshoot and upsell and do all these things going back and forth with email s and the customer might think like they might be turned off by us asking probing questions to you know fix the problem and everything they think you're trying to like swerve the return and everything so every every everything on the phone is much easier and you're able to like really connect and humanize the experience by connecting them with them on the phone and doing more through phone rather than email and I've found

5:28that it's a much better place to be a profit Center rather than you know a cost center on the same thread over to Kelly have you seen customer service like directly impact growth of Revenue well we I like to look at operational efficiencies as money Savers as well because for audian for example we we lowered our return percentage by 5% in the in since January which has saved us a ton of money and with on top top of saving money through reducing returns you can also on top of that do other Revenue drivers and everything so operational efficiencies I think is a really Mi a big Miss that some people look at just upselling and educating the customers but you lose so much money by not make having processes be efficient because you're putting Band-Aids on things and not actually fixing issues so I look at it as Revenue drivers plus operation efficiencies to save money I started my career on the brand side so I was with the brand a multinational

6:34swimwear brand for 15 years and customer service was always important to us and we had phone back then because we felt like that direct relationship with our customer was so important and tying that to revenue honestly when you're on the phone with a customer being able to upsell cross sell even retain them even exchange them into something else you just it's hard to do that through other you know other channels but in general I feel like there was a bit of a complacency customer service when I left the brand and went into the technology side agency side and then when I went to aventus I went there because I saw a huge gap and just people really focusing on the customer and understanding that that is the voice of your I mean that is the the the closest communication you'll have with your brand is your customer so definitely there's a revenue upside there's definitely cost savings because I I talk to Brands all the time and I asked them the first question I asked

7:24them is what do you want to focus on as a brand and most of them don't want to focus on customer service they want to build their product they want to build their marketing they want to they want to be thinking about their brand and they don't want to internalize that so when they internalize it they sometimes you know cut corners on different channels because they want to make it as easy as possible and it's at the detriment of Revenue honestly you end up spending more because your customer you're paying so much to acquire customer and you're not really giving them that service on the other side so for me it's just like it's like it's Revenue optimization and it's retention it's everything Chris Doug any else you guys would add to those too so we have a it's almost like a hierarchy if every single touch point that someone is reaching out to your business is an opportunity for you to educate them to be friends with them to make them a lifelong customer so that ranges from

8:14when someone calls that is the highest priority they're on the phone right now you have an opportunity to persuade them immediately and then from there chat is right there as well then we go down to email not as important to be right on top of it and then direct messages online and then social media comments it's like that is a hierarchy that our agents work from voice being priority and when they're not taking a phone call then they move on to the next one and the next one to the point that we are trying to get 100% optimization of every single customer service rep that they're not sitting around waiting for another phone call to come in it's like no jump on DMS jump on comments jump on other opportunities for you to educate your audience to get them to fall in love with you well especially for your rant you're you're you and a couple others are the face of the brand when people call in do they expect to hear you talk no but but I have no no I got out of

9:02that a long time ago but it was do AI to kind of get that voice out there bro so it's a good it's a good case study of like when I would pick up the phone and answer it was a 99% close rate they're staying on I'm selling them on shirts and when our reps do it it's much lower why is that like a like yes the co-founder is on the phone with you right now but at the same time if you can educate your reps to be as knowledgeable as you are then there shouldn't be a loss if anything they should be rewarded for that so that was something that we learned early on when we revised it it's like you have to be like the co-founder you have to be that person cuz you are the front lines of your brand from a customer service rep perspective do you have a subscription element to your business have what a subscription element that's 90% of our Revenue okay how much of a reduction cuz

9:48this is the business I live in right growing the subscription side and I'm trying to get ahead of these people so they hey don't cancel or if anything they just pause that's where we kind of push them into do you have any tricks of the trade to go from don't cancel just give me a pause yeah there's a couple things happening right now with the FTC as far as save the sale goes the customer has to actually acknowledge that and give consent that you could offer them some sort of Deal or promotion but the biggest thing is ask them questions oh you're from here oh what's that like why did you join a me initially what what did you know all these benefits that you had it's education that's part of it before eventually someone is going to say I want to cancel like no problem cancel you right away here's your email confirmation I hope you come back just so you know for our model they get entered to win an active sweep Stak so

10:31their entries are locked so they are still tied to the brand and if we can follow up with the email drip campaign and everything hopefully they come back but we're very successful at just developing a relationship with them it's not rocket science it's like you need to ask them questions get them involved make sure they you demonstrate the value of why why' you sign up initially nothing's changed right maybe financially has for them in which case you cancel make sure it's a good positive interaction hopefully they come back I appreciate that I'm going go to Lacy let me go over to Doug he talked a

Training and Scaling Customer Support Teams

10:59little bit about training how how are you getting people to do it cuz once the founder is off cuz I'm the founder I'm ripping through emails I'm trying to get my bottom line right but how do I make sure that the the secondary third and even to the point where if I want to Offshore how do I make sure that the training docks are in place no that's a great question so customized training is super important especially when you want to be able to transfer the voice of the brand through your customer service agent so we incorporate that into our training into checking out the brand checking out the Brand's customers again their advertisements how do they already interact on their social medias with customers so that our agents can reflect that when interacting right so it comes down to that personalized training as well as upskill training we have a lot of courses at aventus that are going to be specific to each type of brand and then again having that brand

11:53specific course so that they become a product expert and again hit that tone that the the company is really trying to express to their clients for to Doug there's a big season for like these purchases to happen there's a raor there's a major holiday that usually like they they come in buy at is their education of like hey your your volume is about to go up is that a thing that the team just understands when the season hits yeah it's part and partial to the whole thing because we do about 90 plus% of our Topline Revenue within a 2 or 3 week period same and so we have to and and this is one of the reasons that working with aventus has been great is because we had to build a system that could easily scale up and easily scale down and I know that's like Black Friday SE or Monday but in the fireworks business it's like it's like bfcm on steroids because everyone's just like take my money take my money and and

12:46you have to you have to deliver so quickly and because it's Hazmat you can't just ship it overnight if you mess up right so you got you got people on the phone who are like where the [ __ ] are my fireworks it's July 3rd you know and you got to be able to you're you're your options to give them a a resolution to their satisfaction is much smaller than you know shipping a t-shirt or something like that so I think yeah you got to we have to build a system to scale up and scale down and I think it's it's in constant you know Evolution because something works right now is not going to work when there's a new trend that messes with what you thought was your solid foundation so in your line of business like something's like red alert I got to get this out to the customer like what is that process shipping the fireworks like how do you do this well so it's it's all LTL it's common carrier so we have to ship everything LTL what's

13:33that what's LTL LTL is less than a Trailer Load so we have to ship all fireworks orderers on a pallet it's got to be forked onto a semi Tru taken to you know the local distribution center and then why would you why would you do this business it's a terrible business if anyone wants to buy my company no it's very very all of the reasons that you get into e-commerce are non-existent when it comes to e-commerce fireworks so you know we can't buy ad ad you know we can't the content restrictions are stupid and you know I mean it's explosive so I don't really you got to deal with that but no it's a good point oh my God what is going on how do you in terms of like leveraging customer support to get a little bit of like increase of LTV like do you do you believe that on phone sales or just in general CX are you measuring the increase of LTV on the existing customers I'm going to go with Lacy and

14:25then over to Zoe yeah absolutely so I mean diving into your reports and analytics can show you the return on those you know customer experiences and taking a big look as well at the UPS sales and Crosses from just having those organic conversations with your customers you'll learn more about them more about their needs what they're looking for and with having that personalized training that will lead to customer service Representatives that are able to speak very knowledgeable about your products to be able to offer products that will best fit your customer needs so I think that's how you can really judge that lifetime value as well as the return on investment with their upselling and cross- selling Zoe then Kelly yeah I very very valid but also we do a lot of surveying of our customers and not only surveying but just listening to our customers and what's going on in the inbox to understand how to get them to purchase quicker from that first to second purchase and why aren't they doing that

15:27and ention and LTV is like all driven by knowing that information so being able to really like use your I always say that your inbox your support inbox is gold because all of your answers are there like any question you have about your company it's sitting in the Inbox and if you want to improve your business just go look at what what your your customer support is dealing with and ask your your support team because they know what your customers want if you ask your customer support team like what do you think would make our customers purchase or yeah like how can we get our customers to purchase more I bet you they have a million answers because they're dealing with them all day so to be able to increase your LTV like surveying and looking at all of the purchase journey and all of that but also just like listening to your customers and don't you don't want to forget that your customers are why you have the business are there core metrics and this

16:25is for the whole entire panel I'll start over here with Kelly there's core metrics that you're holding your customer support team to hitting is it response time is it revenue generated what are like the three things or maybe even just like the top thing that you having them me monitored on I think for me from my point of view it's response time I feel like that's that's it it makes or breaks a customer interaction in my opinion if if you're not responsive if you're not able to give them that I hate to say it that dirty word but Amazon experience and they and if you don't have you know if you rely on them to go dive through frequently asked questions find something that you could easily ask in chat I think it's a huge mistake so to me that's you know we are we're we're shopping it's just like you walk into a store it's just like walking in a store I walk in I want to buy a pair of pants I walk and someone

17:12walks up and says how can I help you and then you say I'm looking for these pants and they they literally help you find five other pairs like there needs to be that type of experience for customers and that is also part of response time it's recognizing that someone is virtually walking through your store and how are you helping them are you being of assistance to them so to me she'll she'll dive into a million metrics but from the brand side it's being responsive and making sure you're there to meet that customer at the door and I think a quick piggyback off what you were saying as well is also going to be your contacts per resolution right whether we're talking about pH so important that's what I was going to say yes phone email SMS no matter what it is how many times does the customer have to follow up or answer questions from your team in order to get a resolution I think it even goes back to what Zoe was saying the longer it's it's drawn out

18:03the more frustrating it can be especially in channels that aren't voice so monitoring your contacts per resolution will draw right in line with your customer satisfaction and like your cat scores there's a high opportunity expense with that too because the time that you're making them contact you to get their answer they should be shopping on your website right they should be searching for their product not asking you some detail that should already be covered you know is there a a morning team and then the afternoon team and the night team that you guys all deploy and did you go there right away someone want to jump on that I mean I can kind of jump in there I think what aventus focuses on both with Doug and Chris's brand is dedicated customer service so one of the things that we will take a look at is when the customers are reaching out so we'll do analysis about every 30 to 60 days to say when is this Outreach on when you're Staffing should be there that's going to

19:00lower those response times as well so and having those dedicated Representatives should also decrease your contacts per resolution because they're so familiar with your customers they're going to know exactly what they need to ask all the things that they need to cover to minimize how many emails have to go back and forth how many messages have to go back and forth that's a really important piece of your your software functionality too is to make sure that you can see the analytics around when they're writing in so just follow the trend at that point right right this is something that I've been trying to figure out as my CX team is continuing to grow is like what is the progression for someone that's just starting out as like I'm a junior executive or I'm a junior rep on a CX where do I where do I go next do I just get more tickets do I move into like different channels what does the progression look like for any of your guys' teams so you're saying the pro

19:54progression of like a customer service agent absolutely yeah okay so yeah what we like to do is them focus on one channel and then again progress into multiple channels leading into what Chris was saying creating that hierarchy like the Callin queue is always the most important when you call in for customer service you expect that call to be answered quickly as well as for your questions to be resolved fairly swiftly customers are wanting a 3 to 5 minute phone call so you have to make that quality time so I would generally start with phone and then progress them through the other channels I if I could put in there I I like to allow my agents to not only all allow them to work on all the channels but then also ask them what most interests them because customer support experience it touches every single part of your business and you'll see like Sierra for example she was I called her my product specialist when I worked at ghost because she had a DI dietetics

20:54degree and she was so good at answering those like very deep questions about the like science behind the supplements and so I Sierra knew how to do everything but she was so interested in like the the the science behind it so I was like okay now you're going to do all like if you if that's what interests you we're going to send all those tickets to you some people get really really interested in like the operation side and the marketing side so I always like to not only like let them do all of the different channels but then because they touch every type of business or a part of the business you can allow them to expand on their career like I started as a customer support was part-time customer support agent and I do I got super into the marketing and the operations and like it just evolved so I always like to ask my agents what what are you interested in and like it doesn't have to just be you don't have to answer tickets for the rest of your

21:51life what do you like to do and it's really empowering for them too because they they can not only just like help the customer be reactive but they can be proactive and understand more about the business and use that to help change your business I've been wondering is if I

Incentivizing Customer Support Teams

22:08wanted to incentivize my team to and I don't want to do this in the wrong like wrong way maybe like a sleazy way but I want them to sell I want my CX people to know the product enough sell and get a piece of that sale is that something that you guys have seen in your guys' business or incentivize them to push product yeah for I'll jump in yeah please we launched our membership program last year well this season and we immediately incentivized our reps with a portion of every membership that they sell because it's a it's an annual plan and it's not cheap so they really felt the incentive to and it's not like we weren't pushing the hard sale it's like hey make sure you mentioned that if they were about to spend 1,000 bucks on fireworks like you could save immediately by spending you know 100 bucks or whatever so just give them a piece of it once they have a taste it's like you know they're there they're in they're going to sell your stuff yeah I

22:58think some reps are better than others but we incentivize them that if someone calls in to cancel which is the majority of our phone calls that if they save the sale they get a bonus and it's immediate impact it's like before we were trying to educate them on like oh yeah save the sale and we're like oh we're going to give you a piece of it then all of a sudden the numbers start going up it's weird how that works crazy right is that what you're smiling as if like this is the tactic to play with so I would say at aventus we find many ways to incentivize the agents it's it's more of a I want to say more of a culture so incentives can definitely be monetary everybody loves monetary incentives and I think that's always the go-to some of our incentives as well are for the agents to take that time to complete additional education and they'll gain certificates not only that they can you know go in the running for bonuses and

23:50recognition within the company and their teammates as well so I look at incentives not just as monetary but ways to help them further their education and skills and you know earn certificates and be able to kind of show off in front of their their teammates as well on their progress can I say one please I want some more this is something I can't figure out how I want to do it so I keep changing it but it actually works pretty well because we have so many different kpis depending on what's going on in the business and we actually ended up just doing like random bonuses like when we see someone doing like killing it at like a something that's very challenging we have 70 support agents at Audi and hearing because everyone every old person needs to call us even though they can't hear and it's like it's very challenging so we it's very challenging but with so many support agents and like our return percentage is a really big

24:47Focus we'll like Rand give random bonuses for like people with like the agents that you can tell just like care and we always say that you know all of these kpis we have all these metrics but just don't forget about the customer and if you if you're really truly if I'm using audian as an example if you're really truly helping the customer here all of your all your other kpis will like fall into place and we we use that we like remember the why and like the the reason why we started the business and reminding them of that while they're while you're telling them in the same sentence that like don't forget you like we have a protection plan and so that they can like help them if they lose their device you can they can get one for cheaper and it's all helping them here so while trying to help them sell they're remembering the why and everything else falls into place so we ended up just like giving random bonuses because someone's doing a good job and

25:47it's it's been really it's working really well anything youill what is it I I'll just say I mean they pretty much touch on everything I'll just say you need to re reward the right Behavior you know I think that anything that is incentivized even if it's like like I love the way you put it was so beautiful because ultimately if you're doing what's right for the customer I mean regardless of whether it's an upsell cross sell or if you just gave an amazing experience it should be rewarded and however that means for each person in the company as a leader it's your job to kind of know what makes this person tick are they coin operated or would they rather have you know an extra day off next month whatever it is right so it's a very good point is there any questions from from you guys are sitting in outside or I'm going to do one final

Crazy Customer Stories

26:30question any War Stories or like anything that was just absolutely crazy that you guys had to deal with I got a fun one okay go go so we can't ship fireworks to Maryland but this dude was like I need fireworks but he didn't want to pay for him either so he was in the what he was in the crab business like he's he was a crab broker okay and so his he wanted to send us like whatever volume of crabs in exchange for shipping fireworks illegally to him in Maryland so that I wish that I wish I could say we did it we didn't but I had a picture of like all of his crabs and I'm just like what am I supposed to do with that is awesome that is [ __ ] incredible story yeah there was several moments early on where the customer service lines were just down we didn't know for a couple weeks I like oh the call volume is call volume is very low right now man I mean this is when we

27:18were just starting off and once we did figure it out we were able to like jump back on it but that's what led to us like really investing in understanding like okay we have to change if we want to grow and since then it's been good and your your Niche is like die hards like these people I've seen so many videos of you I've watched so many trxs being redone or built forerunners built that like when I'm in it and I see those comments these people are let's put it this way if you call the thing the wrong thing you're going to hear it from sometimes we do that on purpose oh you're s you're just looking for it's all about that engagement so I would say that my you know kind of crazy stories are coming into the season now when we're heading into Black Friday Cyber Monday when brands are coming to us looking for that preparation to ensure that they can stay ahead of that ticket volume during their high peak season times and really

28:12working with them to meet those deadlines and ensure that they're you know taking their teams from five team members up to 50 team members to handle this incoming volume and segmenting it with tiers of service to ensure that their customers are still receiving the level of customer service that they come to expect right so your newest team handles the easiest tickets your senior members are handling the most difficult conversations so I would say you know coming in and scaling teams in less than 30 days from five agents to 50 agents is probably some of our most exciting and and crazy stories I want to hear a crazy adventage story though like what's something crazy give me something wild like you guys are you guys have wild people calling you half oh oh like a wild customer story I'd like that yeah let's go there so I would say and and I have to say it's not every brand but like eight out of 10 brands that we work for they always have that one customer

29:04that is constantly calling in has an issue with every single thing to where every single agent knows their name and it's just like oh great you know okay great Bill's on the phone again everybody know who bill is always Bill throughout the whole organization the name hits in the chat I know who the customer is everybody knows who the customer is and everybody needs to know how to like handle Bill who is like you know upset about line 52 in the terms and conditions so yeah just the repeat callers I have too many too many yeah too scarred there people who do like chargebacks or like fraudulent things and you find out and then you realize they've been doing it for like a year and then you like confront them those types of customers like there was one customer she told us her name was like water mandro or something and she was she it's like w water milandra is in my head forever like she lived rentree in my brain she even like she was trying

30:09to return something and then she like demanded we give her money back but it's in the outside the return window and I don't understand why customers are all like entitled now that they get like they you even if they're outside the return window they you need to give their money back and then they'll charge back and then the the credit card company will give them their money back it's like insane now but yeah we used to require cuz we would have such a bad we had a bad like fraud problem so we would require like a an ID so we would we would ask them to like send you remember this she said she like she photoshopped a a picture like an ID and with a watermelon and her name was water melandra and like like crazy stuff we saw people like Photoshop like because we would ask them to send us pictures of like what they actually received and they would send us like the wrong pictures and like or they would you

31:07could tell that they were photoshopping it like so evident like I I think you're going back I don't want to take you deeper I can tell you're you're visibly upset yeah like I'm this is triggering no this is actually healing it can I keep going how much time do we have you ever had your agents do the reverse Google image search to make sure that they're not customers aren't just pulling the pictures off the we had one send us a picture of like our founder holding the product saying like this is what I got I'm like no that's our founder you I know those shoes he those are shoes like he only he he has those shoes like get out of here yeah you'll have customers go and pull like you know pictures of whatever off the internet and say well this is mine here's the photo of it and you can just reverse Google search it and be like no this was like posted on the internet 2 years ago oh I have a really spicy one

31:56hey this is the last this customer sent us a picture of and they you know how like when you you do a screenshot and you can see like the bottom pictures yes there was nudes in it oh my so the whole low long row at the bottom were all just yeah wow were they okay the customer

Closing Remarks

32:19support spices panel that we've had in s Lake confence Round of Applause thank you guys very much that's awesome thanks everybody Kelly oh my God [Music]