How Customer Service Metrics Like NPS & CSAT Impact Overall Business Success

Summary

The webinar provides valuable insights on customer service and its impact on overall business success. It also discusses customer data and the importance of personalization in driving customer loyalty. Companies should focus on scaling personal communication in a way that adds value to the customer while finding a balance between automation and extreme personalization to foster strong customer relationships.

Key Takeaways

1. Importance of Customer Personalization: Customers expect personalized experiences that align with their values, which means businesses should focus on building meaningful relationships with their customers.
2. Embrace the Digital Age: Companies must adapt to the digital era, providing real-time support and engagement across multiple channels such as email, SMS, and social media to meet customer expectations.
3. Omnichannel Support Strategy: Implementing an omnichannel support strategy ensures a consistent and positive customer experience, allowing customers to switch between channels seamlessly without losing context.
4. Utilize SMS as a Customer Service Channel: Texting is an effective channel for quick and casual customer interactions, providing ease of conversation and immediate responses.
5. Customer Feedback and Metrics Matter: Listening to customer feedback and measuring success metrics like CSAT, MPS, CES, and sentiment is vital for improving products and services, and understanding the impact of customer service on overall business outcomes.

Transcript

Welcome to the six-page sponsored webinar by Kustomer, about customer service organization, track success metrics, to measure our overall customer assessment satisfaction. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Bla Lee, and I’m a CCXP program assistant with the CXPA. This webinar will be recorded and may be made available in the CX toolbox within the public resource section of the CXPA website.
And for our CCXP certified attendees, this webinar is c u eligible and will be recorded in your account within two weeks. I’d like to introduce our speakers for today A Larson, VP of growth at customer, daily customer worldwide marketing effort, including advertising, brand, communication, demand, and digital, prior to joining customer, and gave us the VP of Marketing as Vance, where he helped create the sales acceleration category and grow the company from six to nearly one million in revenue. Gay oversaw the brand transformation, establishing Sand as an industry thought leader and pioneering a new enterprise go to market motion.
We also have Calley, Co-founder of Anomalie, Callie Means is the co-founder and president of Anomalie.
The only customizable made to order bridal brand that helps all brands visualize and create their perfect dream dress to fit any size, style, and budget. Prior to that, he worked at the White House, Edmund, benefits, and several other startups. Calley is also a graduate from Stanford and Harvard Business school. If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please submit them via the chat box on your right hand side control panel, and we will post the answer along with the recording on our website.
And now with all further ado, I head over to Gabe to get us started. Awesome. Alright. Thank you so much, Leah.
We’re excited to be here today. You guys are gonna be talking about customer service. Metrics and how they can impact your overall business. I thought that was a pretty good introduction of myself and Cali.
So we’re gonna go ahead and jump right in. One other housekeeping item. I really want this to be as interactive as possible. So if you can, right now, grab that chat box and tell me your name and where you’re coming from.
Grab the chat box there at the bottom or on the panel. And just tell me your name and where you’re coming from. Throughout that, if you wanna chat or you wanna ask questions, feel free to throw them in there. And we will make this interactive as we go through today’s webinar.
So with that, I’m gonna put my name in here is Gabe Larson. I’m from Salt Lake City.
Alright. Cali, you ready to get going here? Let’s do it. Alright. So I wanna just start kinda with an agenda, a little level set.
We’re gonna go through a couple different areas. I’m gonna talk more about some of the best practices and more of the big picture thinking. And then what I’ve, Kelly and I kind of, I’ve done is he’s gonna take some of those concepts and then talk about how he’s implemented those strategically in an anomaly. So we’ll go through the customer service metrics, a little bit of those growing expectations, dive into anomalies specifically and then end with how to use CS insights.
So, big picture here: Let’s go with typical customer service metrics. I want to lay the foundation.
These are the four areas that most companies when they’re starting to think about customer success, when they’re starting to think about how do we raise that overall level of service? They’re usually gonna go to one of these. So I think most of you are familiar with these CSAT. Right? This is talking about just the overall feelings of the interaction.
When we change that over to MPS, that’s our detractors and promoters. There’s some problem. There’s some good and bad with MPS.
But this boils down to how likely you aren’t recommend x or y.
Probably my favorite is the CES or the customer effort score. Talking about the easiness, the ease of use, are we making this a streamlined process so that people can flow through this whole experience as easily as possible. And then last but not least, is sentiment. And sentiment is just how I am going up or down based on the different interactions I have with the brand. So these are where most companies start their journey. I wanna jump right over, to you, Cali real quick. How have you thought about some of these metrics specifically in MPS, and how does that work in your business?
Yeah. Yeah. So just, on anomaly, you know, What we saw as our opportunity challenge was that we’re in a category that’s ninety five percent brick and mortar. So we really started to attack something that really isn’t done online. So, being able to gauge customer feedback, customer reaction, you know, when our big barrier was establishing the trust, you know, that usually bribed to depend on a store to do is super important.
And what we found is that it was super important to measure MPS throughout the entire customer journey because this is a very different item. You know, this is an item where the bride goes to an average of five stores to choose her dress. She’s spending countless hours on Pinterest. There’s a high, it’s a high consideration purchase.
And I think, you know, getting to the fact that we see that in a lot of categories, you know, everything there’s a lot of items that people didn’t want to be sold online that are now being sold online. And I think we’re seeing really complicated, interesting, unique customer funnels. So for us, now, we have a pretty complicated process. It’s not a, go through a Facebook ad click and buy.
There’s a ton of data that we collect. We have an initial conversation. We do what’s called a design consultation where we confirm elements of the dress. You know, then we have a six month process where we make that dress.
So what we’ve done, and we we’ve learned, a lot from some of the customers other clients, other companies like stitch fix, What they do is they they they ruthlessly measure NPS throughout the customer journey, and then they tie that to business outcomes like sales, like conversion, like things like that. And what we’ve actually seen is, we’re constantly documenting the throughout the journey and are actually dedicating engineering customer support operations resources, you know, the best people in the company to solve issues based on what we’re seeing in this. And what we’ve generally seen throughout our company is that MPS, you know, during initial sign up, there’s a little bit of skepticism as we’re able to engage and delight and tell the bride of our process it goes up, it’s highest at the purchase.
Then you get to a messy, messier part where the bride confirms your details where she’s waiting for a dress to be created. So we see a dip there and then see an uptick at the delivery. So we see actual customer experience. The team is actually throughout this entire journey.
We don’t have sales. We don’t have anything different. We have one stylus team that’s throughout the journey, and we’re constantly measuring and calibrating resources, to fix issues based on where we’re seeing MPS throughout the journey. I love that.
I love that. One question that just came in, Cali from Mary, from Toronto. I think this is interesting. In your own business, how have you seen MPS tied to those business outcomes?
Is that something that’s fairly clear cut? Or have you felt like MPS direct correlation to business is loose? It’s loose at time. Yeah.
If you go to the next line, hit on this question pretty well.
So, I think I think the best in class, company that we really look up to, and I think a lot of the direct to consumer companies are looking up to a stitch fix. It’s a company that has, you know, sells women’s subscription boxes now in demand. Has a hundred and fifty data scientists, and they are just like maniacal about tying more kind of softer seeming customer experience metrics like MPS two tangible business outcomes doing like really scientific tests. And for us, we’re constantly trying to do that and and and we have a smaller data team pulling numbers on that.
So one thing we’ve seen is that MPS is directly correlated to the number of personal interactions that the bride has with one of our people. And a customer is so cool, the product is omnichannel. So it has texting, Facebook, email, in app chat, really any any customer, sir, any any way that customer would wanna contact us embedded into one timeline. So we’re agnostic, you know, to how the bride wants to contact us.
But where our strategy with our product team is constantly trying to engender, that customer interaction. And this comes from companies like Zapos and some other thought leaders in the space. That it’s actually counterintuitive. There’s a lot of emphasis in reducing customer support inquiries.
We’ve actually found that our goal is to increase them because We have a high value item and it’s an expensive item. And, actually, the more personal interactions that we can have to delight, answer questions, even help the bride on her dress shopping journey and, you know, aside from buying an anomaly dress, that drives up sales. We have an interesting stat right here where MPS is directly tied to number of interactions, which is somewhat related to this where our central kind of sales conversion calls called the design consultation where the bride explains what her dream dress is, and we can kind of bring it all together in a sketch.
And you actually have this amazing statistic, which is the number of times the bride has signed into the dashboard.
And when she signs in her dashboard, she’s able to chat with her stylists and see updates and things like that. The pickup rate on the call is about eight percent at the brides only sign in once and have the call. And it shoots up, you know, you can see the graph here to go to over eighty percent if she’s had more than five sign ins. So, like, the foundational, like, that business insight, and and and I think, customers talking about this a lot, Gabe, is that when we model out our customer experience team, we don’t see it as a cost center.
We actually see that the more people we hire, if they’re having a certain number of interactions, they actually pay for themselves, and it actually can increase the, it actually increases they pay for themselves and it increases our contribution. And just last point on that, and, you know, I think we’re obviously at the kinda higher end of, of, you know, consideration purchase, LTV on our, on what the what the customer’s paying. But we’re actually seeing this like throughout, throughout different product categories. So, you know, a product that’s a lot less expensive potentially lower consideration glossier, you know, has dozens of people with the full job of just delighting and engaging with customers you’ve got a lot of categories looking at leading direct to consumer companies actually finding that more and more of an investment in human interaction creates a longer customer lifetime value.
So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of experiments you can do with the data, to tie, to tie customer experience metrics through real business outcomes, but this is one example. I I love that. I mean, it’s interesting where so many of us are looking for ways to kinda decrease that interactive action. You know, what I’m hearing you say is the board interaction we can have.
Certainly, we realize that that can lead to more bottom line.
Question just came in from Sydney. As you think about anomaly, what are all these different interactions, channels that you’re using or channels that are maybe more popular How have you kinda thought about this omnichannel approach? Quick thoughts on that? Yeah.
Just just just one. Our mantra number one is we don’t wanna channel the bride into what’s good for us. We wanna see where she wants to contact us. So a lot of people channel the, you know, the customer in a certain area.
We give her every option And what we found and we really like about Kustomer is that text is extremely popular.
More than that. Text is where you live, though. What’s that? Text is kind of the number one.
That’s the most fun. Yeah. Yeah. We’re seeing that a lot. We’re pushing the boundaries on.
I think we we we’re setting records at customer for a number of tech then I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but, but brides, really, so so so we pull reports and data on where brides wanna talk to us, but, our stance, at least what we’re seeing from our customer is that we don’t talk on the phone that much anymore. We handle a lot, via text and secondarily via the app and and the kind of in app experience and kind of the last resort is the phone call. So we have an army of incredible stylists texting, you know, thousands and thousands of texts a week.
About a thousand brides signing up a day, asking questions, and it’s just we’re just trying, text is definitely number one. Definitely number one. Interesting. Well, from the audience, I’d love to hear if you can in the chat or in that cue box, what is your most popular channel thinking about your support or service organization?
Are you also in the text I’m gonna I’m feeling like that’s probably not true Cal. You might be a little more, there, but we’ll see what we’re definitely, proponents of the text, but I definitely wasn’t expecting you to say text. So, this slide, guys, I just want to point out when it comes to these SAP measures. And I think Cally was kind of alluding to that.
Don’t, you know, there isn’t one probably that’s just the right one for you. There often is power when you bring these together, bring NPS, bring CSAT together, bring that effort score in, and you’ll start to see that synergy. We often find that it is if you have to go with one, that effort score is probably the most indicative.
But definitely stronger together. Cali, when you think about your own business, we certainly talk about MPS. Are there a couple other key metrics at the high level that you found like CSAT that works fairly well? Or Yeah.
I mean, we see stats really important to us. I mean, we really focus on MPS. And then we’re really rigorous in trying to tie that to business outcomes. So, like, we were talking about.
But, you know, the other thing I just say is, and then it gets into the slightly softer side, but, quantifying the trying to quantify as much as possible the qualitative feedback we’re getting. So you know, we have, you know, thousands of interactions, and we think of just thousands of little focus groups where brides are not shy about giving us a reaction to the product. I think you have a conversation with your customers and fostering that, you’re getting a lot of feedback that’s qualitative in nature. But what we try to do is, as the style is close out those tickets, mark what, think about categories that those go into.
So that’s a huge thing too. It’s almost like trying to try and this is an end of that science, obviously, but I think, the brands we’re learning for, you know, really, look up to are doing this in a more and more qualitative way.
Really trying to mark what, what were the trends are with customer reactions. Because if you think about it, you know, the perfect customer experience is the customer doing most of the stuff on her own, and then talking to a human when she needs to. You don’t want to reschedule your flight by calling the customer service agent at United. You’d rather do it on your app and call if there’s a real issue.
It’s like we can actually try to actually quantify what the bride is talking to us about. And for the most part, those buckets can actually probably be brought in a more automated, automated way, then that then improves customers, you know, resolution time, things like that, which are correlated to customer experience. So That makes sense. So, our little informal poll there, you would probably not be surprised.
We got Julie, Tom, Peter. We got a lot of emails coming through, and we got a lot of phone calls coming through. So I do think you ‘ll do a lot of emails too, but next, we’re big on. One question came in.
I like this from Abigail. She says, is there any difference in prioritization or response time regarding mode of communication. She then said I had a recent experience with no email reply. I had failed phone support.
Then I finally went to a company’s Facebook, and that’s how I got a reply. Any ex any kind of thing you’d answer about that prioritization and think about different response times per mode of communication.
Yeah. I mean, I, again, I think that’s one of the foundations of what customers thought. I mean, if you think about it, hostage it’s Bryte Psychology. And whether she’s writing on Facebook or writing on text or email, that’s a bride waiting for an answer.
So we track our response times and the standard customer experience metrics, you know, on resolution times and things like that, which are well embedded within Kustome’s dashboards and things like that. We don’t, we don’t segregate between the channels. I think you often find that if you tweet a company, they’re gonna respond a lot quicker. That doesn’t really make sense.
Right? So, in Kustomer, it brings Twitter as well. It brings everything into one so the tickets are prioritized agnostic to the channel. Which to me is, like, makes total sense because it’s a customer on the other end of that with an issue.
So we’ve also done some work on quantifying response time to, for instance, a bride that hasn’t paid yet, to sales. And the data team has actually found that, you know, getting that response time to a matter of minutes instead of hours in which case it actually leads to an increased sales that paces itself with an additional marginal customer service, stylist. So, So, yeah, there’s a customer with a question on the other end of that. So we try not to segregate between them at all.
And I think that’s how you know, that makes sense to us. Yeah. And I’ll throw my two cents in there, Abigail. I mean, you are.
You’re just seeing a convergence of this omnichannel, that word that Cally had used before, that I as a consumer don’t really expect quick responses. I’m from the generation of kinda instant gratification. So when we think of different channels, certainly there has been best practices per channel. But again, a lot of our stuff is showing that it is becoming a little more blended.
Like, I just want an answer. It doesn’t matter what channel I want on it. Right. Let’s continue on here, Cali.
And then a great question just came in from Steve. So This customer expectation, as customer expectation continues to skyrocket, measuring success is gonna be extremely important to get that loyalty component Steve just piped in here and said, hey, Cali, we’ve used MPS for about seven months. Right now, we’re only reaching out to detractors. If you thought it through, you know, how do you guys think about that?
Should you be doing something for detractors? Should you be reaching out to promoters? How do you handle that? Yeah. I mean, again, we could do worse than, like, looking up to some brands. We really, I would say, idolize or or look up to in this space. I mean, Glossier, top of the list, Outdoor Voices, and what we found with some of these direct to super brands that have, like, this cult following is that they’re arguably more focused on the proponents.
Like, like, having and to me, it just again goes like, we talk a lot about Bryte Psychology. It’s just like, if a bride is happy and then we do something even more, you know, send her a nice message, send her a shirt.
Do you do it to show some sign of appreciation?
Like, that’s one person that is undoubtedly telling, like, five of her friends, like, oh my This is amazing.
So it’s just as much as you can engender. This is what we’re trying to do. Entering this constant, like, obsession with the psychology of every single bride and, like, scaling, gratitude, and personal actions, particularly with the proponents, showing some doesn’t need to cost anything, just like showing some, like, personal appreciation.
Like, that is what matters. And it goes also to this thing, a lot of people kind of have a social minded strategy to everything. It’s like, the great brands are like, you know, I guess often if somebody tweets or Instagrams, you’re gonna respond really quickly, then try to be you know, really social on it. We try to do that with email, text, everything. It’s like whatever you can go whenever you can go the extra mile, somebody’s probably screenshotting that and sharing it with their friends anyway. So we try to think about, like, we’re communicating on Instagram, whether we’re doing email or text too, if that makes sense. So To answer the question, we’re very, very focused and try to always get better on the proponents as well as obviously the detractors.
Got it. Okay. I like that. Hopefully, that gives you a couple ideas. Let me know if you’ve got a follow-up to that.
Alright. I’m interested to hear your opinion, Kyle. I might put you on spot as well. You guys, what percentage of consumers said they would be less likely to shop with the retailer again if they experience bad customer service.
Now We all know that this is, I think, in fact, a true statement, you know, you’re probably going to shop less if you had a bad customer experience.
The question is what percentage. Do you think that is? I’m seeing a couple people. I see fifty percent. I see eighty percent coming through. Seventy two percent, ninety nine percent. That might be a little high taylor.
What do you think about this, Cali? What’s your thought about what percentage of consumers? Do you guys typically see this being fairly high, fairly low? Where do you end up?
Well, we think that if we have a high trust item and if we botch that first interaction with the bride, the bride’s gonna go somewhere else. So I think that would be pretty high. Sixty east.
Yeah. Pretty high. So almost eighty percent of you guys.
So a couple of you were right in that category.
I think to Kelly’s point, I mean, you don’t have many chances to make a first impression. And so getting those right obviously makes a huge deal, and you see it backed by some of our data. One more question for you here. What percentage of consumers said they’d be willing to spend more money for exceptional customer service again.
I think this is a point that some of us intuitively know, but I was surprised at some of these numbers. Go ahead and throw that in the box if you can. I’m seeing pretty high numbers here. So high eighties, high nineties.
Okay. They got ninety two.
Survey says, let’s see.
Seventy four. Is that surprising?
You know, we got Julie ninety. Thanks for throwing that in.
Is that surprising to you, Kelly? Seventy four percent of consumers are willing to spend. You thought it’d be higher or lower?
I mean, I’m not surprised it’s high. I mean, you know, it’s it’s, You know, it’s what we think about a lot. I think just generally in the e-commerce landscape, you’ve got Amazon, if something can be sold quickly online, they’re probably gonna sell. I think they did over fifty percent of cyber Monday sales.
You’ve gotta differentiate in our opinion. You’ve gotta differentiate either from a community standpoint and a customer engagement standpoint and or some kind of tech tech or operational advantage you’re offering to customers that’s, like, ten x better than Amazon. So, like, a huge part of that is, like, giving a better customer experience because You know, Amazon can sell a pair of shoes or, you know, a pair of workout pants or makeup as well, and and creating that community is crucial.
Yeah. No. Perfect. So this is my last step for you. The typical consumer has stopped shopping with an average of four brands due to bad customer experience. And one of the things you’ll often find, right, is that If you have a bad experience, you know, you might just end up kinda cutting that off, and it only takes one in order to affect that relationship.
Let’s get into this part again. I wanna get a little more into some of Cali’s thoughts on this, specifically on the customer data and what drives this loyalty that he talked about. This idea of communication, we touched on it before Cali, but — Yeah. — dive this a little more.
In guys, this example, so cool about how he’s seeing this really play out in his business, Cali, over to you. Yeah. I’ll just talk about how we think about it and hopefully, this is, the experts and thoughts are helpful to, to, to, to the folks listening and, you know, shoot shoot any questions, over as I’m going through this. But, I think us and and and and a lot of people are listening.
We’re collecting a lot of data about our customers. And I think that’s one of the advantages direct consumer brands have versus Amazon, we can control our data and, you know, ask our customer’s questions. And it’s been interesting to us. The longer we’ve made our bridal survey, the higher the completion percentage is.
So the bride wants to share a lot of information about herself. And we have we actually just relaunched something today where it’s much more comprehensive, you know, forty, fifty question survey, detailed about her body type address, things like that. So we collect that information. So if you go to the next slide, let’s see here.
There’s then an expectation though that we found this, that a generic text or email once she gives us so much information is not responded too well. So we’ve pulled a lot of data that a generic email does not work. It actually, I think, tracks because when the bride gives a lot of information or any customer, I think they’re expecting a personal response. So the question is how do you scale that personal response? So what we did for a long time was just had humans just just constantly, like, reading every single message, and writing a personal email and a personal text based on the forty questions that were answered about the dress and what we’ve thought through with customer a lot is scaling personal communication a little bit, not in a misleading way, but just in a little bit more scalable way. That adds value to the bride. So an example here is we have what’s called workflows where our data is ported into the customer.
And, there’s specific messages that go out to specific brides based on different actions they took. So there’s hundreds of pieces of data from our internal system, and then data on, from the customer side of, like, how many times they’ve messaged us, how many times, they’ve responded to messages, things like that. So we can have hyper specific messages down to exactly what variables the bride chain, select in her dress, whether she’s had a call with us yet, things like that. So we don’t see it really as sales.
Like, we don’t want a sales team. We see that this is a customer delight team. We’re here to foster an interaction and answer questions. So The point here is that with customers with about, you know, an hour of engineering time, we were able to, have very, automated personal messages that increased response rates like two x versus like just a just a generic message.
I think that’s super real real quick on that call, you seem to poke a poke at the bear just a little bit. Couple of questions around personalization.
Yeah. I think this one probably sums it up best if you obviously went a little more automated. You were just kind of stream personalization, having risen to respond, not very scalable. How does a company and this is coming from Tim. How does a company balance that automation versus kind of extreme personalization. Thoughts on the balance and how you guys kind of have found a happy medium.
The balance on, yeah, like auto automation versus the value of just, like, really extreme personalization. Yeah. So I think I will do it. Yeah.
Yeah. The way we think about it is we’re trying to serve up something personal, like, in our stance, there might be something you might disagree with or I know there’s different thoughts on this. Chaplots aren’t quite there for us yet. Like, it’s not generally the best for some things, but not for this.
It’s something where I think in a lot of categories, the bride or customer wants to feel like there’s that personal interaction. And, again, whether it’s us or twenty dollar glossy makeup, like, there’s this principal, like, all in between of some, I think, leading brands that that they’re describing to get that personal because that creates a, like, a lifelong potential customer So what we’re trying to do with the automation is spur a personal interaction. It’s not in place of personal interaction.
There’s also the element of immediacy. So I think there’s a lot of studies, right, that, like, one seventy signs up. There’s a massive drop off on interest for almost any product you know, literally by the minute from when they sign up. So it’s not scalable for us or possible to get to the bride quickly, you know, five minutes after everyone signs up.
So we kinda, you know, think about trade offs. We wanna be authentic. We don’t wanna be, you know, pretending to be a personal text with that. So so we so we make it pretty clear, hopefully, that it’s it’s not, totally personal We often put a disclaimer, but it still shows that we understand what she told us, which psychologically, you know, shows her that we understand and are are being intended to her which then will hopefully spur a personal response that then goes into our stylus box in, on a sign box where then we can respond to it.
So As much as automation can help spur that, and this is another example here of the type of granularity you can go into. So this is just just just quickly. And again, we set this up in a couple hours, during our onboarding with customers.
I’m not being paid to be a proponent of customer here, but it’s been game changing for us.
This, this, this is a search that spurs automated communication based on what they said in our internal survey. So this is that she knows what she wants. Yes. That she knows what her budget is.
This, incorporates her wedding date to make sure that she’s, after our cutoff, and then specific information, you know, in and in our database that really granularized, like, like, like, our, you know, a bride that’s ready to go, and then we can have personal communication her. So that’s how we think about it. And this is again going this is more outbound. Like, you’re going out to them rather than obviously them coming into you in this case.
Correct? Yeah. So both are outbound. We have highly curated searches, like this that produce outbound, whether it’s chat, text, email, things like that.
We also use searches like this to have inbound, customer searches. So you have different teams focused on different levels of the funnel. So we’ll have to search for brides that have paid.
Which is a, which is a field in which we pull into Kustomer, you know, sorted by recent message or or messages that brides that we have had no communication with in a month who paid. That goes into a queue, and then that alerts our stylist team to give them a, say, hi because they’re probably nervous about their dress. So, like, there’s both inbound searching and outbound searching, but the granularity of you know, searches is pretty robust through Kustomer. And additionally, it ties to data that we’re talking about, which is like what actions based on our data analysis are most tied with customer success and purchasing and things like that.
Immediacy. Okay. So let’s increase the immediate. So it’s all kinda tied together. Sure.
These are just a couple examples of just, mask communication that goes out during highly specific, you know, events during the customer journey. So we really tied all that into an automated kind of way through Kustomer.
Okay. And this certainly has been a fairly good experience. So this part. I mean, being able to kind of work with the team here, the technology is if you kinda look at this.
Maybe you could frame this real quick, Kelly. And how can technology, and certainly, obviously, we’re from Kustomer and a believer in our platform. How do you think about, technology enabling this customer service process? How integral is it?
What kind of advice would be to the audio? A couple a couple thoughts. I’d chat with a lot of people in directions or consumer space. It’s almost like Facebook, like, ad spend is just like an afterthought.
It’s like, oh, we’re obviously gonna spend millions of dollars on blowing through Facebook ads. But it’s like there’s not as much thought and time on what is happening and how those customers that are signing up which are only converting at two percent are being served. So I don’t really see it as a sale. I see this customer delight.
So I’ve actually you know, there’s companies out there that have a ten million dollar Facebook budget, but two people outsourced customer support. It’s just like that doesn’t make total sense to me because you can actually show that a higher personalization on outreaching to those customers that are signing up actually can increase your ROI on the ads. Right? So, that just that just kind of one thing when I think about our overall budget for Facebook ads or customer experience software and, personnel, I’d rather, you know, be shifting that more towards delivering customer experience getting a higher higher ROI and gaining trust and and converting those brides that are signing up rather than just blowing, you know, Facebook ads.
So what we’ve seen with Kustomer, which I think is just important to our business. And this time right now, where a lot of direct consumers are worried about out of control hacking, is that I think more and more companies are gonna be focused a lot more on technology and operational solutions on customer experience because you really need to see to have a healthy business. Obviously, you know, marketing flat or going down while growth is happening, not marketing outpacing the growth. So that’s something we think about a lot.
Yeah. I like that idea, right? It’s like we’ve spent so much time trying to figure out how to drive traffic and optimizing that conversion and really getting that funnel to work.
It’s probably the next frontier for a lot of people. So last section here on how to use CS, insights. I think we’ve talked a lot about that.
But I love this idea that when it comes to customer satisfaction, some of these things really start to jump out. Yes. Your customers get more loyal. Yes.
You see, customer lifetime value goes up. And this word-of-mouth thing, I know that’s been particularly of interest for you — Right. — because you guys have focused most on this in the marketing budget, I think, a little bit, you know, a little bit smaller in place. So we’ll talk about that in just a second.
If I think about this, What percentage of consumers would recommend a brand to a friend after a good customer service experience? Feel free to go ahead and throw that in the chat. I think all of us know that most people do recommend, but that customer service, it guys, almost a hundred.
Wow. Ninety two percent of consumers recommend a brand. If they’ve had that type of customer experience, And as I understand it, that’s more or less what’s been fueling your business, Kelly. Is that correct?
Yeah.
Yeah. You could tell this is getting into this slide. I did because they’re not as visually pleasing.
But, what I’m trying to show here, and it should also say because I should say customer, word of word-of-mouth at the bottom there. But we see each touch point with the bride is not just a customer service opportunity, but a marketing opportunity. Because, in our case, it’s a pretty high touch item, pretty emotional item. But if you’re going above and beyond during that design consultation before payment, after payment to confirm all the details of the bride’s dress, What we’ve seen and quantified is that we actually have a successful customer who recommends two live customers before she gets the dress.
And we’ve been we’ve been it’s obviously, you know, an exact science, but that’s kind of where we’re at with tracking who the referrals are that we actually have a pause a referral based on a happy customer before the address is even delivered. And then, obviously, when the address is delivered, and we’re able to as we talked about earlier, you know, keep in touch with our proponents and and and advocates leading up to that wedding, the wedding itself is a viral event. But I think this type of psychology applies.
Why is the wedding such a viral event? I’m sorry. You have the wedding. The wedding is, I think, a viral event. That’s what we would argue. You know, you’ve got, the bride is, and this is, obviously, the center of the wedding, cameras are out.
You know, everyone’s posting.
And, you know, she’s obviously wearing this dress that’s extremely important to her, which is being confident a lot by the people at the wedding. So, if we can, you know, we just think about it from a your customer delight perspective, but if we can serve that customer well and have her, you know, feeling great about that wedding dress walking down the wedding, There’s obviously those moments for great, word-of-mouth, but it’s not just the wedding. It’s throughout the entire customer funnel. So we see our marketing budget we’re rare in the direct to consumer space where we just hire our first marketing person, you know.
We don’t have branding marketing here. We’re just obsessed with the customer experience because that’s how that’s how it is is obvious to us that if we can serve and exceed expectations that there’s a feedback loop.
Yeah. Should I go should I jump in the product thing, Gabe, or Well, let me just set this up real quick because I think you’ve touched on it, but I think if if you’re wise, you’re gonna take some of these metrics obviously, the customer satisfaction concept, and you are gonna start to adjust that whole overall experience.
Maybe some of the things we train on, the process.
Product.
How are you letting this adopt potentially the actual product that you deliver? And so I think that’s another way to take that customer satisfaction score and really make it part of your business. Have you thought about that from, I know kind of on the product and process? You’ve both really good. Holine.
Yeah. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but I think that this is honestly something we stole, like, so we’ve been lucky to chat with a number of other customer clients.
This came through really crystalizing with the conversation with Galosi who, again, I think is best in class.
But they actually, again, when there’s customer service, when there’s a, they’re not really called tickets and customer, when there’s a conversation closed.
Yep.
They’re required. They have to log it as an issue. And then that’s not just like an afterthought. Oh, we’re gonna. That’s literally how product priorities, from an online product perspective and the physical product perspective for glossier based on our discussion within our prioritized. And for us, it’s the same thing. It’s like, we have our tech and engineering team using quantification of issues that our stylists are seeing from brides, as a core way to prioritize where we devote engineering and operational fixes.
Again, you can kinda see here real quick that we have this focus group from a customer luckily, I think, for us. It’s sometimes a little bangle to hear, but luckily, she’s not shy about sharing her opinion. So we’re gonna hear from her why she’s not scheduling that design consultation, why she doesn’t feel like there’s enough value, why she’s not going to pick up why she’s not gonna pay issues during the process. She’s definitely gonna let us know about and, obviously, feedback on the final draft.
So there’s, like, this crazy amount of feedback. And, you know, sometimes it’s tough for us to hear, but, like, we found the best companies lean into that. And learn from it and talk about it really honestly. So, again, that the point here, if you go to the next slide, I think kinda sums it up Again, we talk a lot about glossier, but, it’s not just lips, like, like, like, I think the the great brands we look at what we’re trying it’s like it’s not it’s often like lip service.
Oh, we’re learning from it’s like this is the core part of the product development process is a feedback loop with the customer. It’s not just like having one social media manager on social response. It’s like that’s a core seat at the table, the feedback we’re getting from our brands, it’s, like, going into, like, the iteration of our company. It’s, like, I I do think it’s the way that that truly, like, customer experience as an engine for marketing product development.
Just the last thing I’ll say is, like, and this is talking about a lot. You’re seeing this massive shift, right, with viewing habits and all this stuff. Like, People know what, like, running a thirty second ad explaining to customers what a brand is no longer works. People are wasting money on that type of advertising.
Advertising now is a conversation. And if a brand isn’t being authentic, it isn’t listing their customers, they’re gonna get killed. And you see that more and more. So, you know, I do think this is an important characteristic we’re trying to think about a lot.
Yeah. I love it. I think it’d be great kind of, you know, in the digital world, one on one customer interactions. Our I already see you have to put in chat, but use those wisely, to really drive your overall business.
I love the process maps, Cali. I gotta admit, you know. Thank you. Turn this thing.
Into a machine and you can see his kind of maniacal focus on the customer experience.
Doesn’t just go into marketing. It doesn’t just go into sales. It does mean, it is at the center piece and it affects product, nails, and marketing, everything else. So, Cally, I really appreciate you taking the time. I love the story. If you haven’t checked out a normal, you guys, you’ve gotta check it out.
Success story about the digitization of what I think a lot of people thought was maybe not possibly buying I mean, we were kinda warming up. I think Ali did the idea of, like, shoes with zappos and stuff like that, but you’ve definitely pushed the boundaries with that. Yeah. Definitely.
So dude, check out Anomalie.
Again, Kustomer, an omnichannel customer service platform that really helps you drive that effortless experience, and you can see. From Cally. If you really wanna be maniacal about customer service, Kustomer is a great thing to check out. Closing comments or things from your side, Cally, before we let the audience go.
No. I just, would say I’m sure, some of the listeners are familiar with Kustomer, but, you know, there’s no, no stake for me in this but I I I we are huge proponents of customer at our, at our company. It’s become, I think, the gold standard for direct consumer companies that are trying to change consumer behavior, you know, and and and just candidly, we don’t know anyone who we’ve recommended to that isn’t super happy with it. It’s like a pretty game changing software, which is evident with the success you guys are seeing.
So awesome to chat about this. Hopefully, this added some, you know, values for some dots. Just trying to share what we picked up throughout our journey, but, Yeah. Really, really glad to be here again.
I love it. Again, appreciate your time.
Last tip here, if you want to check out our buyers slide, to see if you can’t figure out the best way to buy customer service software. You can check that out in our resource section or click the link there. And with that, Leah, back to you.
Alright. Maybe Lee’s not gonna jump on. But that’s okay. So I’m gonna let the audience go again, Cally. Thanks so much for your time and we’ll get back to your day job, man. Have a good one. Thanks everybody.