Why Modern CX Leaders Made the Switch

Summary

In this webinar, CX leaders from different companies discuss why they made the switch from outdated ticketing systems to the Kustomer platform. The discussion revolves around their philosophy of customer experience (CX) and how the focus should be on treating customers as human beings rather than just tickets. They emphasize the importance of empathy and creating an effortless experience for both customers and agents. By adopting Kustomer, they found it easier to handle complex interactions, follow the customer journey, and provide timely resolutions. While acknowledging the challenges of technology switches, they highlight the need for improved CX and the benefits of modernizing their systems.

Key Takeaways

1. Customer Experience (CX) Leaders are opting to switch from outdated ticketing systems: The webinar focuses on the trend of CX leaders moving away from traditional ticketing systems to modern platforms like Kustomer. The switch is driven by a desire to enhance customer interactions and provide a more personalized and efficient customer service experience.
2. Humanizing the Customer Experience: The CX leaders stress the importance of treating customers as human beings, not just as support tickets. They believe that showing empathy and understanding towards customers’ needs and challenges is crucial in building lasting relationships and loyalty.
3. Effortless Customer Support: The panelists advocate for creating an effortless customer support process. They discuss the importance of empowering customers with self-help tools while ensuring that agents have access to comprehensive information about customers to resolve issues quickly and effectively.
4. Prioritizing the Agent Experience: The CX leaders recognize the significance of the agent experience and how it impacts customer interactions. They emphasize the need to optimize tools and systems to ease the agents’ workload, enabling them to deliver better service and maintain a positive attitude.
5. Benefits of Switching to Kustomer: The panelists share their positive experiences after migrating to Kustomer. They highlight its ability to handle complex interactions, follow customer journeys seamlessly, and provide efficient resolutions. Despite the challenges of technology switches, the benefits of improved CX make the transition worthwhile for their organizations.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to make the switch; why modern CX leaders are making the switch from outdated ticketing systems. So we’re gonna wait a few minutes, let a few folks join the webinar and then we’re gonna get it kicked off with our esteemed panel so really excited for this conversation today. I feel like I should play some music or something. All right, I see people dialing in, numbers are going up.

And I think we can get started. I know we have a lot to talk about and have an amazing panel that’s taken time out of their very busy days to join us so for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Vikas Bhambri, the head of sales and CX here at Kustomer really excited to be joined by some of our customers to talk about why they made the switch. So you’re not gonna be hearing much from me. Really I know you’re all here to hear from these wonderful folks so no let’s go around the horn and I’ll just go around my jeopardy screen here and have the team introduce themselves and then we’ll get stuck in.
So Michelle, if you can, you’re in my upper left, you can introduce yourself to the audience.
– Sounds great. Hi everyone, I’m Michelle McCombs, I work at a company called HopSkipDrive, I’m the vice president of safety and support there. I have been there for about three and a half years. HopSkipDrive is a rideshare platform designed specifically for children and riders who have a little bit, need a little bit more care in their transportation and we are in eight markets and, sorry, eight states and thirteen markets and growing a ton.
I’ve been in safety and support type roles for almost 14 years now and we switched to Kustomer about two years ago from Zendesk and I look forward to sharing with all of you about our experience.
– Great, thank you Michelle. Andrew, you’re in my upper right. Please introduce yourself to everyone.
– Morning everyone, I’m Andrew, I run CX at Ritual which is a vitamin subscription company aimed at empowering people to feel their best by turning habits into a ritual. I’ve been at Ritual for four years now since we launched. Previously I was working in CX at Dollar Shave Club and yeah, excited to be here today. We’ve been using Kustomer since September of last year and it’s been amazing for our team.
– Great, thank you Andrew. And last but not least, Amy.
– Hi everyone, I’m Amy, I’m the director of CX at lulus.com and Lulus is a curated women’s online fashion boutique and I’ve been in customer experience for about 14 years. I came from live retail in human retail and moved over to e-commerce two years ago. And we switched to Kustomer in November of last year which was amazing being able to get launched and successful so fast before the big Black Friday Cyber Monday rush and so I’m excited to share too.
– Great. I’m sure everyone looks forward to hearing from all of you. Why don’t we start with this, which is, so much has changed I know particularly now we’re living in this pandemic world but besides that, I think consumer expectations are changing you’re all in fast growing companies and companies that are doing amazing things. You know, just for the audience to get to know you better as CX leaders and thought leaders, maybe a little bit about your philosophy of CX so, you know, Amy why don’t you start us off with how do you think about CX and not only how your team operates but how you engage your customers and their needs when they engage your team.
– Absolutely. I’m really really passionate about customer experience and I think that sometimes what’s lost in call center environments is that it is at the end of the day the business of people and I think that one of the downfalls to old school ticketing systems is that it’s no longer about people, it’s almost becomes like data entry for those agents that are working, it’s the same thing, it’s how many tickets there are, we’re never thinking of it in terms of the human beings that are on the receiving end. And I think that what Kustomer has really done for us with that is allow us to spend the time with the human beings that are on the other line and spend more time developing our team which I think is really big and I think that, you know, it starts with hiring for me it always has, you have to love people to work in customer experience because customers almost have like a bad name just because we assume that they’re a problem and they’re not a problem, they’re a human being that needs our help and we have such an awesome opportunity to be able to spread kindness and take care of them.
And so my philosophy is sort of that we need to create an amazing experience for them. And it has to feel that way versus thinking of it as just like a ticket. You know, like nope, that’s a human being that has a life that needs this little thing taken off their plate so that they can have room to breathe especially now like with our COVID days and how things are so difficult. Us being able to solve a little problem for somebody goes a whole lot further than just a ticket.
So that’s sort of where I come from.
– That’s great. I mean, nobody wants to reach out to support, right? And, you know, as brand leaders we all know that they’re generally reaching out because something we did wasn’t optimal, right? So having that empathy is extremely critical.
Andrew, how do you think about it? You know, you’ve been a customer experience leader. You served at Dollar Shave Club and now Ritual. How do you think it about and how has your philosophy maybe evolved?
– I totally agree with Amy and I think, you know, focusing on the people internally too is always a priority for me. So it goes without saying customer service can be a think less job and even you know the best spirited individual can like find those tougher days. So for me it’s looking at the agent experience and understanding what the points of friction are and removing what is already a tough job doesn’t have to be any tougher. So for us, we run a subscription business having, like an easy glance at a customer’s entire history in a single view, takes a lot of the little fatigues you find in the day hopping between tabs away from the experience.
So for me making sure we optimize all of our tools to create the best experience for agents on the back end always leads to the performance results that you could chase using other methods as well.
– Michelle.
– Yeah. My kind of internal saying about the customer experience is always make it effortless. I’m lucky I work very closely with our product team and so we’re always talking about, how do we make this effortless, how do we give them the tools they need to help themselves and then when they can’t make it effortless to contact us. So make sure the team’s available, make sure the team knows what’s going on, make sure the team has the resources they need to get there and that’s, you know, again, one of the things we really like about Kustomer is doing rides for kids.
You know, you might have a call with the driver and then you have a text with the parent and then an email later from the parent asking for information and it’s so much easier for my team to follow the breadcrumbs and figure out what’s going on. So it’s easy for the agents, it’s easy for the customer, and it’s easier for everyone involved to make sure any less than optimal experience is resolved quickly and without a lot of pain.
– And, you know, look you’re all very candid that you’ve made the switch within the last few years, I think Michelle at two years is the quote-unquote oldest client on the webinar but nobody wants to make a change. At the end of the day we all know that making a technology switch has its challenges, right? It’s an exercise for not only you as the leaders but obviously your teams, maybe even your executives if they’re used to getting certain reports that look a certain way, whatever it might be. But something must be wrong with how things are operating to drive you to that.
As you were thinking about that, I, you know, I think for the audience let’s start there like what were some of the challenges you were having with your traditional ticketing platform that drove you to look at opportunities and alternatives in the market? And then how did you go about that evaluation process? So Michelle, having somebody who’s, you know, probably done it two years ago, you can remember what that experience was like.
– I do. I remember the, so we were on Zendesk before, I think that’s relevant not trying to bad-mouth a competitor or anything but what really was the nail in the coffin for us is that, you know, as I said our business model is rides in kids kids in cars and other people’s cars and so we need a very very reliable phone system. And we had an outage with Zendesk that was over two hours long and we’re getting no communication and it was during one of our busiest times and we couldn’t talk to parents and we couldn’t talk to drivers and we were trying to rely on a different platform to text them and it was just chaos.
And that we were already having issues with them. The phone system wasn’t very robust, drivers are upset because we weren’t able to follow along with them about the issues that they’re having ticket by ticket, I mean, our driver community our bread and butter are empty nester moms and so, you know, they’re sending 12 emails about the same issue they’re not necessarily hitting reply, it’s not threading well. So we’re just, it was just chaos and so we knew we had to find a better solution when we didn’t feel like Zendesk really cared about what was going on in our world and that we weren’t a big enough customer to worry about keeping happy.
So all those, you know, it’s technology and it was the support that they were giving us really were what pushed us over the edge to change platforms.
– And then obviously so there was real business pain, right? I mean, having an outage that impacts your ability to communicate with your drivers and your customers, then how did you kick off the evaluation process, you know, who did you look at just you know maybe some of that for the audience?
– Yeah, I created a very large spreadsheet at the very beginning just all the different systems that I knew of I googled around a bit and it just happened to be that so when a customer had reached out to me on LinkedIn maybe two months prior to this big thing and so I threw a customer in the spreadsheet and kind of started diving through and was really impressed with the relationship aspect that Kustomer provides with the community that timeline of all the interactions right there real easy and making it about the customer. We’re unique in that we have quite a few different customers we have a B2C model where parents schedule their rides and a B2B model where school districts schedule rides for kids that they need to transport.
And then we have our care driver community who are independent contractors. So we consider all three of them customers and so being able to use that profile and really explain who you’re talking to, their connection to us, their role, you know, who they are in our platform and being able to see that really easy and cater the conversation was just kind of what really made us glom onto customers, a quick, you know, out of the top of the pack real quick because of all that.
– Right. Amy, hopefully you didn’t have as, you know, kind of a mission critical business outage but in terms of some of the things that drove you to look at alternatives in the market, what were some of the challenges that you were facing at Lulus?
– Yeah, I think the biggest challenges were that our platforms we had, the way I like to describe them is kind of like the dinosaur platforms. So they’re tried and true but none of them talk to each other. They’re the pros and what they do so the chat program was a pro, you know, the email platform was a pro the phone was a pro long long long standing companies that have been around for a long time. What I really felt coming from a very progressive retail business where we are always evolving is that those companies were not evolving as fast as customer needs were evolving and I think that that was where we really started to recognize we were getting stuck.
One, we couldn’t get data out of anything. So we would never really know how many people were contacting us for certain issues and I think that that was something that I was really passionate about getting, my CEO was my, you know, is my boss and she would reach out and say, you know, how many people are contacting us about blank blank blank and we’re like well I think, you know, and everything would come down to basically like feelings. So nothing was data driven and I think that in e-commerce you absolutely have to be able to access data around why your customers are contacting you. And so
not having any data because our platforms don’t talk to each other that was a big issue. The second one was customer abuse. Like we end up with people who are taking advantage. We are kind of known as the company that’ll give you a freebie.
You know, like we don’t expect women who are shopping at 2 a.m. off Pinterest going through, you know, ooh Apple pay like and it’s a 30 second process to buy the dress. I don’t expect those people to read through terms and conditions or the policies. So we’re gonna go ahead and make it easy but what we don’t wanna do is make a ton of exceptions for the same person to the point where it was becoming abusive and there was no way to track that. There was no way to see that.
So we recognized these things and as we started to move forward with, you know, our sort of selection process, you know, we were kind of looking at some of those companies that were again tried and true that were trying to evolve but the thing I’ll never forget my director of digital strategy who was very partnered with me in the selection process, he says, I don’t think we’re gonna find a company that’s different than customer customers of beast. You know, and I’ll never forget the phrase customer as a beast. And the reason for that was because it was gonna solve all of the issues that we really needed in having a great omni channel platform.
But in addition, we were gonna have access to so much data that was going to make us better as a company which is not something that we always think about when we’re in a contact center again. We’ve got to think of how the contact center can become a profit center and that we knew was going to help us because we were gonna have data that was gonna make us better.
– Yeah data is something that we hear quite often and it’s interesting your fraud example I think we have a cosmetics company and I just do a funny little use case there where in the timeline they’re able to see when, you know, a woman has complained about a product kind of causing you know some sort of skin reaction and they do a refund I think very, you know, customer friendly as your policies are. But then if the woman reorders that same product and then tries to get that same refund because they can see it in the timeline her orders et cetera they can kind of call her out on it so it’s interesting how you unfortunately have to protect yourselves in some instances.
Andrew, data was that part of some of the challenges you were facing or were you facing something different at Ritual as you thought about maybe making a move into, you know, a different direction?
– Yeah, it definitely was and for a lot of the same reasons you and Amy both just touched on. I think a lot of it was, so I joined Ritual two days after they launched. You know, someone there probably was like okay, we need to figure out how to answer emails, googled email answering system and found Zendesk. For me I had used it in the past, I was comfortable.
It was kind of just, you know, a solution for that point in time. But then as we started to grow the team, grow the channels we were offering, we had to add things that were costing money to make up for the lack of service that Zendesk could provide. So we didn’t love their chat so we were using something else for chat. CSAT functionality was also kind of weird, we were using something else for that.
And eventually similar to Michelle on her spreadsheet of things she wanted to look at, we just had a spreadsheet of tools that we were using. And I’m just OCD with that kind of stuff and I was like this is cluttered, it doesn’t make sense, like we’re at a point where we kind of hit a transition point in the business of like, we needed to prepare for scale in a big way. So for me it was simplifying our tools by getting everything under one roof. Saving ourselves money and just making it a cleaner experience for the agents all at the same time.
And I guess one other thing to note we were in the process of onboarding external teams and I think for anyone that you know is considering that, it was making things so much easier to just be able to give like a very small set of logins versus you need to go to these three places for these three different things. Having everything like I said under one roof was really the driving factor.
– So, you know, and this is open to all of you, whoever wants to jump in here but, you know, as the audience is thinking or maybe even considering, listening to some of your challenges, evaluating options out there, you know, and engaging the customer sales team, any tips or tricks that you would recommend to them? Things that might smooth out their process based on your experiences in terms of evaluating Kustomer or alternative solutions?
– I can take that. I found what really helped us was writing out our pain points. And then writing out like the must-haves and the nice to haves and seeing what lines up. We had some friend conversations early on with Kustomer about like these are our must-haves and if you can’t do this like this conversation’s over because we know we need to do this.
And then through that, really understanding what you wanna do like changing platforms is daunting but it’s also, you can always, that’s a chance for you to expand or change process or develop something new or something like that and really think about what you want that to be as well in the conversations. Like what your next phase is. Don’t just make it a, you know, jump from this tool to this tool and it’s the same. You know, what can you do in that time that’s gonna make it a better process for your team or for the customer and consider that in the valuation as well.
– Not just doing a cut and paste from one system to another.
– Exactly.
– So once you, you all went through a similar journey in terms of selecting that you were gonna move forward with Kustomer. Let’s talk about that migration process a little bit because you know, as I always remind people change is hard and particularly in most of your customer care organizations they’re 24/7, you might have third parties BPOS, you’re always bringing on new team members et cetera. What are some of the tips or tricks or recommendations that you would recommend to your peers who are listening about making that change process as smooth as possible ’cause it not just involves technology but people and processes as well.
Michelle, do you wanna start there?
– Yeah, sure. One thing I think that we did that was really beneficial is that we have a CTO who believes a lot in a sandbox environment. So I was able to do was use that sandbox environment and get my managers, my team leads and a few of my more seasoned reps into that sandbox environment so that when we do the cut over and the whole team switches over, there’s at least a few experts that know it wasn’t just, you know, I was very hands-on implementation process so it wasn’t just me trying to answer 50 people’s questions. It was me and a small group of people who had already made themselves an expert and I think that really helped.
One of my favorite quotes about the whole experience was from one of my reps who told me it felt like he was moving from a PC to a Mac in that, you know, it can be a similar experience but a customer while daunting being brand new it felt easier and he felt like once he got going with it he was really going to be able to do really well and he and he he noticed the power and kind of the potential of it immediately even while he was frustrated with, you know, knowing done versus solved and in the little stuff and understanding his workflows.
– Yeah, Amy, Michelle alluded to this and you said, you were on a stack of tools that were tried and tested. They’ve been around for years and one of the things with Zendesk and most folks that have been in the contact center space are very used to that concept of ticket. And quite often when we as the new kids on the block go and talk about the concept of conversation, it’s a very different concept. How did your team take to that very specific, you know, change and thought process of going from that ticket based mentality and experience that they were used to to the conversation that they were now having in the customer platform?
– I have done it myself. I made my screen really big all of a sudden by accident and threw myself off. I think that the biggest thing again goes back to hiring and developing people appropriately which honestly that was something that we woke up to. So if I would say prepare yourselves for the switch because it’s gonna get easier and so even right away not having everybody be exposed, there’s two things that we did this is sort of answering your question and also sort of not I’ll get back to it I promise but I think that one thing I think you have to do is schedule your initial launch during a time that you’re the lowest in contact.
So, have a good sense of when you’re gonna be able to take the time with your team. And again similar to Michelle, I had all of my leadership exposed to Kustomer and though it wasn’t necessarily 100% hands-on or live, it’s what I love about Kustomer, it’s so intuitive. So like she’s saying you know switching from a PC to a Mac everything it’s not like what does this mean? You know, everything is very intuitive so you can figure it out.
So our agents were able to do that but I think that’s the biggest thing is we recognized, oh my goodness, we have some people on our team that really don’t like people very much and they’re gonna start to show now because they don’t have to go as fast, they don’t have to click through 20 screens. Everything’s right there and so now we’re gonna have to really adjust and develop. So if you could think development beforehand on what your true expectations are and start with your why’s, I always say that with my team start with my why’s for why we do this because I think you’re gonna end up finding people that aren’t going to probably be all stars for you necessarily anymore because it won’t just be about productivity anymore, it’ll be about quality.
So I think that that hopefully answers your question enough to know that you really will have to focus on your development of your human beings and if you start beforehand it’ll make it easier.
– That’s super interesting. So did it actually result in any changes in hiring profiles or you know you mentioned training but actually resulting in different individuals that you had to bring into the team because it was such a fundamental switch from like this transaction based environment to more you know building that relationship.
– Yeah, (indistinct) keep doing that. We ended up like I said our implementation, our launch day was November, 7th and so that’s getting really tight into we had planned for the end of October but something ended up happening on our end I don’t remember what the situation is but we’re like we’re still gonna do it, we’re still gonna go forward with this. And so I think that what was really interesting is that we were prepared for extreme volume, you know, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday it always happens whenever we do a big site wide sale everybody wants a retro applied coupon or things like that so we get very, very busy.
And I think what we were shocked at is one, how much more streamlined it was, how many omnichannel interactions – like how many people would email in and then chat in so we had so many things that ended up merging like it cut our tickets down significantly. And so, yes at the end of the year last year, we were like, oh my goodness, we have to have way more performance-based conversations than we’ve ever had to have because it went from being all about quantity, you know, like how many tickets can you solve kind of what I was saying, you know. Which honestly never jived with me coming from person-to-person retail.
I’m so outgoing and my teams have always been so outgoing. So recognizing we had some bad apples to put it bluntly that we really needed to work on and develop and what was so great is we were able to develop people because we just had to introduce new thought processes around how you take care of people and that you don’t always have to send a macro, you don’t always have to send the predefined content. You literally can use your time that you have now because you don’t have seven conversations going at once to be better with the person that you’re helping. So you bet.
– Andrew, I know there’s, you know, you mentioned this. Ritual was using Zendesk before you got there and not only your peers here but I’m sure a lot of audience members have been using Zendesk for maybe six months, a year, five years, 10 years whatever, it might be they’ve been around a while. One of the big concerns is, am I going to lose all that data? Am I going to be able to get it into my new environment?
Were you able to get all those old tickets and clients and conversations into Kustomer from Zendesk so you weren’t starting at kind of square zero in a new system?
– Yeah. I mean, as far as preserving historical data goes, we had no issues there and I think I will give the like caveat that we were at a point where we were a smaller team and like nimble and able to make change. So I think as part of the onboarding process, you know, maybe people on the customer side of things were used to two types of requests. One, just migrating over historical data and two, migrating over you know different business rules and processes that may have been set up in those other tools.
The data we had no issues with and then when it came to setting up Kustomer I actually was like no, I don’t really wanna migrate anything over from the old system. It kind of felt like a disservice to like what was available through using Kustomer. But on you know the agent side of things and I think this goes to what Amy said about getting buy-in, like moving to a new system changing up these processes like people who maybe were top performers and we’re fast in these other tools all of a sudden become frustrated because it is a new system and it’s like, you know the kind of thing that takes two weeks to get used to but those two weeks are critical in having you know everyone understand like the why behind making a switch and it really is the long-term output and results.
– Did anybody bring over anything other than just the pure data? Did anybody bring over any rules or anything else from their old Zendesk environment other than just the ticket data? Michelle like yeah we brought over something.
– Yeah we brought over some stuff, you know, it was two years ago and I guess what I really like about customer I think we’re going to cover this in a second but is that we did bring over some of our workflows and rules and then as we have grown these last two years, I don’t think anything exists anymore that we brought over because it’s better now like we’re customizing it more and more for our team’s needs and for our community needs. So, you know, yeah we brought stuff over but we’ve changed it since then and that’s one of the things I love about Kustomer is that it is so customizable and, you know, I have two managers that I’ve really trained up and they’re my admins and we’ll be like hey let’s do this and say okay and they go and the workflows and they tweak it and it’s a better experience it’s routing things differently it’s you know whatever it is and it’s so you know, we brought it over for the comfort level but then we immediately started really improving upon that.
– You know, there might be some folkS on this call that are thinking about maybe making a move just like you did Amy before, you know, Cyber Monday, Black Friday and thinking I don’t wanna do it and then start from scratch. So I want some sort of springboard that I can go out there with, I don’t know if that was something that factored into your thought processes you were thinking about at a very busy time launching a new platform.
– Yeah, I mean, I was definitely nervous but at the same time it was sort of one of those things where you feel the fear and do it anyway. You know, like I knew we were gonna gain so much information and I wanted all of the information that we were gonna get during one of our peak seasons. I wanted that for this year. So I was like we have to do it like. And we went back and forth actually a little bit on like do we wait until after when we slow down because then we’ll really have time?
I am so glad that we did it like we did because it really was intuitive and the team was able to pick it up so quick and now I’m so thrilled that we have last year’s peak season which I think, I mean, if you guys are looking at the trends for what’s happening this year, there isn’t gonna be in store Black Fridays. You know, I think e-commerce is gonna have an incredible opportunity this year and a lot of these sales are starting in October. So if you’re in an e-commerce, you know, retailer I think it’s smart to switch now like really, I mean, do it because you’ll have so much phenomenal data through October, November, December that you don’t wanna miss out on that.
And it is so simple to pick up like I just can’t stress it enough if people have iPhones, this is a piece of cake. I mean it’s literally it’s almost like having an iPhone, Facebook type everything is like where would that, oh it’s right there. Let’s see, oh I wonder, oh it’s right here. So it is just a very simple thing and something that I’m thrilled that we decided to do right before our peak season.
– Andrew, you know, one of the things your team made the change quite recently. What are some of the improvements that you’ve seen since making the switch?
– Yeah, for us the biggest thing was really handle time. So I think across the board I kind of spoke to like, you know, hopping around tabs being something that would impact, it’s just like an added friction during the day. We saw decreases in handle time anywhere from like 40 to 60% across different conversation categories which is gigantic when you look at working against staffing predictions and stuff like that.
– If I quoted you in a case study, nobody believed it. So I’m glad they’re hearing it from you directly.
– Yeah. It’s true. And you know now we have the data to back it up. I think, you know, to Amy’s point, we didn’t have Black Friday coming up but I think we had, we launched it like two or three, we launched it a week before onboarding external teams and three weeks before a new product launch.
So it was like a totally crazy time to do it but off the bat we saw the handle time improvements right away and I think something that goes with handle time, you know, when I talk about agent happiness if you look at the internal surveys we do to see just how people are on like a quarterly basis, a lot of the like questions that would indicate day-to-day stressors, we improved on those results post Kustomer switch. So I’d like to say there’s some correlation there. On top of that, I think CSAT was something we saw jump off the bat just because to the point Michelle made like making the little tweaks to workflows like it’s more intuitive than some of the other tools so we’ve been really, you know, we’ve only been using it since last September but we’ve already made so many changes to how we use the tool and being able to prioritize the inbox in the smartest way possible means that we’re putting priority customers at the top of the pile and ultimately getting better results on the CSAT surveys because you know we’re getting to those people first.
– That’s great. Amy, what are some of the improvements your team sees?
– We’ve had so many, I actually asked this of my team and the thread in slack was so long that I was like oh my gosh, I had to pick through and decide what I was gonna share was the most impactful. My team loves the platform. Like right down from like, I mean we have part-timers. You know, so those people aren’t in often, they’re not using it all the time and even those guys really love it.
I think that some of the biggest things that we’ve had improvement on are the workflows are so great the routing of conversations is phenomenal. Something that we dealt with with Zendesk was what we would call cherry picking which is where you just choose the ones you wanna do and those tougher tickets quote unquote which was probably a more escalated customer at the end of the day weren’t getting done. They were sitting longer and so now what’s really great is because of the routing systems, we’re able to really truly have things come in and be routed appropriately and handled appropriately. And
when, from a leadership aspect, be able to have transparency when somebody’s sitting on something where before we wouldn’t ever really see that. You know, we wouldn’t know if someone was cherry-picking. We would just be like, don’t cherry-pick. You know, and our leadership honestly was kind of terrible because there wasn’t really anything to lead because we didn’t have any view of anything.
So that leads me to my second point that our people’s development has been able to go through the roof which is something I’m most passionate about and coming from retail to this, you know, being in a contact center I actually felt like being transparent here myself. I felt like my soul died a little bit, I’m like, wow! Like we’re just gonna come in and do this mundane thing every day for the rest of my life. I’m not gonna do this, I’m gonna go back to real life, retail. But what’s been so amazing with switching a Kustomer is we have been able to focus so much more on real leadership, real development of human beings, really define a career path, give our leaders something to actually see and lead in other human beings which has been so valuable for those actual humans that are working in the call center that our attrition has just I mean it’s like non-existent.
People do not leave and before people were leaving all the time. So I think that though I can’t necessarily, you know, look at the data myself for that. I do feel that we’ve had less turnover due to the fact that the platform is easier to the point where we’ve been able to actually focus our leadership on actual leading instead of micromanaging which I think is another call center curse is that everything turns into micromanagement instead of like, hey walk me through, you know, why you’re sitting on those tickets, like what’s going on, like hey walk me through why you haven’t, you know, been able to start on that and then the agent says I’m just really uncomfortable with this process.
And we’re like oh my gosh, let me get you some side by side and support you in that. So we’ve been able to truly truly develop people in what I feel is the most honorable and noble career which is the service of helping other people and it gets lost in the abyss of really really complicated workflows and so Kustomer has given us, given me even truly as a leader so much value because I’m actually able to lead people for who they are based on their individual strengths and opportunities and it’s been really incredible from a human level as well.
– So one of the things you touched on was cherry picking. In fact we got a question in here from Sarah saying, can you talk a little bit more about routing and how cherry picking is avoided. You know, are your agents not able to get new tickets in our world? It’s conversations but new conversations under their cues completed. Can you share your insights with Sarah?
– Yeah, so, you know, basically when we have, sorry I didn’t see that comment either but when we, so with Zendesk, it was basically like we just had this pit of tickets and people would select from it all day and now what’s so great is we will have, you know, we have different workflows set up but we have basically like a general queue of emails that comes in and it’s routed to our agents throughout the day. So they don’t get to pick and choose what the issue is. It’s really resulted in better development because where before we had one really kind of sticky process and it’s our no cost replacements that we send out for things like if something’s damaged.
And it’s a little bit of a process on the agent’s end so those would always be left. Anything that was damaged was always left behind. So now we’re able to actually, based on keywords, put those into a higher priority queue so they end up routing faster. So instead of those tickets being or conversations being sat on for hours or days in horrible instances, those are routed more quickly to agents and again once somebody has it, they have it.
So they have to actually work through the process so they actually end up getting further developed and trained and exposed to things that normally they would avoid. So I hope that kind of answers that question. It’s all in how you set up your workflows to route basically and it’s so customizable. It’s amazing and so basically, I mean, we’re in a position right now where we’re basically at zero emails by the end of the day every single day because of the fact that work is constantly flowing versus where if you have a phone agent, you know, like we have it set up so that our phone agents also receive email so that when they’re in between calls they work on this, you know, the emails that we’re getting as well.
Where before we would never really know, do they have the time, do they not have the time. But now we can see it all. So the work that gets routed ends up being visible if it’s not being accomplished. So very customizable.
– That’s great. Sarah, just, you know, Amy touched on using keywords to route those conversations or expedite them in the queue. You can not only do it just based on keywords, you can do based on profile attributes of that individual customer. So you had a flag like a VIP customer or high risk customer or something like that as well as other points of data. So if you have the order information, right?
An order that’s out for delivery. So we have for example a furniture retailer that is able to route conversations that come in from customers that have orders out for that day versus somebody who’s already been delivered, right? Because it’s very urgent. Somebody’s probably reaching out that my driver hasn’t shown up or there’s damage maybe or the boxes something.
As opposed to somebody who might be reaching out two weeks later to argue about a broken leg on a sofa or something. But Michelle you have the most mature program of the three in terms of now being a Kustomer for two years. You know, you’ve obviously probably constantly improved but what are some of the improvements your team has seen having moved from Zendesk over to the Kustomer platform?
– Yeah, like Andrew we saw an increase in customer satisfaction surveys. We, like as I said, we’d like to build really strong relationships with the care driver community. They’re the people on the ground making our company look good and so their happiness is critical to our company and so seeing that improve was really exciting. And just ’cause the agents had more information at their fingertips and were able to to jump right into a conversation with someone and see the back history so easily.
It’s hard to measure but it’s a general efficiency so I have one team called safe ride support and what we do is each and every single ride in our system is assigned to safe ride support specialists to be in charge of that ride. So they handle everything from drivers arriving late, to drivers who can’t find the rider at the pickup location, talking to parents, you know, parents oh I need to change the pickup address real quick to block away. Stuff like that. So they’re handling all this stuff in real time and so they’re coordinating both with drivers and with parents.
And so one thing that was a huge problem for us was just double work. So a parent would call in and get Paul and Paul would figure out what’s going on and he’d start getting to work and then the driver would call in and get Nina and Nina would do the same thing and they’re both trying to solve the exact same problem and then the parent texts and Rob gets that text and he was, so now I have three people solving one problem instead of the expert. And so we were able to, you know, having the timeline and see text when they’re on the call come through or they’re about to call someone they see the message in I’m gonna address that as well and I saw in the chat someone was asking about phone systems so we also, when we switched to Kustomer we use switch to Amazon Connect because Kustomer has such a great integration there and we’re able to um tie it to our back end as well and use Amazon’s powers to route those calls as well.
So not only do we have cues and routing in Kustomer for emails, chats and texts, we also have the benefit of Kustomer being so agile to tie the Amazon Connect and use that. So it’s just very seamless. My team doesn’t even know the phone system’s not Kustomer which sometimes makes troubleshooting tricky. You know, it’s so seamless for them though that they don’t even know.
They’re always like, something weird happening with a customer and I have to actually go troubleshoot with Amazon or something because of that. And so the efficiency overall and not having so many people working on things, they made the team have beer too. So there’s that the intangible things that we see that you can’t exactly measure but they’re happy they’re not frustrated that they just spent five minutes solving a problem that someone else had just also solved and all that and they’re not having we used to have to like every time in slack they would say, I have care driver Susan on the phone and we would have to announce who they were talking to so people would you know try to avoid that double work.
So it just streamlined their process so much.
– Yeah, double work is an interesting one. We use this term agent collision, right? With the old ticketing systems where people hit you from multiple channels and they just create individual tickets that potentially can get routed to different agents and now you’ve got two different agents working on the same issue for the same customers to talk about losing efficiencies. And in some cases what I’ve seen in some of my agent shadows is different teams have the benefit of the chat team sometimes versus the email team of giving different offers.
The social team as an example, right? You know, the Twitter team can go and give a refund whereas the chat team can only give a 10% refund. So different policies as well. And so the customer now has a free refund and a 10% discount.
You know, which one do I use? So it is super interesting that whole concept of agent collision. A couple of questions that are coming in and just looking at time, let’s take maybe a couple of them so somebody asked can you route by language and the answer to that is, absolutely. So we actually have the ability within the Kustomer platform to detect the written language that somebody’s coming in via an email, chat, tweet, SMS etc and use that language to route to an appropriate skilled agent.
So that is certainly something that you can use to drive the routing. So it doesn’t, you know, in the old days we used to look at things like IP addresses or something like that but you can have a Spanish speaker in England and you can still route them to your Spanish speaking team based on the language that they feel comfortable communicating with. Aziz asked about phone systems. Andrew and Amy I know Michelle mentioned Amazon Connect.
I don’t know if voice is part of your strategies and if so if you’re using any Amazon Connect or an alternative partner of Kustomers.
– We’re not offering voice at the moment so I’ll let Amy take this one.
– Okay.
– Cool. Yeah, we started actually we carried over our Dino phone of 59 and we knew very quickly that we were not going to progress with that. So we got Amazon Connect as well. And we love it.
Its integration is great. The cost makes so much sense. You know, the integration that a customer offers for it is fabulous. So it still feels like one platform which with 59 it did not.
So there was almost no point that the data wouldn’t merge the same like everything is really seamless with Amazon Connect.
– Last question before I ask everyone to to wrap it up which is, this whole concept of omnichannel kind of alluding to what is this is asking here, you move to this omni channel world and how do you prioritize which work, email versus chat, down times and how do you see that real-time visibility. Maybe just some insight into how you manage an omni channel agent versus an email only or a chat only agent. If anybody wants to shed some light on that, please jump in.
– I’m that kid in class who always raises my hand even if no one else did. So I’m happy to take that. Yeah, so we use Kustomer’s queue in routing to help organize our omni channels. So we set different requirements so, you know, well, my entire team supports multiple channels depending on I guess my entire department depending on which team it’s different channels.
My safe ride support team does text and phone, my community support team does text to email chat phone so they’re all on the channel and so we just what we did is we said with cues and routing we said they can have three emails assigned to them at a time and then if a check comes in like that’s a higher priority so send the chat to them first phone calls just ring through but they, you know, we know they pause on the email. So you can set how many you want the agent to be assigned at a time so they really just kind of live in their own inbox and get going. I like to do a CS shift every once in a while and I’m always like this is so easy I don’t have to go find what I need to do next.
Like it’s just popping right into my inbox, my open conversations and I just, you know, I take my call, finish it up, go to my the email, you know, and just the next one pops in and then it’s kind of the same like for me it’s an excitement ’cause I don’t do it every day probably. I’ve seen how quickly I can clear it out, where also instead of, we set a three email threshold. So instead of three emails like Austin I have two and I’m like oh I almost cleared out the queue, you know, and it’s kind of like this fun game at least for me when I work it so that’s kind of how we’ve managed our omni channel is setting different priorities and how many we think the agent should be assigned at a time and then they just live right there in their one space and get to work.
– Christina, are there any other questions from the audience that maybe I missed?
– [Christina]
I’m looking through these. It looks like most of them have been addressed so far. Is there anybody in the audience that has any last questions before we wrap things up?
– Yeah, and I’ll ask our panelists to maybe do some closing comments and that’ll give everybody a moment to think about a last question that we might have some time to address. So why don’t we just go around the horn in terms of, you know, a lot of your peers that have dialed in today or maybe listen to this recording after the fact are gonna embark on a similar journey and maybe have some of the pains that you’ve outlined here. What is some advice that you would give to them if they were considering Kustomer over a traditional ticketing platform like Zendesk? So Andrew, if you wanna kick us off.
– Yeah, I think I can’t remember who said it but they had the quote that Kustomer is a beast. I would agree with that statement but I think for someone looking to make the switch, any software that is a beast can be totally daunting. And there are a lot of benefits that make the switch worth it but you know the upfront work, you know, it can be hard to find time to like fit that on your calendar. But my recommendation is, don’t worry about the time.
Just go for it right away. It pays back so quickly that it’s really worth investing in and like if you take that moment to pause like I did maybe like a month before we actually kicked it off, you know, that was like one month that we didn’t have it up and running that we probably would have benefited from. So yeah I would say don’t let the possibilities are like a great thing and not a large road map item that you need to be worried about.
– Yeah, I think Kustomer is a beast is my new t-shirt. I’m gonna steal that one and I’m gonna send to all of you a Kustomer is a beast t-shirt. Amy, thoughts from your side.
– Yeah. I think one of the biggest things that has, I mean, I obviously have a lot to say about how much I love Kustomer but the thing I love most about Kustomer if I have to pick a top thing it is the Kustomer support and staff. I have never, I actually don’t think that I even knew who my 59 person was until we were leaving very similar behavior from Zendesk. We had a rep, I knew who they were, I don’t even think we met with them.
I’m not really sure I really never had a connection there. And as far as live chat, we did have a person at live chat but I got the circle back, circle back, circle back pretty much every single meeting to the point where we would actually never have problems solved that we really were experiencing. And I think that what has been so incredible with Kustomer is from my very very beginning when I was working with Corey as a salesperson, like first of all I don’t even remember the people’s names from live chat but I talked to them all the time I don’t remember who they were but Corey was incredible, so knowledgeable, really honest, great to work with.
Christina was my implementation specialist, like we wanted bracelets that said WWCD, what would Christina do, because literally she was so helpful and so incredible and we absolutely loved working with her. Our support person is Deanna, she is like a boss, we absolutely are obsessed with her, we’ve had so much progression, you know, we’ve worked a lot with John who is on the development side. I think that what I’ve been so addicted to with Kustomer and what keeps me forever in my opinion is the fact that they are so progressive and they listen and they wanna do more for you and we are so connected to the team at Kustomer and that is sup super super unique in my opinion and I think one of the most special things about the platform.
– That’s really fun, thank you. Michelle.
– Yeah, I echo what Amy said about the team. You know, we didn’t touch on it yet and it really is a key differentiator. I’m always shocked when customer service tools don’t have great customer service. You should know your audience and know that they expect a lot out of you and Kustomer does that incredibly well.
I love that when I mentioned like, it’d be great to have this feature. You know, sometimes I’m in the meeting with the product team who’s working on that feature in the next quarter and they wanna hear my feedback and it’s so rare to find a company that truly wants to listen to their customers. Like you can tell Kustomer’s pitch is also what they believe inside the company and so that’s made it really refreshing to work with. And I had Corey as my sales rep as well and he is fantastic, he’s always advocating for me and supporting me and I you know and we keep in touch and I love it, I love just the customer people.
So that’s great. And then I can’t say that’s enough like, I love how much I can customize Kustomer. I, you know, to the little things. I have a manager, she loves to go and change some of the colors to keep it fresh for her team and get their eyes drawn to different cues and notice numbers differently and it’s like it’s a little thing but like it makes her happy her team loves it, you know, it keeps things fresh and new and it’s like, it’s the little things too that make it so great and then there’s huge customization we can do to make sure our customers are happy.
And so it’s been such a great experience that I advocate for it even when Kustomer doesn’t ask me to. You know, in my networks and my circles because I’m one of those people that when I find something that I like and works really well for me, I’m gonna tell people about it I’m gonna let people know and that’s kind of how I felt these two years is that it’s just constantly improving, they’re constantly listening to feedback and growing and the features they’re putting out aren’t, you know, one thing I drove me crazy with Zendesk the features they were putting out were like, how to avoid a contact by doing this thing and your knowledge base.
I don’t care about that. Like, you know. And because there’s features that they’re putting out and doing are things that you can tell came from the community and they’re listening and I really appreciate that.
– We have a question that’s coming from Sarah and I think Andrew you touched on this earlier which was the transition and people having to go from the old world to new world. Any interesting feedback from your top performers who initially found themselves frustrated with a new platform.
– No feedback that stuck. It’s funny you say that because a few of us were reflecting on the transition. Actually I mentioned all of this was happening and we were looking back on the end of last August and September. And I reminded one individual on the team that, you know, she wasn’t super fond of having to switch to a new tool and her response was yeah, I don’t, I just, you know, I didn’t like being slow the first few days but I love it. So it was just you know the, yeah moving, moving from a dinosaur tool to a new one and not feeling like she was at the top of her game, nothing to do with the tool itself.
– Michelle or Amy, did you experience any of that with maybe some of your top performers who are reluctant to change?
– I think that is it right there is just reluctance to change but I think what was really cool is if we did receive feedback almost everything was customizable. So the feedback was actually really valuable like whether it was that something wasn’t visible or you know how do we know this, we’re like, oh how do we know that? So like again picking more down times to get your team really initiated and over scheduling is a really great idea too ’cause then you really do get people thinking and giving feedback but everything is so customizable that even, you know, just those first few days it’s like, what happened?
I don’t know, it was great. So yeah.
– To add to that I would say there was a huge shift in tone from being able to say yes to questions the team had where with some of the older platforms, there’s a can we do this, can we do that and like part of my job became just saying no and no and figuring out how to package no in a nice new way so people wouldn’t be so frustrated with their job. I think understanding once people kind of got to open the hood and like understand like what, you know, what was available to us, it totally changed the dynamic for people working there became like an exciting, there’s like a sense of being able to have buy-in on how we use the tool in like the future direction of it.
Listen, I wanna thank all of you. I know you’re all super busy and I think you’ve been very candid about kind of your journeys and what you’ve been through and I’m sure you know folks that are listening in you’ll probably get a few folks reaching out to you on LinkedIn to maybe dive in deeper and get some specifics answered but thank you all so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I wanna thank our audience for joining and taking an hour out of their day and, you know, we’ve got a couple more sessions tomorrow on make the switch with our product manager and with another customer talking about their experience.
So it’s been make the switch all week so please continue and enjoy and dial in. Thank you all again and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.