Stay Lightyears Ahead of the Holiday Rush

 

Summary

In this webinar, guest speakers from TomboyX, Vuori, and Kustomer discuss the importance of human connection in customer service, especially in the post-pandemic world where the ways businesses communicate with customers have fundamentally changed. Throughout the webinar, the participants consider how customer insights can be used to drive sales and growth, particularly in the context of the holiday shopping season, when brands need to get ahead of the holiday rush and meet and exceed customer expectations. For instance, by analyzing contact reasons, volume, and other metrics, businesses can identify site issues, improve guides, and optimize communication with customers.

Main Takeaways

1. Human Connection in Customer Service: The pandemic highlighted the importance of human connection in customer service. Businesses are finding value in providing a platform for interaction, even if it’s not directly related to their products or services.
2. Data-Driven Decision Making: Using customer insights and metrics to drive business decisions can lead to improved sales and growth. This includes understanding why customers are reaching out, identifying site issues, and making strategic changes to improve customer interaction.
3. Adapting to the Digital-First Era: The pandemic has accelerated the shift to a digital-first era, requiring businesses to adapt their customer service strategies. This includes dealing with supply chain issues and changing how they communicate with customers.
4. Importance of the Holiday Season: The holiday season is a critical time for businesses, and it’s important to meet or exceed customer expectations during this period. Preparing for the holiday rush and understanding potential challenges and opportunities can be key to success.
5. Building Effective Customer Support Teams: Building a robust customer support team is crucial for handling customer queries and issues. This includes having a team that is well-distributed and capable of handling various customer service tasks.

Transcript

Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today to discuss an undeniably important topic right now, which is how to stay light years ahead of the holiday rush. My name is Andrea Paul, and I am the Director of Research here at customer. And today I’m joined by two very special guests that are gonna be sharing some amazing insights with us that I hope you all find some value in. We have Michael Perez today. She is the director of business operations at TomboyX, and Chad Warren, senior manager of customer service at Bori. How are you guys doing today?

Good. Isn’t that great? Awesome.

So I’m sure that you guys are in the full swing of holiday prep. And for the next half hour, we’ll be diving into something that’s on everyone’s mind, which is the peak holiday shopping season.

It’s only a few weeks away, which probably is coming sooner than a lot of people want. But, you know, for many retailers it is the busiest time of year, but also the most opportunistic, most successful time of year as well. So it’s really, really important for, you know, brands to ensure that they’re delivering on consumer expectations during the peak shopping season. So before we dive into the meat of things, I’d love for you both to just introduce yourselves briefly. Tell me a little about, you know, your company, your role, your background.

Chad, we can start with you.

Okay, yeah.

So I work for Viori. We are an athletic apparel brand making gear from cycle materials and we’re about six years old. I came on to help run the customer support team and build it out and we started with just like a Gmail inbox and an iPhone that we kept turned off and we’d listen to the voicemails at the end of the day because didn’t wanna talk to anyone, but now we have a team of thirty people spread between California and Mexico, we have people actually in our warehouse who work in customer service too. So they’re right there and they can slip a note in if we need to or grab something on the packing floor. And yeah, now we’re getting to a point where we can’t use the excuse like, hey, we’re a small company anymore.

But yeah, so now we have a big retail presence with our own stores and an REI in Nordstrom’s and then of course our biggest store, what I call our big store, which is our online store. And that’s what my team supports.

Awesome. What about you, Michael? Cool.

My name’s Michael and I work for TomboyX, which is a gender euphoric underwear and apparel company.

And we’ve been around for about seven years, we’re celebrating our seventh year anniversary. THE COMPANY — congratulations.

Thank you. I know and we’re going nowhere but — Up. — from here. Yes.

Our founder started the company making a button up t shirts for any gender that accommodated anybody and they decided to put out the first boxer brief for women and people went wild for it, and so they totally pivoted the business into being a gender neutral underwear that was comfortable for all bodies all gender identities, and it’s taken off being like a brand that really represents communities that didn’t have representation previously, and we have scaled through four different warehouses at this point and now we’ve reached our Mac capacity shipping out of San Diego, and we have had a very cool journey scaling through shipping through holiday seasons, and we’re pumped to be here. Awesome. Well, thank you guys both for the great introductions.

I think just about every retailer is impacted in some way, shape, or form during the holiday season, but What do your businesses typically experience? What sort of promotions or volume upticks impact your teams? Chad, do you wanna start with one.

Sure. So when we started Viori, we didn’t actually Hala wasn’t our biggest time of year, it’s actually the summertime because we sold short, we just have sports. And so as we started having more products and started supporting, like, having more than just men’s yoga shorts and have a whole range of women’s clothes and outerwear.

Then we started seeing that Christmas obviously the holiday time started being the largest time, busiest time for us. And it’s been, you know, I wish I could it would be a lot easier if I had a better Because we’re still so young, but a better set of data that I could look back and compare to and prepare for this year and for the years past, but it’s And I’m sure Michael’s experience the same thing because we don’t have that much history, it’s really hard to plan off the past because every year just we’re taking these huge steps and if I just prepared for what we did last year, I would be drowning probably for this year.

And yeah, this like the holiday time is always fun time when you’re in customer service and it’s it’s when like, I really wish that we were on the office for it because it like that’s the best time is when you’re chatting with customers and you have like some music playing and everyone’s kind of having a good time, but this year and last year we’ve all been kind of separated in working from home. So we’ve been trying to like build a good, strong Slack game and we’ve all been having that community there. I’m sure that we can all relate that. But it is very true.

It’s that, you know, I work on the marketing side of things, but whenever there’s like a big push, big campaign, it’s that buzz happening in person, feeding off of everyone else’s energy.

But in a remote world, Slack is the best you can do.

Michael, what do you experience during the holiday season at ten by x? Yeah. So my role is a little different and it spans over customer support, customer experience, outbound and inbound. So my purview is that whole experience of receiving the product, how fast Can we get it out and what’s the customer experience and customer support response to that?

Yep. And so our company really does a good job forecasting, what the holidays are going to look like, and then taking the stats that our customers respond to like how many customers contact per order and forecasting out our holiday season. And so we see anywhere from twenty to fifty percent in the past four years increase when it comes to holidays. And so walking into that, like, extreme pandemic world where there was emotional isolation happening — happening, which causes people to want to shoot more, get dopamine hits from like receiving or giving for other people, like that’s something that was completely unpredictable last year.

But then you have the transformation of the market of ecommerce happening at the same time where you have a whole population of people who are like I can order whatever I want and have it delivered… and then we have to compete with Amazon when it comes to things like that.

And so you have this whole unpredictable factor when it comes to forecasting this. Yeah. So for TomboyX, we like to be able to map out the customer experience from the beginning to the end, meaning that we want to like communicate and facilitate expectations and we want to meet them. If it’s going to take two months to get your things like we’re talking about like are we going to lose sales for that but also What does our brand loyalty look like?

Is someone gonna trust us and hang around longer if we tell them what to expect and then we abide by it? So, the holidays has a lot of known factors and a lot of unknown factors, but I will say going from having a very predicted and mapped out customer support time pre pandemic and then going through that unknown flux during the pandemic has given us a lot of kick as data right now, be able to prepare for this holiday season. Yeah. And I think, you know, the pandemic really did just throw a wrench in just about everything, but I think customers or organizations felt it — No.

— especially heavily. They took the brunt of a lot of it because a, consumer behavior shifted so significantly, and then b, there were all of these, you know, effects that happened, whether they were supply chain issues or even longer hold times or response times because it was just this influx and inquiries and things were going wrong.

But we did do some research right after the holiday season last year, and the results that we got were just like a whole different ball game in the midst of the pandemic. There were a ton of companies that were forced to become D2C brands overnight, that were not D2C brands. Luckily, you guys had experience in that, so you didn’t have to reinvent the wheel in any way, shape, or form, but they had to field a lot of different inquiries, so maybe more consultative convert conversations about size or fit or what have you, maybe just having to deal with a higher volume of returns because of that in a digital first era where you can’t touch and feel things, and and we’re hearing, you know, still to this day about a lot of supply chain issues that are lingering. So I’d love to hear from you guys just sort of what you’re expecting from the holiday season this year if there’s any particular challenges or opportunities for your business and for your team.

Chad, if you wanna kick this off.

Yes, I think similar to what Michael said, we there’s a lot that we learn from the pandemic that I think we’ll continue to that fundamentally like changed how we communicate with customers and what we that customers to to reach out about like one thing and Michael touched on it earlier about how there was a lot of like people lonely during that time and still today, people the conversations we’re having with customers are are a lot more like, hey, how are you? What are you doing? How like, it’s almost even more human than it was before.

And so I expect that so I expect chats to be an increase of chat time, which are normal chat times like three minutes. And now we’ve increased it to like seven minutes for a chat going back and forth with a customer because they are asking like some personal questions, but obviously we try to keep them back on track on on on on what’s what we’re trying to do which is help them get something that’s going to motivate them to move and but we like expanding the time for the interactions and the increase back and forth. So there’s, that was the thing that kind of blew me away the most that I learned last year and that we’re gonna probably this year is it is increased back and forth the customers in longer chat times, longer longer phone handle times.

Which of course then we have what we’re doing is staffing up for those things and making sure that we extend our hours a bit so that we can people who don’t just work a normal nine to five job. Yeah. That’s something that like we absolutely saw across the board during the pandemic. I’m sure that you guys heard about the Zapos story where they just opened a hotline during the pandemic, and we’re like, You don’t even have to be a customer.

Like, you don’t even have to, like, be asking a question about a product, like, just chat with us. Because there is a need for human connection, and it’s not being fulfilled right now when everyone’s in lockdown. So it’s Very interesting that you’re seeing that still happening, which I guess makes sense, like we’re all working remotely still. So I think that that that human connection is still in need, and that I think that customer service in a lot of ways is shifting in that direction too where you need this, you know, human personalized connection and not just speaking to someone as though they’re, like, a number on the list of things to do.

So I definitely feel you there. Michael, what are you expecting this season in terms of your customer inquiries. Yeah. That’s and that’s an interesting topic.

I’m gonna speak to what we were just talking about and I’ll pivot it — Yeah. — to other things we’re expecting, but the pandemic and the way that I mean, all of us going to the grocery store, being able to share like one common trauma that was happening with everyone created this new non trainable asset of humanity recognition.

And I think that Tom WEEKS had an advantage there a little bit because we have been serving the queer community for a long time — Yep. — like an underrepresented group of people who’s looking for something to affirm their identities. So the conversations in our lead times have always been a lot longer. And when I have people in and we start training about like pronouns, safety, being able to have conversations and make sure that someone actually feels love in that space has been built into our KPIs and our metrics previously.

So I think that that just I mean that just increased like Chad said during the PANDEMIC, and those are the conversations we’re having, like email chains that are open for days because people are sharing pictures back and forth. I love that. Yeah, that kind of community that comes out of a virtual connection where it’s really difficult to feel recognized was cool to see, but we are definitely I mean, we leaned even more into that. I brought back our SLAs even more.

I’ve been training forward when it comes to like Okay. We actually don’t need to close these in an amount of time, like, why don’t we why don’t we have fun? Why don’t we engage? Why don’t we ask for ideas and turn inbound into outbound?

Why don’t we self promote the other and also gain like even more in our business, which has become really cool. So that’s definitely built into the holiday plan.

I think when you started you said holiday is starting in three weeks and I actually think to comment to a couple of things that you said, I think holiday started three days ago.

After Halloween, it is now holiday season. That is the new news. Friday is just like expected sale amongst a lot of other things that are happening. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so true. What Chad said previously about not having I think the first question answered was, like, holiday wasn’t the biggest for your company previously, and you had to, like, earn and learn on the go as holiday season started increasing with growth?

That’s our pride season too. Like pride used to be our other holiday, and we have that same kind of like dichotomy happening throughout the year. but this year, I mean all of us, I’m not going to beat around the bush the inbound supply chain delays are kicking everybody’s ass, and I think the question that we have to answer is How do we sell and how do we meet expectations when even our expectations aren’t being met? And so I think that we are expecting to not have the items that we wanted when we wanted them. And that we started having that conversation a couple of months ago. Okay. We’ve had delays all this year leading up to holiday, the largest delay that we’re all going to experience.

Are we going to do well? Are we going to do what we wanted? Are we going to have the product seasonally like are we gonna be selling Christmas goods in February? Yeah.

And are people going to get what they want on time? So for us, The outbound and our warehouse metrics are very important in tandem with customer support. Okay. So everything that I could do to look back and see our top detractors in customer support shipping delay.

When is it going to ship and why isn’t it here when you said it was going to be and all three of those are tied to expectation.

And so in my forecasting, we are making sure that no matter what I am staffing to be able to ship in twenty four hours. There is no forty eight hours. There’s no twenty five hours. And with that, we can start telling our story to our customers. So I expect a very high influx of orders. I expect very high delivery expectations.

Both November and December, people want their orders because we are competing with two day Amazon who has their own carriers who has their own trucks and who has their own ships now too. So their product is flowing and people don’t know what’s wrong and why they’re getting some things and not the others. And so to tell that narrative, I think is really important. Yeah.

I think I mean, I’ve heard this across the board. It’s, like, competing with the Amazons of the world, quote unquote, whether or not, you know, your product. They do sell on Amazon or not. But I I think that, you know, you have to try your best to inch your way in that direction, but Amazon doesn’t have the differentiators that your brands do in terms of delivering service, right?

Like, building these one to one relationships with consumers.

You’re, you know, purpose driven in different ways. And that is such a differentiator that Amazon could never provide where it is this human connection. It is, you know, especially during the holiday season when people are very stressed out, I think that a customer service interaction can completely change the game for you. It can build a customer relationship for life or conversely if you have a bad interaction. It probably do the opposite, and you could lose business for life. But I do think that trying to deliver on giving customers as much information as possible upfront about expectations being proactive, And then providing these incredible experiences, they can really be game changers.

So, obviously, a lot to deal with in a normal season let alone one where we’re still dealing with the lingering effects of a pandemic. But I guess the question I have for you guys is how have your team sort of prepared for the influx? You’ve spoken a lot about it already, but in terms of strategies, technology, tools, how do you make sure that both your teams, your agents themselves are really being set up for success.

Michael, we can start with you.

Yep. I’ll start with I’ll start with customer support specifically — Yep. — because we talk about supply chain and outbound, but when we’re looking at agents specifically, I take the schedule as it is and I just throw it out the door and shake it up. So for us, we walk into November and December with a schedule that keeps a consistent amount of people on the days, but then we have backups and we have swings.

So everybody actually gets a little extra time off in there because they have to come in and work so quickly and work so fit fear but that authenticity factor is not something you can really measure outside of, like, seasat. Sure. And so we I still wanna allocate space for that. So we go on like a PTO freeze for the holidays.

Everybody is just like really on board for the holidays and rolling forward. But the CS team specifically actually gets three days off a week because we have to change into a structure where we have a different amount of agents on per day with swings and backups rolling all the way until Christmas Eve. And so we start working on like weekends with multiple people, and it’s a really it’s a really cool team experience.

But we also turn on a lot of the customer features of being able to pre filter tickets before they come in. So we kick up self-service super hardcore in the holidays. And that’s not something we do because we have the space to converse usually in the year, but we totally turn that on. And I actually have everything filtered into queues, and then I assign different SLAs for each one because we have to be really fast about order changes.

But we can be a little bit slower for the where’s my order, what’s went what went wrong, please investigate it. Mhmm. And So when we alleviate the regular KPIs, I throw those out the window too and we talk about walking in for holiday KPIs, so people feel like everyone has opted into the same standard and we’re all working together to create that vision and get through it together. And I think that’s super important because you can never be like, just keep doing what you’re doing, but work a lot harder for the holidays.

And every year, you’re like, I love all night. Yeah.

Yeah. I I mean, I I totally agree with that. And I think that, you know, I have another session that customer now all around self-service and there are definitely detractors from that. We just spent the last fifteen, twenty minutes talking about the human connection and how valuable it can be.

But you know, you there is such a fine balance. Right? You need to be efficient and effective, and there are specific conversations where it doesn’t really require, you know, a full blown relationship building conversation. There are certain customers.

There are certain inquiries where it’s like I just want to answer instantaneously, and if you give it to me quickly, that’s all that I need. And I’ll be completely happy with that. So the more that you can tap in to appropriately tap into tools and escalate appropriately when it doesn’t work.

I think the more successful you can be in a in a high volume situation like that.

Chad, how is your team preparing for the influx that’s to come imminently?

Well, one of the first things we did to prepare was actually Michael just talked about queues and routing. We actually have never had queues and routing on because we came from a really small team and grew last year from three people to thirty people and we just — Yep. — came from a team of dive into the inbox, grab what you want, take take care of it.

And so I really wanted to get queues and routing turned on from like before the holidays and we have it turned on and now like around ten thirty were were done with tickets. It’s pretty crazy because and it’s just routing it to the right people and stuff and and all the good things that come with queues and routing. And we’re still refining it. So that’s the first thing we’re doing is is we restructured the team so that we have these different tiers of of people who specialize in different areas and that in self has already mean we feel really confident about our response times coming into the holidays in addition to all the people that we just hired in the tenth people that we have coming into.

But the really the biggest thing during this time to make customers feel good is to make sure that I have really good communication with my team. And, like, if there’s something going wrong, just letting them like, being upfront with them, because then they can be upfront with the customer, and then working really closely with marketing because that’s who is opening and closing the floodgates for us. And and luckily, I have a a really good working relationship with our director of marketing because She really understands how everything she touches affects us and customer service. And so opening closing those flood gates to make sure that it aligns with if we have product or not.

And if we have enough people working or not, The biggest Another big thing that that we worked really hard to get on that I’ve been working to get since like our very first holiday are gift cards. And I think that will be a big thing for this holiday that’s gonna be different than last holiday is we actually have something that doesn’t have time frame. It doesn’t have if you get it instantly, and this holiday, we also have some physical stores where you can go in and and pick it up. And so pivoting like customers to like hey you actually, if you’re comfortable, please come and see us like we want to see you in person.

I’m sure you want to get out of the house, like come see us in in pushing people to kind of visit our stores and our retailers has been is is something we’re gonna push towards that we weren’t able to do last year too. Yeah. So But, yeah. Keeping the team happy, I’m gonna have to steal that schedule from you because I’m not sure I can how you’re making that work, but I would love to know more because my team would love to hear.

They they have three days off during time. But we do it like a a I Chris, like, the holidays are my favorite. And so we’ll do we actually in a few weeks have dinner where we have the whole team coming together to kinda start and it’s I think important to get everybody together in the same page and everyone who wants to come whose feels come to like just like start start off and be like, hey, it’s all of us, we’re all here. We’re just selling shorts.

It’s not like we don’t work at a host? Not carrying cancer. Yeah. Exactly. So we’re we’re we should be enjoying ourselves, and that definitely shines through even through an email.

Like, it shines through that people are are happy and and feel informed of everything that’s going on. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I my previous sort of quote was that, you know, during the holiday season, customer service representatives were like the superheroes because they’re the ones, you know, whose asses are on the line so to speak.

They’re the ones and in a DOC business, they’re the only ones that are are speaking to customers face to face, but I feel like in the last two years, they’ve been the superheroes the in entire time because, you know, the influx and inquiries was constant when everything was up in the air. So I truly believe that. And what you were saying about about marketing too, you know, we recently were were sort of digging into how the customer experience, customer service is truly a team sport, and it goes both ways, like product teams, e commerce teams, marketing teams have such a huge hand in the customer experience that directly affects customer service teams and working in tandem is so beneficial, but then also customer service teams are really like frontline boots on the ground gathering so much incredible information for other parts of the organization, whether that’s, you know, issues with the navigation or transaction process, like on a website or, you know, logistics, maybe certain things are damaged more often in transit.

There’s just so much information that customer service teams are able to gather. So working with other departments, especially in times like this is is really, really huge.

And I think the knowledge share in both directions is is incredibly valuable.

And speaking with that, I know Michael you were saying this previously as to how you have tons of data that you’re planning for, but we’re running close on time. I’ll just sneak in one last question which is how are you looking at data? Are you obviously, Michael, is pulling stuff from from previous years, but are you planning on having tools in place in order to gather insights now? Planning using data and insights from the past.

Chad, do you wanna speak to that briefly?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, we the what we have and collect from the customer is is not as important, I think, as the like anecdotal conversations that we have with with other teams, but it definitely helps us back back it up because the people who who care about the numbers, they get they’re gonna want to see the the data to back up what what we’re saying, but what we’re bringing in is is a lot of like product specific stuff right now and there’s always going to be like the wash of data of of okay this is how many people reach out asking where their order is complaining that it arrived late those kind of things. We’re focused on right now just getting really good data about our products from customers.

And so there’s not there’s not so much that we’re using specifically for holidays when it comes to data it’s mainly just taking data about our products and then having conversations with our product team to make sure we’re making the the best products.

As far as the data, like from our contact to order ratio, that’s probably what I spend the most time looking at, and it’s still for our company, it’s pretty high right now. It’s in the double digits and I’d love for it not to be.

But, yeah, it’s it’s it’s it’s like twenty five percent right now and that’s the number one. That’s the data point that I’m looking at bringing down as soon as I can. Because that’s what’s causing like, if there’s all this all these questions coming into us, then we’ve already failed the customer somewhere along the way most likely.

Yeah. And I think that like going back to what we were talking about self about self-service, a lot of people do wanna get the information from a like, by themselves and anytime a day. And if they’re having to reach out to customer service a lot of times they already feel like they that we didn’t support them enough. But yeah, data right now for for us is really focused around product.

And getting the contact to order ratio down.

I mean, those go hand in hand. It’s like, you know, there’s a reason why there are people reaching out to you, and if there are complex issues that take longer time, it’s usually due to an issue that happens before your team even knows anything. So using the data that you guys are gathering for things earlier in the sales cycle for different parts of the organization, I think, is so powerful and incredibly valuable.

Michael, do you want to expand a little bit more on what your team is doing?

Yeah, I I am a my role is I’m a I’m a data monster and so I I mean I use every level for different locations and product is certainly a big part of that because I mean defects and requests go right to the production team and we track the amount that we’re getting and the habits that we have within there to help develop future product. But we also do a lot of shopping habits as well. So how many people pre purchase reached out to customers support versus post purchase?

And what are those issues? Like, is there a limitation when it comes to needing a fit guide beforehand?

AND, customer has been really helpful for diving in because I I use, like, a couple of levels of contact reason to get a holistic picture to help answer company wide questions.

So I mean anywhere from NPS, I could go any direction with this, honestly.

Basically, creating brand loyalty and creating new processes around this data is a huge part of our success in customer support too because I mean we have pretty kick ass metrics and getting a sense of self-service and customer success and seeing how that turns into loyalty and seeing how that turns into sales, seeing how that turns into growth is like the map that I I get to build using customer.

So the insights that we use come from being able to take a snapshot because we look at our business weekly. And so I’ll look at the snapshot from contact reasons to volume and to all of the back end to front end metrics, and then say, okay, this site issue caused x, y, z, or we need a fixed guide, or we need to talk to people a little bit sooner. Like, we just moved our contact page from being an independent contact page to on the product page itself with a self guided, like, questionnaire that’s routed in there, which increased the volume of questions, but ultimately also increased the speed of sale too. And so like those in tandem and making those decisions like how quick can we get a sale? How quickly can we talk to our customers, but why are we talking to them? Is a big part of that but those metrics also play into warehouse that play into there’s it’s a multi level. It’s all interconnected.

Yeah. Mhmm.

Well, thank you guys so so much for taking the time to to chat with me. This was an incredible conversation and super insightful, both for holiday and just generally in the customer service space, you guys both have really great high growth companies, obviously. So I think the insights that you provided are gonna be really, really valuable.

And I wish you the best of luck during the holiday season.

Thank you so much, Andrea. Thank you, Chad. Yeah. Thank you, Michael. I I hope is it too early to say happy holidays?

So. I don’t think so. It’s after Halloween.

We’re allowed now.

Alright. Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon. Bye.