Summary

As part of Kustomer’s “Make the Switch” campaign, Ryan Patchitt, the Customer Experience Manager at Waldo, discusses the positive experience of switching to the Kustomer platform for Waldo’s customer service needs. In the conversation, Ryan highlights that Waldo’s philosophy on customer experience revolves around finding a balance between technological advances and maintaining a human-centric approach. They believe that humans buy from humans, and building brand loyalty requires personalization and a human-to-human relationship. To that end, switching to the Kustomer platform has provided Waldo with a robust omnichannel customer service platform. They now communicate with customers across various channels, including voice, email, social media, and text messaging. The integration with Talkdesk for voice has been seamless and beneficial for the team.

Key Takeaways

1. Time-Saving Benefits: The Kustomer platform offers significant time-saving advantages by centralizing customer data and providing a comprehensive view of interactions. Agents no longer need to spend investigative time searching multiple systems to find order information or customer history, resulting in more efficient and streamlined customer service.
2. Customer-Centric Conversation View: The shift from a traditional ticket-focused approach to a customer-centric conversation view has been a significant improvement for Waldo. This view allows agents to easily access all relevant information in one place, including the ticket, associated questions, orders, and conversations. The ability to handle multiple conversations simultaneously and quickly address customer inquiries has led to a better overall customer experience.
3. Smooth Implementation Experience: Despite the challenges of implementing a new platform during the holiday season, the adoption of Kustomer went smoothly for Waldo. The project management and support provided by the Kustomer team were instrumental in minimizing hurdles and facilitating a successful migration. The positive experience has led to improved agent productivity and greater customer satisfaction.

Transcript

Alright. Welcome everybody. It’s March.

That means madness is in the air here. Kustomer wanted to take advantage of the season. With our make the switch madness campaign. If you haven’t heard over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been presenting the biggest match ups in the CX industry.

It has been a blast.

You can see I now have the official customer Jersey, so this is it’s game on here as we dive into our own version of March madness. So Today, we have another great guest, which we’ll get into in just a second. But let me introduce myself. I have Dave Larson, the vice President and Growth here at customer.

And we have Ryan joining us. Ryan, thanks for joining. And how are you? Very well.

Thanks. How are you? I’m good, man. Good. Good. Good. You guys do you get into March madness as much?

You probably don’t over on that side of far? Is that No. Not as much, but something that I have to visit the u the US to to really see what it’s about. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it’s a fun time. Not everybody gets into it, but it’s always fun to see young people sport, compete, etcetera, etcetera. So thank you for joining.

We’re going to be talking about Waldo today and some of the experience that you guys have had about jumping onto the customer platform.

Before we do, maybe you could tell us just a little bit about yourself and what you do over there at Waldov.

Sure.

As you said, my name’s Ryan. I’m the customer experience manager here at Waldo.

Well, there’s a direct to consumer contact lens company.

We operate in the USA, UK, and EU.

It’s a subscription based company started in twenty seventeen and just been growing steadily since then. Awesome. Awesome.

Again, this will be fun to dive in for the audience. Would love for this to be as interactive as possible.

So if you can now, grab the chat. Let’s do it in chat.

I’m going to open up mine right here. Tell me your name and where you’re from.

See if I can do this just to give you the example panel as all attendees. So I’m cave from from well, now I’m thinking about the US. That’s something more like I’m from Utah.

So throw that into throw that into chat if you can. Would love this to be interactive as we go out today. Alright.

Let’s start a big picture while the audience gets oriented on some of this stuff. There you go, Yasmina, Brooklyn. Tom, Tom coming from Colorado, Beth coming from Texas. Okay, yeah, perfect.

Love the chats of Calum from the U. K. Okay, we did some UK. You’re bringing us, Hannah from California.

Yeah, I didn’t know if we should be using U. S. Or UK, but but I love it. So let’s dive in.

Let’s start a big picture and talk about your philosophy, on customer experience yourself or kind of what you guys believe in Wallen? Yeah, definitely. I’ve rolled over to see our main focus.

Is to find a balance really between technological advances in customer service, as well as maintaining a human centric experience for our customers.

At the end of the day, my belief has always been that humans buy from humans.

And as the world goes more virtually.

It’s about finding that balance and that human to human relationship to build brand loyalty and and customer experience for us. Love it. Love it. And tell us just a little bit more about your team.

What’s the makeup of it or number of reps? Just so we can get a little bit of a play. Or what’s the day to day look like? Main channels you use, give us the high level there.

Sure. So we have a team of nine customer service agents based out in Durban, South Africa.

They work on two shifts during the day. Focusing on the UK and EU in the morning shift and then going on to the USA in the in the afternoon shift.

We expand across a lot of platforms with Shopify, our own internal platforms and then going into our fulfillment centers, a lot of their platforms as well.

Got it, got it. Okay, so yeah, you guys are running a tight ship, a lot of shifts trying to cover all the different types of across the world.

I like that. Okay. And then let’s dive into this idea of maybe this is a start.

You’ve been with customer now for a little while. But maybe just walk us through as you were looking at customer and evaluating them. What were some of those things that kind of we’re on your list of must haves from a technology standpoint that maybe kinda you saw that light bulb go off when you started talking to customer. Yeah.

So every two years, we kind of do an overview of our technologies and the platforms that we use. And we’re looking for a customer service platform. Our main focuses were to find a robust omni channel customer service platform.

When speaking to our customers, we like to speak over the channel that they prefer.

So that’s over, you know, email, Facebook, phone calls, or any other social media platforms, And so we needed that omnichannel robustness.

Looking at for strong reporting as well, being able to to let our there’s different stakeholders in the company. I understand what our customers are needing in what they are saying is very important to us. And then finally being completely cloud based, I think in the current situation, if a company is not cloud based, there’s a lot more difficulties involved in that. So we wanted you go completely car based.

Yeah, yeah, that’s so important and I moved into that a little bit more, but with all the COVID stuff you’re working from home and — Yeah. — you gotta figure out that as much as you can. We had a question coming from Tommy from the audience just on your omnichannel. When when channel is most heavily used by your consumers?

Great question. At the moment, our voice. So phone calls is the the biggest channel that we use followed by email.

And then going into the social media side and text messaging as well.

Yeah. So those are kind of the top three and then uh-oh, I don’t know if you feel comfortable with this, but to follow-up on that was what voice provider do you use?

Yeah. So we use we use Talkdesk as our voice provider.

It was a suggestion from customer actually.

To look into Talkdesk and yeah, they’ve been great so far. And do you, yeah, any quick click on that how is the integration with Talkdesk and customers? That works fairly well together, kind of having the voice and this other aspects of the omnichannel CRM together. Yeah. It’s it’s worked fantastically so far.

It’s been it’s been great to have all of that information stored in customer So the agents have one singular, sorry, singular platform to look at.

We’re looking both at history and the current chats with our customers. I love to see that. Yeah, I think that integration with these voice providers with this customer service CRM makes a big difference and I’ve loved some of the things I’ve seen with our partners at Talkdesk. Alright.

Next question. But before I jump into that question, I have to do an audience poll. I just need to know because we’re getting a decent amount of comments here. I just need to know cool or not cool my Jersey.

You just put it at cool Ryan, you can do this as well.

Or not cool because there seems to be a little debate amongst members here.

And while they put that, okay, we’re getting a couple here.

I understand. I didn’t get one. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Hey, you need to make that happen actually. Well, to do list.

We’ve got super cool. Okay. I like that cool with a k.

Not okay.

Going to k like customer.

Alright. So I think most people I did get one not cool, but I’ll take that offline.

Let’s go to the next question on the list here. You’ve obviously now switched platform. Oh, Actually, there is one question from the audience. Let me get this from that.

When you switch platforms, how did you get your leadership team to buy into the change. Any quick advice there before I move on, Beth thanks for throwing that out. I forgot to get that. No.

No worries.

I think you know, with stakeholders and it can be various amounts of stakeholders involved, it is through just constant communication with them, helping them understand and answer the questions that they have, changing platformers is big and it has a direct impact on customers which are our bread and butter, to be honest. So, you know, I think, a, first helping them understand what the benefits are, and then showing them that complete roadmap and project plan as detailed as possible. I think eases their mind in terms of the project go going forward.

So for for us, it was just, you know, having that open communication with them, helping them understand and answer answering the questions that they had on on the change — Yeah.

— and then keeping them updated throughout the process. They really push on, were they more sitting kind of the business aspect of? Or did they really push more of the financial like a cost saving or an ROI or something? Yeah.

It was a bit of both for us. Obviously, ROI is is very important to any business. And I think that once you have found that not only does it help the ROI, but it actually helps the experience and the journey and the customers go on.

That’s that for us just sold it and we were able to push forward. Love it. Love it. That’s helpful.

That’s helpful. Okay. I love the questions, everybody. Keep coming and I’ll make sure I monitor those.

So, as you’re now on customer, you’ve been on the a lot from a little while. How long have you been with customer?

Since January. January. So you’ve been on a little while now. Yeah.

Experiencing the changes now firsthand. What have been some of those things that have kinda jumped out that, oh, man, this has really been one of those great features or a breakthrough for the team. Anything come to mind on that front now that you’ve kind of felt it, taste it, touch it, touch it. Yeah, Definitely, for us, the main one is the timeline view.

I think it was the biggest change moving from tickets and ticket numbers, which is a more traditional way of looking at it, to conversations.

It took it took some time for us to get our own heads around it.

But now that we’ve got now that we’ve got that understanding and just having the one view of a customer’s complete journey with us at any single point in time. It just gives our agents that the personalized experience that our customer, we expect our customers to have with Waldo with Waldo.

Just, you know, having a full view of any past eight orders and conversations that they’ve had with us helps a lot. Makes a big difference, right? You’ve actually kicked off a little bit of a little bit of a firestorm here. With that comment on having your team wrap their head around kind of tickets versus this conversation or full customer view.

Yeah. If I’m saying this right, Philippe is kinda asking any you you were just kinda going through it, but any double click on that, like how but what was why was that so different? Or what was the what was the difference between the tickets versus this kind of three sixty customer view?

So for us having that the three sixty customer view, it allowed the agents in one click to to have an understanding of, you know, from the beginning, from the first order that the customers had with us. Has there been any sort of, you know, pros or cons throughout their journey?

When looking at that it allows the agents to to say, you know, you’ve been with us for x amount of time. We can see that you needed yeah. We can see that you you clicked. You need your contact lenses now a month ago.

You seem to be running out at this time of the month, why don’t we change your plan to this? And it just it helps I think it really helps the the agents get a more personalized experience to the to our customers.

And it also saves a lot of time, which is which is great for us. You know, they don’t need to go into that investigative time to find out, you know, where are all these orders in shop? WiFi.

It has all of that in there, which has been really helpful. And I think that that’s the key, Philippe, I hope you’re going to hope I’m saying that right. But yeah, when you have that ticket view and Ryan, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s — you know, you get this ticket and it just has the ticket and the question associated with it. So as Ryan’s saying, I then go into shop to find what order maybe this person’s talking about.

And then I go into my CRM to maybe find that — Yeah. — you know, some information in the past about them. And then I look to see other tickets in another tab that this person — Yeah. — that it would be other channels.

It’s all fine. I mean, that’s what we’ve done for hundreds of years.

Hit the world of customer service, but that ticket focus changing to a Oh, yeah. I have it right here. Oh, I see the orders. I see the conversation.

Yeah. And that that customer centric conversation view versus that that ticket you so hopefully. Did I explain that? Is that Was I right on that?

Yes. Yeah. They’re they’re right. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So this timeline view with the three sixty was kind of a big aha.

I got to get to Andrew’s question. We were going to get to this a little later, Andrew, but I’m anxious to hear it as well. As you jumped on customer, because it’s newer, how was this implementation experience?

Yeah.

How did that maybe start at the high level and I’ll ask a couple follow ups. Yeah. Sure. So the implementation of customer went pretty much as smoothly as it could have gone with one or two hiccups with regards to Christmas being in in the middle of it, which is I hate Christmas that always.

That’s always good. Never never a good a good time to immense a new platform. Yeah. What did you do at overexpress?

One of those things that you kind of kick yourself for afterwards.

But I mean, we had a really good project manager from from customer side who yeah. It was my first time project managing such a — Yeah. — such a change. And it helps a lot in terms of what to look out for and what steps we need to do things.

And then, getting that information to our different stakeholders, and it allowed that to happen as well. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you one one question follow-up question came in about is is Christmas a fairly busy time? I mean, is that a high season for for you guys or is it a slower time? Or I think you surprised some people that you would change — Yes.

— what typically is maybe a busy season. So with the nature of Bordeaux because it’s a it’s a quite a personalized product I would say, it’s there’s not a huge dips and and and well, yeah, peaks and troughs, especially over the Christmas time.

So it’s not a widely used gift to people. I mean, I don’t know many people that buy contact lenses for for their friends. Hey, you can tell. You never You never know.

You never know. So it is a very personalized experience, you know, you buy your own contact lenses. And so with that, the Christmas time it is always going to be a little bit busier, but it’s not that those huge peaks that other companies might see if they are, you know, if their product is focused towards their Got it, the gift. No, that’s helpful.

And then you and I talked a little bit about this idea of kind of hand holding versus self implementation and you know, sometimes when you get different technologies, whatever it may be, there’s a lot that you rely on yourself. And this process customer, decent amount of hand holding from that project manager. Talk us through that a little — Yeah. — very helpful.

You feel like you wanted to do more on your own? How did that work?

Yeah. No. It was very helpful.

I don’t have a lot of experience as I said with regards to to the implementation of platforms.

And so having that guided hand or the guiding hand helped a lot to get my understanding to a point where I was like, okay, great. I can now implement this and implement that.

So at Waldo, we are a very streamlined team.

And so we don’t have some of the resources that are large extremely large companies might have. Yes. And so having that helping hand was great. All right, two more questions on this, one from the audience, one from me.

Yeah. I mean, I assumed you were changing this the system out and this is a big ordeal. So what were we talking here? Six twelve months of implementation, I mean it just sounds like a big problem.

So, no, it was a month — a month — a month implementation which was, yeah, start to end.

Pretty flat. It was supposed to be, yeah, it was supposed to be three weeks. And then then Christmas pushed it up to to a month.

But it was fast, but that’s how business works these days. No, I love it. I love it. I mean, that’s a pretty to get a full customer service CRM data migrated, things is all, you know, that that makes a big difference.

One question from the audience that’s come up from Peter, And this always comes up. So Peter, thanks for asking. It’s part of the migration implementation A lot of times dev resources were needed or engineering resources to make sure that you could kinda get things connected right. Was that a fairly painful process, migrating the data, getting your dev team involved, or was there much of that, or you guys were able to minimize it?

No. We were able to minimize it completely with the help of the customer support team and your your dev team.

Which which helped a lot. I think we, you know, from our side, our dev team worked extremely well.

With the Dib team, we had a few meetings. They got the information that they needed. And it was very seamless in terms of implementations. I’m not a dead person, so I don’t know the ins and outs of that.

What? It just work. Yeah. It just I got told the one day that it was migrated and it was migrated, which is it helps a lot.

Oh, see. There you go. Peter, it’s not not not too difficult. It’s definitely possible.

Alright. So Andrew, Peter, let me know if there’s anything else. Tried to grill them a little bit on that migration and implementation process, but let me know if I need to double click somewhere.

Okay. So we hit a little bit on the implementation, a little bit on that agent, the timeline view.

Was there a few other things that jumped out from the overall platform that are worth maybe noting here. Yeah.

So for us another important part, and I think it’s Because our team is in South Africa and during this time, everyone’s working from home, it’s it’s understanding the agent’s journey from a managerial point of view, finding out where they maybe lacking where they’re excelling, I should start with where they’re excelling, where they’re lacking, and being able to train them on that. And I think that what we’ve noticed from a QA perspective is through the searches and understanding how customer utilizes those searches. We’re able to view a lot more tickets or conversations. You see, I’m still going back to the whole thing.

And help more conversations at once.

Which has been great, because then we can read through those conversations at a much faster pace, and then go back into them and train the train agents where necessary and also award agents where necessary, which is good.

Got it. So a little bit on the manager experience, quality control.

And this influx idea, you were just touching on that a little bit. But you guys have done — Yeah. — with the, you know, moving things around routing as needed based on different kind of influx tickets slash, you know, question.

Or — Yeah. — pretty sick. Talk a little bit about that. Sure.

Yeah, just an example that we were discussing before this the other day. We did have large influx of of tickets on one particular day. And it was it was great in terms of how I as the manager could go into to the system, reroutes, we say routes, reroutes, Americanized some of the language, but rerouted some of the the conversations to go to specific people.

Didn’t have to wait for a deaf person to do that. I didn’t have to, you know, ask your guys your guys team could go in there myself, which has been really good, reroute some of the conversations to myself, to the other managers in South Africa.

And we were able to handle that quite large. I think it was We had an extra hundred percent. Oh, yeah. Like two times the amount of tickets that we normally have.

And we were able to to deal with that very smoothly. So it’s helped us in situations where we needed to flat where we needed that fluctuation to occur. Got it. Got it.

Yeah. Couple, one follow-up maybe on this from Kimberly. Just when you routing, are you mostly just routing based on influx in volume? Are you guys routing a lot on different aspects of customer?

Do you have really extreme kind of complicated routing? Or are you just using routing to kinda manage manage flows a little more effectively? Yeah. So at the moment, manage flow is a bit more effective we have only been with you guys for for a few months.

So it’s still learning.

It doesn’t stop. I’ve had many phone calls this week. To learn more about workflows. So we still we are still learning. And I think that as we are As we gain the knowledge of that, we’ll be able to do a lot more complex writing in the future.

But you know, it’s nice to know that the support team that that you guys have is is then unavailable to chat and have calls with and help out a lot with that, which has been great. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe we can end on that.

You were just talking about the support team. Any thoughts on your experience working with the customer team? You touched on a little bit of implementation, but Sounds like you’re still although implementation’s done, you’ve been working through different things and continuing to learn — Yeah. — have been.

No. It’s it has been great. I mean, I don’t know if I’m allowed to to name people.

But, yeah, your customer support agent Bryce has been really great in terms of And helping me understand workflows.

I’ve had a few meetings within this week to just sit down and allow him to explain exactly how they work and what is needed.

Coming from somebody who has no background in terms of JSON and JSON. Think that’s how you say it. But no understanding of JSON and getting a full picture from your team has really halved and it’s it allowed me to grow and then utilize that to better support our customers and our agents.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, Bryce, Bryce is a rock star. I’ve worked with him on a couple projects as we had talked about. So Okay. As we wrap here, maybe just some, you know, a high level advice or coaching for anyone considering, you know, customer over traditional ticketing system, what words of wisdom would you pass along?

Yeah. I think from my experience, from the experience that the companies had, it’s been great.

I know it can be quite daunting, migrating from quite a more traditional way of doing customer service to something that is completely new.

And getting that buy in, not from all the stakeholders, from the agents and stuff like that, it can be difficult, but it’s it’s definitely worth it.

Just spending that time, understanding it, and getting the stakeholders to understand it.

It helps a lot. Yeah, I mean it definitely sounds like it’s been a good decision. Is there, you know, from you know, any numbers or or feedback from the team. I mean, the the agents that sounds like the company’s bought into kind of the new framing, the new platform, and it’s all now just off to the races.

Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. It is. It’s the the team really enjoy its We’ve been doing a lot of sessions with everyone involved where they teach.

There’s a lot of internal teaching of, I found a shortcut here and I found a shortcut there, which has helped so much. And they they excited about the platform. And I think they were excited from the beginning, and that excitement’s just growing and we’re starting to see that with our with our customers as well. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it’s one thing to get your customers more happy, but obviously the agents play such we’re rolling that.

They make it easy for them, make it better for them, that obviously does translate often into better customer experiences. So — Yeah. Mine really appreciate the conversation today. If somebody wants to reach out and continue the the dialogue, LinkedIn in?

Is there What’s what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Oh, yeah. LinkedIn is always good.

I think that that’s probably the best platform to use. If anyone has any questions, they’re more than welcome. I’m normally on LinkedIn most of the day.

So, yeah, that’s probably the best one. Awesome. Awesome. Well again, appreciate you taking the time, fun to talk track about why customer, why now some of the benefits of it coming from Ryan.

So thank you again for your time, Ryan, and for the audience. Have a fantastic day. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.