Importance of Personalizing Customer Service

Summary

This webinar highlights the significance of personalizing customer service to retain customers. Anomalie, a customer service platform, successfully competes with brick-and-mortar bridal dress companies by offering hyper-personalized experiences. They use surveys and a platform like Customer to consolidate data and tailor interactions. Traditional customer service teams struggle due to outdated technology and lack of integration. Anomalie’s approach starts from the first customer contact, building trust and relationships. Scalability is achieved by investing in technology that enables meaningful conversations. Personalization is crucial as 41% of Americans switched brands last year due to the lack of it. Brands must prioritize personalized service to retain customers and foster loyalty.

Key Takeaways

1. Scalability of personalized customer service can be achieved by investing in technology that consolidates customer data and enables meaningful conversations.
2. Customer service teams should be equipped with efficient technology that empowers them to solve problems for customers and build strong relationships.
Anomalie’s success in the highly competitive market has been driven by their ability to tailor their communication and offerings based on individual customer preferences and requirements.
3. Brands should focus on using available data to deliver personalized experiences, as customers expect customized service and are more likely to remain loyal to brands that understand and cater to their needs.
4. Personalization in customer service is vital for creating trust, improving retention, and differentiating the brand from competitors.
By combining efficient technology and human interaction, brands can achieve a balance between personalization and scalability, resulting in better customer experiences and increased brand loyalty.

Transcript

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. No matter where in the world you are. Thanks for joining us today on our webinar, the importance of personalizing customer service. I’m Vicus Bambry, and After twenty plus years of CRM and contact center, I find myself here at Kustomer as the SVP of Sales and CX.
For those of you who don’t know Kustomer’s a customer service platform that is helping brands provide an innovative approach to both their, customers and their agents. Joining me today with will be Cally Means, the co founder of Anomalie. Cally, please introduce yourself to the audience.
Hey, Vicus. It’s great to be here. You’ve been an incredible partner. Custer’s been a game changer for us, and it’s awesome to be able to talk about it. I’m Cally Means, the co-founder and president of Anomalie.
My background is in marketing operations.
Went to Harvard Business School and met my future wife there. Never thinking we’d start a company together, but during our engagement, She was having a tough time finding a wedding dress. And, given that her entire background was in manufacturing Tering in in Southeast Asia, she actually found a city in China that makes eighty percent of the world’s wedding dresses.
And, through a series of events, most importantly, her making her dress and dozens of friends asking her to do the same for them. We quit our jobs, start an Anomalie. And, you know, the really interesting thing to us is that this is an industry that’s almost entirely brick and mortar because of the requirement of such high touch customer service. So really, the journey of Anomalie has been about figuring out how to bring this insanely personal high touch, customer service in an online model, which we’ve actually found, can actually bring improvements for brick and mortar, which I’m sure we’re gonna talk about. But, That’s my quick story, and I’m looking forward to diving in.
Sounds good. So here’s what we’re gonna cover today.
First of all, you know, the reality is that today’s customer service is not personalized and, you know, we’ll kinda dig into why that is. Right? Why are brands and companies challenged to deliver that personalized service?
We’ll hear more from Cally about Anomalie and the amazing work that they’re doing to deliver personalized customer service in competing with a lot of the traditional and the brick and mortar, bridal, dress companies. And then a bit about Kustomer. And then, of course, we wanna make sure we keep enough time to answer your questions.
But we’re actually gonna start out with a question of ours. So right now in your platform, you should be able to see a poll question. So just take a quick thirty seconds to answer the poll question.
What percent of Americans do you think switched brands last year due to a lack of personalization.
Alright, Cally. What do you think the answer is? I’m gonna say a pretty high number, maybe twenty five, thirty percent.
What do you think?
Oh, forty one percent. Well, I knew the answers that I would have been cheating. But, four forty one percent of Americans switched brands last year due to a lack of personalization. I think that is, you know, a really high number actually higher than, obviously, you thought it would be, and I think, higher than I thought it would be when I was doing my research.
But I think it’s, you know, it it really boils down to, the level of, you know, expectation, the switching cost for a lot of consumers now is so low, that if you aren’t delivering something that’s personal to them, that personal relationship, personal service, they’re gonna move on. So it’s definitely a, you know, when I talk to a lot of the executives that we speak to your customer, is definitely in the top two or three mandates, as companies go forward is to how do they tackle this problem?
Yeah. I mean, looking at the customers of customer, it’s just any possible item, you could think of as as being may direct and online, and it’s, it’s definitely as you said, the switching cost is a big thing we think about and, and customers got a ton of options, and we definitely found that personalization is vital.
Yeah. And here’s the reality today. I mean, customer service is not personalized. Right? All the investments that brands are making, you know, if you think about what they’re doing on the marketing side, on the acquisition side, you look at the portfolio of tools they’re using to target specific individuals tracking their behavior on websites and social media, their history of what they’ve purchased, etcetera.
You don’t see that same level of investment.
On the customer service side. Right? A lot of it is done on the acquisition side, but not on the customer service side.
I think when we think about it, the question is why. Right? You know, are we all the same? And the answer is no. Right? Regardless of how we engage a brand, we’re still not treated as individuals.
Let’s look at some examples of that.
So I think this is a classic one. Right? And this is one that I personally it’s one of my personal pet peeves.
When I go to a brand’s knowledge base, as an example of their website for self-service, if they know something about me, let me use an example.
You know, I’ve got an Apple iPhone X. If I go to your website to search for chargers, you know, issue with charging, don’t show me fifty different articles with, you know, content about every single device out there. So Here is, you know, what you might be wrong with a Samsung device or a Motorola device, etcetera.
Show me an article that’s specific to my Apple device. Right?
Cally, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that or had any situations where you’ve gone to a website of a brand that you’ve done business with, yet they treat you as though you’re a first time visitor, even from a customer service or knowledge perspective.
You know, I was thinking about this, Vocus and, you know, we think a lot about the difference between brick and mortar and online. A lot of people think that conventionalism is that brick and mortar can offer a more personalized experience.
But I think I think I actually think there is a benefit of online. I think what we’re seeing with some of the great companies that develop great customer relationships is you’ve actually got more information at your fingertips and able to give that customer you know, much more, personalized experience, burst work at walking into a store. So, you’re definitely seeing that a lot more.
Yeah. And the thing is, you know, a lot of costs a lot of brands now are kind of layering on top of their knowledge base strategy with, you know, with bots, right, with, you know, different AI tools on top of them. The challenge is not getting any better because a lot of these bots are looking at, you know, generic information, even the ones that are using some sort of machine learning behind the scenes. The machine is learning based on a wide array of customers or your entire portfolio base. And so the suggestions or the recommendations they’re making are based on what everybody else is clicking on or what everybody else is seeing. Once again, still not personalized to me and my relationship with that particular breath.
If I look at, you know, the other thing, right? This is now I’ve tried to leverage yourself service tools But now I need to engage a live support. And what happens here is let’s just look at an example. Let’s look at John and Right? So we’ve got some basic profile information about John. We know he likes to buy on mobile. He prefers to contact support via Twitter.
He’s ordered ten thousand dollars of our merchandise to date. So thank you, John, for your business. And he just placed an order earlier today. So John’s a, you know, pretty good customer if you ask me.
Let’s look at Bob on the other hand. You know, Bob’s a good customer too. Right? I mean, he contacted support via live chat. He placed his first order last week, and his order was delivered three days ago.
So he’s already received his order. Now what happens in most scenarios there And you’ve probably experienced this, Cally. And the consumer is what happens is Bob’s actually reached out to us first In most contact center environments, Bob will get routed before John because he was first in the queue and we wanna do right by Bob and we route him appropriately, or maybe we’ve taken it a little bit smarter, and we wrap Bob to the chat team and John gets routed to the social team.
But here’s the thing. If you look at the value to the business right now, John obviously has much more value to the business and he’s placed an order earlier today. So time is of the essence. Right?
We’ve got an order that we either need to fulfill. Maybe he wants to change. Maybe he needs to change the shipping location, whereas Bob’s order was only delivered three days ago. He might have an issue with a billing, or maybe he was overcharged, or maybe something is broken, but Once again, the timeliness of that particular engagement without knowing that detail about these people, we’re not delivering personalized service, because what happens is most of the time, and I would say ninety five percent of the time for most brands, Bob gets routed before John. Regardless of the urgency of his particular situation.
Right?
So just so you know, Cally, if you’ve ever had an urgent situation, and you’ve reached out to a provider. Maybe your car broke down on the side of the road. You’re probably in line behind somebody who has a question about a claim.
I don’t know if that instills any confidence in you.
The last piece of it is when we engage the team members. Right? So now we actually, you know, get routed whether we’re last in queue or first in queue, we get routed to a live agent. And here are the challenges that simply everything is cookie cutter or scripted. Right?
Everything is one size fits all. And, you know, if you fit into that, you know, nice big bucket, we’ll try our best to resolve that particular issue. So all of this is really counter to what customers want. Right?
Customers almost want you to be telepathic.
I want you to understand everything about me. And we want you to be proactive and tell me how you’re going to help me, right, which is completely different to how most brands are operating today.
So let’s kind of dig into why brands are challenged in delivering personalized customer service. So I think Cally, if you would agree with me, if you look at what we just touched on, we would say most of the brands that you and I engage today are not delivering personalized customer service. Is that fair? Hundred percent. And it is these are the concepts we’re thinking about every day and, Yeah. Definitely have a lot of thoughts on that.
But hundred percent agree that that’s the norm.
Right. And, you know, what we look at is why are customer service teams handcuffed? Right. And we look at the three core areas of any customer service organization, the people, the process and the technology.
Right? So let’s dig into each of these. Now this the people aspect of it really, you know, is interesting to me because, you know, if you walk into you know, most contact centers today, even in the year twenty nineteen, you see a very common theme. You see multiple monitors, multiple applications on those monitors, multiple tabs, post it notes and paper everywhere.
Right? So we’re asking these people who are advocates of our brand, are really the front line for our brand. We want you to deliver Zappos like customer experiences in as short a time as possible because we’re all measuring you know, first contact resolution average handle time. But we’re gonna give you really crappy equipment and technology to do it with.
And then we scratch our hands and we wonder, why do people in these environments turn over? Right? And how are we gonna, you know, empower the front line of our brand? So I don’t know, you know, Cally, if you’ve got any experience or have you seen this, but you know, in terms of what you see in a traditional environment, with these types of, you know, kind of what I call the traditional contact center overload and infrastructure.
No. It’s something we think about a lot, and and and and we really think about the psychology of the style of seeing that they’re most excited And the job is thus rewarding that they’re able to focus on really solving the problem for the bride.
And as much as you can get technology out of the way, arm them efficiently with the relevant information from various sources, whether that be from the, your internal database or, or or information they put on through other sources and wherever they have, message in from. As long as you can consolidate, get technology out of the way and allow them to really problem solve and connect with the customer. That’s better for us, and it’s better for them. I mean, it makes for a more rewarding job and better interaction with the customer.
No. I completely agree. I think, you know, the challenge for folks though is then, you know, how do we scale this. Right?
And if you look at the processes, you know, for most companies, the easiest thing to do is have a scripted or standard process across the board. Right? Because rolling out individualized or targeted policies is simply too hard to deploy and train. Now, Cally, I know you’ve done an amazing job an Anomalie of having a very personalized experience, both, you know, kind of presale as as as the bride is, you know, in a generation mindset, and then, of course, post sale.
How do you think about sCallyng this, right, as you go and continue to service thousands and and eventually millions of brides. You know, how are you gonna scale this level of personalization?
Yeah. A couple thoughts.
Yeah, Victor. So, you know, we were lucky, in that we found this value proposition, which is basically, you know, significantly less expensive, more customization, full refund, burst, the boutique.
So we’ve been lucky to have a ton of brides, about fifteen percent of US brides came to our site and signed up and gave a ton of information on a forty question survey.
Last year. So we, we, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of rides through the system to check us out. We, we, we, we say we’ve had, we have a store and fifteen percent of possible, you know, bride customers in the United States have walked in to see what we’re about. And the first point I make there is And I’ve been chatting with a lot of other startups in the city about this. The ROI on hiring more stylists to greet those customers more quickly and develop a personal relationship has actually proven extremely effective.
So a lot of the time the bias of tech companies is not have a lot of humans on the case, but we’ve actually shown that if you can, you know, use the incredible information that us and other, you know, companies are getting with these, you know, onboarding surveys and and other data that the customers are giving us and use that to both do an automated way, but also a personal way, particularly if the customer responds, you know, get back to them properly and smartly, that actually human do scale there, because the more personal relationships you’re able to make, the higher our ROI goes up. And
We’ve been committed to, you know, significant multiples of growth while lowering marketing cost. So I think a lot of people kind of look at Facebook, you know, ad budget, don’t really blink an eye, kind of expect that’s part of doing business. But don’t think as much about what to do when those customers come in, give a lot of data on how you can form a personal relationship with them. So you know, we’ll dive into this a little bit more of a customer allows us to create hyper hyper personalized and specific, queues and workflows to target, you know, various customers or various, areas of the funnel in a hyper personal way you know, then then the other answer to your question is, I I I I think you really can scale, you know, a large human if you’re able to prove ROI, you know, on that investment to, you know, establish that personal relationship with with the customer before or after during you know, the sale.
Yeah.
I think I think you you you touched on something, you know, really key there, right, which is the technology I think this is the biggest bottleneck of them all for for most, most brands that are out there is because over the year, what they’ve done over the years, they’ve, you know, created a Frankenstein of tools. Right? They’ve, you know, they’ve invested in, you know, different systems with different data sources that don’t talk to one another They’ve got different channels, you know, so maybe they started out just doing email support, and then they vaulted on channel, chat or voice or social as as another channel.
And so they’ve got kind of this hodgepodge that either, you know, individual agents or teams need to now jump across. So This is definitely something that we see is that just the sheer investment, you know, a lot of people say, look, I’ve been spending a ton. On customer service or contact center technology over the last five, ten, fifteen years. The reality is it’s created a more more disjointed environment as opposed to a seamless environment by which their agents can perform.
And one of the things that we’ve seen in the research we’ve done is that, to compete today, companies simply have to personalize the way they connect, but using data that they have to have meaningful conversations. Right? Because if you don’t use the data you have, about the consumer, then you’re just talking to them once again, like everybody else, right, or putting them in this giant big bucket of everybody’s a VIP customer, or no, you’re not a VIP customer, which, you know, can really not be positive. Right?
So your standard customer is putting them in these big, you know, kind of homogenized buckets as opposed to treating them one to one. And that’s something that you’ve tackled. Right? And I’m really excited for you to share with the audience what you’ve done at Anomalie.
And and maybe we can start a little bit about when when you were starting the business, what what did you decide, you know, kind of, you know, obviously you know, understanding the the the bridal dresses and kind of that piece of it in the manufacturing, which I I know you said your co founders kind of has a ton of industry experience on. But when you were thinking about the customer experience and marketing and service side of it, What are some of the building blocks that you wanted to put in place, in order to lay the foundation properly?
Absolutely.
You know, fundamentally, we started with a question. How can we use, you know, it’s not it’s not a strategy to sell something online. And it’s, like, that’s not inherently giving the customer more, more of a, you know, benefit.
We wanted to start with the central premise: how can an online model, a remote model, not brick and mortar add more value to the bride.
And, you know, the core insight we had right away is that, again, brides were very interested in hearing about these new models, but they were really testing us before the purchase. Whether we understand so them, whether we were smart, whether we understood what they were saying about their design, whether that we could be trusted to make their address, And as we develop that relationship, we could actually show them that a remote model could actually produce benefits versus the brick and mortar because we could consolidate and understand their design and then translate that to our consolidated factories to deliver, you know, much more customized experience because they’re not beholden to the inventory of the stores.
You know, we’re able to work and consolidate production in the factory, and they’re already expecting a longer lead time. But, again, the core premise was that we’ve got to earn their trust right away. And then just you know, that started with Leslie and I on the first couple of hundred calls. But as we scaled to hundreds of thousands of rides signing up and wanting to check us out, you obviously had to scale the systems and where this goes into, you know, you were talking about Vicus with, you know, multiple different systems.
If you’re doing your text on one, your email, another, your social, another, you’re continually probably missing information from one place and then asking the same question again. If a bride’s considering trusting us to make her wedding dress at porn item that’s almost never sold online, and we’re asking the same question three times. She’s gone. We’re gonna lose her trust.
If a bride fills out a forty collection survey, which she does about her, you know, very personal, and detailed questions about her design. And that system is going, that data is going somewhere else. And one of the stylists is chatting with the bride and has no idea that you’ve already answered forty questions. And we gotta feed that into the conversation, that bride’s probably gonna be lost.
So so so, again, our challenge was to kind of have a lot of top of funnel interest, but there’s a real imperative to scale that, that trust building, that reverberation of the data, that that precision on, you know, knowing exactly who every single bride is. Because for the bride, and, you know, I think, I’m hoping these comments spur, you know, thoughts for everybody, but, you know, certainly for this, it’s one of the highest touch, you know, emotional items possible. And we’ve just found that you need to nail every single interaction, and really be contextual.
Because for that bride, it’s a once in a lifetime purchase.
No. No. That makes perfect sense. And I think, you know, what I’m hearing from you is from you is, you know, as we look at, you know, your you know, your competition in terms of competing with, you know, the brick and mortar where, you know, ninety five percent of dresses are still sold today is you’re looking at personalization as a strategic weapon. Mhmm.
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, you go again, it’s not just it’s not just selling something online. For us, we’re actually, you know, skeptical of a lot of the direct customer models.
And I think a lot of them, looking at this call. Right? What’s happening is Amazon, I think, is is dominating a lot of the a lot of the commodities But you have all these creative ideas where companies are differentiating themselves from, you know, I think their customer service and their relationship customer in the community is is often a top one and also potentially the distribution of the the the product itself not being, you know, available and needing a, you know, really special and differentiated service model. But but, but, yeah, that personalization is really, really, front and center for us And what we found again is that if we can get the right technology partners to consolidate all of the communication, all the data we’re getting from rides into one place and be able to use that in a really efficient way.
That’s a much better experience. And you alluded to this thickest in stores where you walk in and it could be your fifth visit, but they probably don’t, you know, they don’t have three hundred pieces of data, like, already, like, at their fingertips. Right when you, you know, walk in, we do. And that’s our kind of mandate for our stylist team is always make the, you know, interaction with that bright personal And then on the actual product side, again, we can take that, data and information, style preferences create a much more customized sound because we’re integrated with factories instead of beholden to the inventory of a store.
Going on this slide, I mean, it just kinda talks about, kind of what, what , where we saw the opportunity and kind of exciting, you know, there’s a kind of direct to consumer brands, and categories listed here. What we kind of learned is we stumbled upon this idea that that wedding dress is actually a really large market, larger than likely lingerie. It’s larger than shaving, which you hear a lot about.
But like a lot of industries, it was actually as I said, brick and mortar, we think because the bride expects that extreme personalized high touch experience that she currently associates from stores. So our challenge has been how do we not only get parity but improve on that personalization. That’s the, you know, we’re continually pushing to do.
Yeah. I I think one thing on, you know, what I found interesting is, you know, your you’re your, you know, your customer service team, which, you know, you, you know, you refer to a stylus, they actually engage very early on in the process. Right? It’s not you know, if you think about traditional service, people think about it.
Well, you purchased something for me now. I’m ready to serve you. You’ve already brought that to the forefront when the bride first showed intent or interest in engaging, Anomalie. Yeah.
A key point here, because and I think this hopefully is applicable to other listeners for the call. But, you know, we have an expensive item, and, you know, it definitely makes sense to engage the customer at all. All levels, even prepayment because they’re gonna have questions. You know, but I chatted with, and then they’re now customer clients, some some, prominent startups who have a lower price point item who have also found that the ROI of being hyper available and personalized on prepayment communications can really make a difference and being highly personalized on, you know, post payment know, relationship building to, you know, increase that bride’s retention and spend or customer, excuse me, I think, in terms of bride’s always.
You know, it can really pay a big dividend. So so so, yeah, so we we we, like the analogy of the store, we found that brides almost always wanna some questions and have that spark of a personal interaction. And what we are mantraing on the stylus team is that if the bride can see how smart and empathetic and caring we are, she’s gonna pay. When she gets to a call, the bride’s paying over sixty percent of the time because she’s able to see who we are.
And yeah, just do diving in yeah. So I go ahead and take this. No. No.
Sorry to interrupt. Can we share with the audience kind of how you’re how you’re actually doing that in terms of having that personalized communication, in math with the bright makeup. I know we’ve got you out there. Yeah.
Let’s just dive, and I know we’re running up on time. So let me, let me dive into these slides and and and give us a couple of personal examples specifically how we’re utilizing the connection between customer and our, you know, other tools. So this is an example of our survey. I think, you know, a lot of companies are doing this now.
We’re collecting this data upon sign up in our internal system.
And, as I mentioned, a bunch of brides are signing up. Ninety four percent of them are voluntarily taking this survey. So this is pretty important. The bride’s expecting us to, after answering these questions to you know, have these top of mind as we’re engaging her. So that’s the bright experience. She takes this survey. And then what customer has really been a game changer for us in doing as, you know, as as Vicky said, I I I I think that we’ve gone over four a huge part of customer is that it takes all the communication channels and consolidates them around one customer, you know, in a timeline.
What is cool for us is that, within a couple hours of onboarding to customers, it’s just very turnkey. They connected our proprietary database and all of the data we get from Bryte into the customer. So when the bride takes that survey, immediately, she’s important to the customer with all those survey answers.
And what’s cool is that it’s not only at the fingertips for a stylist if we’re engaging the bride. We can create these, to tools called workflows where we’re sending hyper personal communication based on, dynamics of that bride. So I have an example of one of our searches here, and I think this is a really good example of how customers have been huge for us and how thinking on personalized mass communication has really evolved.
Yeah. But just to go through this search real quick, you’ve got an intro survey, which is data that comes directly from our survey that I put in that was two slides ago.
Customer is, data that’s imported into custom with a k, on other information that’s attributed to that bride. So this is, searching for the first three is filtering a bride based on what she wants to have a vision of what she wants for a wedding dress. She has a budget, that’s in our range, and that her wedding date is after six months. So after a cutoff, she has accepted a sketch, which is an action in the survey, where she actually said she’d like to sketch.
And just super, you know, hyper specific actions that, you know, identify an interested bride. So she’s signed into a site more than twice. She’s shared photos on our site. So just the general example here is an and I’m not, you know, with no coding background, our team can, can create these hyper searches.
And then going back to here, we can tie workflows to them to actually spin communication to brides based on, you know, what actions they took. So as Nicholas was alluding to earlier, it’s not like you know, hey, how are you doing to everybody? It’s a much more specific text about that bride’s dream dress if she has said that she knows what she wants and uploaded photos and, you know, has shown a lot of interest. If the bride has a wedding three years out, hasn’t uploaded photos, you know, and how you know, it is clearly more in the, you know, checking us out mode.
We communicated differently to her. And that’s automatic, goes out via text, emails, personal, in app chat, And then these are additional examples throughout the funnel.
A trigger that we cannot send. So the main point here is that our team, once we got onboarded with a customer, which which was surprising to me, you know, we were candidly, concerned about, shifting over systems. It took a couple days. We put our twenty five at the time, stylists, switched them right over. And the team has been empowered to think about these searches, and then we really kind of see it as a laboratory.
And this, again, it goes to that empowering every single stylus But we we we we have meetings every week where communication that they feel like they’re sending again and again and again and again. We have a meeting and then we create searches and workflows to make those communications automatic. So for instance, you know, a live customer, we send lay samples to every single live customer. So we now have just a triggered text to say that lace is uploaded.
Let us know if you have any questions. And then any question the bride asks goes into a specific queue for stylists that are ready to answer those lace questions. So we’ve got personal communications triggered by these searches, you know, with hyper personalized messages that can, you know, take into account, you know, everything from the bride’s name to address, to make that really ring personal to her, and then true human interaction if there’s a response. And there’s, you know, thousands of responses to these, which we want because that allows us to have a real human interaction with the bride.
But it really saves a lot of time on that initial outreach that would just be a bunch of, you know, copy and paste thing and and and and not very fun work for the stylists. So these are some examples of that.
And as I mentioned before, we attribute a lot of this to the customer. This is, the design calls, which convert to revenue really as we started implementing some of these workflows and and and really kind of mass communication, what was interesting is we’ve actually been decreasing marketing spend and ramping up you know, the calls which directly correlate to revenue. And we actually, like, you know, in our board meetings and and the expectations we’re setting and and expect to hit are continued, you know, multiples of growth as I said without increasing marketing.
There we’ve found that it’s much better to spend on a personal connection with the customers that are already signing up, giving us a ton of data, then just ramp up the Facebook ads, because the customers are in the system. They’re just psychologically asking can I trust this company? And I think this applies to a lot of different companies. I think, you know, really investing and understanding the data and then creating these automated workflows and having the staff available to answer probably smartly, you know, quickly has really been a game changer for us.
Yeah. I mean, Cally, if you were doing as you were going through that, and and thank you so much for the amount of transparency that you’re sharing with the audience. I was just thinking of, you know, you know, all the different emotional purchases that, you know, we’ve all made in in our lifetimes, right, whether it’s the it’s purchasing a car, purchasing a home, I mean, to have that level of engagement and personalization as I was going through one of those journeys would have instilled a tremendous amount of confidence in me that, you know, the brand, the car the car manufacturer, the car dealer, or, the the home builder really cared, about me as an individual. So what you’re doing is an Anomalie, obviously, with brides and their dresses, as you said, is extremely applicable to other industries that are not necessarily doing it today.
Yeah. I mean, you know, because I was just chatting with you about a friend, my co-founder, my former company, who is now trying to revolutionize housing purchasing. I mean, I couldn’t imagine that my rival wedding dress is for an emotional purchase, but it’s, you know, we see time after time, these industries that, you know, we never thought would be, you know, touching, you know, an online purchase, are coming in. And again, it’s not just because, okay, it could be online.
The data and the, you know, the type of efficiencies that can be gained, the overhead that can be cut from an online model is, like, such a customer value add, but you’ve gotta have the personalization. And, and, again, it’s been fascinating, you know, on this journey and and and and, you know, frankly, evangelizing customers to a bunch of, direct to consumer, friends at, at other companies. And I’ve really seen these principles take hold, you know, various companies from makeup to bad bad advice to you know, again, it doesn’t, it doesn’t just need to be an expensive wedding dress. I just think, like, there’s a sea change going on. I and and the, really, the direct to consumer companies that we look up to. Glossier, one of your other companies is really, I think, the prime example, they have dozens of people you know, on customer, just hyper, hyper obsessed with personal connections with their customers.
And, you know, their their their price point for an item is fifteen dollars, but they’ve been able to just have incredible customer loyalty, incredible revenue growth, incredible, incredibly low customer growth, really from a strategy that first and foremost, in our opinion, is just customer obsession, prompt responses, contextual responses, So, you know, that that that companies like that we really learned from. I think I think that’s what that’s what, that’s what the great kinda new wave of directing the super companies are focused on.
Yep.
So you’ve done a, you know, a tremendous job on kinda sharing with the audience. I think a lot of what I was gonna talk about with Kustomer, and I think I’ll do a quick recap, in the interest of time here, but Thank you for that. I mean, you know, as, you know, as Cally alluded to, customer’s a platform that is built entirely around your customers. Right? So bringing in all that different data as Cally alluded to from multiple systems, all that, you know, different data about what people are doing on your website?
Are they registering the survey information? Any products they’ve purchased? The shipping of that of those products and the status. And then, of course, all those conversations, whether they’re automated, or whether they’re actually being had with a stylist or one of your agents all within one platform.
The key is once you have all that great rich data, about your customers is then giving it in a view that your stylist or your agent can actually use. So kind of a single view that gives them all this great information. So once again, if they’re then engaging that customer It’s at their fingertips and they can have a contextual conversation and not make assumptions or not do the traditional. And I’ve heard this a lot that my system is down right now. So things are a bit slow, which basically is, you know, kind of their excuse for saying I actually have to go over to this other system and find out who you really are because the initial system you came into doesn’t really identify you to me as an agent, omnichannel. You know, Cally alluded to, you know, SMS, as a key channel for, for Anomalie, but chat, email, social, voice all in one single view, so that you can also jump between different channels, but your agents can, as well.
You know, the proactive support. So How do you automate? How do you search and segment for very granular levels of detail? I think Cally did a great example showing one of his searches when you can get really myopic in terms of either the individual or a very small subset of individuals that you then want to engage with a particular message that is personalized to them. And then, ultimately, how do we automate a lot of this? Because, yes, we wanna have personal engagements. Yes, we wanna have personal interactions, but we need to be able to do this at scale.
And that becomes, you know, especially the better your business is doing, the bigger challenge it becomes, because you know, as much as we all want to invest in personnel and labor, you don’t wanna be hamstrung by that in any way. So that’s all part of the customer platform. So with that, I wanna make sure we have time for at least one or two questions. So I’m looking at my producer now. And we’ve got some questions from the audience. But I think one one that I think that’s really interesting, Cally, maybe we can touch on here in the last few minutes is, you know, one of the questions from the audience is can you explain a little bit whether you think AI and automation helps or HERC support personalization?
Awesome. Yeah. I think that’s a great question. I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
You know, the best customer experiences actually aren’t when a human is just on top of you and you have to talk to a human all the time. You know, the great customer experiences are when at two AM on your phone and all the information possible, you can do very complicated actions you know, with ease, you can get your automated communication updates when you need them. And then when you need to and when you want to interact with a person who’s got all the information at their fingertips.
So when you talk about AI and and we talk about this a lot, I mean, you know, not sound too, you know, highfalutin or or tech, you know, I know we’re in San Francisco, but too, you know, tech obsessed here. But, you know, If you look out twenty years, our doctor often is gonna be, you know, a I I I r machine. They’re not gonna be radiologists. Our money is gonna be managed by a, you know, much more AI enabled situation.
Our kids are probably going to be driven to school, not by human beings. And I just think what is cool about Kustomer, frankly, I’ve been thinking a lot as we’ve been developing an AI system to be more predictive about custom dresses, and that’s a huge thesis of our company, is the tough part about AI is having the data. And what the customer is doing is, like, basically, the central database for communication and knowledge for our company and many other companies. And I know that’s on the road map, which it’s happening, and it’s increasingly happening. But, you know, that’s the hard part to AI, and I look forward to seeing and improving the experience for our customers, improving our efficiency of hyper smart personalized, you know, innovations that utilize you know, machine learning, to add more value to customers.
But, you know, I don’t think customers like being on a phone tree where the, you know, robot doesn’t understand what you’re saying, and you’re saying operator, operator, operator, operator, you know, they’re smart experiences or not. But I definitely think the customer expectations that companies are utilizing tech to deliver them answers and deliver them value faster, you know, more efficiently And I think, you know, they’re agnostic, whether they’re getting that from a computer or a human, they just want the information right. So, we’re really excited to see what, what what have the coming years, with customer and, you know, other services to to help serve to our our our rides better.
Great. Well, Cally, with that, the producers have given me a rapid up signal. So, Cally, wanna thank you so much for joining me today. It has been really interesting to hear about Anomalie and what you guys are doing to personalize your customer service And I would ask any of you if you have any questions, comments for myself, or Cally, or the team at customer, feel free to reach out, but it’s, been an absolute pleasure.
Absolutely.
We’re happy to chat or dive into this more. This has been a game changing software for us. That software we use and always always happy to chat about, how we’re using Kustomer and, hope hope this is valuable to you.
Thanks, Cally. Thanks.