Acknowledging the heroes behind great CX

I think sometimes people forget to just be a human. Throw a GIF in the chat, or say something funny. With the situation tech is in right now, it's so easy just to be serious and have your head down. But we're all trying to get the ship in the same direction. So have some humor, and have some people-focused moments like icebreakers in team meetings or all-hands meetings. I think that's really important. I see a lot of people go into these new jobs just heads down and focused on execution, but you also need to build these relationships and maintain them. It is so important. I had a leader who said, we all have emotional piggy banks. Our daily interactions and critical conversations are all deposits and withdrawals. I do my best to not overdraft, and ensure my relationships continue to be give-and-take versus one-sided.

We’ve created a culture where our top performers are being recognized but also where performance is our true north. We see this culture of silent quitting and this term becoming more popular. It is going to be ever more present in the workforce and modern-day leaders have to find a way to retain their talent. It’s achievable through performance management and recognition.

You prioritize it by making a framework that allows people to grow and have opportunities for internal mobility. When I first started at Dutchie, the time for learning and development was there, but it was unstructured. There were no measurements for success. Through a collaboration with our People Partners and Operations - we’re in the process of creating an Apprenticeship program. This will be an incredible opportunity for agents to shadow other teams in the organization for job pathways. I know what my WFM managers are thinking, yes it’s a lot of shrink. But, voluntary attrition is also expensive. Our organization decided this was a priority to keep investing our resources in internal growth

I got my foot in the door as far as tech and customer support, and I found that I was a really good agent, and started working my way up into a trainer role into a manager role, and from there it just kind of blossomed. So I found my way to Sana. I've been working remotely in customer support since 2015. I love it. I don't want to go back. It is something that I just kind of fell into, but I think the abilities that I gained as a performer really helped me in this role, because you have to be able to speak and convey multiple things to different audiences, and that's something that I'm pretty good at doing. And it's a lot of empathy. Musicians and artists in general are typically soft-hearted and empathetic. And so that translates really well to customer service.

You're always going to need that human ability to translate, as AI can only do so much. I truly believe that I think you will always need human support at some level of the interaction, whether it's because the AI is glitching and it doesn't understand what they're trying to say, or it's just the escalation that's beyond the AI's control. Unless it can actually go into the back end of your systems and make changes and do those sorts of things like you're going to need a human to complete the task. So I don't see AI replacing humans at any point.

My advice would just be to trust yourself. You got the position for a reason—your leadership clearly trusts you. And so you need to trust yourself. You're gonna make mistakes. You cannot always anticipate every single challenge that's going to come your way, and if you get caught up in shaming yourself for not seeing those things before they approach you're just not going to be able to do your job effectively. So trust yourself. Trust your intuition, do the best that you can, and keep learning along the way. You should never stop learning.

I had done some work on the phones in a help desk-type role in college, and then really enjoyed the work. So I took off in the role at Brooks Running, and then about a year in I applied for the supervisor role. From there it was learning a lot about contact centers, workforce management, and quality management. I learned that WFM is about how to deliver the best service you possibly can with what you have. What keeps me in this role is that I can feel the growth we’ve had as a team and in myself. I was scrambling a lot earlier and I feel like we're just becoming more and more efficient in everything we do. So now it feels like I have just so much more control. And when something comes up we're able to pivot and address it, and it's a great feeling. It feels like we're able to forecast our needs much better and act upon them.

My hot take is self-scheduling. Let your people schedule themselves. I think it gives a real sense of ownership, and we've been teaching folks how to look at the forecast and the daily staffing. If it's green, that's good. If it's red, try not to schedule anything. Then if we're understaffed for that hour, make sure you know not to throw that break in. It has been awesome but hard to manage at times, when there are overlapping breaks and everybody schedules the same 50 min break, for example. But the team has just been so great. So it's really easy to say “It looks like we had 3 breaks from 3 to 3:15, coming off of a lunch hour. This can really create a lot of stress on the queues. If we can stagger those next time, that would be great.” I just think it's the best way to do it. It's fun, it's easy, and you lean on a lot of trust in your team.

I always think it's a shame when people just assume people aren't working. Maybe they're just stuck on a really hard ticket, or need some coaching in another area. There's a large list of reasons that they could be dealing with issues and not online, so we always try to lean in with empathy and check-in regularly with my team and our leads.

I'm a pretty empathetic person. I find that the great thing about working with people and support is they're also very empathetic. It just attracts a similar vibe, which is really nice. It's also really great to help people when usually they're writing into support like pretty jazzed up. And normally it's not at their finest moment. So it's always really nice to have that moment where you can really turn it around for someone. And the space itself has been really growing, and expanding in terms of tech capabilities and tooling. And I think that's also really exciting.

I understand that things like full resolution time are super important, but I think it's also really important to keep in mind the client's experience. I preach to my team that it's really important to follow up, even if you're getting ghosted by a user, to ensure that their problem is solved before we actually count the ticket as solved. I hate when I write to a support team and they close out my ticket right away when they've answered the problem. Does that mean our full resolution times are a little bit longer? Yeah, but we're also making sure that our users are actually taken care of, and we are answering all their questions, and we were making sure that the problem at hand was solved. I think that's something that's really really important. We'll see all the time in our satisfaction comments people thanking us for the follow-up, and that's something I feel is really really important. But some people tend to overlook that for the metric. The metric may be one thing, but the client experience may be a completely different viewpoint.

Things like AI and NLP have become front of mind. The data that's available now, and the tools that you can use to leverage that data and make it work for you, has been the biggest change.

I love it because it's completely changed from the moment that I first got introduced to it. It goes back to my call center days, where, I was sitting with a headset on the phone, and I was tied down to my phone, and I had to press a code for going to the restroom, and we had codes that you had to press on the phone just to step away from work. But it was just really basic. It was to make sure this employee is doing what they should be doing, and anything outside of that was bad. It was like big brother. What I love about it being part of a startup is that there’s been a culture shift. It goes beyond the logistical support of workers, and it takes like a people-first approach right before we roll anything out. We have to think about how it’s this going to affect our team, and when to schedule events and lunches. So the freedom of it is what I love, and it's completely different than 10-15 years ago. A huge focus right now is retention. That workforce manager just really helps, because, again, we take a people-first approach, just like most startup companies now really invest in their people.

One of the things that we're starting to look at deeply is how to create better reporting and integrate it with our internal software, and use that to our advantage. For example, now we actually have data that can say our agents are spending 25% of their day tackling bugs and this is what it's costing us, in a dollar amount. By bringing this data over, you're able to make that priority a little bit more urgent. So we’re just taking the data that we have within our workforce management tool and using that to our advantage, and tying it in with our narrative, as every company has its different priorities. And so we're gonna tie that into to what we feel is important, and show that over to our different teams in our different parts of our organization

What I see is a lot of teams are seeing how they can bring a proactive approach to support. So we're not just sitting there waiting for the tickets to come in and answer the questions back. I think we'll start to see more teams develop a proactive approach, whether that be using a chatbot or AI. But making it more proactive instead of reactive, is my hot take prediction.

Conversational AI will change the game this year. With my own ears, I've heard robots call other robots and handle the entire interaction with no human involved. The corporate side of the transaction is going to implement it to reduce their labor calls, but it's not going to take long for the consumer side to figure this game out as well and you're gonna have all the various little digital assistants handle appointment setting for you. It changes the entire dynamic of workforce management. Objective decision-making is easy for AI. That's their meat and potatoes. But we will still always need humans to make judgment calls, and that's what the future of WFM is, as it relates to human labor capital.

I don't need to buy puzzle books at the airport newsstand, because I always have a puzzle on my laptop ready to solve. There's always some sort of volume or age to your staffing puzzle. I hesitate to ever call them problems because it's just a mathematical riddle that has to be solved, and that's what keeps me around. It stimulates my brain.

AI will allow us to introduce a lot of flexibility into agent schedules. The more flexible I can be for my front line, and the more I can do for them, that is ideal. We need to make sure these agents understand it's going to change what they do but not replace what they do. That flexibility is key to maintaining the relationship that you, as a workforce manager, have with the people you're responsible for.

There’s a big shift away from solely reactive support, and really trying to find ways to be proactive. We can identify people that are having problems with your website that aren’t actually reaching out. And then also all the AI that's going on right now, really trying to do more with less and just trying to automate things. I think there's a really big focus right now on self-service and automation.

I always think there is pressure to expand your service offering too early when there's not a large enough team. At the four-person company that I was at, we did live chat. I don't know how I did it, because we only had one or two people ever on it. We had email, and we had live chat. But if one of us was sick and the other one was on vacation, we couldn’t offer live chat. Don’t be in a rush to get to those stages; those stages can come. If you're in a rush to expand, but you don't have the actual service for it, it's not providing that good customer experience.

We don't measure agents on resolution times because we actually want to have a conversation with them, versus trying to resolve in one touch. For example, if we get a feature request, I don’t want to just tell them we don't support that feature. We actually want to try to understand why they want that and their business use case. Oftentimes we can either draft a more compelling feature request with our product team, or we can find a workaround. Without asking those questions, we're gonna miss that opportunity. We obviously want to solve tickets as quickly as possible, but we just don't want to miss the opportunity to help them find value.

I really love just helping people. I love being the voice of the brand. And so in my role, I really am helping people who are typically a lot younger than I am. I'm mentoring a lot, and I love that being in customer service for like 25 years now means I have a lot of wisdom. So I stay in it for that reason. That's what fills my cup the most. Learning and staying on top of this evolving industry, it’s awesome to think back and see how far we've come in this space.

A few years ago, I don't think companies like ours felt the impact of social issues going on in the world. Now we're kind of in a position where companies are expected to have a statement or a stance on what's happening in world events, and really put themselves out there and be vulnerable enough to take a side. That's something newer, and we’re learning how to navigate that.

With my team, it’s about identifying what they're passionate about and then running with that. That doesn't mean that it has to be here with me. I want them to have a compelling future and help them in that space, whether that means hooking them up with the right people, sending book recommendations, podcasts, or anything. I want them to be successful wherever that is. I've done a lot, seen a lot, and I've experienced those things. Now I'm watching the younger generation navigate that same space. I’m watching some of these women that I work with having children and trying to find work-life balance. I’m mentoring them through that, and letting them know that everything they're feeling is okay, none of us are perfect, and that's a hard role. I've been there, and I’m just trying to be the support for them that I didn't always have.

Assembled has been a game changer. We had a home-built agent dashboard before. With Assembled, I can tell if someone sat on that ticket for 30 min, left and came back to it, and sat there for another 30 min. It's all recorded. So that's huge, because we have a lot of visibility when I need it. We used to look at call and chat acceptance rates. I could see someone accepting 100% of their calls, but then I’d hear from the team that person's phone is always off. Adherence has been huge for us because we have way more balance. I’m not only looking at adherence, but I'm also looking at the acceptance rate, and I have a way better idea of what's happening. We just launched a chatbot and that's been a game changer as well. It's actually made the volume of our tickets change a lot. So we have fewer phone calls and more chats, and for us that's a way more efficient channel, because you can be on 2 chats at once and it's better for multitasking. My team wants to be on the phone less than chat, so everybody's happy with it.

I don't want to go too strong with the bots. We really pride ourselves on having best-in-class customer service. We want to have a reputation for having amazing customer service, and it's a little less in your control if it's a bunch of robots answering. I think that they can definitely help people in their role, but we're not ready to have them fully replace humans yet. When we were launching a chatbot, the team was nervous about their roles. It doesn't actually mean anything for them. It means that instead of hiring 30 people this year, I'll only hire 20 because we're growing so much. It's just helping us manage that growth a bit.

Support leaders are very empathetic, but we also have standards. And Assembled is helping us uphold those standards. We have adherence goals in place, and they have to be met. We’re not too strict or firm, but Assembled has really helped us understand everyone's performance whether they’re meeting our minimums or not. And if they’re not, what are we going to do about it? I think it's good to be really empathetic, but at the same time have those standards. In the end, everybody needs to be productive for their teammates. If one person isn't doing it, it just means somebody else is gonna have a bad day, because everybody has to work together to have that best-in-class customer service and reputation.