Why Leading DTC Brands Made the Switch

Summary

Two CX experts from leading DTC brands Comrade and Cotapaxi share their positive experiences making the switch to Kustomer’s customer service platform. They highlight a seamless transition and quick adoption by their agents, supported by the fact that the Kustomer platform imports past conversations from their previous systems. With Kustomer, both shared that their customers benefit from a more personalised and humanised experience, while Kustomer’s features free up time for reps to engage in outreach activities. Additional highlights include the platform’s internal knowledge base, reporting capabilities, and integrations with systems like Shopify. The Kustomer platform proves to be an invaluable tool with widespread benefits for their service team and customers alike.

Key Takeaways

1. Seamless Transition to the Kustomer Platform: Transitioning to a new customer service platform was a seamless process, with agents quickly adapting to new systems and features.
2. Personalised Customer Service: Modern customer service platforms can enable more personalised and humanised customer service experiences. This can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Efficient Information Access: The use of an internal knowledge base provides customer service agents with quick and easy access to necessary information, improving their ability to assist customers effectively.
4. Improved Reporting Capabilities: Enhanced reporting capabilities provides valuable insights into customer inquiries, allowing businesses to improve their FAQ sections and overall customer service strategies.
5. Integration with Other Systems: The ability to integrate with other systems, like Shopify or return systems, provides a more complete picture of the customer, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of problem resolution.

Transcript

Thank you so much for tuning in today.

I’m gonna give everyone just a couple minutes to start rolling in, do a little bit housekeeping right off the bat.

And, you know, just to introduce myself quickly, my name is Andrea Paul. I head up content and research here at customer.

And today, I’m joined by two incredible CX experts from leading D2C brands. We have Heather with us today, who is the Head of CX dot comrad, and Jacob, as well, who is the customer success manager at Cotopaxi.

How are you guys doing?

Great. So good. Awesome.

Always good to hear. But before we get started, I just wanted to let everyone know that’s tuning in.

You’re more than welcome to ask questions throughout. This obviously is a webinar for you, so we want to make sure that we’re speaking to what is important to you and what you’re interested in it. I know that a few of you reached out via email yesterday, so I’ll be sure to incorporate those questions into our conversation as well.

But we definitely want to make this interactive, so feel free to go wild in chat or the Q and A. I’ll keep my eye on that.

But, yeah, let’s let’s kick things off. You know, I am super excited about this conversation today, particularly because, you know, I think a lot of folks have really felt this momentous sort shift happening in the retail D2C space over the past few years, and especially in the last year, which has just been crazy to say the least, but I think, you know, consumer expectations have shifted a lot, and delivering these sort of exceptional experiences have become harder and harder. And I think, you know, having the proper tools and technology in place not only to deliver on those expectations, but also to scale has been really hugely important and sort of necessary.

So I think, you know, for the folks that are tuning in that might not be super familiar with your brands. I’d just love to kick things off quickly with you, Heather. If you could just give us a really brief overview of Comrad and a little bit about your background and your your role at the company.

Yeah. Again, Heather Cooner.

I am the head of CX at Conrad Sox. We make really awesome compression socks that don’t look like compression socks. So they’re great for every day. They’re great for if you’re on your feet. They’re great for if you’re sitting a lot to really support that circulation.

A lot of pregnant moms, a lot of nurses, doctors, and one of the challenges we’ve had in CXs that we have our customer base is everything from teenagers all the way up to, you know, people in their nineties. So it’s a it’s a fun blend. It’s a fun blend for sure. Awesome. And what about you, Jacob? Can you give us just a quick overview of Cotopaxi and your role there as well?

Yeah. Again, Jake Baldry, I have worked for the company now for four years. I’m the success manager for our customer experience department.

At Cotopaxi, we’re a a gear and apparel company or b corporation, so we give a percentage back on all revenue that we include.

And our overall goal is to just bring adventure to the world, giving people the opportunity to use the gear and apparel that we provide to get out, experience the community and get involved and do some good while you’re at it.

Awesome.

So thanks so much for those introductions. I think, you know, let’s just start I think everyone’s very excited to hear from both of you guys. But again, so much has changed. You’re both in very fast growing companies doing interesting things in the CX space. So Let’s start with you, Jacob. Could you walk me through sort of at a high level your CX philosophy at Cotopaxi and how your team sort of approaches customer experience?

Yeah. So at Cotopaxi, our customer experience department kind of aligns with our overall motto for the company, and that’s having a people focused mentality, data driven information, and an overall adventure obsessed vibe to the company.

So our CX philosophy is to really put the person first and to utilise that data that we can pull from whatever platform we’re using to then bring it back to the customer and help them have a better experience with our brand and with our products, and then in doing so hopefully inspire some adventure and get people out there, really doing some good and experiencing the community around them utilising our product.

Awesome. Heather, how do you think about CX? How has your philosophy sort of evolved? It it kind of aligns with what Jacob said for us as well.

We because we’re a wellness brand. We’re all about making people feel better every day. So we want that to be our main focus in CX as well. So, we’re, you know, we really, it’s really important to us to be able to treat that customer as a human being, as a person, as an individual, and be able to really address that on a personal level, because usually it’s not about the socks, You know, it’s really never about the socks.

So we want to make sure that we can we can take care of that person just as we want to with our product.

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, it is, you know, very interesting for you both to be speaking about, you know, sort of the mission of your company and how it very much does revolve around the customer experience, so to speak. So I feel that delivering a great experience to your customers is so in line with your brand purpose that it’s even more important.

And I think a lot of brands are realising that and should shifting to that mindset, that that’s sort of what keeps customers when you’re building this community, so to speak, of advocates by providing not only just a product, but like a larger experience.

So I love to hear that.

Let’s get into the meat of things. Obviously, the title of this webinar is why leading D2C brands made the switch. So let’s talk about making the switch.

You know, I think change can often be quite hard. Right? It can be hard for you as a leader, it can be hard for your teams, but you know, there must be something wrong with how things are operating to sort of drive you to make a switch. So let’s start there what were some of the challenges that you were having with your previous platform that drove you to sort of look for alternatives in the market, and how did you start going about that evaluation process? Heather, do you remember what that experience was like?

Yeah. For us, it was really just that feeling of everything being so disjointed that a customer interaction you know, it was all ticket based. So, everything was just a ticket where it made it just so disjointed to really service that customer.

So we looked at and we had actually tried several different options.

And when I heard about customer and the way that it’s focused on the customer and the way it kind of brings that whole experience together, that was what really triggered us to to look deeper at it and was really just fits in line with what what we really wanted, to be able to care for our customers.

Yeah. Absolutely. What about you, Jacob? What was that process like for you?

Yeah, I would say the evaluation process was pretty similar to Heather’s. Our previous DMR platform was fairly bare bones, just a ticketing system.

And we loved number one, the pricing for customer was amazing, so that was a great draw. And also just the people focused ability to be able to take multiple points of contact combine them together and overall help the customer in a more efficient and more well rounded way. Our previous platform was organised and and nice, but, like, we didn’t have the capability to really help the customer in whatever way they could reach out to us. And then also utilising the data that came in from those conversations to be able to flip it around report back to our overall organisation and then be able to better help the customer at the end of the day was so incredible and so much of a better experience for us working in the organisation that in the end it was a no brainer for us to make the switch.

Awesome.

And Yeah. You know, I know a lot of folks that sort of consider switching systems, they’re somewhat intimidated to do so. I think would be a good way to describe it because, you know, you can be very entrenched in a particular platform or you don’t want to retrain your team or You have a lot of history that you don’t want to lose. So, yeah, I think it can be intimidating just to even consider going through that process.

For you guys, what was the that migration process to customer like? We can start with you, Jake.

The migration process process was really easy for us, fairly seamless. I think in the decision period, that evaluation period we just talked about, we were nervous of losing conversations with customers, losing that information that we had, because being a smaller company, we had brand loyalty that we were really wanting to be able to enhance and maintain.

And so, knowing that customer could take past conversations from our previous scene where platform and pull them into the current platform into customer was so amazing. And then once we made the decision to to physically make the switch within a couple weeks, all of our agents were used to the platform, loved the capabilities, And I think the overall capabilities that customer provided us are just any change or, like, adaptation for our agents was overshadowed by all the new ability that we had on the team. So in the end it was really, really seamless.

Awesome. Love to hear that.

Heather, did you have did you have a similar experience?

Yeah. It really was.

I we have the same concerns of as far as movie tickets and, you know, and not losing that that information. And then for me, also, at the time, because we’re a startup, at the time, I was the entire CX department. So, I could not afford to have the implementation go badly and lose a bunch of tickets or create more work, because I have to sleep sometimes too. So I only had, like, you know, I was really had been very concerned about things getting backlog and and not being able to, you know, to make that seamless switch from our old system to the new system, but it was, it was the probably the the easiest implementation I’ve done, and I have a background in IT, so that’s saying a lot.

That it was probably the easiest, easiest implementation I have done ever, We didn’t lose anything. I think the hardest part for me was just figuring out like how I wanted our, our tags, and things like that, because we were still developing the department at that point. So if you — if you have all that stuff already kind of planned out, if you’re moving from and, you know, an existing department into into customer. I think you’re you’re gonna be golden, for sure.

Super easy.

So both of you have been with customer for quite a while now. So I guess I have two questions for you. One would be what would you say are the biggest improvements that you’ve seen? And then secondarily, if there’s any particular sort of aspect or functionality of the the customer platform that has made a particularly big impact for your team.

Jake, we can start with you.

Yeah.

I think looking into customer and what capabilities it provided us, the our department at Cotopexy is a little bit different than some other companies. We’re split into two different sections, the customer success team, and the customer support team. So the customer success support team is focused on short term reactive communication with customers, and the success team is focused on long term proactive initiatives to help the company. So when we moved over to customer two years ago, we were really focused on what data it could provide us for the overall company, and that would probably be the biggest thing that we noticed when we first transitioned over our last platform didn’t have much reporting capabilities in general. We couldn’t create charts. We couldn’t pull any information.

The connexions to other platforms like Shopify or NetSuite were somewhat difficult to integrate and it was very manual for our agents, but transitioning over to customer with a few months of time to really settle into it, we had the capability to pull information from customers’ orders coming in, we could give tracking from the platform, we could pull information directly and give it back out to the customer and to other departments within our organisation.

And then you also asked about like one piece of the platform that we’ve really loved and utilised.

Most recently, our customer success team has been focusing on the knowledge base. So, we just created a new help centre for our company that pulls from that knowledge base and having the formatting and thematic capabilities to to control it entirely on our own was absolutely amazing. Before then, we pulled from our website, we had, like, embedded a link there was like a few different locations that information came from. And so, we had to communicate with multiple other departments to get anything done but with customer, we have full formatting, thematic control of every part of that internal knowledge base.

And in having that, it’s really helped our agents and then also has been an amazing resource to shoot back out to the customer when they need help.

Awesome.

What about you, Heather? What improvements have you seen? Are there any particular parts of of the platform or functionality that have impacted your team a lot?

Yeah.

Again, like Jacob says, the reporting has been awesome to be able to really keep track of even what kind of questions people are asking so that we can improve our FAQ, which we use the knowledge base for, which is wonderful because it takes, like, thirty seconds to throw in a new, you know, question or a new answer for people, which is wonderful.

Same with Jacob, that you know, being able to pull things from the orders in Shopify. I apologise. My giant dog just walked in behind me.

Pull stuff in from Shopify and also from, like, our return system, also our you know, NPS scores and reviews and all of that. So we have that whole picture of that customer, makes things really, really much easier when we’re chasing down problems. It’s also with the platform, it’s also made us much more efficient.

Because we can use shortcuts, and creating a new shortcut is so easy. So if we have something come up, we can just throw together a new shortcut instead of you know, that the rep’s trying to recreate that every time, as well as just being able to to create workflows and automation.

So that we’re able to automatically respond to requests for a discount code. We can automatically pull out things where it’s something for marketing can automatically be shifted over to a queue for marketing. And things for our sorry, our donation programme into a a special queue for those as well. So this made us just much a much more lean, efficient team.

And we’ve actually been able to bring it down to about seventy percent of the tickets that the reps actually have to touch versus one hundred percent So, that gives us a lot more bandwidth and a lot more time to really slow down and take care of that customer the way we want to. Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve been hearing that so much in the past year, you know, being able to provide some more, like, efficient self-service to customers when all they want is you know, a very quick answer response, and then shifting a lot of that bandwidth that agents have, to, you know, more of this like relationship building or consultative support or more complex challenges that come through the door.

And that wouldn’t really be possible unless agents could be more efficient or have, you know, less of a volume of tickets through some of these automations or self-service capabilities. So I love to hear that that’s something that you guys are taking advantage of and able to scale.

And I guess, you know, to follow-up on that as as retailers, I’m sure that, you know, the peak season of Black Friday’s cyber Monday is already on your mind. It’s definitely on the horizon, rapidly approaching, maybe sooner than we’d like. But do you feel like customer or any particular aspects of the platform at all have helped you either with peak season last year or other sort of peak periods.

JV can start with you there.

Yeah. I would say definitely.

We started with customer again two years ago and our first year into the holiday season with the various promotions that we try to have going. We were excited to be able to use the various capabilities within customer to make it more efficient.

Beforehand, we set up a system of shortcuts and different tags and just a whole system within the platform so that we could help our agents respond more efficiently to standard questions about the promotion or retroactively applying the promotion.

We had dozens of these macros created, so that we could just efficiently get tickets out when we did have that major spike. And in doing that the first year, we saw major improvements in our overall need for agents to be on during the holiday season, and this previous year actually, we had it so dialled in utilising the platform.

That most of our agents were ready to go, you know, that’s how it goes in retail, the holiday seasons, like go time. But most of our team was able to take the entire time and really focus on their own personal things, which was so awesome and had so much to do with the capabilities in the platform that really set us up to be able to just knock out all those questions preliminarily without having to stay on all night long or or whatever. So it was really good.

Awesome. What about you, Heather? What what was your experience like during the beak movement. We’ve actually had the same experience just being able to create those shortcuts and create those workflows and get that information out there proactively.

It’s really made us over the last few years, especially, you know, We staff everybody for Black Friday, and then we end up taking, you know, each one person takes a two hour shift, and then somebody else takes a two hour shift. And the rest of us have the day off. So it’s really been been wonderful for, you know, for you know, expense wise, but also for our team as, you know, human beings that we get to have that, you know, that extra time to spend with our families and stuff. So It’s been really, really great.

And another thing that, you know, that makes me feel better during a busy time like that is that some of the features of customer that I like the most are some of those features where you can do things in bulk. So if we have an out of stock situation, I can I can bulk message those people and say, hey, we’re out of stock of that? What else would you like us to send you instead?

So that really gives you that peace of mind that knowing if there’s a huge issue you can actually take care of those customers all at once rather than rather than one by one. So that has made our made our holidays season a lot easier for sure.

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s huge. Right? Like a lot of CX agents, can oftentimes have somewhat thankless jobs, especially during these high stress time periods.

So I really think that any tools that can be put in place to make their lives easier. It not only impacts agent happiness, and there’s less churn. And as you guys were saying, you know, they can enjoy the holiday and take vacation and not stay on twenty four hours a day.

But customers also feel that at the end of the day, right? Like when agents lives are easier and they’re happier that can be reflected directly to the customer. So you know, it impacts the entire experience end to end. So I really do love to hear that.

You know, personally, as a marketer, use a lot of different technology tools, a lot of different vendors, and I think one of the keys to a successful relationship in my opinion is finding these partners at these companies that you really work well with and can rely on when when things arise. So I’d love to hear from you, Heather, what your experience has been like working with the customer team thus far.

Oh, it’s been awesome.

Really, one of the best responsive vendors that we have It’s really wonderful if you have a tech question or if you just I want to do this, and I don’t know how to do it. Is a question I ask a lot, and the responses are just wonderful.

And a lot of times they’ll just they’ll tell you step by step exactly what you need to do. Sometimes they’ll if it’s something a little bit more complex, they’ll even send you the little code snippet. And tell you where to put it if you’re trying to do something really complex.

And I love the fact that when you submit a a request, you guys give us the ability to say it’s low impact, medium impact, or high impact. So if I’m trying to mess try to figure out something with a report. I can I feel comfortable sending that to you, to you guys without, like, jumping ahead of someone else who’s having a having a more issue? So, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable about using that service and just knowing that I’m going to get back a really professional, friendly well thought out response that’s gonna tell me how I what I need to do to fix my issues.

So it’s been just wonderful error. Rep is great. If I have any questions about our account or if I just don’t even know who to ask, that’s always the best person to go to. So it’s awesome.

Jacob, what about you? How is your experience then?

Yeah. I would echo what Heather said. It’s been a a great experience starting out like our right after we initially made the switch to customer, we went to the two thousand nineteen summit in New York and met a bunch of employees, that experience really kicked off the interpersonal experience that we’ve had with the platform.

Everyone’s so helpful.

And after that summit, any connexion that we had or any touch point that we needed was immediately available. Communications is always very clear and speedy.

Our rep currently, John Jackson on name drop is super awesome and very responsive to us. And we can be somewhat needy because we really wanna utilise the platform for all that it all the capabilities that it does have.

We really like to get involved and I don’t have much of an IT back ground. I think it’s interesting for sure, but customer makes it really possible and capable for someone who doesn’t have that. Background to still be able to jump in and understand every part of the back end of how to set up your internal knowledge base, how to set up your, like, ticketing system, queues and routing, macros, everything is easily explained. And if you have any questions reaching out, I always got a response within like the same day, which was always amazing knowing that we had that immediate connexion to solve a problem that might be bottlenecking sent to not being able to move forward with whatever initiative we had at the time. So, overall, connexion with customer has been phenomenal. We really enjoyed it a lot.

Awesome.

Definitely something that we strive for and and love to hear. So I’m glad that you guys have had good experiences.

So we definitely have a lot of questions coming in, but I I guess from my perspective to sort of wrap things up, I think my only final question to you both before we move on to questions from the viewers would be, you know, simply put any advice? Do you have any advice to folks that might be looking to switch from, you know, a traditional ticketing system over to customer. Jake, we can start with you.

Yeah.

I would say if you’re working in a traditional ticketing system, you should change to customer today.

The capabilities within I mean, just it’s night and day difference with what capabilities you have.

To be able to route those tickets to various agents. If you have a really super large team, they make that capability super easy to be able to group different inquiries into different categories and then route them to specific agents and if you have a really small team, you can set up the internal side of things to to match your team’s needs.

And it really focuses on the overall customer’s experience with your brand, helping like every mean, they could text, they can email, they can call in, they can chat in, and it’s all in one location connected to that customer’s profile.

And that helps in so many ways over a traditional ticketing platform that, yeah, I would say if you’re thinking about it, it’s an amazing choice and has made a night and day difference for us.

What about you Heather? Do you have any advice. So do you echo that? I I tote I totally echo that. The only thing I would add to is that I think sometimes when you’re when you’ve been using a ticketing based system for a while, you get kind of in that mindset that this is the way the world is. And I think you you have to kind of take a step back and say, in a perfect world, you know, what would my CX team look like and what would my experience look like and kind of have that, you know, that dream.

Because customer will do that for you. That’s the nice part about it, is that it’ll be customizable for your team and for your needs, and it’s so flexible, yet so powerful that I think a lot of times you don’t even know — you don’t know what you’re missing until you jump in. So I would definitely echo that, you know, today is a good time to switch. You definitely want to want to get that, get that going.

And I and you will not be you will not regret your decision for sure. It’s gonna change your your lives and change your rep’s lives to make us all a little bit little bit less stressed out in these hectic days for sure.

Awesome. Yeah. I guess just to follow-up on that on the agent aspect, like, what feedback did you get from your agents after switching?

Did they struggle at all? Did they immediately intuitively get the hang of it? Did you get any direct feedback from your teams afterwards?

Well, when I when we switched, it was just me. So that was you know, it was it was very easy to learn, but I did, as we grew our team again, and added new people, it’s so intuitive that teaching them the software was not a concern. You know, we got to be able to talk more about procedures and products and things like that rather than spending hours and hours and hours on how to use the system, because It’s so intuitive that it’s very easy to navigate, so it’s not something that it takes them time to — really a lot of time to learn.

I’ll tell him about you, Jake. Yeah. I would totally agree. I think to go back to what Heather was saying a second ago, I can be one of those people that you know, is is used to a standard operating procedure, and I wanna keep it that way. And so when we we made a switch over to the customer platform, there were so many more capabilities, but I think, like, the biggest transition for our agents was just formatting individual preferences on how they wanted their individual page to look, and then going in creating those searches so that we could like group different tickets together was a new thing for us for sure and took a couple weeks to really nail down, but after the fact, it didn’t take a very long time for our teams to really get used to the platform. And it matched I mean, the communication matched very similar to the the previous platform. So once tickets started rolling in, we got used to everything pretty quickly.

Awesome.

And, Heather, you know, there are questions around different sizes of CX teams. And if it’s good for small teams and big teams, Jake, I know you touched on this a little bit, but Your team has obviously scaled since switching over to customer, you know, how was that process of scaling?

Both from an agent side of things and and a ticket side of things, did did that go seamlessly?

One of the things I love about customer is that those kind of things are almost instantaneous and just easy. So as we’ve added more reps, adding adding their profile, adding a search so that I can keep track of what they’re doing, all of those kind of workflow changes and stuff like that. I I can get those done in a day. You know, there’s not, like, a long time to plan that so we can react really quickly.

And so scaling has just been, like I said, probably the easiest app that we have to be able to make those flexible changes, and make those changes quickly. So that’s really allowed our reps to, you know, hey, we we’re having this incident today. Can you make a shortcut? Okay. Thirty seconds later, Here’s your shortcut. You can use that to respond to this particular incident.

So, things like that makes it makes it just really easy to be able to scale and be able to adapt to any situation that happens to come up.

That’s awesome.

And one question we did have around your companies, are are you guys servicing the US only, or do you have international business that you’re doing as well?

So Cotopaxi has serviced a various range of countries. Currently, we have we’re working on our EU website. So it just went down about a month ago so that we could revamp it and change some things up. So, yes, we do cover EU and Canada as well.

We’re pretty much shipped to anywhere in the US. There’s a few exclusions because of shipping issues, but other than that, we service the entire company with products or the entire world, I guess, you could say, almost like they wanna purchase from us. And then we have that EU entity. We’re working on some some different initiatives in other companies currently to grow and wholesale and incorporate sales as well.

So, yeah, we do have a wide range, but the majority of our sales do come from US.

Yeah. We’re right now, we’re US based and then we do we have just started ship to Canada and kind of the same thing. We’re kind of slowly moving into adding more countries and also building out that, that, as Jacob said, we’re building out our wholesale side of things. So we’re able to handle those customers within customer as well. In kind of a different area. So that’s that’s made it really nice to be able to expand into those areas and still have like a one stop stop shop for for all these different needs.

Awesome. And I know we’ve discussed this, you know, briefly in passing before in terms of just, you know, integrating different systems, different channels in one holistic view.

We did get a question around what panels you guys are currently using within the customer platform and if that has shifted at all since you switched over to customer. How that we can start with you?

Yeah. We use we have our integration Shopify so that we can see the order and the tracking information and and that kind of stuff, then we also have like a review, appendo reviews, we pull the reviews in onto the customer’s profile, same with our NPS scores. That gets called pulled into the onto the customer profile, and then, of course, we do like CSAT within customers. So that ends up on the customer profile.

And we’re also using Zapier to pull some information off of a for a donation programme comes from a different area.

So those integrations, we just seem to be adding more and more of them all the time.

And it’s pretty seamless to do that. That’s one thing I’ve loved about it as as we as we grow and we we’re kind of still in that period, even though we’ve had customers since twenty eighteen, we’re still in that period of, oh, wait, we could do that in customer. Oh, we can do this in customer. Oh, this will be so much easier to do in customers.

So we’re still kind of doing that as we grow and as we our team gets kind of spread out a little bit more. We’re finding a lot more functionality even than we thought we’d have in the first part, first when we first got customers. So yeah, definitely lots of integrations out there, and I think there’s more that I’ve been looking at that I don’t have connected yet. So, definitely lots lots of things you can connect to.

Awesome. What about you, Jake?

Yeah. I would totally agree with Tethr. As far as channels we bring in, of course, we we do the standard channels of, like, text call. Chat, voicemail, all those types of things that we integrate into how we communicate with the customer, and then integrating other platforms for customer information very similar to Heather. With Shopify, NetSuite integration, we also use loop for our returns.

And that goes directly into the platform. We’ve looked into other capabilities as well. We’re in the same process of just like it seems like we integrate something new and different to better help the customer base every day. So we’re sure that most of those plat I mean, any platform we try and align with, we hope to align them with customers as well so that we can integrate and pull that data in one location to then be able to report back to the company.

Awesome. It’s always one of my first questions on a new when we’re integrating something new. Does it integrate with customer?

Yeah. I think that that’s super important. You know, we keep talking about the agent experience, but when agents are, like, searching for information that is an unpleasant experience for them and for the customers. And even if it only feels like you know, a few seconds to switch around tabs or systems.

Yeah. It just creates a little bit of a disconnect and obviously impacts efficiency. So I do I always hear that that’s one of one of the biggest benefits is just having everything there and integrated and actionable in a single system.

And one question I did have for you, Jake, In terms of like the data that you’re looking at, do you use that data to inform just your team’s operations do you share that with, like, the larger organisation to sort of improve in other areas, whether that’s, you know, the website or fulfilment or things of that nature?

Yeah. We definitely use the data for our support and success teams but we also once a month have I mean, we’ll occasionally have other departments reach out to us and ask if we can pull specific data on specific items. I think our product department reaches out about a specific product to see if there’s certain issues with it that we’ve communicated with customers on. So we get lots of little inquiries like that from various members of different departments But then once a month, we have a meeting that we call voice of the customer, and we pull data for every different department and any specific product promotion or anything that happened in that month that would bring a heightened level of customer communication or concern.

We highlight those issues and then we tie them back to any customer conversations or interactions that we’ve had. And we utilise the various platforms. We use delighted to pull our MPS score. And so we use information from delighted that can be integrated into customer to then come back to the company and explain like overall, company or customer sentiment on our brand, on specific promotions, and then on just products and encounters in general.

So that’s been super useful.

Yeah. I always I love to explore those sort of conversations that brands are having with the larger organisation because I do feel like CX teams are in such a unique position, especially for a lot of businesses that are more direct to consumer.

And in the last year, you know, when brick and mortar shops were closed for so long. It’s like these CX reps were at sometimes really the only interaction that customers were having, which with a real person.

And they very much are, you know, boots on the ground, first line of defence, there’s so much information that you can gather from customers in terms of what they like, what they dislike, what their experience is like both with you know, with your team, but with the product itself and the brand itself. So I love to hear that you guys are taking advantage of that.

One question that we did get is in terms of how quickly you guys noticed a difference or your customers noticed a difference after switching to customer, how soon after did you guys notice an impact?

I can go I would say our customer base, I’m not sure that there was much of a concern or or noticing, I think just the overall capability to connect different conversations was very appreciated by our customer base for sure.

Lots of customers love a text response we’ve noticed. Love like being able to quickly text about an order or an order concern And even if they emailed us or called in and we call back and they don’t answer, being able to send that information quickly in whatever channel the customer reached out to has proven to be really efficient, and our customer base really loves that. And then it also stops from overlapping responses in those previous ticketing platforms.

We’ve had issues with a customer being answered for the same concern twice or three times because they reached out in two or three different ways, and so that was a major plus for customers just really being able pull all their information into one location, helps zone in and help us help them the very best we can.

Oh, sorry. What about you, Heather? I would totally agree with that. I think for our customers, it just gave them a much better and more humanised experience.

So, because they knew we were treating them as an individual, and rather than a ticket, it also gave It also gives our reps the time to be able to actually think about a personal response to that person rather than just even if we use a shortcut, we can still add a nice little note if they, you know, mention that they’re buying the socks for pregnancy, you know, we can say, congrats on the baby or, you know, things like that. We can really humanise it, so I think our customers have really appreciated that. And then for us as well, it freed up a lot of our time being able to pull all those things in together, as Jacob mentioned, so that we’re able to do more outreach kind of things.

Like we respond to any anything any NPS that’s other than you know, there’s a passive or a detractor, we respond to those and ask, Hey, how can we do better? How can we fix this? Same thing with reviews, we can respond to every one of those reviews and say, how can we make this better? And then also be able to respond to those, take the time to respond to those publicly and through social media and things like that.

So, it’s given our team just a lot more bandwidth. And I think that makes a difference for the customer because they a lot of times customers think it’s not worth trying to contact us because they’re not gonna get a response because they’ve had bad customer service in the past.

But we can actually get out there and say, yeah, we’re here for you. Like, we’ll take care of you. So I think that’s made a really, really big difference for us as well.

Awesome. And you mentioned reaching out on social media, but do either of you have social media integrated within customer where you can respond on on different channels, and that’s something that your your audience is looking for, your customers are looking for.

What we do, we have, you know, Facebook and Insta are like our big ones. So we spend a lot of time responding to that stuff, and it’s great that we can do it from within the platform because it means that we can keep it all together in the same team instead of, you know, jumping to screens and stuff like that. So it’s great.

Awesome.

Yep. Same here as well. We use those. We integrate those two as well, Facebook and Instagram.

Great.

Yeah. I’ve been hearing I mean, especially when you’re talking about, like, direct to consumer retail brands.

I just feel like there’s oftentimes, especially, you know, with younger generations.

That is their preferred method of communication. We did some research recently, and it was just so interesting to look at these generational differences. And Heather, I know you touched on this a little bit more, because what someone that’s, you know, seventy needs and wants is completely different than someone that’s twenty.

And those younger generations very much do prefer things like text, like you are saying, Jake, and reaching out via social media, things that they’re not calling up on the phone anymore to get their questions answered. So I do think that, you know, whether or not your customer base right now needs that. I do think that that’s the direction that things are moving.

So it’s good to hear that you have you have all of that integrated.

The only final question in here, which is, I believe, for you, Jake, is around the knowledge base. So you were speaking to that being very impactful.

How did sort of If you could expand on that a little bit more, do you have agent resources and articles that you load within there? Do how did the agent sort of see that information, access that information?

Yeah. We both have we have both an internal knowledge base for our customers, and then also for like our agents to utilise.

For our help centre, it’s tied back to those articles that are within the knowledge base in customers, so we have probably one hundred to one hundred and fifty articles on stereotypical questions, concerns about products or processes that then can link out and when they’re embedded in any form of communication that we send out to a customer so that they can read those articles and help problem solve themselves. And then almost more impactful for our team is the internal knowledge base with product information. We have a few different folders that we’ve created a CX training manual that has like all the processes for not only customer as a platform, but any process and platform that we use.

In our department.

We have a training manual embedded into that internal knowledge base that our agents can just quickly click, there’s like a tiny little button up in the corner that you can click on and it zooms out to the page, and you can even share those links with customers if you want to.

It’s proven to be incredibly useful. We have like a in that training manual, we have a set of SOPs, our standard operating procedures for every process that an agent would do. And so, their information on how to do their job successfully is just truly at their fingertips, and then also all product note information we have embedded in there as well. So every product that we have has like an extended measurement chart included in that internal knowledge base along with known problems or concerns that we have about the product specifically if there’s anything unique about it, it’s written in there and at the agent’s fingertips. So That capability has proven to be one that we truly love and use every day, every ageing uses it all the time.

Awesome. Yeah. And again, like, with the the recent consumer research that we did, that’s also turning into more of an expectation for support teams, right? It’s not just these like post transaction problem solving, like I need a refund or return, there’s a lot of this consultative support that happens before the purchase happens or during the purchasing process. So having that, you know, product information at your fingertips, whether it’s with sizing or issues or anything like that, I think, is so important and kind of expected now by consumers. So, yeah, I think that’s a great strategy that you guys are utilising.

That was it for the Q and A. We spent fifteen minutes chatting. So thank you guys so so much for for taking the time. I always love having these conversations and and hearing how how real brands are using our platform.

And for anyone that’s you know, tuning in. If you have any additional questions for us, you can reach out to marketing a customer, or to me directly, it’s just Andrea. Paul. At customer dot com.

But thank you guys so much again. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and a a wonderful weekend, and thanks everyone for tuning in.

Thanks, guys.