Summary

In this interview, Andrea Paul, Head of Content and Research at Kustomer, talks with Alexandra Skey, the Director of Customer Experience at OhmConnect. OhmConnect is a service that rewards people for saving energy, contributing to building a carbon-neutral world. Alexandra’s CX philosophy focuses on highlighting the importance of customer-facing roles. She stresses the importance of having critical conversations with customers and avoiding unnecessary apologies. Alexandra also talks about the benefits of using Kustomer as OhmConnect’s customer experience platform, highlighting five clear criteria that led them to choose Kustomer: supporting rapid growth and onboarding a larger team, easy training and navigation, enabling complex prioritisation for time-sensitive conversations, resolving the issue of merging multiple conversations from different channels, and integrating various platforms seamlessly.

Key Takeaways

1. Making CX Cool: Alexandra’s CX philosophy revolves around making customer experience a valued and respected part of the company. By championing customer-facing roles and celebrating customer wins, she aims to change the perception of CX and its importance within the organisation.
2. Hiring for Potential: Alexandra believes in hiring individuals without prior CX experience, recognising the transferable skills from other industries like retail and hospitality. This approach brings fresh perspectives and allows for a strong pipeline of talent within the organisation.
3. Critical Conversations and Empathy: Alexandra emphasises the significance of critical conversations with customers, setting clear expectations, and actively listening to their needs. Instead of unnecessary apologies, her team focuses on understanding and empathising with customers to create genuine and meaningful interactions.
4. Smooth Migration Process: The migration process from OhmConnect’s previous platform, Intercom, to Kustomer was smooth and well-supported by the Kustomer team.
5. Kustomer Provides Valuable Data and the Means to View It: Data collected from customer interactions has been instrumental in identifying areas for process improvement and automation, allowing OhmConnect to streamline their operations and provide a more valuable and personalised customer experience. OhmConnect values the Kustomer platform’s timeline view, which provides a holistic view of each customer’s interactions and history. This feature enables the CX team to build more personalised and meaningful relationships with customers, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Transcript

Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in today.

My name is Andrea Paul, and I head up content and research here at customer.

I’m joined today by Alexander Skey. She is the director of customer experience at OhmConnect, How are you Alexandra?

I’m doing so well. I was saying this morning I’ve already been to the farm and back and the sun is shining. Now we get to hang out, so Good start to the day. I love it.

Very good to hear. Before we get started, just for everyone tuning in, We absolutely love to hear your questions throughout this webinar. So you know, if there’s anything that comes up that we’re discussing, that you have questions on, or any, you know, additional inquiries that you have, feel free to throw them in the chat. I want this definitely to be more interactive. We wanna answer anything that you’re interested in, so go wild in the chat. I’ll keep my eye on it and try to get to as many as possible in the end.

But I’m super super excited about this conversation today, particularly because I absolutely love what On Connect is doing, and I think it’s a business model, perhaps that a lot people might not know about or, you know, would be extremely excited to support if they did. So for those that are tuning in who may not know about HomeConnect, I’d love to take a few minutes, you know, Alexandra, for you to just a give a brief overview of the business itself and a little bit about you and your background on your role at the company as well. Oh, what a great beginning. Absolutely, Andrew.

So HomeConnect is a service that helps reward people for saving energy. So, when it’s Energy bills are really expensive. And during peak times of the day, we invite you to save energy. We actually put that money back in your pockets.

We raised one hundred million dollars at the end of last year to build the world’s biggest virtual power plant. So, instead of spinning up more coal burning power plants, we’re hoping to do this all through technology through smart thermostats and smart plugs and automatically powering down your devices, yeah, so We’re helping build the carbon neutral worlds. We have an incredible team, and they’ve been doing it for seven years. I am just so stoked that I got to join a buddy in AFF ago and build this out, mostly in California, but we do have companies who work with in Australia. And who knows where will be next, I can’t say.

That’s a secret for now. And then as for myself, Obviously, my name is Alexandra. I live in Victoria, Canada, which is the big country north of where probably most of us on the webinar are from. And I have a one year old Australian Sheppard, who is currently at a farm because he’s crazy, and he would be all over the Zoom if he was here.

And then my backgrounds, I spent my twenties building tech companies in San Francisco and LA across North America actually And then the last few years, I’ve switched over to customer experience land, and I love it. I was the director of CX for a company called Bambora. Which moved about thirty five billion dollars a year in Canada before this. And now I’m the CX Director at HomeConnect and helping our customers have really good experiences saving energy and earning rewards.

Awesome.

I actually did not know that you had an Australian shepherd. I know you’ve walked away your dog with me before, but I too have an Australian Shepherd, and I’m completely obsessed with her.

She’s, like, the most beautiful, smart creature that’s ever washed this planet. So Oh, smart. I literally well, the reason happy George now goes to the farm some days is because he started opening doors and running around the house with toilet paper which is very distracting. One time on his evening calls.

Now he’s playing with other friends outside, but they’re wicked smart, I love them. Yeah. Have you ever tried to, like, get them to her get her to her sheep or anything. Oh, he he hasn’t heard sheep of kids? For sure. Yeah.

Will dogs or yeah. No. He’s a party dog. He just wants to play and get out there, and his name is Happy George because he, you know, he just he’s always just Oh, I love that. Us. So yeah.

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think what you guys are doing is so incredible and so important.

And, obviously, as like a a CX organisation, especially over the last year, what I felt as a consumer myself is, you know, social interaction was a little bit limited over the last year and anxiety levels were sort an all time high. So I feel like the interactions that I’ve had with customer service or CX teams were sort of more important than ever. And more impactful on a business than ever before. So bravo to you and your team for, like, filling that role. But I would love to know from you sort of at a high level what your CX philosophy is at HomeConnect and how your team sort of approaches the customer experience.

I would love to share that.

So number one, and this may sound strange, but keep in mind, I’m new to CX in the last four years, so I’ve always had a bit of an approach that comes from somewhere else. But honestly, number one, my philosophy is to make CX cool.

The last theme that I joined was very much the and stepchild of the company. And we had to work really hard to change that. A lot of safety teams are built on entry level roles, which for some reason have don’t often get the credit and the and the just kind of the the credit that they deserve. These are hard And if you have a team that doesn’t want to be there, there isn’t supported by an organisation.

How can you wow your customers? So for us and for me in general, it’s about changing that narrative completely. These are privileged positions. We get to speak with our customers every day, and I’m always saying, look, look, if you don’t have customers, you’re not paying customers, you have a hobby.

Right? We’re not all of your hobbies. He actually put roofs over our heads and food in our family’s bellies, and this is super important. And so changing that narrative and getting the whole company to buy and that we are critical part of a team that we can provide really good insights and feedback is number one.

And having fun, like we celebrate our wins publicly. We have lots of fun events, when we were choosing customer, which we’ll get into later, the whole company knew we were doing it, the whole company was supportive of the launch, because we championed it. We’ve talked about how exciting it was. Every week we celebrate a customer store and we talk about one of our customer’s journeys to our whole company.

Like, we make customers front and centre for us, if people don’t wanna participate, we literally cannot do our job. So that’s for one. And then I have two more, again, a little bit unique, but I love them and I’d encourage else to adopt them and take them and have them be their own. The second is to build a really strong alumni culture, and part of that means hiring human who’s haven’t done the job before.

Humans haven’t done the job before.

A lot of folks when they hire teams, they’re like, I want you, you’re perfect, Andrea, and you’re going to stay in this little box forever, and you’re be perfect, and then good now I’ve got you. For me, I’m the opposite I’m like, Andrea, join the team, grow and then go. And go maybe get promoted internally get promoted on my team or get promoted to the community and building that really strong pipeline. For front facing roles, which is often most of using customer, most of our team’s ever customer facing, these gritty tough roles.

You’re working with customers seven hours a day. They don’t always show up as the best selves, and it’s tough And if we can just kind of recognise that and realise these are incredible stepping points into companies and support that transition, both a really strong recruitment pipeline, then you can have constant fresh talent. You can have — Totally. — create incredible opportunities for folks.

And I often also never hire people who’ve done the job before, because again, I think it’s tough. If you’ve been in a customer facing role for three or four years, You know, I just personally think it’s really, really tough, but I love folks that, you know, if you’ve been in retail or if you’ve been a waiter, or, you know, I have someone on my team that worked in their community for a few years and decided they wanted to be a nurse, and they’ve landed with us. We have someone who’s a photographer. We have somebody who’s going to school.

Like, folks that typically get looked over for roles because they don’t have the experience. I found are actually the best in these position. So — Yeah.

And then finally, I have one more, and this is really just about teaching teams to have critical conversations and never apologised, which is kind of funny because I’m Canadian, so we apologise a lot.

But but it’s just, you know, seeing for the inconvenience or apologising to your customers when you don’t mean it, it just falls flat. Like, teach your teams how to set expectations, how to manage those expectations, how to listen to your customers.

I will shut up now. He’s like, I guess, because I’ve been talking a lot, but, like, I feel really strongly about this and really showing up and our company clearly resonates. So Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, definitely feel free to go go as long as you want. We’re here to hear from you.

But I think that’s a very interesting approach and one I I don’t hear often. But all of, like, as you were saying, hiring folks that may not have had experience in previously, but I feel like, you know, a lot of those restaurant workers or retail like those are such transferrable skills. It’s about connecting one on one with a customer. It’s about finding that empathy and and the willingness to, like, help and assist in enjoying doing so.

So I absolutely love to hear that, and it’s a a new fresh approach that I haven’t heard previously. So thank you for sharing that.

So my question for you now that we’re sort of moving into more of the meat of the conversation is when you joined HomeConnect, you said it was about a year and a half ago. Did they already have a CX tool in place when you were there? Were you starting from scratch what did you sort of walk into when you when you joined the team? Yeah. I I walked into the team at actually a really interesting opportunity.

The company was growing fast I think that’s I guess pretty common for startups, and we had just had a knockout summer twenty nineteen. Just acquired more customers than we’d ever had, we had more energy saving events than we ever had.

And our CX team, we just weren’t prepared for it because it happened so quick. And so throughout the summer, the team would sort of handful of folks and would end the day with six hundred open conversations, right? And customers reaching out and not hearing back and our team was trying super super hard, but it just we weren’t necessarily set up for success because the ramp happened so fast. And so at the end of the summer, the team got together and said, okay, we’ve got it.

There’s some improvements that we need to make here because we really care about our customers. And so I ended up joining the team at about that time, and we realised, okay, there’s a few things that we want to do to improve what we’ve done. And there’s a few things that we want to honour and sort of say thank you and I think we’re ready to move on from that. And so we did have a CX platform in place and it was intercom.

A lot of companies use intercom and a lot of companies love intercom.

So I’m you know, I’m I’m not here to kinda say don’t use that, but but — Yeah. — but but but that’s what the team is using. And before we evaluated, is that the right platform for us, we actually said, okay, well, what do we need from a platform? And there were five clear things, and I wrote them down because it was funny at time, but I was like, they were so clear.

And just the other day, I’m like, what were they again? And all the problems with them, which is why they’re not even top of mind. But number one is probably the obvious is rapid growth. We had a huge influx in customers.

So we needed a platform that supported that. But we also needed a platform that could onboard a lot teammates because we actually realised we needed to have a bigger team now.

Number two, we needed a platform that was super easy to expedite training.

We have a huge seasonal ramp because in California.

In the summer, it gets hot and people turn air conditionings off. And then, boop, that goes the well, actually, those that know the energy grid kinda goes like this because solar during the day is super helpful, but at night, the curve goes like this. And that’s interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a whole another conversation, but that’s where that’s where we come in. And so, to be able to have a platform that is easy to understand, but that takes all the guests work out. There’s no cherry picking. There’s no where do I go?

There’s really easy content to plug and play.

Complex prioritisation for some of our customers, some of those conversations are really time sensitive and you know maybe answering within an hour or two will make a difference. For some, you know, maybe ten hours or a day is totally fine. And so, we needed a way to really solve for that.

This is one that I think everyone can relate to merging.

It is huge for us. This was the one that actually flagged us that we needed to look for a new form, our customers reach out to us from Facebook and from their email and then also from chat within the product And before a customer, that all looked like three customers on top that we work a lot with families. So, you know, someone might write in, and then another family member might write in on different emails for us, they’re the same customer, but we’re responding and supporting them as separate. So there was a lot of siloing going on that we needed to solve for. And then the fifth is integrated platforms.

We wanted to bring all those together, but then also delighted who we use for a customer sentiment, our internal CRM. We sell a lot of devices on Shopify. And we were like, this is a big ask, but we had this criteria.

And it was funny. I was in San Francisco at the time, and we had a company event. And I just sort of assumed, in my previous world, we’d use Zendesk. And I sort of assumed, okay, well, we’ll probably choose that again.

And I’m really glad that we actually took the time to put our our prioritisation criteria together before we looked for platforms, and I would highly encourage teams to do that. Because you may be surprised what you find And anyway, so our CX ops manager said, hey, I think we should try a customer. And I said, well, what’s customer? And he said, customer the k. I’m like, what?

Anyway, a conversation, and I was sold on it. And then that night in my hotel, I guess your team had just raised sixty million. And it was on I think your CEO was literally on the newsreel in my hotel blah blah blah, customer purchases. Where is this cousin? A sign. See, I was like, okay, this is a sign.

But but, I mean, I’ll get into how we couldn’t do what we do without it in a minute, but but for us, it would it has been, like, one of the best decisions we’ve made as a team.

And, yeah, it very take it again now. I mean, we love to hear that. And and I think that is sort of a great point and you said you encourage other teams to do that is just you know, understanding the problems that need to be solved and doing a thorough investigation. I know personally, you know, I work on a marketing team, but I use tonnes of tools and technology as well. And it’s very easy to just you know, revert back to old faithful or, like, whatever you’re familiar with.

But the problems at one organisation could be very different than another organisation, and there could be new options that you haven’t heard of. So doing sort of that thorough evaluation process and understanding what’s gonna be best for, you know, your current role in the current challenges that you’re facing is very good words of advice. So I appreciate you sharing that with me.

And I guess my next question would be sort of around the migration process from intercom to customer because I think that a lot of businesses are somewhat intimidated to make a switch because They’re so entrenched in a particular platform or they don’t want to have to retrain their team on a new tool. It can be a very daunting task. So I’d love to know from your perspective sort of what that migration process looked like for you and your team. Yeah. I think I think to start.

It really was I think as you learn anything new, just letting the team know, hey, there is going to be a very period of time where this is gonna feel super bumpy and you won’t know where buttons are and you won’t know where to find things. That will disappear so quickly.

And so, setting your team up just at the beginning and then getting everyone on board. But for our migration process, it was really smooth.

I would say and I guys, I know I sound super bullish on customer, but I actually am and I’ve used a lot of different platforms. And for us, it’s really good solution. So they’re not actually paying me to do this. Just in case you’re wondering, but we felt really supported shape manager Matt.

He had a full satinaboard every single week, what we needed to accomplish. He actually helped us to our tasks. It was like, oh, wow. Okay.

We better deliver here.

But we really felt like we had that VIP treatment, and I promise you we are nearly as big as some of you are on this call today, so it wasn’t like we were just this huge whale and big company like they really made us feel special. We actually migrated I think the last two or three years worth of customer conversations from intercom. So we did not start customer from scratch. And I know that was a huge, huge amount of work, but we felt really supported by the customer team to do that and we have actually we like, it it just it really worked.

We created a lot of custom routing and business rules and that this stuff was helpful when we actually did the switch, because our customers are, we have events up until seven or eight at And so we actually started the migration at eight at night, PST. And that is in New York. I’m pretty sure New York stayed. I don’t know if it’s in the city which is EST.

So Matt is up till midnight with us doing the migration, actually offered to, didn’t we didn’t ask he offered. And then he helped us create training videos, he trained our team. We ended up actually sending him a bottle of Scotch. We reached out to his boss for his address just because he was so helpful for us, and it it just every step along the way, we’re like, okay, this is clearly the the right decision.

And it’s not because everything goes smooth. It’s just because we felt supported the entire way to, when anything came up. We knew we could go to someone, we felt we had, and we just felt really supported. So I think you do a really good job there.

And as I said, we had a huge, huge archive that we had to move over and we did awesome.

I know you mentioned at the beginning that you were sort of flagging with your agent so to speak that, you know, things were gonna change. It might be bumpy at first, but they would get used to it. Did you have any like push from agents or other folks internally during that process? Did they come around eventually?

Did they find it intuitive? Or or what was that that sort of process. So one of my little things is our teammates are actually energy ambassadors and that picked up on that very quickly. So language in our team is important.

That’s besides the point. We didn’t actually, because the platform that we’re using at the time really wasn’t meeting our needs. And I mean, merging alone was a real challenge for us. We were, you know, hosting five conversations with the customer and it would take us ten minutes to realise it was the same one.

So I think we were really, really ready for a change that the new process was actually pretty great. And the first few weeks we adjusted our goals for our teaming. So we said, hey, look, maybe your performance goals, your daily performance goals are usually this. On the new platform, we’re just going to decrease them a little bit so that you have room to succeed that we can set you up for success.

And then over the next three to four weeks, once you just can’t imagine going back then we’re going to bring that performance level up. And so I think that gives your team permission to go, oh, so I can spend ten minutes between a conversation, making sure I know where all the features are, making sure I understand what to do. I can raise my hand and slack a teammate, like, you know, set your team up for success in the trend.

And it will only be a few weeks in my opinion. And then there will be one or two features that people love for us and emerging, but there’s something more, the timeline. And then and then the rest just kind of fades in the background.

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, that’s a perfect segue.

You’re just in duties there. Which is essentially how long have you guys been on the customer platform now?

May twenty twenty. I think I actually officially hosted our first conversation in May twenty twenty. So getting to a year now.

Congratulations.

But what would you say are sort of like the biggest benefits that you’ve seen from switching over to customer in that past year. Totally.

Number one and For all those that like data, this number one isn’t a data thing, but it’s actually super important. It’s just this feeling that our team is on top of Everyone in the company knows we use customer, and we have so much credibility that we can do it because we absolutely have the tools we need. And that confidence that I can bring a new teammate onto speed or on board and up to speed pretty quickly because of customer because of a lot of the different tools that we have, it just feels amazing. And the company knows it and gets it. So we are like, the reason we’re bullish on customers, we just have so much confidence in the transition that the customer supported us in.

Probably not a daily basis, but like definitely on a weekly basis, our team leads like, man, remember before? How would we do that? What we do now?

Like, often.

The number two for us is, okay, for the sentiment folks, yes, you know, our CSAT went up pretty big. We were in the fifties and the sixties before, which is totally fine for our industry. Our industry is actually a little bit lower than that. Right?

We we support a lot of utilities and electronics and stuff. But but now we have an average c set of, I don’t know, like, eighty six to ninety on average for the last months. Like, it’s just it’s just stupid high. And and and the reality is that anytime I talk about CSAT, I always say don’t worry about the number.

Focus on training over time, focus on the specific comments from customers, focus on it in context. So I hate just throwing out a number, but for us, the consistency that the platform has provided and the ease of use and the fact that we can see the whole customer at the same time just allows us to do this time and time again. And we have a lot of customers, you know. So it’s not that we can have really close relationships with each one, but this platform allows us to to do that, to get up to speed on someone in a minute and then really make sure we host that.

The third is growth. We’re applying for monumental growth. As I mentioned, we We did a big raise last year to build the world’s biggest virtual plier plant, which means we’re growing fast, both our team and our customers. And not once, have we even blinked about, oh, can customer on board another, you know, double our customer base?

It hasn’t even been the thought because we’re so confident in it. With teammate onboarding again, we onboard a a seasonal team starting in three or four weeks.

Super confident with that. And really just like, it allows us to scale with confidence, and we actually updated some of our workflows to support a new product that we have coming down the pipeline? Actually, it’s not so many people know about it. But but again, it’s just that that confidence.

So, I would say those big three things. Like, the team is like, this works. We love it. Couldn’t do without it.

The integration with our sentiment and just the changes we’ve seen there. And then how we can grow and and adapt, and it’s just it feels good. So — Yeah. — those are I love that.

And I think a huge part of that which you, you know, you alluded to as businesses grow oftentimes, and this was sort of what was happening when you first joined the company, but it can be frustrating for the folks talking to customers. So your energy ambassadors, it’s like it can be frustrating when they can’t do their jobs well when they can’t service their customers as quickly or as, you know, thoroughly or in a personalised way because despite, you know, maybe they’re great at it or that’s like what they want to be doing, if you don’t have the tools in in place in order to support them in that mission, then it can be extremely frustrating.

It can, you know, not be great on morale so to speak. So the fact that that your team finds value in it and is able to scale so rapidly with the business, I think is is really huge and super super impactful for your customers, but also for your team happiness, which I think is equally as important. It’s you know, when the team is happy and their jobs aren’t, you know, ripping out their hair every day, that is definitely reflected in in your customers happiness. So we love to hear that.

Do you guys have you guys, like, used any, you know, data that you’ve collected from your customers to understand your business more thoroughly or understand your organisation more more thoroughly or organisation?

I would say on on aggregate for sure under what our customers reach out to us about. So for example, last year twenty percent of our inbound conversations were all around logistics, which for us is ordering, shipping, returning, delivering of products. And when we actually realised, at that point, it wasn’t as big of our as big of a part of our business as it is now. We realised, okay, this we need to improve our processes here because we’re actually driving a tonne of conversations around things that we actually can automate and our customers would prefer to automate so that we can focus our team on on providing some higher value conversations.

So I would say that is huge.

Right now, we are in the middle of launching a new product. And so our product CX and Marketing teams. We’re getting together every week providing feedback from customer. You know, we talk about trends, so what are people reaching out to each week? We talk about specific use cases that we get from delighted that are really easy for us to find and track based on the tagging and customer based on the workflows, and the teams and all that kind of thing.

And then in general, just really understanding the ramp.

We’ve got our quarterly findings that today and, you know, we can easily show the company. Hey, look, this is what our the work and now our team does most of the time. And then, you know, it goes like this this is why we need to solve for it the way we’re doing. And so I would say one hundred percent yes, we share a lot of feedback with our teams. We actually help guide.

Or we provide information to our teams that are building products so that they can make sure that they make really informed decisions.

And so it has been super helpful for us. And then honestly just on the day to day, right? We run a pretty robust service recovery programme all powered through our customer sentiment. So many times someone feels like they didn’t have a great experience or maybe feels like there’s a gap in knowledge.

You know, we can just easily restart conversation through customer and it’s just very easy to do. So that’s not really a trend, but that’s like just kinda Yeah.

No. I love that. And I think that that’s something that’s becoming more, I hope, fingers crossed, more like common knowledge and more common practise is the understanding that CX teams have so much information and value in order to share with the larger organisation that can make the actual business better, whether that you know, product development or even just, you know, a flow on a website or something like that that you’re having people reach out for particular reasons. It’s like the CX team are really the boots on the ground, like, hearing all of the feedback from the customers. So the more that that can be shared with within the organisation, I think, the more impactful.

So love to hear that you guys are doing that.

And I have a couple more questions for you. I know we’re running up to half an hour already, but I use you know, as I said, I use a lot of different technology tools and I think one of the keys to a successful relationship is finding sort of like partners at these companies that you work really well with that you can rely on when when anything arises. So I’m just wondering how your experience has been Working with the customer team, do you feel like your feedback has taken into consideration? Your problems are solved?

You know, you have a say in sort of what the product development looks like. Yeah, I do. I mean, I would say there were sort of three phases for us. There was when we were doing platforms.

We’re working with Jose, and I feel like he was really good at hearing our criteria. I know, obviously, as being a team at a customer, you have what you know are the tops, But I feel like Jose really listened to us on those five criteria and we walked through like, okay, how would this work?

Through implementation with Matt, as I said, he was a shining star. We sent him a bottle of Scotch. Like, we were like, Matt, join our team. We love you.

Right now, we have weekly syncs with Andrew. And they’ve been really helpful. I feel, for example, we’re actually in the middle of launching our knowledge base. We chose not to do it in May last year when we launched customer. Just because we were going into a huge ramp for our team, and we didn’t have the bandwidth.

But now we do. And so we were looking for somebody that could help us customise our customer knowledge base and Andrew said, oh, I have a company. They know a customer really well and we interviewed them and we hired them and they’re working with us really well.

So I would say, it’s been a year, almost a year, and we’re still like, hey, we want to do this thing. Oh, Andrew, you have a recommendation. You can kinda connect us. So that’s really good. I think with anything, there’s always improvements. Right? It’s like, you know, there’s always things you wanna see, but I think for us what we love is like the continual development.

You know, I think we’re really excited to start digging some of the reporting developments that your team is working on. And I know there’s some chat stuff coming down the line, which could be kinda cool internally.

So I think for us, You know, we’re not the only voice as a customer, but I feel like if we need help with something or if something is broken, we can raise our hand Often, it’s not something broken. It’s we’ve mucked up a search or a business rule or something and we just need some of the homeless. Correct that?

But yeah, I would say, I was actually shocked that we still have weekly syncs, but that feels great that we have that opportunity to to reach our hand up if we need it. Awesome. Always good to hear.

This has been you know, massively interesting and eye opening to me. So thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I do have sort of one final broad question. But before I do so, for anyone that’s listening in right now, if you have any you know, questions that you want to throw our way, feel free to put them in the chat. And but my sort of Last broad question is if you have any any advice, any like advice to folks that might be looking to switch from Intercom or any other, you know, ticketing system or or customer service software over to customer? Like, what would your sort of final word of advice be?

My final word would become join my team for a day.

Honestly, just just see it and experience.

That’s probably not very sustainable.

But but I think for us, and I think where the world is going, which I think customers really figured out is this idea that like a customer is in a ticket, right? We don’t have tickets seven zero six four or someone raised in your hand. It’s like Oh, Bernard is reaching out to us and she needs help understanding her energy data or she would like help understanding, you know, how she can improve or getting her device or something. And having that timeline, having that holistic view of the customer, it is so helpful.

And I would say for us, it just it would be very difficult to go back to a traditional ticketing system because it’s really hard to build a relationship with someone when you’re just trying to disappear numbers and not build those dots.

Like, for example, so say we have — with different teams focusing on different areas. The same customer may have reached out post about an order and you know Alex and our logistics team is working on it and then they’ll reach out about performance data and Molly will pick up a conversation and say, hey, Berniece, I see that you were chatting with Alex last week, your order is still en route Just wanted to let you know that I’m going to help you out with your performance data and wrap that up. And our team will always say, hey, picking up the conversation from here or even Yeah. So you reached out to our team, and and Kelsey actually helped you with this topic last month.

So let’s actually dive in a bit more because maybe there’s some still gaps. That makes us look like superheroes. It makes us look like we’re just close. Like, our team is spread out across America with teammates in Mau, with teammates, East Coast to Canada, and and for us to be able to pick up those nuances and and make our customers realise, oh, we’re paying attention because the reality is customer lets us, like we’re not making this up.

It actually gives us that timeline and that tools. And for me, it’s like, yeah, I love that. Like, it it especially for BBC companies, and oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Timeline is huge.

Yes.

I live there. I love it. No. That’s great. Yeah.

Cool. So again, if anyone has any questions, feel free to throw them in. I’ll start with this one from just you know, curiosity perspective over the past year did Connect see any, you know, pandemic related differences? Did you guys get more inquiries?

Did more folks wanna use your services and get a little extra cash in their pockets? Did things slow down? Like what did that sort of look like for your team. Yeah.

I think we are one of I think we’re very lucky and grateful that our business actually grew quite a lot during the pandemic and I think more more of our customers and more of our community we’re hoping save rewards and earn a bit from saving energy and more people are home and using more energies with energy bills are higher. So there was more incentive So I think for us that actually we did see an increase in that. But I think the thing that was different is the types of conversations we were having with our customers Some of our customers, in addition to, you know, we’d reached out and we hadn’t heard from them for a few weeks and we’d hear back that, you know, maybe someone had had COVID or someone had passed or had complications.

And so we changed the tone of our conversations a lot. We gave our teammates permission to, well, actually they always have permission to be human, they actually are meant to. But to really slow down and to take the time if we felt like someone was was sharing something really special. We also had a lot of fires in California last year, so we would get a notification that a device had gone offline and reach out to a customer and, you know, they would share actually, I just lost my house because of fire, and it’s like, holy shit.

That’s — Yeah. — how can we support this? So so the conversations we had became really meaningful and and quite actually intimate and really realising that, like, the world is going through a lot. And so I think just giving our team time to support to support that, even if your business is slowing down, realising that people are rating in, we’re all impacted by this.

Right? And some of us you know, more than others, and so just kind of taking that time if you have it. And, yeah, so we we did see some really interesting impacts. As a result.

Yeah. I feel like that was something across the board that sort of shifted with needs changed over the last year, so whether that was proactive outreach that needed to be done, or maybe even like the measurement of success was different instead of you know, handle time or SLAs or something like that. Like, maybe it was required to have these longer, more empathetic conversations in order to build customer relationships and take more of that human approach.

So I love that that that’s something that you guys adopted and and really supported your customers on, so we’ll bravo to you.

What channels are you guys currently using?

For support. So we we predominantly use email and we use chat.

All of our inbound inquiries either come through an email, so help at On Connect. We actually created a type form on our website for folks to fill in a couple of questions that automatically gets routed to customer and depending on what people say, it gets routed to different teams.

And so we have quite a few places at the top of the funnel that comes in. But predominantly we host through email and chat. We have just started lighting up an Amazon web voice, platform, mine might have butchered that name. But for some of our folks that are reaching out and calling our customers, now we’re doing that directly in customer. And we’re doing that at a smaller scale, but, you know, we can have those recordings in there, and that is something we’re starting as well. Awesome.

And then my last question for you here is sort of what do you what are your, like, plans twenty twenty one. Obviously, you’re launching a new product and and the company is growing rapidly. But is there anything sort of for your organisation specifically that you want wanna hit anything you wanna achieve over the course of this year. Oh, I love that.

I predominantly, like, we just wanna continue to build a really awesome team. We have incredible CX culture in our company and we have the most fun, and I want us to keep doing that. Other teams love when they get to meet with us. And we just what place you wanna be.

And I love that. I wanna be there. Our team wants to be there. So so continue to do that as we grow.

We’ve already onboarded more teammates year than we did last year, and we’re probably gonna do two to three times that. So for us maintaining that culture, customers are a huge part of that, how we communicate with our customers. It’s so easy for us to say, hey, here’s the past one hundred conversations that a teammate did really well and observed those. Or, hey, a really good way to get your feet wet is actually follow-up with a conversation.

Here’s all the conversations where we’re waiting for a response from a customer in the last seven days. You can easily follow-up. Here’s some really nice shortcuts you can do that. Please also bring your own personality.

Like, the platform allows us to kinda make our teammates feel a bit like rockstars, especially new. I mean, some of our teammates have been here for four weeks and we’re already showcase them in a customer’s story because they’ve been able to really understand our customers and use the platform and do that. So I would say that and really supporting rapid growth.

We are growing like crazy as a company and we really wanna help California’s energy grid this summer. We are on deck to be there when the power lines go down or when the lines go down or when those energy needs go really high when fires happen and people have to get relocated. Like, we are really, really, really there to support the stability of the energy grid. And I think that’s actually huge. I know our CEO and leadership team could speak to that at a bit more of an eloquent level.

But ultimately, like, that’s why we’re growing. We really want to help. We’ve got a lot of Californians that could really benefit from this and also energy grid in the global climate that that kinda needs it. So I would say a couple of different focuses for the year. Awesome. Well, let’s extremely inspiring. My whole family is in California, so I will definitely recommend them to you.

And make sure that they they get on it. But this has been such a wonderful conversation.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

So many you know, interesting anecdotes and new approaches that I haven’t heard. So love to the conversation and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and a great planning session today. You, Andrew. Take care. Thanks so much. Bye, Alexandra.