Join me and the insightful Ty Givens from CX Collective as we confront the common myths of benchmarking in customer support. Get ready to discover why pursuing industry standards might not be the golden ticket to enhancing your customer service game. With Ty's extensive experience, we delve into the importance of customizing your customer support to outshine the competition. We dissect examples such as response times and satisfaction scores to show that the benchmarks which work for some companies can be utterly irrelevant for others. By the end of our chat, you'll understand why creating internal goals based on your company's unique data and customer interactions is the key to delivering excellence in service.
As we continue our enlightening conversation, we switch gears to the power of feedback – the kind that numbers alone can't capture. Prepare to see the value in the stories and detailed experiences shared by customers, which often hold more weight than any statistic. We discuss how these narrative reviews can influence everything from recruiting to purchasing decisions, driving home the point that businesses need to listen intently to their audience. We explore how to harness this feedback to refine strategies, adapt to customer expectations, and truly embrace a customer-first approach. By the time you're done listening, you'll be equipped to shift your focus from chasing numbers to building a brand that resonates with people on a personal level.
I'd love your thoughts on this episode! Comment below, and like/love/share/support if you found this inspiring, thought-provoking, or useful!
Transcription
Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello, welcome to episode 257 of the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward Today. Welcome Ty Givens to talk about benchmarking. I’d like to welcome to the podcast today, ty Givens. Ty, lovely to have you join me for the first time. Thank you so much. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Ty Givens: 0:42
Sure, first, let me thank you for having me on. Let’s start there. I’m excited for this conversation myself, for everyone listening. My name is Ty Givens and I am founder and CEO of CX Collective. I’m going to date it back to call centers because I’m technically a dinosaur in this space. I go back to that time and I’ve started my career with Fortune 500, but I love building things and working in the unknown and solving really complex problems. I started CX Collective, which used to be called the Workforce Pro, in 2016. As we’ve evolved and changed, we re-branded. Now we help companies build or improve customer service experiences. That’s people, process, tools, technology, all those things A lot of fun. That’s awesome.
Charlotte Ward: 1:54
It’s such a varied space to be consulting with other companies in, isn’t it? No, two weeks must be the same for you.
Ty Givens: 2:02
Nothing is the same. I always say ahead of. Cx is expected to be in the past, present and future and work across people, process and tech simultaneously. The best example that I give is you and I are having this conversation right now. If a live chat popped up that you needed to answer, could you really divert your attention to focus there and focus on me? It’s just not possible. I think that from my time leading teams and the expectations that I had on me, I wanted to create a space and a company that actually supported other leaders so that they didn’t have to feel like they had to do all things on their own. I know that battle of fighting to get headcount. If you say you need workforce management, they’re laughing at you like I’m sorry we’re not bringing in another high paying role. I need a trainer. I’m sorry we don’t have someone who can just train. I mean. So now we work with our clients in those capacities. It’s like what do you need? Where are your gaps? Then, as the collective, we fill in those gaps to make you whole for a short-term project or long-term for many of our clients.
Charlotte Ward: 3:20
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I mean, it’s interesting what you say about budget, because I think that getting budget for people is hard. Getting budget for, bizarrely, just for the most basic of tools is hard sometimes, isn’t it? Yet here we are expected to deliver something that’s resilient and scalable and high quality and all of those things, and measure it as well. The people listening to this won’t have spotted it, but that was a segue into what we’re going to talk about. Did you spot it?
Ty Givens: 3:55
I did, I got it. I see where you’re going.
Charlotte Ward: 3:58
So what are we talking about today?
Ty Givens: 4:01
So we’re going to talk about the farce of benchmarking, the farce, okay, that’s cool. I’m not against benchmarking. Let me say that what I mean by that is that the experience that a brand or business gives its customer is so personalized that what the industry does matters far little in comparison than what most people think. I just oh no go ahead.
Charlotte Ward: 4:34
I was just going to say I think that’s really interesting because the and I think one of the first things we should, first of all, we should define what benchmarking is. Let’s go there in a second. So the thing that occurs to me about benchmarking, and the reason for my not so subtle segue earlier, was that benchmarking is really all about numbers. It’s really all about metrics and how we measure the quality, the resilience, the scalability and everything and the effectiveness of any part of our customer experience and our service. Right, and I think companies I mean your word, farce, was well chosen, because I think that companies put a lot of emphasis on where they sit against certain industry benchmarks and standards In. I would I kind of want to say, in a kind of slightly delusional way, that it actually is an indicator of how well we’re doing. You know, it’s a contributor, not an indicator of, but a contributor to the bottom line, and I think that’s the farce of benchmarking. Frankly, just to put my feelings out there, let’s talk about first. What are we talking about, though? We’ve talked a lot already about benchmarking, but what really is it?
Ty Givens: 5:58
Yeah. So let’s take the retail industry, e-commerce, online shopping. In the last 30 days, several times, I’ve gotten the answer, the question what are other companies like us doing? How are they measuring their C-SAT? Or what are their C-SAT scores, what is their first reply time and what is their volume? And I can provide that data, however, because right now industry average for retail this is, according to Zendesk, it’s 18.8 hours on first reply.
Charlotte Ward: 6:39
Wow.
Ty Givens: 6:41
Well, I tried to get our clients within one business day. That’s eight hours. So if we’re looking at that benchmark and we’re saying that success, it doesn’t mean that that’s success for you, because you can do far better. We’re not going to lean on that. C-sat globally is at 94%. I think it’s high 80s from, I guess, the aggregate of customers using or providing surveys for the data on the Zendesk platform benchmark report or benchmark survey. But the client that I was working with of course won’t say who was in the low 80s and the target that I set for them was 90%. Sorry, actually the benchmark was 89%. I set 90% for them and I set 90% because, based on the analysis that we’ve done on why their C-SAT is where it is, I could clearly see the fixes that were necessary to put them to that 90%, and that was just the starting point, because they can even do better from there. So when I say it’s a farce, it’s not that the information is not valuable, but if I were to compare other companies that we’ve worked with in that same space, so, yes, retail, but the specific type of products they sold, the reply time, are different. As far as the expectation, the C-SAT scores are very different for different reasons and their volume is very different for different reasons. So it’s cool to look across, but at the same time I wouldn’t say that everyone should start assigning their targets based on what other businesses are doing, because your business may be different.
Charlotte Ward: 8:37
Yeah, actually I would argue that most businesses are different. Not at all. Yeah, I mean you might be able to identify, like if you could get the information, if you were lucky enough to be able to get the information my gut instinct and in fact it’s kind of plastered all over my LinkedIn and the customer support leader’s home page that no two support environments are the same. No two weeks in support are the same. No two customer bases are the same, no two technologies are the same it’s the number of variables that is the problem. And so even if you look, even if you segment by industry, by vertical, by, you know, I don’t know sales model or whatever so if you look at B2B Texas like that’s still quite a big quadrant of the market and I know what roughly the averages are for some of those metrics you talked about for CZat and First Reply, and I know where I can far exceed them and where I don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of meeting them because I’m not average. I’m quite unique in that very big bucket and my bet is that a lot of other organizations are quite unique in that bucket too.
Ty Givens: 9:58
They are, and we always say that we focus on bespoke customer experiences, and it almost goes without saying, but I think that it still has to be said because the reality is that you know, the term good customer service or excellent customer service means so many different things to so many different people. Sometimes, for we may have a client who feels that excellent customer service means that everything is automated and their bot is stellar and they get very few tickets, and then you may have someone who says, no, excellent customer service for us is first contact resolution and we want to submit requests because we are about you know people first. It just really runs the gamut, and so I think that what the idea is for me is to really review the current engagements, listen to the existing customers and let them tell us what success looks like, and let them tell us what their metrics should be, instead of us deciding what the metrics should be.
Charlotte Ward: 11:10
I think that’s the right way to go, and I think it’s the only way you can set reasonable and achievable targets for improvement in your own organization and have an understanding, because your customers are telling you, you know of what good is in any of those, across any of those metrics, right? There is another side, though, I think, to benchmarking. I think this is the, I think this is the side that nobody really wants to admit to, and that is that benchmarking is really a marketing tool, isn’t it, isn’t it? We reply faster, we, our customers, are happier, like it’s all out there when we’re doing well. We never tell anyone when we’re doing badly. It was nice, so that’s absolutely true. I mean, did customers buy it, though, would be my question.
Ty Givens: 12:02
You know, I think to a degree, but I don’t think that it is that they’re buying it based on self-reported metrics or sales. I think they buy it when. I’ll give you an example If I am considering using a new business or company, I the first thing I do is go to their battery views and read those, because I figure, if there’s two schools of thought there, one do they reply to the bad reviews and what do they say?
Charlotte Ward: 12:34
Mm-hmm.
Ty Givens: 12:35
Because that tells me how much you care about the experience.
Charlotte Ward: 12:39
Mm-hmm.
Ty Givens: 12:39
The other thing is can I live with the worst? Mm-hmm. Right. If someone says, you know, this product only lasts a week and I only need it for three days, well, a week is fine, Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, those bad reviews are not always bad. Sometimes they’re informative, mm-hmm. I have a friend. Her husband has a medical practice. He is an amazing doctor and she is she’s amazing at creating a patient experience. She has this vision of what she wants and she executes well. So on her. Someone left a review on Yelp and said this doctor’s office feels too much like a spa.
Charlotte Ward: 13:20
And she called me frantic.
Ty Givens: 13:23
She’s like, how do I get this taken down? I was like, well, you can’t, you know, and then she goes, but it’s a bad review. We had all five stars and we have this one. I said you know what I was like. That’s not a bad review, that’s an informative review. So the next time someone wants to go to an office that doesn’t feel like a doctor’s office and feels like a spa, they’re going to be like oh yeah, I read that that’s where I’m going to go, because that’s good for them. It just wasn’t good for her, and sometimes those experiences are personal. So, I think, or all the time, they’re personal. But I think that at the end of the day, it sounds good to say our customers are satisfied, but, like you said, is anyone ever going to say our customers are never satisfied, they’re not? I think we just have to read between the lines on what does that mean and what does that look like? And I think a lot of businesses do a great job at the top of the funnel making sure that you feel really good and supported and you get fast answers until you buy and then at that point, they’re a good look yeah yeah, yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 14:26
So I think if we should, sorry, do focus on trying to create a good experience across the board, regardless, that’s my opinion, I mean right towards the end of that example, you said the key thing, which is that we should read between the lines, and I think that’s it. For me, the number is never informative, it’s the words behind the number, the verbatims, the actual opinions and feedback. And I always like to kind of dive into the simplest example possible, and so when I’m interviewing people for my team, for instance, which is a deeply technical company, a deeply technical product, a deeply technical team, I just go to like give me a really simple example of when you, as a customer, had a great experience, and nine times out of 10, we can’t think of the time we talked to a deeply technical company with a deeply technical team. It’s that restaurant we popped in last week, or our last purchase from Amazon, or the damn cell phone company. You know, it’s the everyday. And I think the thing that I think the thing that tells me is that we actually all understand what we want to say about customer experience as customers, and we all have opinions because we experience it so much. Those people are willing to commit the words in whatever review platform we’re talking about or whatever survey you throw at them. Those are the ones actually that are more important than any number, I would say. I think that for me, I guess my own personal reference point for that is the Amazon reviews, some of which are hilarious. There’s no getting past it. But when I’m purchasing something from Amazon from a seller that I’ve never purchased from before, I’ll do my search, I will do. I’m only interested in four stars and above, but I want prime delivery because that’s very important to me as well. Now I’ve got a list of products I’m going to look at If I see one that catches my eye. I’m not really interested in the number at that point, because they’re all four and above, but, much like you, I’m diving into the quality or the life and see what people’s real experience with the product is. I think that a lot of organizations, whether we’re talking about B2C or B2C, miss that opportunity. Rather than just talking about the number, it’s okay to put on LinkedIn, our customers were 94% satisfied last month, but I would love just more verbatims. I would love our customers. 10 of our customers gave us feedback on this particular thing, good or bad, and here’s what we’re doing about it.
Ty Givens: 17:15
I think you hit the nail on the head. What are you doing about it? That’s the part that I think is missing a lot. We ask for CSAT, we ask for NPS, we ask for customers to take their time to tell us how they’re experiencing our product, service, business, et cetera. But what are we doing with that information? Because I’ve seen where, qualitatively, there’s an idea that a business or a support team is performing a certain way, and then you get the data and the data disproves what you thought you knew and you have the verbatims from the customer, but you’re like well, no, no, no, because the customer I spoke to last week said this right, but 40% of the people who did the survey said that. So, what are you going to do about that? And I think that having tough skin when you read those reviews and those results is going to help, not internalizing it, not making it personal, but at the same time, being open to the fact that the expectation of the customer is different than what you thought it was.
Charlotte Ward: 18:24
And that’s okay and that’s okay yeah yeah, absolutely, and I think then you’re making informed decisions in a way that a number can never tell you. One of my colleagues told me a kind of I wouldn’t call it a proverb or a saying, but like a slogan. I don’t really know what the word. It was something that came out of a study that was done in the mid 90s on something or other. I can’t remember any of the details, but the important thing is the next kind of few words, which was data tells the truth to perception, which I really love. You can have a number, but on its own it’s not really meaningful unless you use it to calibrate what you think. And you can use numbers and all of the verbatim behind it to do that calibration and that kind of challenge and, like you say, you have to develop a bit of a tough skin, right, but it challenges your perception, I think. And I think if you’re prepared to be challenged, then you can take that baseline that we started talking about, start this conversation and build your internal improvement. And who cares how you’re doing against some random benchmark at that point right?
Ty Givens: 19:44
Right, what are your customers telling you? You can hit those benchmark numbers and the customers are still very unhappy. And then what? Right, so it’s definitely you got to listen to them. I mean in 2013, no, maybe 15. I remember doing a Six Sigma Green Belt certification and the I need to do Black Belt. I haven’t done that yet, but it really focused a lot on just, you know, non-value add initiatives, which is anything your customer doesn’t expect you to do, and I have adopted that mindset when it comes to working with clients, like I really let the customer feedback drive our initiatives. Sure, I know what things we need to do, just in general, but you know what we need to do is different than how we need to do it. The customer will tell you how you need to show up for them, but we have to listen and you almost have to take a step back. One of our team members she joined she’s helping out with some kind of like business systems analysis and I told her. I said get rid of everything that you thought you knew about what it means to give good customer service. And I said because what is good is what the customer expects and what the client wants, and it’s very different than what you’ve always known and you have to get rid of that. And she’s like that’s really good advice. I said yeah, because what’s good for them may not be good over here. Different standards exist and we just and we have to show up in that way that makes sense for the business.
Charlotte Ward: 21:25
Yeah, I think you said it right there. You know, you said the customer will tell you how you have to show up for them. What a great ending to this conversation. I love that. I think that that’s a great takeaway. And you know, if you still want to go out there and measure yourself against whatever segment of whatever industry you want and whatever benchmark, go ahead and do it, but show up for your customers and the way you need to for them, because they’re telling you right one way or another 100% and share this with whomever will.
Ty Givens: 21:57
Whoever you need, when you need backup, I’ll say that, yes, if you’re doing it. Listen, the benchmarks look like this, but I don’t think that’s the way to go. Ty and Charlotte said it’s okay, we’re here for you.
Charlotte Ward: 22:08
We’re here for you. We’re here for you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, ty. What a great conversation. Thank you, oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me. Oh, you’re welcome. Will you come back for another conversation soon? Yes, anytime, awesome. Thank you so much. That’s it for today. Go to your customersupportleaderscom forward slash 257 for the show notes and I’ll see you next time.
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