Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to episode 285 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Ty Gibbs to talk about delivering a superior customer experience. I’d like to welcome back to the podcast after a bit of a break. All my fault, take full responsibility for time off the air. But please welcome back Ty Givens. Ty, it’s lovely to have you join me so early and picking up the new run of the podcast. Welcome back. But for the benefit of the listeners, do you want to introduce yourself?
Ty Givens: 0:54
Yeah, so first, thank you for having me back. I was so excited to run into you as support-driven last fall. That was so cool. It’s like, you know, for you to be so far away and for us to be able to see each other and say hello, that meant a lot to me. So wonderful to see you, wonderful to see you here. Um, for everyone, my name is Ty Givens, and um I have been in the support operations world for 25 years. And I’ve gone from workforce management to running large teams. And now what my company does is in essence, we help companies deliver the best experience that they possibly can. And um, that sounds very vague, but you’re a CX person, and you know that’s because it runs the gamut. Um, but we work alongside of um startups and then brands that are growing or looking to modernize and change to help, you know, implement tools and resources, processes and policies, um, train up their team, just kind of like all things that everyone thinks one single CX leader does, but all of us know that it’s not possible to do all those things, we help with that.
Charlotte Ward: 1:59
That’s awesome. Thank you so much. So, for uh for everyone listening, the the uh consultancy that you spend, I think you just said a decade building is CX Collective, right? Where can people find you?
Ty Givens: 2:13
www.cxcollective.com. Um, and if you’re more of the hands-on uh person, then visit www.cxcollective advantage.com. There you’ll find a plethora of playbooks that you can just execute on your own without us. It’s totally you.
Charlotte Ward: 2:31
Perfect. Uh and advantage is the right word, actually. What a good word to start on. And and touching on everything you just said, like, you know, the this isn’t typically, you know, the the great customer experience, the superior customer experience, um, doesn’t come through one person. It’s not one person who crafts it and delivers it. And and often not just one person who even it’s not just about the how, is it? It’s about what it looks like. Like probably it’s a it’s a you know, it takes a village to create, but it also takes a village to kind of understand what good CX looks like. It’s the learning for some of us, like you and me, that’s the learning of a lifetime, right? Um, so so yeah, for those, um, for those people who are listening who might want to go and look at your playbooks, for instance, um where does kind of understanding that’s that experience, what good looks like, what’s superior, what excellent looks like in a customer experience, where where does even just understanding that start?
Ty Givens: 3:38
You know, I okay, so when I started CS Collective right into my 10th year, um, when we first launched, it was called the Workforce Pro. Nobody got it. It was based in workforce management. I digress. Um, but you know, what I found is that early on I had this idea of what it meant to deliver excellent customer care across the board. And that came from my time at companies like Intuit and Herbal Life and Molina Healthcare, you know, and then you know, Candy’s Thrive Market. Like I just thought I knew. And um, you know, start working with clients and immediately I would start like trying to tell them what their superior their the superior experience should be. And you know, when that would happen, I would read the body language and sometimes they’d be looking at me like, well, actually, we don’t want to deflect, we don’t want to turn off our phones, we don’t want to move more towards chat. What we want is for our customers to feel welcome when they come through the door, whichever way that is. So, what that taught me is that the term superior, good, excellent, customer service, customer experience is all relative. And what that means actually depends on what the the your customer base expects of you. So when I started to work on the playbooks earlier this year, one of the things that I decided to do was instead of telling people exactly how to do a thing, I told them what to think about in order to do that thing. And the idea behind that was I don’t want to tell you that there’s a complete right way to deliver this experience. What I’m gonna tell you is like conceptually, here’s what this means. Now, here’s how another company used it, and this is what happened for them. Then I take it a step further and ask questions what does this look like for you? And I’m thinking about what does it look like for them? That’s how they’re building their own playbook, right? Um, and so in my opinion, um, and this is again, you know, 25 years and 10 years and working across over 50 companies, it’s all relative, and there is no right or wrong way. It’s whatever the customer expects of you.
Charlotte Ward: 6:11
That’s so important about customer expectations there, because and that’s what makes it relative, because customers are different um support team to support team, organization to organization, industry to industry, aren’t they? So um it’s it’s really interesting that you use that language. Um one of the um, you know, when I’m interviewing new hires into my teams all of these years, um, and I’ve like you, I’ve worked in many organizations and I’ve delivered a slightly different customer experience in every organization because of all the reasons you just said, right? You have to think about it highly contextually. Uh, but when I’m hiring potential team members, one question I ask is, you know, tell me about a time you had a great customer experience. And I and I I I don’t want to lay on the pressure. Like I’m very, very um open as to what that means, what the story is they want to tell me. So as you can imagine, it’s often, you know, the uh the cell phone providers or the broadband providers or the energy providers. They’re typically where good custom uh where poor customer experiences sit. So I ask, I I actually asked two questions tell me a good customer experience and a poor customer experience. All of the poor customer experiences are in those sectors. And then when the good when you pull on the threads of the good customer experiences, they become really personal, actually. And I think that and that’s part of what fascinates me about this question. So there are stories of restaurants, and sometimes it’s an energy provider, rarely, but sometimes it is, you know. Um uh, but often what makes it a good customer experience is just how personal it is, how personalized it is as well. But that really is highly contextual, isn’t it? And I think and that the the customer expectations are so individual, depending on the environment, that uh to your point, you can’t have a one-size-fits-all. There is no point in saying this is the way you should do it.
Ty Givens: 8:18
Yeah, yeah, I know um like some of the best experiences I have are at the places where I know that their um expectations of how customers are treated are completely crafted. Um, so here I’m I’m in the LA area, we have places like In N Out Burger where you know that there’s going to be a certain way that you’re going to be addressed. There’s everyone’s always smiley, they’re polite. Same for like a Chick-fil-A, there’s a certain way that they engage with customers. Um, and then you can also have those businesses that um get so much volume that trying to make the customer happy isn’t necessarily their focus. Um, they’re trying to get through to the customer as needed, but whatever that it is that they’re providing is something that surpasses whether or not the experience is good. And I’ve seen that happen a lot. Um ideal, but it’s the reality of the situation, right? It’s like you’re more happy just to get a response than you care about the tone and the messaging around the response.
Charlotte Ward: 9:31
Yeah, I think there’s always like table stakes when it comes to things like tone and messaging, isn’t there? You don’t want to be uh you don’t want an awful, you know, tone or like uh, you know, to be written off in terms of, you know, uh like uh entry-level like respect and things like that. But um, but but yeah, but uh this comes back to expectations, doesn’t it? I mean, I think that when you go into an in-and-out burger, you first of all, because it’s a brand, you’re expecting to be treated consistently across visits, but but also you kind of symbiotically learn from the restaurant what to expect. So when things diverge from that, either positively or negatively, that’s when you’re really talking about an elevated or an awful customer experience. And I think that that that’s because to some degree what you’ve been conditioned to expect in that context as a customer. Whereas in other scenarios, the expectation might simply be I just want a quick answer. I don’t want the conversation, I don’t want you spending time in chat asking me how my day was, you know.
Ty Givens: 10:42
That customer. Um I I I remember calling um a credit card company, and the guy was so personable, it was very like wonderful. Like I get what his purpose and his reasoning was, but I don’t think that he picked up on the fact that, hey, I’m just trying to get this question answered so that I can move on to the next thing. And he went down his full script, and I’m just like, okay, okay, okay, okay. And so I think in those moments, like there has to be um some level of how do I want to say it? I want to know that if I am in fact talking to a human, that you can pick up on the fact that I may not need that level of coddling. I just really wanted you to answer this question. And when we take quality requirements and we make them so structured that the person is not in a space where they can kind of move or think or, you know, I’ve got to hit these points, yeah, then it it actually could degrade the service. Um, and then since I didn’t leave a review, I didn’t feel it was necessary. But, you know, um one of the things like I for for our clients, I write a lot of you know, processes and you know, structure things for them, but I always try to leave a little bit of logo room for like, you know, using the 80-20 rule. This is gonna work most of the time. There’s gonna be a part where you really just need to listen. And so, you know, even when I talk to my my team, um, especially because we work across so many clients and organizations and business types, and all of our services are bespoke, I’ll get asked, well, what’s like how should I go about doing this? You’ve been working with this client now for three months. How do they expect it to go? So we had one today um that uh working on the CSAT uh situation, we’re trying to um they’re doing an incentive process for the holidays, and CSAT’s a big part of it. But we’re finding that customers are giving negative CSAT reviews, not because of the experience with the agent, but because of the experience with the policy, right? They don’t like that they do these things. So um when I looked at what the client wanted, and I’m working with my team on it. I’m like, uh, one of the things that we’re saying is they will have the agent review the CSAT. And one of my team members was like, they’re gonna have the agent do it. Like, what if the agent is not honest? And I said, Yeah, I mean, there are such things as dishonest people. But this client trusts their agents implicitly. They’re not worried about that. And so while we might have something where we’re concerned about it, we have to pay attention to what works for their environment. I don’t know all of their team. So in that case, I’ve got to support whatever the client wants. Find that, you know, explain risks. I’m sure they’re aware of it. And if we need to change it, we’ll change it. But at the end of the day, um, we have to deliver what they’re expecting us to deliver. You know, that that’s our job.
Charlotte Ward: 13:45
Yeah, 100%, 100%. Um, you know, I I I love the idea of that 8020 as well. Um, it reminds me a little of something which I know I’ve mentioned before probably several years ago in the podcast, to be honest. Um, but years and years ago, I went to a um presentation, uh, a talk given by head of uh customer experience or support. I I I forget his title and I even forget his name, I’m ashamed to say. But this was probably eight years ago. So I think at this point that’s allowable, right? But the thing that stopped, and I know I do know he was from Rafa Cycling. There we go. I can remember the organization. So um anyway, that’s my little shout-out. Um but but the the phrase I heard when when it came to kind of scripted customer experiences, scripted support, scripted, you know, conversations and processes for processing customer queries. Um the phrase he used was we yes, we have processes, yes, we have scripts, but we create room in those processes and scripts to allow our agents to zigzag across them, which I thought was a really excellent kind of visual on like you need that wiggle room, you need to, you can you need a direction, you need a a direction to kind of head, you know, send your agents in. They’ve got to get to the resolution, they’ve got to get to you know the end of the conversation and the and produce a happy customer at the end of it, but you don’t need to be so rigid. I think that’s really important.
Ty Givens: 15:19
Yeah, there I mean, like listening and you know, and and that could be part of personalization too, right? Like I’m actually taking into consideration what you’re saying to me, and that’s being folded into my response to you because I hear you. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, what we want as customers or it’s people in general, or we want to be understood and and we want to know that we’re heard, and we want to know that you get where we’re coming from, and we want to know that you want to fix it, right? Those are the things that we that really matter to us if you have a bad experience with a company, you’re looking for them to fix it for you, and what that fixing looks like can run the gamut. So um it’s important to have ideas around what it means to fix for that customer, um, how much of that the frontline is gonna be able to execute without any escalation, how much of that you want to give to the next tier, how much of that needs to be escalated outside of that. And at the end of the day, I think if we were to teach frontline people, which some companies do, so that that’s a wonderful thing, but the the impact that they have on um bringing a customer back in the door with making deceased things, it helps. Because when I was a representative, I was only did it for six months, but I was a terrible rep. I’ll tell anybody all day long. I had no idea what my role was, and I had no idea how my role impacted the bottom line at the company. Yeah, yeah. Helping owners and actors.
Charlotte Ward: 16:58
Do you think um, just touching on that for a minute, um, support is typically or often an entry-level job.
Ty Givens: 17:07
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 17:08
For a lot of people coming into any kind of, you know, retail or e-com or services or technology company, it’s often the gateway in, it’s often the doorway into the building. Um, these are often low-paid, they’re often um, you know, early in their career, um, inexperienced, you know, don’t have the contextual knowledge or the technical knowledge or or whatever coming into the industry or the organization, right? How how do you um begin to convey to someone coming into that role or even in that role for a period of time, given all of that uh, you know, given that all of that inexperience, let’s let’s let’s boil it down to kind of essentially an experience. Um, how do you begin to convey the impact that they’re having in terms of retention or or any other like key business metric, frankly?
Ty Givens: 18:10
Yeah, I think that what we have to do is is find ways to help them understand how the conversations that they’re having with customers tie to the bottom line. So maybe we don’t use jargon or big words, maybe we don’t say attrition, because that might go over their head. But if you’re keep it simple, you know, we lose like one out of ten customers every day due to bad customer experience. Every customer that comes in brings us a monthly revenue of you know $100. If we have this number of customers, that’s what’s gonna pay your salary. If we lose customers, we can’t pay your salary. And I think if we thought about it and delivered it in a way where it made sense and it ties them in, and then we also need to teach that they are the company. And I don’t know that people have that always in mind. Like when you work at a company, you are that company. If you think about any place or the last place you called, you may or not may or not remember the name of the person you spoke to, but you know what company you called, and you can read you can reiterate that experience to someone. I called this company, this is what happened. Well if you’re the company, then that means that you can’t take things personally, which is another skill that has to be taught. Very true. Yeah, what happened is not your fault as a person, but it’s the fault of the company. And in this capacity, you are the company you’re not you, you’re the company. So, because of that, you have to fix it for the company because the company needs to. Have you know 200 customers in order to pay for you to be here? We don’t want to lose this one, right? And when you tie it that way, people feel more connected because my opinion, and happy for anyone to shoot me down, is that service people are not salespeople. There’s a different call and a different pull. Agreed, agreed. Right? Sales is like, you know, dollars, dollars, dollars, they’ll tell you whatever they need to tell you, most cases, not all, but to get what they want. Service people are like, how can I help you? Let me make this better for you. You know, there’s a softness to it. So if there’s a if you’re a service-based person and they go, the company’s losing X thousands of dollars every month, but then you’re looking at how much they’re bringing in, it’s kind of like, I that doesn’t really resonate with me. But if you’re like, hey, if we lose so many, then we are gonna start impacting, this is gonna start impacting our department. Oh, so what can I do to make that better? We need to make sure that you do everything in your power to keep our customers coming back. And here are the ways to do it. Now you got buy-in.
Charlotte Ward: 21:06
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um I th I I love the idea of like tying it directly to a number of customers. You know, I think dollars can feel a bit abstract, you know. Again, if you’re in an entry-level role and and you’re hearing, particularly at enterprise level, you’re hearing about, you know, potentially multi-million dollar customers, right? It’s kind of there’s a disconnect there, it’s kind of hard to process. But yeah, this this is, you know, this customer is has this impact on you, on us as a business, and this this experience adds up. Yeah.
Ty Givens: 21:44
Yeah. I remember um working at a company and one of the reps was really upset about the the pay that they were receiving compared to what they felt like executives were receiving. And they’re like, realize that we are there’s like a 300 to one ratio between what we earn and what they earn. And that’s uh, you know, true statement, hard pill to swallow. There’s also the points that what when you’re, you know, if you’re a CEO and you’re getting your salary, that’s one thing. But then there’s the other side of that, which is if you’re in some sort of entrepreneurial space, you may not be getting a salary, you may only get what the company profits, and so there’s a risk associated with that. So you’re right, coming down to the dollars and cents of it, it doesn’t make sense to the front line in those terms. But if we speak to the compassion in them, they will understand wanting to create good experiences for people. Um, and if we give them avenues and opportunities to voice what they’re hearing, and as a company, take seriously what they’re saying. So it’s one thing for me to roll up that customers are really upset about this particular piece of the process, it’s another thing for me to roll up that they’re having it, they have issues with this, and it gives to engineering or product, and I can actually see engineering and product working on it because now I know that what I’m saying to them is valuable. And guess what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna find more opportunities to add value because I care. Right. And I think that if you’re looking at customer service as a cost center, not as an investment, you know, and the team feels like they’re a cost center and not an investment, they’re not gonna roll things up because they’re gonna feel like it doesn’t matter anyway. But if we can get their voices heard in the right ways, I think that we could get so much more proactive with experience across the board, which will be a one for everybody.
Charlotte Ward: 23:42
Yeah. This this is where actually service people do become salespeople, I think, particularly leaders, you know. And I think it’s a skill that you learn over time, particularly if you’re stepping up out of a service role into leading a service team, you know, you have to to for your team to feel heard, you have to advocate for your team. And the way you do that, it’s not just advocating for your team, but for your customers, because they are one and the same, you know, they are all downstream of the product experience, of the engineering delivery, of all of the promises the company is making out there in the marketplace before these prospects become customers. So, so advocacy, I think, and all of the different ways that you can advocate for your customers and for your team through your customers, I think is um it’s it’s a skill set, it’s essentially a sales skill. This is what’s important, this is why it’s important, this is where I think we should be investing and why. Um, those are skills that leaders have to learn in this space, aren’t they?
Ty Givens: 24:47
Yeah, there are. And I can tell you that, you know, a lot of times for support, we are um not, we don’t toot our horns as much, right? So don’t you don’t hear support screaming about how well they’ve done. And then even in some cases, when they do, the metrics feel so soft for the executive level that it still doesn’t even resonate. So it’s like, oh, okay, you answered, you know, 500 tickets more, that that’s nice. But like, what does that mean? And so we have to change the narrative around how we’re communicating up and communicating out and partnering cross-functionally, um, so that we earn that seat at the table, so to speak, where our voice carries weight. Because I can tell you for myself as a leader, you know, I can remember working in a company as a VP and getting really excited that I was able to get my dream dashboard guilt that finally answered all the questions and outlined all the gray areas that I had struggled with over the years. I was like, this is amazing. I now know everything that’s happening across the board. And I presented it in the executive meeting, and everybody was completely blank because they don’t care. They don’t care about the metrics in the way that I cared about the metrics. What they cared about was the story behind the metrics. That’s where I fell short. And so that is one of the things where I’m like, okay, leaders, let me help you tell the story that’s gonna get people’s ear. Because you can talk to me about your good metrics all day long. I get it. I live this. They can talk to you, you get it. You live this. 100%, yeah. Right? So you take that to the executives and they’re like, yeah, that’s your job. So what else is new? Right. So turning those numbers into a story that impacts how customers are experiencing your business or your brand, um, how you’re contributing to the growth. That’s what matters. And those are the things that I think we’re missing just in general. And some of that comes from getting promoted without having a leader over you who developed you in that way to teach you how to tell those stories because it happened to me. Um and you get to, you can get to the VP level and still not know how to speak executive.
Charlotte Ward: 27:05
Yeah, very true, very true. Uh and I think I think it’s a really good point. Like the the stories behind those metrics, first of all, like never show a full support dashboard to an SLT, please. Yeah, just one 101, don’t do it. Pick one number, right? Or or more precisely, one experience that you want to talk about, one point you want to get across, one story you want to make. This is the thing that I understand to be important. So this comes back to your point of like think about what good looks like for you. And then then the story you tell is how you’re meeting or diverging from that, right? And and that’s the story as a leader you tell to your cross-functional peers, to your product team, etc., and to your executives. This is the thing that we need to do more of, or this is the thing that puts us at risk of uh not delivering what I believe to be the thing our customers expect. Yeah, yeah. And you can pretty much frame every single thing you do in support as a leader in that light, can’t you? Um, and you just need to do that over and over and over and over again. And you have one metric to attach to each of those things.
Ty Givens: 28:21
Yep, that it matters so much. I mean, you know, really um customer satisfaction and net promoter are things that executives seem to understand because they see that net promoter and customer satisfaction have direct impact on revenue because they just care about revenue. So how do you tell that story? Everything that you’re doing is leading up to creating satisfied customers, the the quickness in which you’re responding, the accuracy in which you’re responding, the way that you’re putting out any, you know, uh preemptive self-service opportunities, anything you’re doing is all about making that customer happy. Why? So that that customer will continue to buy. That’s what executives care about. So you’re right, singling it down to a single metric that makes sense, that tells the complete story is what we need to focus on.
Charlotte Ward: 29:14
Yeah, yeah. And and actually, I think like diving into because you can have a you can have a headline metric like MPS or CSAT. Um, and you’re right, that is what executives typically will attach to. But there’s very little you can do with that headline metric in terms of the narrative. You have to kind of go one layer deeper and you and you you touch there on response times. That’s an easy one. Most organized most support teams measure their response times or can measure their response times if they want to. So, and that’s the that’s the hook for your narrative, whatever the thing is. We are we looked at our response times for the last quarter. Here’s a change we made, this is the outcome, and we’ve noticed its effect on CSAT in this way. And I think like that, that’s the thing you do over and over again, right? And and ultimately CSAT or MPS is the usually the sole outcome. You know, that’ll be the thing that you always hook back to, particularly for for an SLT, but for the product team or for the you know success team or your other your other cross-functional peers, it’s gonna be one one layer down. Like this is why we need this to influence this one thing, because you know, yeah. 100% 100%.
Ty Givens: 30:31
And you know, it’s our job to know, like you said, those layers that lead into that and use that as part of the narrative. But to not be insulted when we’ve done all this work and improvement on all of these different KPIs, and at the end of the day, we’re only talking about the one you are, but the one that you’re talking about is impacted by all of the great things that you’ve done. And you know, and maybe those are those are conversations you have with your team around all of the improvements that have been made time over time. When you get ready to go onto that boardroom, you better be concise and effective and impactful.
Charlotte Ward: 31:09
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Concise, effective, and impactful. Um, just like this conversation. Just like this conversation. Uh thank you so much for joining me again, Ty. It’s been a pleasure to have you back. Um, we I feel like we covered a lot of ground there, but I think that I do think it was concise, effective, and impactful. So uh yeah, great. Um, will you come back and have another conversation with me? I I’d love to dive on some of those numbers.
Ty Givens: 31:37
Absolutely, we definitely can. Anytime you’re ready, just let me know. I would love to.
Charlotte Ward: 31:43
Awesome. Thank you so much again for joining me. That’s it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two eight five for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.
