Hey friends, I hope that you had a great weekend. If you are on the east coast, like me, I hope that you finally got some time outside after a few days of heavy smoke in NYC (thank you, fellow Canadians). That said, I’m also thinking of my friends in various parts of Canada where the conditions were much worse. It’s your reminder to get a JUDY kit, and stay protected!
Not this past week, but the week before I was in Dallas for SubSummit, an annual conference fully centered around the subscription business. At SubSummit, one of the fireside chats I did was alongside Jess Cervellon, who is the Head of Customer Experience at Feastables, and everytime I spend time with her, I feel like I learn 4-5 new nuggets of information. Not just small things, but NUGGETS. I define nuggets as pieces of information you can put to use right away, and see an immediate return on.
So for today’s email, I wanted to write a deep-dive based off a 45 minute chat I did with Jess, just asking questions and poking where my interests took me. I did my best to explain the full context, but if anything didn’t make sense, just hit reply, and ask!
But, before we get into the 5 pages of Jess’s brain, did you get a chance to listen to Limited Supply this past week? We talked about fake awards given to alcohol brands, how a Chinese eCommerce company has more advantages in the USA than a US eCommerce company and our takeaways from Commerce Summit. Listen to the episode on this special link! Also, please leave us a review if you have 22 spare seconds — it helps us a lot!
Lastly, HOOX is running a special discount for newsletter subscribers who want to buy 2 or more landing pages from HOOX! The offer ends on Sunday, June 18, 2023. Go to the HOOX website, and book a call. If you’re spending over $100k per month on ads, ask for the Nik Sharma newsletter discount → Book a call on the HOOX website!
Ok, let’s get into today’s deep-dive with Jess!
Here were a few of the big takeaways.
Customer Experience is NOT Customer Support!
The single most important thing that all brands should remember is that Customer Experience is not just customer support. Yes, customer support is one aspect of Customer Experience but CX goes way beyond just answering tickets on Gorgias about exchanges or returns.
Jess mentioned that the definition of Customer Experience is exactly what it sounds like. It really is “the entire customer experience end to end.”
The best CX in the world starts long before you ever make a sale. True CX includes the entire customer journey pre and post purchase all the way down to the packaging, the messaging and copy on your products, emails, and ads, plus things like the unboxing experience, the post purchase email and SMS experience, and yes of course, traditional customer support.
When to Hire a CX Leader + The Ideal CX Org Chart
Another big question that I get from a ton of the brands that I’ve worked with at Sharma Brands is “When should I hire a CX leader in my org?”
For most brands, you should have done this a long time ago. In my opinion, and also Jess’s, CX should really be part of the core founding team. The right CX leader in your org is going to help you optimize every touchpoint in your customer experience/customer journey from day 1.
Where you manufacture, what ingredients you use, what your packaging looks like, what your ads look like, what your emails look like, what your support program looks like, how you handle issues, complaints, and negative comments on social media etc are all part of customer experience!
CX, in my opinion, is like the modern day “brand director”, overseeing everything that not only goes out from the brand, but everything that even becomes a part of the brand in the first place, too.
The best CX leaders know this and are willing to go deep into the details to make all of these elements shine for your brand.
The CX Team Org Chart
As far as an org chart, In Jess’s view, there are a few critical roles all brands should consider when it comes to CX:
- Head of CX
- CX Tech Lead
- Customer Support Lead
- Community Team
- CS Agents
First is your Head of CX or Director of CX. This person will set the vision and strategy for what an exceptional CX program looks like at your brand. They will also directly manage all of the other departments/CX related roles in your org.
Next is your CX Tech Lead who is responsible for researching, testing, and implementing all of the relevant technology and tools that will empower your CX and CS workflows from end to end. These are the folks who get to decide which softwares, chat bots, and automation tools, etc that your brand should be using to make CX as seamless as possible for your company.
Next is your Customer Support Lead who oversees ticket resolution and manages your team of CS agents who spend all day interacting with and problem solving for prospective customers, existing customers, and returning customers for your brand.
Next is your Community Team. They are the folks responding to comments on social media, doing fun surprise and delight missions for new and returning customers, plus sending out countless DMs, likes, and emails, to make your community feel heard!
Last but certainly not least are your CS agents. These are the folks managing customer support tickets, exchanges and returns, compliments and complaints, and so much more. Depending on the scale of your business, you can have dozens, if not hundreds of full time or part time CS agents depending on the total volume of your brand.
Someone reading this should take this framework and build an agency doing just customer experience, in this way.
What Metrics Matter When It Comes To CX?
If you currently have a CX program in place, here’s how to know whether it’s working or not for your brand.
For customer support specifically, the basic metrics to pay attention to are total number of tickets, average response time, CSAT, and overall NPS.
Both qualitatively and quantitatively, if you are getting a ton of negative comments, DMs, and emails about your customer experience, then you know there’s a huge problem!
Conversely, if customers are sharing your posts, commenting about how much they love your brand, and giving you positive reviews on their unboxing experiences, then you know your customer experience is great.
The Best CX Teams Build Strong Feedback Loops Which Rapidly Improve Your Brand
Out of any employee or department in your org, your CX team likely has access to some of the most critical and relevant data that can help you rapidly improve your brand.
As is probably obvious, your CX and CS leaders are in the trenches every day listening to real customer feedback, compliments, and complaints. They know (often before many others in the org) when something is working and when it’s not!
As Jess puts it, the best CX teams act as a flywheel for innovation and improvement because they have so many core insights and data points about where to streamline or double down. They can gather this feedback in real-time from their day-to-day ops, then communicate it to other departments, and help your company troubleshoot issues as soon as they arise.
Don’t Give Your CX Away To AI
AI is a hot topic these days and many companies are thinking about how they should or shouldn’t use AI tech and tools going forward.
As Jess puts it, AI can certainly augment and improve your CX program, but you shouldn’t give your brand away to AI. Not only are some of the tools not ready, there still needs to be a core group of humans thinking about CX strategy, resourcing, training, managing, ops, retention, conflict resolution, and more. AI just isn’t there yet. To get great results, you need a combination of people + software to do well.
What is the CX Team Not Responsible For?
Okay, so it seems like the CX team is involved in a lot. The best CX teams are involved pre-purchase and post purchase and with all things related to customer support, but what are CX teams not responsible for?
Well…
- They are not responsible for your RoAS.
- They are not responsible for making sure the freight truck delivers your brand’s products to your 3PL on time.
- And they are not responsible for every negative comment you get on social media.
Although the CX team does a ton, they aren’t responsible for every single thing that happens in the brand. They are a crucial part of any great team but you can’t expect your CX team alone to be the only department saving the day as you scale.
Resolving Tickets Before They Ever Arise
Another unique nugget was that the best CX teams solve problems before they ever arise.
How is that possible you ask? Well it goes back to everything we discussed above.
If your CX leader has already thought through the full customer experience, they can proactively take steps to reduce tickets before they even arise.
If they think a customer might have a question, they create content and add it to the FAQ. If they think a customer might ask about a comparison chart, they have already created one and added it to your website.
If they think a customer is going to ask about the delivery status of their order, they’ve worked with the respective email and SMS teams to send proactive updates before that question ever comes up.
IMO, The magic of great CX is that you don’t even notice it’s there. If the packaging looks great, the product works as described, the emails are on point, the text messages are clear, the community managers are on brand, the FAQs are rock solid, the help center is robust, and your team is solving problems before they even exist in the customers mind. To me, that’s the definition of great CX. It’s so good that as a consumer you didn’t even realize all of the effort that went into making the full customer journey and purchase experience seamless for you.
A Story About Going Above and Beyond
One last thing I wanted to touch on before closing out is the importance of going above and beyond for your customers. I asked Jess about a time where she went above and beyond in her role at Feastibles and she shared this.
Last year when Feastibles did a Sweepstakes giveaway of 11 Tesla cars, Jess was the one who had to hand deliver these vehicles across the country.
One of the recipients wanted their car delivered at VidCon (the famous YouTube/video creator conference in LA)
Instead of the car being delivered to Los Angeles, it was ready for pickup in Sacramento.
Jess (From Chicago) had to fly to Sacramento the night before and pick up the car. The next morning while driving the vehicle to LA, she realized there were some major issues with the battery.
In real time, Jess had to go to a Tesla dealer, exchange the car, and still find a way to arrive on time to VidCon to deliver the vehicle to the sweepstakes winner. The sweepstakes winner didn’t realize all of the behind the scenes complexity of it all. Jess just found a way to deliver a magical experience for the customer that went way above and beyond.
I thought that was pretty cool and after spending time with Jess over the last couple years, I feel like CX, especially the way that she thinks about it, is so underutilized and underappreciated amongst brands. I hope you picked up 1 or 2 nuggets in today’s deep dive with Jess.
Okay, now onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Motion — The easiest way for your creative team to understand what ads are driving results for your business, in an easy-to-use dashboard.
With HOOX, we can help people with landing pages all day long, but the biggest challenge even after a page goes up, is how do we get traffic to the landing page in the first place! 95% of HOOX clients use paid social to drive traffic to their landing pages, and for a few years, I’ve always recommended people use Motion to understand their creative results.
Motion is a performance creative dashboard — think of it as the cockpit for your creative team to understand how your performance marketing is working, and what hooks, angles, and punchlines are driving better CPMs, clicks, and conversions.
Motion partnered up with Dara Denney (who’s an experience senior director of paid social at a growth agency), to create a 4 part series where Dara gives away all her creative tips, tricks and insights around paid social creative. The first (of four) parts has already gone live, but you can watch the reply here.
If you work on paid social, ad creative, or growth marketing, I highly recommend signing up for Dara’s event. It’s completely free, and even if you can’t make it live, you’ll get the recording in your inbox.
Click here to sign up for the series with Dara!
LP of the Week:
This week’s LP of the week goes to the company who’s desk I am writing this email on… Branch Furniture. Branch needed a landing page that focuses on customers who are working from home, and tired of using a duct-taped setup.
My favorite part of this page, which is a technical favorite, is the dynamic color swap that happens in the shop section of the desk and the chair. I think our copy team also did a great job with explaining and expanding on the pain points of working from home.
If you’re spending over $100k/month on paid social, book a call with us and ask for the Nik Sharma newsletter discount. Click here to book a call!
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter brought a few nuggets of value to you. I feel like I learned a lot just putting this newsletter together and spending time with Jess. Next week, I’ll be in LA for a few days, mainly at DTCx, and then at the US Open. If you’re at either, shoot me a note!
I hope you get a solid 9 hours of sleep tonight, and have an amazing upcoming week of work and weather. See you next Sunday!!