Startup Central — How to practice vulnerability in CX with Calm, Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge
Customer support performance comes down to a long-standing formula: the number of tickets resolved, the speed of resolution, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. But for lifestyle and dating apps there’s an extra layer — acknowledging and offering vulnerability. In the latest Startup Central Virtual Meetup, we asked industry leaders from Calm, Coffee Meets Bagel, and Hinge how they practice vulnerability both directly with customers and within their CX teams to earn customer trust across every touchpoint.
When Calm launched in 2012, it was one of the first meditation apps on the market. Since then, Calm has built out its library to include a wide variety of masterclasses, stories, music, and other content to help people relax and sleep better.
“Our mission is to make the world a happier and healthier place. One way we do that is with our content, while the other way is the experience we provide through customer support,” says Layna Smith, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Calm.
As Smith explains, you have to be vulnerable to develop a mindfulness practice, so vulnerability is inherent in Calm.
“Mindfulness and meditation are really about investigating yourself, investigating your beliefs, and accepting the reality that you are in,” says Smith. “And all of those things are only possible through being vulnerable with yourself or the people around you.”
Frances Brittingham, Customer Experience Manager at Calm, agrees, explaining that because vulnerability is so inherent in the content of their app, they have to recognize it as an important part of their customer experience team’s voice and values. “We encourage our support team members to express their vulnerability when working with customers,” says Brittingham.
Creating a context of trust and safety for users
At dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, Head of Customer Experience Brenda Guardado says the main focus of their platform is the interesting kinds of people you meet. But the only way for people to express themselves and connect with others is if they feel they’re in a safe space.
“We want to educate our users and we want to empower them. If you’re ever in a situation where you’re not comfortable or you see someone you know that there’s not going to be a connection with, you can always block them,” says Guardado.
One way of ensuring the safety and security of their users — or Bagels as the team calls them — is to monitor the dating app for any breach of use with machine learning. With this tool they’re able to instantly ban any users they deem as fraudulent.
Educating users about data usage
An often overlooked aspect of corporate trust and vulnerability is the treatment of user data. Calm has a small legal team that they refer to whenever users have questions about their data.
At Hinge there is an entire department dedicated to data privacy, working closely with the Match group to make sure that Hinge is compliant, building the right materials to help users understand what their rights are under DPR and CCPA, and making sure users have the ability to easily get their data.
The Hinge CX team makes in-app data downloadable for users. “By working with our data engineering team, we’ve found lots of ways to advocate for our users,” says Cutler. “It can be a daunting technical project, but we’ve been able to use our relationships with users to get these agreements pushed ahead.”
Scaling empathy and instilling vulnerability as a core support team value
Just three years ago, Hinge had a support team of two people, including Matthew Cutler, Head of Customer Experience at Hinge. At that point, the team approached empathy and vulnerability as a very one-on-one relationship. But as the company and its membership have grown, Cutler’s team has needed to support more and more users while maintaining that level of empathy.
“We don’t have as good a ratio of agents to users anymore. But what we do have is a suite of new processes and techniques to figure out which inquiries need something that is very personal, and which inquiries are more empathetically served by a quicker response,” says Cutler.
One of the ways the team accomplishes this is through a really robust self-service program. “We’re constantly revising and expanding our self-service offerings through the help center we have, through AI-assisted search, and through more and more automation and self-service portals,” says Cutler.
In terms of keeping that one-to-one ratio where it is really needed, Hinge is continually developing specific and reliable filters and integrations that let the CX team service those tickets that require one-on-one attention. To hold additional space for especially tricky tickets, the team holds weekly “peer-pong” stand up meetings, in which they bounce ideas off each other.
Want to learn more? See the full video of their talk here.
