Startup Central — How to prioritize customer experience with Handy, Freshly and Novo

Does your organization put CX first?

From the people you hire, to when and how you outsource, prioritizing CX requires a holistic approach.

In our latest Startup Central Virtual Meetup With CX Industry Leaders, we asked Brian Kale, Head of Customer Success at Novo, Devon Langston, Associate Director of Customer Experience at Handy, and Ben Segal, Associate Director of Infrastructural Efficiency to share with us insights and learnings from their experience.

Hiring & Recruiting

For smaller companies and startups, budgets are tight, and getting the hiring process right the first time is critical. Before joining Handy, Devon spent four years scaling operations at Uber and two years growing her team. She’s well aware of the importance of hiring the right people.

“I’m really passionate about hiring because it sets the foundation for your entire organization.”

— Devon Langston, Associate Director of Customer Experience at Handy

When asked what she looks for in a candidate, Devon says being customer-centric comes first. “I look for someone who sticks to their guns and will come at you and say ‘I think this policy is wrong, and here is why, because it’s harming our customer,’’” says Devon. “That’s definitely someone I want on my team.”

Other qualities she looks for are street smarts and intelligence. “It’s not worth it to limit yourself, saying ‘I need someone with a CX background, who has worked with every system,’” says Devon. “Someone who can critically think through a problem and get to a solution you feel comfortable with…I think that trumps anyone who has years and years of CX experience.”

Brian echoed this, saying “I myself look for bartenders, waiters, service industry professionals — these people often have a lot of hidden talents.”

Another quality in demand when it comes to recruitment? Creativity.

“Sometimes in CX you have to think of creative ways to problem solve, so when we hear ‘created my own board game,’ or ‘developed my own video game’ that stuff is great for us,” says Ben. “We figure we can train someone like that quickly. But we have a harder time finding someone who is a little more empathetic, or has that creativity bug.”

Balancing Outsourcing: BPO vs. In House

As small businesses and startups begin to scale, one of the biggest challenges they face is how and when to outsource.

At Freshly, they decided to “tiptoe” into the issue, as they weren’t quite sure what direction they wanted to pursue at first. Starting with just 13 people in a little office in New York, the company soon ran into problems handling its customers on the west coast. To better cover these time zones, they expanded with a contact center in downtown Phoenix. While this helped, the company was still facing the issue of an overnight backlog. “It became obvious that we were going to need to look offshore to get 24/7 coverage,” says Ben.

Freshly started with 10 people broken into 2 shifts — with 5 agents and a supervisor per shift. “We were lucky enough to find a partner who was willing to take a shot with us and start really small,” said Ben. “Since then, we’ve grown to where we’ve had 50–60 people at one BPO, and even partnered with a second BPO to compare metrics and see how they were performing against each other.”

Freshly is now mostly BPO, while maintaining a small contact center in Phoenix and a remote team in New York.

Devon echoes this cautious approach to BPOs, while also emphasizing their utility.

“The one thing I think when comparing inhouse vs. BPO is whether or not I want to incubate something and how close I need to keep it to the core business owners,” says Devon. “Once I have that comfort I’m like ‘you know, the BPOs are made to do these things and they’re fantastic at it, let’s have them just go and crank it out’’”

Prioritizing CX: Cost vs. Quality vs. Efficiency

The perennial challenge for CX is keeping costs low while maintaining high quality and efficiency. “There is a natural tension there,” says Devon. “My interview question for managerial positions is ‘tell me about cost, quality, and efficiency.’ I want to see that they understand that the relationship between these three things is naturally tense, you pull one string and the others move. You really have to prioritize.”

To manage this, Devon recommends bringing this problem to the attention of leadership. “Ultimately CX is just this downstream function at times,” says Devon. “And sometimes you do need guidance from other areas of the organization that have a better understanding of the business as a whole.

Ben emphasized the importance of not getting too distracted by numbers. “We try to look at the root of the issue,” he says. “Instead of saying ‘hey we’re giving away $20, can we give them $15 and still have them happy’ we look at why we had to give away that $20 in the first place and try to fix that.”

Driving Customer Obsession

Although customer experience is obviously the priority for CX teams, it can be a challenge to make CX top of mind for the rest of the company.

Devon recommends doing it through the data. “I tell them ‘hey, whenever you break this it affects my team in this way, and here’s the cost behind it,” says Devon. “I’ll tell CX stories with CSAT scores or tweets that come in — either positive or negative.”

Ben takes a similar approach. “Every Monday morning we would do a company update,” he says. “The VP and I read 2 really great comments and 2 really negative comments to the whole company. And at the end different people from different teams would come up after and say ‘hey what happened there, what can we do?’”

Want to learn more? See the full video of their talk here.