CX as an Entertainment Department
Join us for a captivating session as Shray Joshi explores the innovative concept of Customer Experience (CX) as an "entertainment department." Discover how proactive engagement and customer delight can transform CX into a source of entertainment for your audience. Shray will share valuable insights on how to create memorable, smile-inducing experiences that build customer loyalty and set your brand apart.
(upbeat music)
- And welcome to our next session with Shray.
Shray from Good Peeps.
Shray, how are you doing today, my brother?
- Good man, thanks for having me on.
- Oh dude, thanks for taking the time.
I know how busy your schedule is.
I think first thing I wanna call out,
and I said this earlier on,
Forbes 30 under 30, I think I just saw that.
I think it came out just last week, I believe.
But congrats dude, that's a great award there.
- Yeah, it's been a cool week to say it last.
- And so I have it up, so I have to ask.
So here it says, the company scales
from one to 10 employees this year,
and it's generated at 100 million in revenue,
and over 60 million monthly views on social media channels.
I know you probably don't like doing this,
but give me like 30 seconds a minute of like, why?
Like why did they pick you?
Like tell me why you have been so successful.
It's okay to be used as a lawyer now.
It's me asking you a question.
- I think it's, so like backtrack it
and make this way longer than 30 seconds is like,
I do not have a traditional marketing background,
and this list didn't go to advertising the school,
then learn how to do PR pitches, any of that bullshit.
I actually used to be like nutritional biochemist,
who is like doing data research analytics all the time.
And so got like really clear with just being able to
understand like what's bullshit,
what's not like working on things like pretty objectively.
But like, unlike I think a lot of the other agencies
or a lot of the other business owners,
I was gonna like born through the brand side.
So I used to work at a lot of companies.
So I was the marketing manager at a company
called Chacha Macha, it was like this awesome shop
in New York and LA, you know, in the year that we were there,
you know, they did like crazy clubs like Kith, Nike,
Versace, Louis Vuitton, like all these other guys.
Then moved over and was the head of marketing
and growth at a company called NUGS,
which we rebranded, called it "Dissimulate."
Built out the growth, the acquisition,
the marketing functions there.
And then was at Helping Kombucha,
that like Kombucha brand that's in like every single store
in the United States.
And so helped lead up all of digital
as well as growth up that business.
And so kind of like built all of my relationships
and kind of name as just like this operator
who just like was obsessed with working all the time.
And then I think when we moved over
and I decided to start my own company,
it was like, hey, like I told you before,
I said, I'm not the greatest at like PR
and like short form content and like being
like a Twitter thought lord.
But like what I'm really good at is like,
I understand marketing and I think that people,
especially now with like how, you know,
recession is going and all that.
People just want to work with people
that can impact their business in like a really meaningful way.
And so like good peeps, we've never once pitched a brand.
We've never once, you know, outreach to a brand.
It's all just been through intros,
through our other brands that we work with
because like they like the work that we do.
And so rather than relying on like top of funnel marketing,
like any great business, like if you have a strong word of mouth,
that just means you have a great product.
I think we've just built a good product with good peeps.
- That's great.
I think that, I guess the way that I see it too
is I personally love reading books about people
that have been in the weeds before.
And you could tell the author is completely different
than a book Byron by no offense to consultants out there.
But someone that's outside talking about the inside stuff.
And that's, I would say like that's how I would compare with that
is that you've been there, like you know and you're driven.
So again, congrats to you Shrei.
- Thank you.
- I want to take this to the next topic,
which is I recall you saying,
I think it was on a previous podcast,
but you talked about customer experience
as an entertainment almost center.
I guess first question for you is why do you view that?
Is that one, is that true?
Do you think about that sometimes
and why do you view it as an entertainment center?
- Yeah, I think that like with CX so much of it is people
just going, we need to be putting out fires yesterday.
And so it's super reactive.
And so the output of the person who's behind the desk
you're responding to tickets has the mindset
of someone who's being reactive, right?
So it's how do I respond to as many tickets humanly possible?
And so I could put out the fires I need to be put out
'cause the house is burning down
because it's black Friday,
so every Monday and we sold like 75 times a unit
so that we didn't expect and you know,
our shipping is behind, et cetera.
And so like for me, I always thought of CX as like,
similar to social DMs, someone is willing enough
to reach out to you directly the brand to go,
"Hey, either where's my shit?"
Or, "I have this question," or whatever have it be.
And so like they've now experienced all of your content,
your creative, your website, your tone of voice,
your imagery, et cetera.
But this is like really the first time
that you have to really be about your shit
because you could have this amazing experience
but your customer support team is just,
hello, Brian, order number, this is,
like the soul of the brand dies
and like the whole kind of experience dies there
because it's now the first unique one-to-one touchpoint
that's going on.
And so when I'm talking with our customer service
and support teams, it's treat marketing like,
or treat CX like it's a marketing channel.
Like the people that you should be interacting with
should either have like such a great experience
or this unique experience where they actually felt
like they were talking to someone who gave a shit,
they were being funny, they made the conversation lighter,
they educated you about the brand and the product
and the way that you didn't know,
they went above and beyond in some way.
But it now becomes a marketing channel.
People start talking about this amazing experience
that they had with the brand.
It humanizes the brand right
'cause they now have this one-to-one interaction.
And so like what we end up doing is that
with all of our brands that we work with,
when we're going through CX,
we actually put them through the brand training
so they can speak to the brand similar
to how our social team does, our ad team does, et cetera.
So I call it entertainment 'cause it's like,
"Hey guys, have fun, the customer will feel that."
It won't be as much of a transactional moment
as they probably get with every other brand
that exists on the market today.
- Now do you though have to go through a branding
almost exercise because it probably needs to be in parallel
with whatever the components in the emotions
that are coming out of the marketing side of the brand.
Do I have that right?
- Yeah, I think it's like if you can convey enough
of what the brand isn't,
you should let people kind of fill in what it is.
- Interesting.
- And I feel that great CX people
are people that are great writers.
Like they just inherently understand human emotion,
tonality, et cetera.
Like it doesn't take a PhD thesis in brand marketing
to understand how an underwear brand might talk to you
if you have a shitty experience about your underwear
and how it got stolen.
I think it's just like half of the brand training
is like, do you have common sense high emotional equity
and the other half of it is like,
can you use a ton of voice that sounds like an actual person
not a robot?
- That's so interesting.
And I feel like that's almost I'll call it a hot take
where I do think CX is,
the greens or it should be leaning more towards
the creative side than anything right now.
But let me kind of take a step back.
So I checked out some of your brands, Chomps, Caged.
And I will say that on the marketing side,
these websites, clearly from my perspective,
job well done, it's clearly like, wow,
the brand is coming right at, you know the brand,
you know the emotions and you are sharing that
with whoever's visiting.
When does, you were talking about CX as the extension.
And I guess my question is, in your examples,
when you're diving into the brands and creating this,
do you think about CX afterwards?
Or are you actually thinking about, all right,
here's how I'll see X plays a part of this
while the same time as you're recreating the website
and thinking about the branding components
and rebuilding it?
- The right answer should be, I think about it in the start
and I think about the end result at the kick.
But what I end up actually doing in practice
most of the time is, I don't even bucket CX
as like a separate thing.
It's much more just what's our tone of voice
and how does that come to life.
And there are a bunch of ways that a customer experiences
our tone of voice is that through the website,
is that through emails, is that through social,
is that through responding to the DMs,
is that through responding to ad comments,
is that responding to CX tickets.
And so for me, I kind of just look at it more as a,
how does our tone of voice translate into the channel
versus a really thoughtful exercise of like,
and this is how it translates.
Or let's have our CX be the pivotal pillar
that we then build these insights off of.
I wish I could say that I was really smart and do that.
But really it's more about just like,
how do we make it so that when we're talking to someone,
no matter what channel it is, it's an awesome experience.
- Yeah.
There are, wait, I'm gonna say, all right fine.
I think there are way too many tools out there.
And there's a lot more tools than I think
almost challenges today.
How does good peeps think about utilizing technology
to solve some of the CX challenges?
Is it at the forefront?
Or is it like, hey, regardless of the tool,
tool agnostic, like we gotta figure out some key issues
first outside of just utilizing a tool?
- Anything that does one of two things
well will always use.
One, it saves time from repetitive tasks.
An example of that would be like this shipping insurance
company that I were not, I'm not an advisor to,
but this shipping insurance company that we work with
that we love, like order protection.
Like what they'll do is that they'll basically say,
hey, you're gonna get a bunch of people.
We're gonna ensure a lot of your orders
for these expensive ass products.
You're buying a $500 hex-clad order.
You have shipping insurance.
And so rather than your CX team having to deal with
like the tickets and like, where's my stuff, et cetera,
we'll take that on and we'll go through the brand training,
et cetera.
And that'll be a redundant task that actually buys back
my team's time.
We'll sign up for stuff like that because it's like,
there are some of these repetitive things that you could do
by just teaching other teams how to do it.
And it doesn't require rocket science to be able to
communicate with customers.
Like common sense gets you 80% of the way.
They're 90% of the time.
Or you'll have something like post-scripted,
like post-script sales, right?
And so they'll use this team that's in, I think,
Texas or whatever, rather be to basically one-to-one
conversations with the brands or with our customers
and basically help them to get beyond just the
consideration phase but go into the conversion phase.
And so you'll kind of see that we break it out
into two buckets where it's like,
is this a repetitive task that can be taught?
And with enough common sense, it can be kind of managed?
Or is this something that requires a one-to-one touch
that I don't want to build the team out for?
But this tool is really helpful because it helps drive
efficiency in the overall business.
So very rarely do you find things in bucket number two.
Most of the time you find things in bucket number one.
And for the things that are in bucket one, it's like,
can you offload the work off of my team without sacrificing
the actual experience that we have with the customer?
Because too many times, like you say, you just start
like offloading everything into machines.
And like all of a sudden you're getting like eight texts
going like, hello Brian, you're, I'm going to keep using
Hexclad because I just bought one from my mom
so it's just top of mine.
But you left your Hexclad in the cart.
Click here to buy blah, blah, blah.
And like, sure, it works.
It has impact but in my eyes it completely kills
the whole branding experience.
And so it's like that trade off.
Like to me, that like small amount of realized revenue
is not worth the machining of the business and like the
automation of the business because it kills it.
So we'll use tech as much as we can.
I just find that most tech sucks at acting like humans
and like trying to act like a person.
So on that note, how important is the human element in CX?
In your opinion.
And do you think that there always will be that human
element moving forward?
I think that AI is doing a great job of starting
to sound like humans.
But when it comes to anything that's a more complex problem,
I see it just failing instantly.
And so I think that there are big buckets where you can
remove the human element to it.
Like, for example, where's my order?
That's most CX people's ticket problems.
And that could be something that's offloaded to something
that's AI.
But if it's like, hey, AI has already said, where's my
order?
And someone's like, I'm not happy with this.
I need you guys to do XYZ.
When it requires that kind of human element to it, where
it's like, hey, it's now moved beyond just this kind of copy
and paste cookie cutter response.
I think it'll always require a human element.
Look at fast food.
Look at a lot of these dining establishments.
They have tried to move everything into those annoying
ass kiosks that you just click in a bunch of people
have touched in.
It's like super grimy and dirty, but whatever,
because it's easy.
At the end of the day, if you want anything that's not out
of the box in terms of a solution or a response,
you'll end up just going to the person at the front desk
going, hey, I actually just make my order with you,
because I don't want to click 75 buttons to figure out
what I need.
And so I think that there's going to be always this element
on direct to consumer, where it's like, hey, at some point,
there needs to be someone to catch this customer journey
or this customer reach out.
Because automation will not solve the irrational
human experience in my eyes.
Think about a business that has been trying to solve everything
through automation for a while now,
is like all things like call centers, right?
You go and call American Express.
You go call DoorDash because your orders messed up.
You go call Verizon because you need
to go and update some of your billing info.
These guys have figured out that there are certain parts
of the journey where it's like, hey, this
could be managed by a robot, and this could just
be managed because it's very in and out task.
You want to update your credit card information,
put your number in.
You want to update your shipping information
for your product that you just got delivered
or that just got shipped out, put in the right address here.
But for almost everything else, people
prefer to talk to people because it just gives them
that sense of confidence, that what they're looking for
to be resolved is actually being dealt with by someone
who cares.
I think that's something that AI will never fully take over.
It's interesting if you look at even just the last few years,
I've talked to several brands as well where they go from,
OK, they're scaling a brand.
They start to go to a BPO and they're
going to outsource everything.
And then they see the customer experience drop.
And then they go back in-house and then it gets expensive.
And now some of these brands I've talked to
are doing a little bit of both.
That's again just what I've seen.
But I'm curious if you've noticed the same type of patterns
and I guess is our next step to that?
Do you think that this will change?
You think it'll be a mix of outsourcing and keeping
agents in the house?
Do you have recommendations to your client?
I think 100%.
It'll move that way.
But I think that there's this classic thing that's
going on in Silicon Valley in a lot of tech
where it's just the word AI makes everyone lose their shit.
And they're like, oh my god, it's this crazy genie in a bottle.
But most of the tools in practice today,
I don't think that these language models understand--
I think these language models do a great job
of understanding output for very broad conversations.
Give me an article that talks about five reasons why
you should be drinking protein powder every day.
It's going to digesting a lot of info
and just regurgitating it.
But when it comes to these unique experiences
where there's a lot of different factors that go into it
from tonality, who the person is, et cetera,
I just don't think at this point there
is a tool that solves for that and the way
that the customer is expecting their problems to be solved for.
But I think what you're saying, the blended side, which
is like, hey, people ask where the order is?
Throw that into AI all day.
Because all they need to do is just grab.
Exactly.
And so I just think you have to figure out what solutions
or which moments that solution works
and not just trying to throw it everywhere that you can
because I can very quickly see that just
pissing off your full customer base.
Right.
Right.
Before the call, I asked if you had some subscription brands.
And I know you do.
It's not the majority of brands, but you
do have some subscription brands.
And I wanted to ask about that.
If there was a challenge in retention, getting customers
to purchase again and again and again, do you have any--
I'll call it a formula or any sort of path
that you usually go down of like, well, first,
we got to look at this.
And second, we got to look at this part
of the customer journey.
And can you share any of those insights with us?
Yeah, we use this tool called lifetime lane.
I think it's really cheap and close to free.
It's not expensive whatsoever.
And it gives you basically what you're
looking for to understand why your product is not
doing as well as you're looking for it to do.
What lifetime we let you do is it looks at cohorts, cohort
trends, repurchase rate data, time between purchase,
repurchase the same product, repurchase different products,
et cetera.
And so what we'll do to understand and kind of dissect
subscriptions per se is one, go to the most common denominator.
Most people end up canceling their subscription
from month one to month two.
That's where most of the churn happens.
Cool.
Make sure that you have a unsub subscription survey.
Of why did you do that?
And in those questions, have one or two things.
Either, hey, this is something that you're
canceling your subscription for.
But by the way, we actually solve for that with x, y, z.
Do you want to make sure you keep your subscription?
Because there might be just be an education gap.
Or two, it's, hey, your product is not what I wanted it to be.
Your pricing is too high.
You sent me too much of this.
I don't need enough of--
going and just looking at that month one to two churn.
And understanding why people are kind of churning
is the simplest way to go and figure out
why your product is not doing as well as you want.
And then second is we look at time between purchase
for a lot of our brands, because we are a consumable business.
And so for example, just because I have it in front of me,
I think that these guys are caged.
On the back of our product, it has 24 servings.
And so if you're taking about a scoop of protein per day,
this should last you about a month.
And so if it's not that, then cool.
It's really clear that there are a couple of things going on.
Either one, we're not doing a good enough job of educating
them on how to use the product and why to use the product.
Because third, the customer will buy it and use it the way
that they want to.
But we need to get there as the educator of why
you should be using this frequency.
Two, they've bought, but they haven't bought a really long time.
And that's that time between purchase.
And they just buy the next time we're on sale.
So great.
That's a pricing problem.
Or three, we look at their initial order purchase.
And it's a huge promo.
And we just go, great.
It just wasn't a solid quality demo.
So we just-- we honestly just spend time between those two
guys.
And the simple answer tends to be the right answer, which is just
look at what your customers are saying.
What are they telling you?
And just digest it.
Because you see that so many of the times
you work with these brands that have these fancy,
nasty tableau breakdowns and these fucking NPS scores.
And you're like, when was the last time you talked with 50
of your top customers that recently turned and asked them why?
And that'll get you 80%, 90% of the way there.
And so going back to like original OG founder,
common sense mentality, I just think
that people tend to overproductize and overprocess things
that in practice tend to be much simpler than they appear.
Now, do you have any--
let me take a step back.
I think what's really fascinating to me is you answered it
from--
and this is not what's fascinating.
But you answered it from a calendars perspective that's
really involved with product where it's like, well,
the product-- it tells to me like you're saying,
the product or the pricing.
It's the service that people are leaving.
Now, have you changed--
or do you have examples if you work with brands that
have shifted any sort of strategies
to get to the point of where maybe it's
like kind of disguising a little bit of the product
or the pricing?
And again, I say that because--
let's use Cages as an example.
And I might be wrong here, but I look at the website.
I look at everything that Cages is doing to sell me
on that first purchase.
And then, is there anything that happens after that,
after two months, three months, that you're
doing to keep on selling them again to repurchase or repurchase?
Yeah.
I mean, I think Cages is a pretty unfair example to use
because I can answer this forever, which is like,
what's great about supplement brands is that one part of your job
is to inspire the purchase.
But the second part of your job is
to become a part of their daily lifestyle.
Yeah.
So the way that you do that is by one, obviously,
educating them on the product.
And so post-purchase, like what we do a fantastic job of,
is like, Caged wants to own two buckets--
education and inspiration.
And so what do we do is like, we have the greatest quality
product that is on the market, but every single fucking
founder says that because they're all
drinking their own Kool-Aid.
And so how do we build that value is that we focus on education.
Hey, health and wellness is really complicated, complex.
And most people nowadays are so confused
by what they're being told on a daily basis.
They feel like they need a master's thesis
to even understand what to eat anymore.
And so what do we do at Caged?
We promise that we will deliver to you
really sound research-backed science on how
to live a better lifestyle with our products being
a part of that lifestyle.
And so rather than focusing on exclusively the product,
we focus on the lifestyle.
And so we educate you on both how you should use this stuff,
but also how you should be living your broader life
to become a better and healthier you.
So that builds that trust in a longer term,
because now you're no longer just buying our protein isolate.
You're buying from Caged, the actual business
that you now trust.
So that's fucking one to build and repurchase.
And the other is like, think about any higher end brand.
In my eyes, Nike, which you have left me right behind you.
You think about like a Starbucks.
You think about like any of these affordable luxuries.
They do this great job of just kind of making you feel good.
Like by you owning the product, by you subscribing
to the mission, to the vision, to the values of this business,
you look at this product with like an angle of like joy
and like you're just super proud to be a part of this thing.
I mean, a lot of people who drink AG1 feel that way, right?
They're in the end crowd, because they take their greens
every day.
And it's in this nice glass bottle.
It's super premium and it's fantastic.
It's a great experience.
And so for Caged, we then focus our emotional output
on inspiration.
And so great, we've educated you about the product.
We've shown you how it goes into your day to day lifestyle.
Now, like let's now focus the rest of our time
getting you to want to be better.
Like Caged's tagline has never stopped evolving.
And so like we now then push that into our actual content
strategy beyond purchase one, which is talking about,
you know, putting them up for hydration challenges,
putting them up for like what we'll do is that you
onboard to the brand will shoot you texts in the morning
of just like these quotes that we find super inspirational.
We'll put together fitness challenges
to get the community to activate.
We'll work with celebrities and creators
that you think are cool and interesting,
that then talk about their struggles and challenges
and their kind of mental blockers.
And so the goal of all of this is like, cool,
let the product do the speaking for itself.
But also like, what if we just doubled down?
And like half the time you saw Caged,
we just kind of made you feel better.
In this instance, it was what the action of like move
is like what we always try to kind of convey.
And so every time you see us, you now think about
wanting to be better, wanting to do better,
getting inspired, feeling like you're a part of the community.
You're now not just exclusively relying on your product
to drive subsequent purchases.
I think a lot of direct consumer brands
completely miss the mark on that.
- Gosh, that's good.
So let me just clarify really quick.
Post-purchase education is one element of this.
And post-purchase inspiration is another point of it, right?
Do I have to? - Exactly.
Exactly. - Like I think--
- That's good.
- A brand that we don't work with that I fucking love
and my wallet can back it is like Jolie,
the shower head.
And like what do they do?
They educate the hell out of you on like what the filter is,
what it filters out, how your water is disgusting, et cetera.
But you know what they also spend a lot
of their product messaging on?
You're gonna have these great hair skin nails,
your hair is gonna feel healthy,
your skin's gonna feel better.
Like it's these outputs where you go,
"Oh, I wanna feel like that.
"I want to be that.
"That's exactly what I'm looking for."
I think they do a fantastic job of getting you
hyped up about something that used to be like the most boring
thing in your house, which is like one showerhead
are you using?
You now feel like one, you know more than all of your friends
about the water that you have that's going into your house.
And then two, you could say with confidence
that like my hair health is way better than yours
because of XYZ.
And that's that like inspiration of like feeling better,
looking better, whatever happened to be.
- Yeah.
I mean this actually goes in a full loop because
the attendees here, what has been talked about a lot
that I keep on hearing is celebrating customers.
And it's celebrating your customers too because
if we all look in our inboxes, email inboxes,
like the, let's be honest, like the world's a tough place
right now.
There's like a lot going on.
And if you look at your inbox right now,
it's all just marketing messages by this,
by this, by this from certain brands.
And there's just not much of just one education
that you have just said, two inspiration
or three just celebration of just like,
hey, congrats, something happened or with the brand
or you did this.
And if we could just tell the people listening,
those three things to focus on,
I think just retention in general,
my assumption is will change drastically
if you focus on those things.
Would you agree?
Is there anything I'm missing there?
- Absolutely.
I think a perfect example is like we have
a underwear brand called culprit.
And we just changed our first email onboarding
or post purchase email from,
you're gonna be getting this order
and it's gonna be shipped by then to,
you just made the fucking best decision of your life
that is literally the phrase that we use.
And if you then look at the subsequent repurchase rates,
open rates, click through rates of the customers
that came in through that welcome series, that's great.
I'm actually stealing that from you as the celebration side.
It is a complete game changer.
I think that so many of the times people are just like,
all right, thanks for buying our product.
Do you wanna buy another one at 20% off?
And you're like, no shit that your subscription business
is failing.
Yeah, sell not just the product, but sell the brand.
And if you don't have a brand, then fucking get one.
It helps LTV just as much as a good product does.
- Well, I think that's a good place to end here, right?
Thank you so much for your time, man.
I really appreciate it.
Shay, Joe, she, hey, check that out.
And again, congrats on the Forbes 30 and the 30.
- Thank you, man.
- Yeah, thanks for having me.
- Of course.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)