Inside the CX of Gordon Ramsay's Favorite Cookware Brand
The Juice is sizzling this week because we got Michael Ludwig on the pod. Michael is the Head of Customer Service at Hexclad, a chef-grade cookware brand for your home. In fact, it's Gordon Ramsay favorite cookware brand. Yes, he's the famous hot-headed chef from the Food Network's Hell's Kitchen, so it's no surprise his favorite cookware brand would have incredible customer experience. Michael shares how his background in CX and time at major brands like Lexus have helped him build the ultimate CX playbook. We discuss why it's hard to instill surprise & delight mentality into CX agents, the importance of going above and beyond for the customer, when to break the rules, the big change Hexclad's CX team made on their busiest day of the year, and lots more!
(upbeat music)
- My name is Jess Servion,
and I'm super excited to bring you my new podcast,
The Juice With Jess.
This podcast is gonna be about everything
in your customer's journey.
We're talking acquisition, awareness, making that purchase,
retaining that customer, bringing them back around,
and everything in between.
This is gonna be all about delivering dope brand experiences
and talking to some really amazing people
who are in the customer experience space,
the marketing space, and everything in between.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome back to another episode of The Juice With Me, Jess.
I am your host, and I am joined this week
with Michael from HexCloud.
He is the head of customer service.
Michael, tell the audience who you be, dog.
- Well, thank you for the introduction.
I'm Michael from HexCloud,
and I've been with HexCloud for coming on two years now.
Prior to HexCloud, I was at a direct response marketing
company.
Prior to that, I was at Hulu and Toyota.
All companies have absolutely nothing to do
with one another, which is interesting.
- As it goes.
- But all of them had a focus in customer experience
and customer support and put a emphasis on that.
And I really get behind organizations
that put value in delivering great experiences
for our customers.
And so it was a natural progression for me
to move over to HexCloud as we grew the organization.
- Yeah, I think that you have a really awesome path
because we're very similar in that sense of like,
I came from B2B and then all of a sudden I met ECOM,
but really and worked at Feastables, right?
Like a Feastable and started Feastables
is customer experience.
But I think what's really awesome about our past is like,
we worked for these organizations that cared so much
about customer experience that helped shape our careers
to be able to deliver these really dope customer service
and moments in these E-commerce brands.
And I think it's really underrated.
Like I think people don't realize like,
I think a lot of times like E-com customer service
or experience, like a lot of people hire within
that like the D2C world.
But I think look at like, I'm not trying to like hype us up,
but I am going to hype us up a little bit.
I even like kind of look at us, like we have these like
crazy different backgrounds and then led, you know,
these really awesome customer service departments, right?
Like at the core of who we are is that customer experience.
And I think that's just really fucking dope.
- Yeah, it was interesting because I didn't know
a single thing about the E-commerce space
before coming to HexCloud.
And I've really, really enjoyed it.
But like at the core of it, like you mentioned,
is our philosophy on delivering these great experiences.
I remember when I was at Toyota, there was a,
when they were starting to have some recall issues,
they realized that they needed a social media presence.
And so they took me from the customer service side.
They saw I had a media background and they put me in there
and there was nothing written.
There was no playbook for us to deliver a great experience.
And so I took that freedom and created just different ways
that we could engage with our customers.
And I remember this one specifically where I had a customer,
Alexis owner that had checked in on Four Square
when that was a thing at a Starbucks Square.
- Oh my God.
- A Starbucks location.
And I had made this Twitter list, a private Twitter list
of all Alexis owners that I had engaged with in the past.
He checked in at Starbucks.
I was like, how can I make this experience even better for him?
And so I quickly called that Starbucks location,
said, hey, you should have a mail walking in.
He looks like he's in his 30s to 40s.
He has this color hair, his name is Keir.
And I remember like at that time they were writing the names
on the cups of coffee.
And I said his name's Keir.
I'd like, this is gonna sound strange,
but I'd like to give you my Starbucks Gold Card number.
And I'd like to buy his cup of coffee for him.
And just let him know that we at Alexis
appreciate him as owner.
And not even 10 minutes later, I see this tweet
that comes out that says, oh my God,
my car company just bought my cup of coffee.
I will own nothing but Lexus's from here on out.
And that got retweeted.
He sent it to us followers, obviously.
He had about, I wanna say, 2,400 followers at that time.
He retweeted it.
One of the bloggers that we had engaged with in the past,
that was also Alexis owner saw it, retweeted it.
So at the end of the day, this literal $3 cup,
$3 cup of coffee, garnered around 25,000 impressions.
- Yeah.
- And it's just the simple things.
It's like the natural things that you,
you wanna do to just make someone's experience
that much better.
- No, absolutely.
I mean, it doesn't matter like what type of company you're in,
right?
You could be a luxury brand, you could be a snack brand,
whatever it is, right?
Like making your customers feel special
is so important into their service
and their experience journey, you know?
- 100%.
- Yesterday, 'cause I'm in LA right now, right?
I don't naturally live here,
nor do I live in Chicago half the time.
But yesterday I was at Airwon, right?
And I've been really obsessed with Airwon lately,
like while here.
And I think it's like, oh, it's a whole social thing.
It honestly is, and I get it.
It's like really expensive, all this stuff, right?
And it pains you inside to like spend the amount of money
that you do on a smoothie.
But I've been, I go and I spend that money on the suits.
Right, 'cause I wanna experience it, right?
So this really dope thing happened though.
So the parking lot at the location that we were at
was really small, so we had to go and park in like block a car
and then you have to leave your car
with the parking lot attendant, right?
Not honestly, not really even a big hassle.
Like, okay, completely understand.
Like I'm from customer experience, I get it, right?
So we're in the store, we get the things,
we like even like grab food,
we're sitting there for a while, whatever, right?
And in eating food, and then we come back to the car
and there's snacks in the car.
There's like a snack pack and two drinks
and like some lip balms, right?
And like brands that like I've never heard of,
but I thought that one, that was a dope sampling opportunity
for those brands.
Two, 'cause you go to the store
and you're spending so much money,
every single detail of that store is so on point,
including the fact that if they have to move your car
and it's an inconvenience to you,
here's some snacks on us because we're a grocery store.
- Love it.
- That is a dope customer experience
that is like the smallest thing.
And like now, like granted, again, all right,
everyone is very expensive, right?
But now if I'm thinking about the experience that I had,
like there was no piece of that experience
that was terrible is the point.
- Exactly, and you know, they made you feel appreciated
and valued as a consumer and a customer.
And made you think about this experience
that you probably wouldn't have thought about otherwise,
right?
You mentioned that you didn't have any hesitation
in leaving your keys with this attendant, right?
- Yeah.
- And they created this experience for you
that if they didn't create this experience,
you would have never even thought about
them possibly moving your car,
maybe they didn't move your car
and you wouldn't have any concern with that.
But also they're now just creating this experience
where you're like, hey, they went above and beyond for me.
And I love that because I'm a firm believer in
like you might not think about that smoothie again.
Like you might think about like the damage
it did on your pocketbook.
- Oh, absolutely.
- But the thing that you're gonna remember
is that experience that you had with the parking lot.
- Yeah.
- And it's gonna make you be like,
hey, if I have to go, if I'm gonna be in LA again,
- I'm gonna go to Airwan.
- Yeah.
- I'm gonna go, exactly.
- And I did post it online.
I actually did post it on LinkedIn.
In the thread of I'm back at Airwan again,
but you know, whatever.
- Yeah, no, I think it's the little things
and it doesn't matter if you're like a luxury brand
or you know, non-luxury type of like,
I don't know what diaper brand, right?
Like it doesn't matter.
I think it's really important to take care of your customers
and like make them feel surprised and delighted sometimes
because those things will go a long way.
And especially if they end up on social media
and the amount of impressions that that can generate
for your company.
- Right.
And the other thing that a lot of organizations
sometimes don't take the time to think about
is that every touch point that you have
with a customer is important.
- Absolutely.
- Right?
And Airwan's taken the time to think about,
hey, this parking lot attendant is a touch point.
- Absolutely.
- Right.
And so whenever you have those opportunities,
we should be thinking about
how do we make this experience that much better?
- Yeah.
I love that story.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's switch gears a little bit.
I mean, the man, the myth, the legend
who leads customer experience at HexCloud.
And for anybody who doesn't know what HexCloud is,
actually, why don't we just start there?
What is HexCloud?
- So HexCloud started as a hybrid cookware company.
We have a pretty unique product that infuses
the best of non-stick cookware with stainless steel.
And it's an amazing product that at the end of the day,
we want our guests, our consumers
to feel like they can do anything
in the kitchen with their cookware.
We wanna empower the consumer to get creative,
to use our cookware.
Like, yes, it's pretty.
But at the end of the day, we design our cookware
so that it gets used.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And it's a rather unique product.
- Yeah, it's a beautiful product.
I am very grateful to have HexCloud,
knife and pan.
So going back into your experience, right?
And just leading customer service,
customer experience, like,
how has your social media background from previously,
let inform your CX strategy at HexCloud?
- I love that question.
So for me, one of the,
we talked about this earlier,
but what I really gained about,
what I really gained in social media
was the knowledge and understanding that 90%
of what you do on social media should be focused on listening.
- Mm-hmm.
- Right, that other 10% is engagement and responding to.
Because if you're not listening to what your consumers are saying,
then you're failing.
You're not bringing that information back to the organization
and empowering decisions based off
of how your consumers using your product.
And so at HexCloud,
one of the things that was most important to me
when I came into HexCloud was,
how do we organize this data from our consumers
and build it in a digestible manner
that anyone within our organization can access, right?
And so a lot of what I did in the first year
I was at HexCloud was thinking about
what is the best backend structure to collect this data?
What is the best way to receive this data?
And then what is the best way that I can report this data out
back to the organization?
At every one of those touch points,
I think about who my consumer is, right?
So when a customer reaches out to support,
obviously it's that end user.
When it's my product team asking me for feedback
on a specific product,
my consumer is my product team now.
And so how do I get this information back
to my consumer in a way that is easy for them
that there's no speed bumps or blockers
in preventing me getting the answers to them?
Does that make sense?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think what I think is really interesting
is that in a lot of, I see this a lot,
like a lot of like CX support, service leaders
don't really look at social.
Like they do, but it also lives
in a different department, right?
- Yep.
- And I think that that channel is so important
from like a feedback perspective
and to quantitate it and qualitative, right?
And add it into like a feedback report, right?
So it does make sense, it absolutely makes sense.
And I think that like we can deep dive in it,
there's so many tools out there,
but there's so many different ways of doing it.
It's also like none of it is clean.
It is so not clean.
But the data from all of these channels,
not just the people coming to you,
but the people that are outside of you
that are like on Twitter or TikTok
on these other places are so important
because those people who are the loudest
are not gonna always come and write into customer support.
- Correct.
- You know?
And so like gathering that data
and being very data focused is so important.
- Yep.
- We're in a feedback loop, you know?
- Yeah, one of the other things that we did was
we prioritized social media.
You know, social media isn't going away.
- Right.
- And so at HexCloud, we have our traditional contact channels,
email form, SMS,
but then we also have social media, right?
And we have a social media marketing team,
but we also have a dedicated social media,
social support team.
And we try and,
while we may not monitor all of our social feeds
on our dedicated help desk platform,
anything that ultimately impacts the customer
from a product perspective gets funneled back
into our help desk so that we have this closed loop system
on being able to accurately report data
back to the organization.
- Right.
Absolutely.
- I think honestly, we can't even stress it enough.
Like feedback loops are just so important
to bring back into the rest of the company.
These symbols was the same way.
I mean, I had to invest in a lot of tools
and we talked about it,
but I like to be a little tool agnostic around here.
But I had certain tools that I utilized for listening,
for key words, all of these things, right?
And would add that information on a weekly basis
into my feedback report.
And I just think it's so valuable.
You know, I'm really curious
because not every social review
or comment is positive, right?
How do y'all deal with like bad reviews
that you might see on TikTok that never end up in your,
like not even just on a feedback loop perspective,
but from a support perspective.
Like what does that look like?
- So the way that we've structured HexCloud
is our social support team
and our social support manager is classified.
The things that they look at is just not necessarily
your traditional social channels,
do I say Twitter or do I call them X now?
- Yeah, yeah.
My phone just updated and forced me to update.
Now it says X, it comes up on my notifications
and I'm like, who's X?
- Weird, right?
- Yeah.
Twitter, Facebook, community pages.
But I think of it as any channel
that is a one to many communication channel
that includes our review sites,
our native review sites,
our external review sites, Better Business Bureau,
all of these different review platforms,
that is the responsibility of our social media team.
And the way that I think about it is
our social media team is a dedicated team
that is trained to be able to speak publicly
on behalf of our organization.
- Right.
(coughing)
- Most of our support team,
or most of traditional support team,
is trained to speak one to one.
Very few of our support team members
are trained to speak one to many.
And so, just like our traditional contact channels,
all review channels are also pulled in
to our back end system.
And we will make every attempt
to identify a customer on a review.
We'll reach out on those review platforms
to try and identify a customer
and tie that customer to either a purchase,
be it on Shopify or our e-commerce site,
or through a retail channel.
We sell at Costco on Amazon.
Traditionally, those don't come into our help desk,
but with different tools, we can pull that in
and get it part of that,
get it included into that feedback loop.
- Mm-hmm.
- At the end of the day,
we want to service our customers where they're at.
- Absolutely.
Ding, ding, ding.
Where they're at, could beat your customer
where they are because, like,
if you are channel switching your customer,
you are creating a friction experience.
- 100%.
- Ding, ding.
One more time.
- Yeah.
- And then also, we look at each channel
and we look at those friction points
and say, what is a friction point in this channel
for our consumer?
And how do we take that friction point away?
- Yeah.
- Back at the start of Black Friday last year,
we changed our contact channel
because personally, I was tired of seeing all these fields
that a customer had to fill out.
- Yeah.
- And so we changed the way that a customer reached out to us
on our website to make it less obtrusive,
less intimidating.
- Mm-hmm.
- And--
- That's interesting.
- A more pleasant experience for our customer.
- Yeah.
- And at the end of the day,
what it allowed our customer to do
is actually provide more information
because they felt comfortable on the platform.
And because they're providing more information
and richer information,
our support agents were able to better understand
the customer concern and resolve it quicker.
- Yes.
- And a concern that's resolved quicker
is typically a happier customer.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you hit on another point, right?
So like going back to what we were talking about,
like meeting your customer in those channels,
also making that experience frictionless
on the outward customer, right?
Is really important as well as even for the agent experience
because you can get to a point
where you're given too much information.
- Yep.
- You need the necessary information and that's about it.
You know?
So just commendable.
Like I think it's like thinking about it
in like both as like an outward customer
and as well as like an internal customer.
I also wanna actually wanna go back to what you were saying
about social support versus customer support
and like different kind of skill sets.
You as a customer experience leader, okay?
Like how do you navigate that?
How do you find like, so you have a team of people, right?
And it doesn't necessarily have to be hexagon,
it could be like Lexus could be anyone, right?
You have a team of people.
How do you pick, you're really good at this skill
and you're not so great at this skill,
but let me get you into maybe doing something else, right?
Like how do you, you as a leader just like can see that?
Hard question.
- It is a hard question because I don't think
there's a good answer to it.
- Yeah, I agree with you.
- One of the things that I identified
while I was at Hulu was that it is much harder
to find a good social support agent
than it is to find a good general agent.
- Really?
- Yes.
I would think the opposite for me.
- No, for me, like one of the things that I look at
is for a support agent is their ability
to recognize the impact of word choice
when responding to a customer
because you gotta remember
they're not just responding to the customer,
they're responding to any other person
looking at that tweet, at that post, at that review.
And so I want to find a support agent
that understands the impact of word choice.
And so sometimes there are customers
that will leave a review of our product
and try and bash the brand unfortunately.
- Yeah.
- And it's important for our agents
to provide enough information, but not too much information,
but to show other people besides just the customer
that's leaving the review,
the work that we've done on the back end at the same time.
- Yeah.
- Right?
And so there are times where we'll respond to a customer
and say, "Hey, we're sorry that the goodwill assistance
that we provided outside of warranty
did not meet your expectation."
- Yeah.
- And thinking about that, anyone reading into that,
they are now empowered with a lot of information
that they didn't know about before.
Hey, this brand provided assistance
that they weren't obligated to provide
because they were outside of warranty.
- Yeah.
- And it's the customer's expectation
that weren't matched in that case, right?
This brand provided assistance
when they didn't have to, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- And so that, in my opinion, is a lot harder to find
than someone that is gonna follow policies and procedures
like they're black and white.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
- Does that make sense?
- That absolutely, that point actually makes it
absolute sense.
- So we would have job roles open sometimes
for two, three months because while these candidates
were great at customer service and support,
they weren't necessarily understanding the importance
of a brand's impact that they can make externally
on these social sites.
- Yeah, but yeah, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
Like I actually take back what I was saying,
like really, like I think I'm the opposite
because you're absolutely right
'cause now if I'm thinking back to, you know,
just hiring at like festivals,
but also hiring at like some of the other like firms
that I have or companies that I've worked for previously,
like you can find really good support people,
but those support, like that support of like following
the rules and like doing these things
doesn't translate well to like social channels.
Social channels are like a different game.
We've had a couple of like copywriters on the podcast
and like it's so, you know, copy is very about
like the brand voice and the brand feels in the wants
and like that social support person needs
to really understand that and like the outward effects of that.
- Yeah.
One of the hardest things that I try and instill
in each one of our customer support agents mind is
how would you talk differently to our customer
if you knew who this customer was, right?
If they were your best friend,
would you approach this differently?
- Yeah.
- Right? If they were your mother, if they were your brother,
would you approach this differently?
- Yeah.
- We at HexCloud have different partnerships
that we do with different brands.
And we, as part of those partnerships,
sometimes do giveaways, right?
And our marketing team. - We love a giveaway.
We love a spectacle marketing moment.
- Our marketing, I went up to our marketing team and said,
"Hey, for any of these collaborations that we do
"with these different brands, are there any extra products
"that we on the customer service team can use
"to surprise and delight our customers?"
Right? Let's say we have a six-time purchaser
that has a huge LTV.
And we recognize that we take care of the customer's concern.
Is there a product that we could send them
on behalf of our company as well as our brand partnership
and just say, "Hey, we appreciate you as a customer.
"Thank you for giving us this opportunity
"to resolve your concern."
- Yes.
- Right? And so one of the hardest things
that I've ran into is not getting products.
That's not typically an issue.
It's getting the support agent to recognize
here's an opportunity that I have to go above and beyond.
- Yes.
- When I was at Guthie Ranker previous to HexCloud,
we did this challenge called the Golden Pitcher Challenge.
And we saw every time a customer would reach out to us,
we saw that almost as an opportunity
to win back the customer or engage the customer.
Because if a customer's reaching out to you,
they're giving you an opportunity to do something.
- Mm-hmm.
- Right?
And so what the challenge was was
we would encourage our agent to think about
what the customer wrote into us about
and say, "How can I pitch a sales opportunity?"
Or, "How can I pitch this opportunity to a customer
"so that they understand that this offer
"is customized to them?"
- Yeah.
- And so at the end of every month,
a support agent would be able to submit their pitch
that they made to the customer,
whether the customer accepted it or not.
And we would share this with all the other support agents
and say, "Hey, vote on your favorite pitch that was made."
And based off of those,
based off of who had the most selected pitches,
we would reward them and just say,
"Hey, thank you for customizing your pitch.
"Thank you for going above and beyond for the customer."
And here's, it was literally a beer pitcher
that had a trophy of a baseball pitcher inside of it.
And we stuffed it with candy and gift cards
and stuff like that.
- Yeah. - It would rotate around
from different agents to agents.
- Yeah, that's amazing.
I love that.
And I love that you also incentivize the pitching,
like being involved in it and that creates brand obsession.
- And one of the projects that I'm working on right now
is how do we get more support agents
to recognize these opportunities to go above and beyond?
And how do we document those to really, truly understand
the impact that they're making to our consumer?
- Right.
- Right.
And so it's hard sometimes.
Like if I gave you $200 and say, "Go spend it,"
it'd be pretty easy, right?
- Right.
- But like it's hard sometimes to get an agent
that is so focused on sometimes policies and procedures.
- Yeah.
- To think about how can I step aside
and just do something different
and make this experience better?
- Right.
- I think so many of our support agents have been
instilled to think you have to follow these procedures.
I haven't met a single human that operates that way.
I haven't met someone that says,
I operate this same exact way each and every time.
- I mean, yes, but no.
Like I have met a lot of BPO operations that are like that.
And I always find it in BPO operations
because it's like a third party outside of your brand.
So they are so fearful of not doing something right.
- 100%.
- And that's actually something I really struggled with
with like at Feastables, like we,
'cause Feastables at the beginning of creating Feastables,
right?
We didn't know our customer.
We had to like, we had to make so many pivots
like along the way.
And so I had an external team
and I had an internal team helping.
And like, and the external team was lovely.
They were amazing.
Everybody gave it their all.
Like it was really awesome.
But it was like trying to teach them
that like surprise and delight element was a struggle.
Like trying to just even empower them to be like,
hey, like you can do these things.
Like you have free reign.
And I finally had to just be like,
listen, if it's 50 bucks, just do it.
- Right.
Like return windows.
- Return windows.
- Yeah.
- Oh, God.
- Like are some BPOs or some support agents
that are so afraid of breaking policy
that they don't recognize, okay,
this customer is five, 10 days outside of their return window.
But this is their sixth, seventh order, right?
Like how do we go above and beyond to recognize,
hey, sometimes life gets in the way
and I couldn't return this within the return window.
- Right, right.
Oh man, I actually had a,
dude, we're talking about this because like, here we go, right?
I actually had a really terrible experience
and I'm not gonna name this brand,
but put it this way, a luggage brand, okay?
And most of these luggage e-commerce,
DTC, whatever I know I'm repeating myself,
but like, notice most of these luggage brands
that are coming out on the market
that aren't like a to me or like something
like high, high luxury, right?
Have, still have lifetime warranties or whatever it is.
So I have this one particular carry on bag
that I've had for years, okay?
And like, I'm obsessed with it.
Like it's, I mean, I took this bag everywhere I've ever been.
Like it has been Japan and Australia
and all these places and it has always like,
I've never had to like check a bag
because it's got enough room for my two week adventures, right?
So I'm like, I'm very attached to it, I will say, okay?
Anyway, so it was time for me to get it repaired.
It's time, the handles, not, it's not working.
My wheels are like kind of lopsided.
The little like compression bar on the inside
is like broken, okay?
So anyway, so I have, so I finally was like,
all right, brought myself to be like,
I'm gonna have to detach from this,
the suitcase and get a new one.
So I reach out to the company and I reach out,
do, do, do, reach out.
I'm on a chat box 'cause I'm a chat bot queen.
Do, do, do, do, hey, chat bot.
Hey, you know, support agent, like explain the situation.
I was like, oh, you know, I'm like, I have this one.
It's in this color and they're like, oh, well,
we don't have, we don't have that one in that color anymore.
And I'm like, okay, well, I'm down to replace it.
I'm already having a really hard time,
like coming to the realization of admin after replace it.
And I was like, can I pay that?
So I wanted this one that was black,
but my fiance has the same one.
So I wanted to personalize it, right?
I wanted to like put my logo on it or my,
I'm sorry, my initials just so we could distinguish
who's to choose, right?
And I had no problem with paying for it, like at all.
And so then I was like, hey, yeah, okay,
I'll just take the black one, like that's fine.
And I was honest, I was like, I'm really disappointed
that like you don't have this like hunter green anymore.
I know I'm being a difficult customer, okay?
But just stick with me here, crowd.
Okay.
So anyway, so I was like, okay, I'll take the black.
Like it's fine.
Like can I personalize it and pay the extra money?
And they're like, no, we can't, we can't,
you can't personalize it.
And I was like, one, I like, can you escalate this?
'Cause like, I'm literally asking to pay for it.
Like I can literally go buy a brand new one
and personalize it.
And they're like, yeah, we'll escalate it two days later.
They're like, no, can't do it.
Sorry, like, toodles.
And I'm like, listen.
Now I don't like that company.
- Yeah.
- Now I'm gonna go get another one from another company
just because I had a shitty experience, right?
And like my point of telling you the story though
is because it's like when you have people in the org
that like just can't break the rules or they can't,
like or it's not even like them personally,
it's empowerment to your team to be able to understand
that like you can like exceed a policy
for a satisfaction, you know?
- We, you know, the thing that disappoints me
the most about your story is that that support agents
or the possibly many support agents that, you know,
worked on the back end of your ticket.
Didn't think about is all the memories you have
using that suitcase and all those trips that you went on
using that suitcase.
- Yeah.
- And now instead of these amazing memories
that you have on each one of those trips,
you now have each one of these trips tainted with a suitcase.
- I know.
- Experience.
One suitcase experience that's now tainted multiple.
- Yeah.
- Trips that you went on.
- Yeah, I know.
- Because you now have resentment.
- I know.
And I listen, listen, I'm looking at the camera
for any of you watching, okay?
I absolutely know I am being a difficult customer, okay?
Absolutely, but like, come on, man.
- You're not, you're being, you're being like human, right?
- But that's how customers are, you know?
- I have a similar situation to yours
where it involves a luggage company.
And my wife and I tried for many years
to try and conceive a child.
And we go through IBF, first round doesn't take,
second round, takes thankfully,
and we're blessed with this beautiful baby, right?
And as a new parent, you don't know what to purchase, right?
And so we probably went through three different diaper bags
before we found the perfect diaper bag for us.
And we loved this diaper bag.
And then the handle on the top of the diaper bag ripped off
and there were some other tears.
And we reached out to, or first we went to their website
to see if they still had them.
They still made them, however they were out of stock.
And you could sign up for in-stock notifications.
So my wife reaches out to their support team
and their support team said, hey, that shouldn't be happening.
We're sorry that it happened.
It's out of stock right now, but we're gonna give you
a discount code for the full value of that diaper bag
for what you paid, actually, just for the full value
of the diaper bag.
They didn't take into account any discounts
that you might have received or whatnot.
But the thing that I love, yes, we were a little annoyed
that it was out of stock and they couldn't do anything
to get us a diaper bag in time.
We lived with it for about a month
before it came back in stock.
But the thing I love about that experience is that,
let's say they provided you a gift card for your luggage.
You could apply that gift card to that replacement luggage piece.
And then pay the difference for the customers.
- I mean, straight up, I would have gone to the store
and just had a in-store experience,
a new one to find my new attachment to it.
Let's be real, right?
But yeah, no man.
Okay, wait, since we're talking about good experience,
I wanna, this is a super brief one, right?
And I will name drop on good ones, not on bad ones,
but Jolie, a shower head company.
So when I moved into a new apartment,
I really wanted to get a filtered water system.
Like in Chicago, the water's very harsh,
so I wanted to really just start fresh, right?
So I bought the Jolie for the apartment,
for my shower, but it didn't actually fit.
And so I contacted them and I was like,
"Oh fuck, I'm gonna have to email in."
I was like, "Not looking forward to it."
I was putting it off, you know?
I was like, "Oh God."
So one Sunday, I like chat in,
and they say their support hours are like
Monday through Friday, right?
But I ended up getting a response back,
like on a Sunday afternoon, I was like,
"So that's a nice surprise,
"and delight in my journey, right?"
Like, that's really dope.
And no questions asked, they, I said,
"Hey, this just doesn't work, can I like return it?"
And they were like, "Oh, you know what?
"Don't even worry about it, keep it, give it to a friend.
"I've already credited you back."
And I mean, like this product is like over a hundred bucks,
right? So I was like, "That's so sick, like I can't use this."
And then the next day, I went to work,
and I brought it to, I brought it to my homegirl,
who was also moving it to a new apartment,
and I was like, "Shout out to you, Laura."
I was like, "Lora, here's a new Jolie, like a shower head."
And so what that experience created,
not only was it like, "Surprised and delight
"by your hours of operation,"
which I understand that everybody can do that,
but like, that was a surprise and delight for me.
Surprised and delight that I just like,
no question that's asked, got a refund,
and then created a word of mouth.
Like, and I know not every policy is that way,
but if you think about it in a journey manner
of like what my customer is experiencing,
even in a bad experience, you can turn it around.
- 100%.
I had this experience and it was with mixed tiles,
since we're name dropping.
- Yeah, we can name drop on good ones.
- Mm-hmm.
- And this experience was mixed tiles offers these,
you can upload your photos,
they'll print them out and frame them for you,
stick them on the wall.
We ordered a set, absolutely loved them.
I realized that I could have ordered it differently
and ordered them cheaper.
And because we loved them so much,
we were about to order some more.
And so I opened up a support ticket
because I love opening up support tickets
being in customer support myself.
- As we do, yeah.
- I opened up a support ticket and just say,
"Hey guys, we love our product."
And I was a little disappointed to find out
that I could have ordered this with a discount,
like a different way and it would have been cheaper.
And they initially came back to me and said,
"No, you couldn't have ordered it that way
"and got it cheaper."
And then I sent them a screenshot showing,
like, "Here's my cart, like, here's the receipts."
- Yeah.
- And I said, "We are going to, we're gonna order more
"so if you wanna just credit me the difference
"in a gift card or coupon code for $30."
I think it was.
I'd be satisfied with that.
They came back and said,
"Here's a discount code for $25 off."
- Yeah.
- And initially it was like,
I don't like this experience.
- Mm-hmm.
- We still ordered.
I got my CSAT survey.
I rated it a two-star.
- Okay.
- Because we liked the product.
It just the experience.
- Yeah.
- I got a response within, I would say 30 minutes
and saying, like, "Hey, we saw your feedback
"that you left, went through the entire ticket,
"send the conversation that you've had with our team.
"We are so sorry.
"Like, you're absolutely right.
"This could have been ordered a different way
"and we should have handled this differently."
- Yeah.
- We want you to keep the $25.
We've gone ahead and issued you a refund
for your entire purchase amount.
- Yeah.
- Of your first order.
Use this, use that discount code
that you got on your next purchase.
- Wow.
- And I don't know if I would have been as impacted
if I wasn't working in customer service,
but I found it, I loved the experience
because it showed me that they valued my feedback
that I provided them.
- Right.
- They said, "Here's a two-star customer,
"like not an extreme one-star or zero-star customer.
"Here's a two-star customer.
"Let me see what feedback they left.
"Let me review it.
"Could we have to improve this experience?"
- Yeah.
- And they recognize that they could have.
And from that point forward,
like, I talk about mixed tiles
because I've had nothing but great experiences.
- Yeah.
- It's made me forget about that
slightly negative experience.
- Yeah, I know.
- I love it.
You can turn a frown upside down, man.
Like, that's literally our jobs, right?
- We've instilled that type of thinking in Hexclad as well.
So like, after that experience,
I made a point that our managers review CSAT feedback.
- Yeah.
- Anytime it's a one, two, or three-star feedback, right?
We celebrate the forum five-stars with our agents.
We, to your point, for luggage,
like, or for the shower head, at Hexclad,
if we see a customer that has a concern with a pan,
and we know that there's nothing we can do with that pan,
but it's a warrantable concern,
we'll tell the customer just recycle it locally
and we'll send them a replacement pan, right?
Why inconvenience the customer
if we're not gonna do anything with that pan anyways?
- Yeah.
We're coming up on time,
but, and I honestly really wanna keep talking about this stuff.
So, actually, for anybody who's listening,
I encourage you, reach out to me and Michael,
and share a story.
'Cause on that note, Michael, where can they find you?
- You can find me on LinkedIn, I'm active there.
- Very active.
- But yeah, like, I'm on Twitter everywhere.
Basically, look for me and you'll find me.
Like a true CXer.
Yeah, reach out to us.
Share your good experiences and your bad experiences,
and if you're interested in chatting with Michael Moore,
reach out to him as well.
And on that note, thank you for joining me
for another week of the juice,
and we'll see you next week.
Hey, wow, you made it to the end of the episode.
That means that you like me and I like you,
which also means you should subscribe to this show.
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