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Anecdotally, I see figs everywhere. In my past life running customer success teams, I had 80-some customer success managers in our organization. And yeah, I could have spent every single day on individual customer issues. But at some point, you do need to have some process where you're doing things that actually make changes for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, hopefully millions of customers.
I have a lot of conversations with CEOs, founders, who inevitably what their question to me is, is like, what is the purpose of customer success? Because some people view it as a sales function. Some people view it as account management. Some people view it as product adoption. And inevitably what I get when I have these conversations, I realize they haven't really decided what they actually want it to be. Yeah.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. A super quick PSA before we get started. Whether you have been listening to our show for some time or this is your first time tuning in, if you enjoy this episode, please, please, please let us know by clicking the follow button wherever you listen to your podcast. That
That simple click does wonders for our show and will help us to keep bringing bigger and better CX knowledge to all of you. So without further ado, let's get into today's show. I am here with Michael Baer, the SVP of customer experience at FIGS, a beloved e-commerce apparel brand that has found incredible success reinventing the medical scrub. I'm sure you've seen it around. Whenever you go to the doctor, I always see them.
And Michael has spent much of his career building and leading customer experience and customer success teams. So today we are going to dive into how great CX sets organizations apart among many other things, I'm sure. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me. It's been great to be here. So I'm curious to know your expert perspective. What do you see happening in the CX space today that you think many companies are missing? I think a lot of...
People selectively choose which pieces of the customer journey they really want to invest resources or time into. You know, some of that's post or pre-purchase education, clear descriptions on the site, the actual site experience itself, an app, post-purchase support, delivery, you know,
Those all are rarely consistently good. And I think the experience is the full set of end-to-end touch points. And the reality is that they all don't have to be amazing. They all don't have to be best in class. But you can't just hope or invest in one and hope that it will make up for the other one. So the best customer service team in the world, the best retention team in the world won't solve an oversold product. Right.
And I think this probably makes sense. There's very few roles in companies that actually are focused on end-to-end. That's, you know, one of the things I really do like about my role is, you know, I get to think about kind of like every touchpoint that a customer has. But that's how customers value the product or service is the sum of all of the experiences and then the product or service itself. So I think, you know,
that selective investment choice is sometimes a blocker for people. I can tell we're going to get along because I agree with you so, so much. I think it's so easy to focus on. I mean, obviously sales is such a big thing and marketing is such a big thing. Acquiring our customers is so important, but we will lose them if we don't continuously build trust and create a great experience for them throughout their entire life cycle with our companies. Right.
What are some of the things that you do or think about to really create that seamless end to end experience? It's being thoughtful about like, what are the customer's expectations for these things? So a lot of it depends on the product or service that they're coming. Like how much knowledge are they going to have about it ahead of time? Is this a product that is like inherently self-serve?
is this a simple buying decision? Is it a complex? Are there multiple people? So thinking about all of those things really helps you determine where do you want to invest? How complex do you want to make the sales motion, the post sales motion? How many people really need to be involved? How much social proof does the person need? So I think a lot of it is just being really honest with the complexity of
and the time to value for the product. If it's, you know, one of the things about apparel is really great is as soon as you get it, you put it on, a lot of the value that you're going to get in that product is there. Now you might get other things like first time you wear it out and someone gives you a compliment or first time, you know, someone else, you know, kind of sees you in it. There might be some kind of like social pros that happen with it. But, you know, that's very different than like a SaaS product, which, you know, usually there's this, you know, kind of
peak that happens during the sales cycle, you go through implementation that drops off and then you're trying to like bring that back up. So, you know, be really thoughtful about like who all is involved in that buying process. How many touch points is a customer going to have and where, where can you, you know, make sure that you're consistently delivering for the customer.
So when it comes to e-commerce, I actually think you might be the first customer experience e-commerce leader that we've had on the show. And I'm really curious to know what are some of the key elements that you think about or that you think are really important in creating a great customer experience in an e-commerce setting? Yeah. So I think of like three kind of main stages for the e-commerce experience. There is the on-site experience, the
There's the shipping and delivery experience. And then there's kind of like the support experience of the person who uses it.
On site, you know, that's clear descriptions, that's help center articles, that's self-serve tools, that's FAQs, reviews, all of the things that all of us that are shopping on our phone every single day are looking at and determining like, hey, how do I, do I want this product or not? And then I think that's honestly where most people start. If they get into a checkout and they've paid, great, I'm done. That unfortunately is not the end of the story for most people because then there's this
if you're Amazon, it's one or two day window, or if you're other companies that are, that are trying to manage costs, it's, you know, sometimes five, 10, 15 day window where now the customer is in this delivery stage where like, is it going to get lost? Is it going to end up on, uh,
my yard? Is it, you know, how, how's the package going to get to me? Then there is an unboxing experience. Like all of those things, those really do impact how happier or sad is the customer going to be once they get the product. And then of course, after that, you have your support function, anything that the customer needs.
kind of related to the product. So I think about it in those kind of three buckets. And, you know, the first is where it gets a lot of resources and the other two are kind of often like how cheaply can we do these and how cost containment can we keep it. But they're all three really important. When it comes to those other two, the shipping and the support piece,
What do you think is often done incorrectly? Like where do you see companies kind of missing an opportunity? I would say on the shipping one, yeah. So I think whether people think about it or not, there is a decent amount of like branding that goes into shipping services. Like everyone knows FedEx and UPS. Everyone has familiarity with FedEx.
There's those tracking links and there's a lot you can do around it. Like in that, that timeframe, you can help educate the customer more on the product. Once they get it, help them if it's apparel, help them style it better. If it's, you know, things that maybe they want to learn about the product. There's some great tools out there that can keep just customers better informed of the status of the package, particularly if you're shipping internationally, like that is going to go through a lot of stages. And yeah,
keeping the customer confident that that package is going to get there and is going through a normal cycle is really important. So I think those are super important
And that support function, I mean, I think you, you know, I could talk about this like endlessly, but you know, making sure that you're available and the channels that your customers want to talk to you and not just the ones that you've decided that they want to talk to you on, you know, making sure that you're being really resolution focused with those and investing and resourcing the team to resolve customers inquiries and questions as quickly and easily as possible.
There's a lot around customer effort right now that I think is so very true because sometimes I'll have conversations with people on my team who...
We'll review their responses to customers. And, you know, we have some people on our team that have masters in fine writing. And it's interesting because they write these like incredible, arguably novels to customers. And I've seen this over my career. And I'm like, when you get an email from a company, what are you looking for? They're like the solution or the resolution that they're offering. Right.
I'm like, they don't read anything else. And I know that kills you, but like, you're trying to be really efficient with your words, get to the point, get, you know, if you can most importantly solve the person's problem, because that's what, that's what someone wants from, from a support person more than anything is like solve the problem that I asked you to. Yeah.
Looking at that effort in every single way, I'm so happy to see that customer effort is getting the attention that it is of late. Because just like you say, it's not only, okay, how many clicks do they have to make? But it's also how many lines do they have to read? We are in a world where our attention spans are...
Very short. And they are dwindling. And we want immediate answers as quickly as possible. And we don't want to have to try to get those answers. Like customers expect a lot.
I'm curious to know in your experience, because you've been in this space for your entire career, how have you seen that shift? Like, where would you see the consumer? Where would you say that the consumer is today in relation to their desire for reduced effort compared to the past? The cliche of this is soon as Amazon has changed everything. But interestingly, like not, I mean, essentially, because like so many brands over the last couple of years were built on,
So colorful, bright UI, modern fonts, incrementally better products that are direct to consumer and more
you know, I don't know how, how much that's going to be in the future. But like, if you think about like Amazon, like the UI is not great. The, the website itself, like they don't invest a lot of resources. They invest everything into the actual experience and ensuring that like, it's easy for you to shop. You can come back and buy easily. You get your packages quickly. If you have an issue, it's resolved very quickly. So,
Amazon has definitely like raised the bar for everyone. Obviously the most easy, easy example of that is in the shipping experience, but yeah, they, they do everything really, really well. But I also think just, you know, now, um, you know, when I think about like what is best in class experience for our customers, it's, you know, it's, it's not just us versus other category competitors. It's,
It's every e-commerce experience they have with another company. So if they buy their shoes from Nike, if they buy their leggings from Athleta, if they buy workout gear from from Aloe, they have an experience with every single one of those companies. And that is the comparison that you are now against. So I really think about, you know, every single e-commerce company and every single experience that a customer has sets that expectation for the customer. And that is what they hold you to. Yeah.
It's a really, really good point. It's not only our direct competitors where in your case, it's one scrub versus a fig scrub. It's actually their general experience across the board in all of e-commerce.
What are some of the things that your team has focused on to really create a great customer experience? We serve a really unique customer base. The healthcare professionals that buy our products do one of the most physically, emotionally, mentally challenging jobs there is. And so they're also very resourceful, very intelligent. And so we really look at a lot at like self-serve tools. So, you know, really easy example is our help center,
Every single month we do a review of it. What are the most viewed articles? What returns zero sum searches so that we can add content in there? How every single month can we make the language as direct as possible so that if people want to self-serve their questions, they can. Mm-hmm.
If they want to contact us, great, wonderful. We'll talk to them. But as best we can, trying to find as many self-serve options for customers as possible. And then just being continually being the voice of the customer around the organization. So there's a lot of things we do programmatically to ensure that feedback that customers are giving us. And this is where we invest a fair amount of resources in ensuring that
all of the feedback that we're getting from surveys, from social media, from CX tickets, from every single place that customers are sharing feedback with us is getting disseminated around the organization to ensure that we're making the product better. We're making the website better. We're making the app better. We're making all of the touch of the shipping experience, the unboxing experience, like every place that a customer is going to be interacting with us, knowing that their voice is being heard and being shared and being approved upon. Yeah.
This is really, really hard to implement in my experience. Having created voice of customer programs in the past within organizations, it's
conceptually like, okay, we take the feedback, we disseminate it, we share it with the rest of the teams, but it's much more complex than that. And I'd love to understand a little bit about like, how do you actually do that? One, how are you taking information from all these different places and consolidating it into something that can be easily understood? And then two, how are you actually sharing that throughout the organization in a way where it's being heard and acted on? Yeah.
So I think there's like one aspect of it, which is, does your organization value and have a culture for customer feedback? A lot of companies say that they're very customer focused. The reality is what they're really focused on is like continuing to have revenue and continuing to have customers that pay them. They're not actually interested in the customers that they serve. I've worked for a couple organizations where
the CEOs and the leadership team were the most customer focused people we had in that permeated down in that, that is like a, an, a massive tailwind to any like CX leaders. I've also worked for companies where it was clearly just writing on the wall and that was not, not as much of a focus. There is some aspect of it is like your organization has to value that and your leadership has to, it has to be part of the culture.
Functionally, how you do it is being, I would say, consistent, like having a voice of the customer program that's consistent, expected, and actionable. There has to be some as close to the moment as possible feedback mechanism. So in our world, every single week, there's a voice of the customer report that goes out that shares feedback from surveys, social, CX tickets, everything we get.
And we have individual people in the customer experience organization that like for lack of better terms, like moderate each one of those. We bring them all together and we have an analyst on our team and a couple other people that help kind of pull everything together. And then we send it out to a pretty wide distribution list. I've always really kind of thought about this as like if I were writing a newsletter for a mass audience and I wanted to have a really high open rate and have something that was
writing the voice of the customer deck is that. So it's got to be, like I said, consistent. People need to know it's coming and people are going to be held to understanding what it means. And actionable, like have firm opinions on like what you're reading. So, you know, as much as you can use data, but then there's a lot of things like social feedback is a great example of something that like is going to probably be a little bit more anecdotal by nature, but
sharing customer verbatims is super important, sharing the data where you have it, giving recommendations. And then I think the last thing is don't only share the bad stuff because I think that's sometimes where customer experience, customer success leaders is like you obviously are dealing with
Things that people don't like. And so your nature is to kind of like share those things. But it's really, really important that you also share like what makes the product or the service exceptional. Like what do people love? Because that is an organization is really what you need to be doubling down on because that's really what sets you apart. Like no one buys a product because it doesn't have these deficiencies. They buy a product because it does these things differently.
And so I think, you know, as much as you can trying to insert those positive pieces of the product or service as well and making sure that everyone knows like, hey, when customers love our product, here's what they love. And when they don't love our product, here's what they don't love. And let's try to, you know, do more of these and try to eliminate those. It's really putting your marketing hat on. Right.
right? And like being a marketer to your internal organization. Yeah, I think that's a lot of the lot of the role is communication, cross-functional liaison between, you know, trying to get issues resolved. And also think some of it is like, if you're at a high enough level, being able to spend time thinking about things that actually will impact tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of customers. My past life running customer success teams, I
I had 80 some customer success managers in our organization. And yeah, I could have spent every single day on individual customer issues that we were working through. But at some point you do need to have some
process where you're doing things that actually like make changes for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, hopefully millions of customers. Completely. I'm so glad that you share that and you bring that up. And also on the topic of customer success, I know that's something I am a total customer success nerd. I love customer success. Obviously, that's more in a B2B SaaS environment, but you have experience with both. And I'm curious to
Understand a little bit about your opinions on the customer success landscape today. What's happening in that space that you've been seeing? Because I know that you're still kind of in touch with it, despite maybe not running a direct customer success team at this moment. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I care a lot about it. I mean, I have a lot of friends who still work in this space and it's something I really do care a lot about. Like I said, I ran a really big team in my last company that I think has some of the best customer success managers. I think one of the ideas that I've been kicking around is the idea of whether customer success is actually about being a trusted advisor as your core role. Yeah.
Guessing you probably have some thoughts about this. And I know you had a we had a recent guest on the on the podcast where this was. Yeah, I don't know if it was totally her position, but like was definitely in there. But I'm really curious if that's what customers want or if that's what customer success leaders want to position the role as.
Because the more and more I think about it, I think at the end of the day, like product knowledge and subject matter expertise trumps everything else. And I suppose by, you know, saying that you're a trusted advisor, if that means that you're helping them adopt more features, improve better workflows and thereby getting a higher return on investment, then yes, I agree with that. But.
you know, businesses have employees that tell them how to run it. I don't know if they need their customer success manager to do that for them, but they definitely need someone who knows the product in and out, knows every feature, knows every workflow that can help them maximize every dollar that they're spending on that monthly, yearly subscription. So, yeah,
You know, customer success has gone through a really interesting last like 12 or 24 months. I have a lot of conversations with CEOs, founders who inevitably what their question to me is, is like, what is the purpose of customer success? Because, you know, some people view it as a sales function. Some people view it as account management. Some people view it as product adoption, right?
And inevitably what I get when I kind of have these conversations, I realize they haven't really decided what they actually want it to be. And so they kind of act either like it should do everything or this six months, we're going to be very sales focused, net revenue retention, it's upsell, it's cross sell. And then suddenly they're getting all these bad reviews and Facebook comments. And it's like, okay, now it's all reputation management and advocacy and
And that just doesn't work because honestly, those are different people. Completely. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I think it's interesting. Yeah, I have so many. So the other day we interviewed Jim Roth, the president of customer success at Salesforce. And Salesforce is essentially the...
It's not technically the founding company of customer success, but they kind of made customer success like what it is today. And his- Yeah, they made it famous. They made it famous. And his definition of customer success was really the fact that a CSM, a customer success manager, their role is to ensure the renewal. At the end of the day, it's about making sure that
The customer wants to stay and spend money with you. I think like that in its core, I think that's still true. But with what's happening in the economy today, when this question of what is customer success really here to do? A lot of customer success teams are getting laid off. I was one of them. Like the entire customer success function was just like, eh, we don't need it anymore. We're just going to like take that away. And I... They're on their own. Yeah.
And I think that my opinion of this, I don't disagree with a trusted advisor being a role that a customer success manager plays if it's driving to the end goal of renewal. And in my opinion...
The renewal is really based on trust, that the company trusts you. And this CSM is kind of the, typically the person that that company has been interfacing with the most after the sale has been done. And so the CSM is, I would even say it goes beyond an advisor and like a consultant, right?
You know, it's like, it's deeper. It's like they, a CSM's job is to really understand that business and be able to say, Hey, here's what's in your best interest. Hey, I've noticed that you've been using this, but maybe not in the right way, or this is what your intended goal was. And yeah.
We haven't gotten there. So let's work together to create that outcome for you. And it's not just like, Hey, here's a new feature. Want me to show you how to use it? Or it's really active. And it's really like building a relationship between the two companies. And I see that as the CSMs core role so that the company feels like they can't live without your business.
Totally. Yeah, I think the renewal part is really key. And that's why, like, ultimately, where I usually get to with people is it's a retention function. Being really clear about why people renew to your product is really important because if people renew to your product,
because it's become so sticky and the way it becomes most stickiest is more features, more modules. Like the more they use of your product, the more value they get, it's more sticky. Great. Well then your product, your team should actually be focused mostly on feature adoption, product adoption. But if it's a simple product and there's only a handful of features and like a CSM's onboarding them and they're onboarding them in like 10 minutes, it's like,
There's only so many products, features to be talking to that customer about. Well, then the role of that CSM to getting to a renewal is probably different.
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And this is where I think that customer success is one really misunderstood and also where it's on the chopping block because it takes so many different forms. And it's really up to the customer success leader to figure out what is the right form for that business. Because as you mentioned, like it might be more of a scaled customer success strategy.
Yeah.
or even better, increase of business with your customer. So I think it does, it just takes so many different forms and a pitfall that I see a lot of companies doing to their customer success team is having them manage so many different things. Like I was a customer, I was a head of customer success where I was running a
SMB CSM team and enterprise CSM team and the customer service team. And I mean, I loved it because I love doing all these different things, but that's also a lot. It's three teams in one. And it meant that I had many, many different missions and I was spread really, really thin. And it wasn't until I got kind of hardheaded about saying, I'm only picking like two goals and all these other goals that you're asking me to achieve. Like we're not going there. We're only...
the mission-critical items that align with the company goals and all those other things you're asking me to do. Like, I'll put it on the roadmap for next quarter or the quarter after that, but we can't do everything. And I think that's just something a lot of customer success leaders are being faced with right now is that they're just kind of getting all the leftover things that need to be done that is just overwhelming them and then they're not being successful or really pushing...
results that are needed to validate the function. Yeah. If I were to give one piece of advice to CSMs looking for roles is the number one thing you need to be clear on are, does the organization, does the leadership that you're going to work for have a clear vision of goals?
Because if they don't, if they're pivoting, if they're like, it's this now, but it was this before. And it's like, it's everything. It's customer success. It's like, it can't be. Totally. Because if it's everything, it's nothing. Yeah. And that's probably true of like every job. Like you don't want to have a job where like it doesn't have clear goals. But I think customer success because of the name itself.
truly is the whole organization so like what does this person's role or this organization actually focus on completely thank you for diving into the customer success world with me even if it's not something that you're necessarily core your core focus is on these days but not not currently but it's something i'm very passionate about and there's there's a lot of like
amazing customer success leaders, amazing customer success managers I see really struggling in that environment. And largely because there's just a lack of clarity of the goal that's on the point of that function. Completely. So kind of jumping off of this topic, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about leadership. Because I always say that
is the key to CX. The employee experience is core to the customer experience. I wanted to ask, do you agree or disagree? Why or why not? Yes. Simon Sinek says it is. And I generally believe everything he says. I think the way you treat the customer experience team sets an example for how they should treat customers. Then as part of like why I like running these teams is it's, it's one of the few roles that every company has. Um,
Usually they're bigger organizations. They're often people in similar life phases. They're also by the nature of the people that do these roles, like highly empathetic, like very sensitive feelings based people, helpers by nature, problem solver. They're just generally the most wonderful people. Like this is, this is obviously my bias, but I think people that work in customer success, customer experience are some of the most kind, generous people.
thoughtful people that you'll interact with. And so because of that, yeah, I want to generally like have a great work environment for them. I want them to love their jobs. Their jobs are really hard because like what they're being asked to do every single day is solve problems one after the other, after the other, after the other. And this is, you know, to a customer, it's a, it's the most important person to our organization. So yes, everyone in a business solves problems, but like these are the people that do it for the customer, the most important person.
So, yeah, I think as much as you can creating a culture where people feel valued, feel that their work is meaningful and like moves the needle in the business and they have a career path and they have a trajectory and they can learn every single day, you know, is super important. And I think if they if they have those things and they are really connected to and this a little bit goes back to the culture and value of the organization being customer focused, feeling like they're working for an organization that does care about customers.
It can be an amazing work environment for people. What are some of the things that you do as a customer experience leader to really make sure that your team is in a good place? I can think of a couple of things. One, to go back to our previous conversation, super clear goals. I am like ruthless on this. And so I started my career in financial sales.
mostly a commission based role. So I learned variable compensation structures like very early on in my career. And I've more or less kept that every single job I've ever had in saying like every team that I run will have a variable compensation structure because it helps...
narrow the goal set. If I put goals on in front of you that are associated with your variable compensation, it really does help like focus in on like what are the things that are most important. So I have, I try to make sure that we have very clear goals. We communicate them every single day. We have a daily dashboard. I've done this for a decade straight now, a daily email that goes out that shows everyone's stats, everyone's metrics reaffirms every single day. What is the metric that we're shooting for, for these individual goals?
So again, that, you know, back to that consistency expected. So trying to do that, having culture teams, like I think it's real super important having a team of peers, you know, I can't run the culture team for my organization. Like they don't want to hang out with me, but having people that like, and they have budget to spend and we do fun things, whether it's like in-person events or remote events or just kind of like day-to-day fun things.
to keep everyone connected. The last thing is I just try to be like super transparent and as best I can share with them the limited knowledge that I have. So years ago, I created this career development program where I just started trying to teach people things that they didn't need to know for their role, but they would need to know for their next role. And so
you know, oftentimes I can't do it for the whole organization, but like once people got to a certain level in my organization or once they'd been with the company for a certain amount of time, I tried to, you know, I had, I kind of built off this like nine or 10 session program where I tried to like teach them things that I thought, you know, they would need in their future. And again, I think the transparency and the openness of our elite of the leadership team is, is super important because all of them, they're looking for their career path or looking for the growth opportunities and
And having a leadership team and certainly like being a leader myself that's there to help people find that is really important. Completely. I want to underscore something that you had said at the beginning of that answer around clear goals. Again, we were talking about it when it comes to customer success, but I think for any company,
leader for any team. Brene Brown said it best, clear is kind. And just making it really, really clear. This is what your goals are. This is what you're running towards because it can be really easy, especially in...
I find startup environments when there's a lot going on that it can get confusing of what am I really here to do? And I love the idea of sending an email every day to be like, here's where people's stats are in relation to the goal so that, you know, without a doubt,
what it is you're being measured on so that you can be successful in that and just focus on being successful in the thing we're measuring you on. Yeah. So I appreciate that. Yes. Yeah. I love the clear kind. You know, I had a manager early on in my career who said indirect direction gets indirect results. And, you know, there's just things that stick with you. And that was one of the things that stuck with me whenever I was 22 years old or 23 years old when I heard that. And so I err on the side of being overly direct with people.
people in communication, for sure in goals. I've worked at three startups. I mean, I was the 12th employee at a very early stage company that grew to a couple hundred employees. You can still have clear goals at that stage. Like the activities that people do can vary, but the goals that their success is measured on, like you shouldn't be doing an activity unless you know what the clear criteria for success is. Mm-hmm.
If I'm going to take out the trash, I know what the clear criteria for success for taking out this trash is. You can take any activity that an organization is going to do, whether it's starting on day one or it's a thousand days old and figure out like, what does great look like in this?
Then set that for the person so they can go get it. Yeah, exactly. What are some of the things that you really look at to measure customer experience? Because there's many different factors. Of course, there's probably response time and...
Things like that. But I'd love to hear a little bit of what are the core measures that you look at? So customer satisfaction, I think, is the North Star metric. I mean, that's the one, you know, Zappos uses HMD. How's my drive? It's like, how's my driving? You know, if you've ever been on the highway and you see, you can call that number and tell how you're driving. Zappos has a similar metric. I think they actually call it HMD, but it's more specific for the customer happiness team there.
But I think, yeah, having some binary metric of like, you know, is the customer happy or not happy with the support that you gave them is super important. So I think that's kind of first. You know, as far as like service levels, you know, speed of answer and stuff like that, a lot of that is...
should be determined by your customers. So, you know, as you're, as you have service levels, if you're seeing like really high abandonment rates and calls and chats and customers emailing you multiple times to get an answer on something that they're telling you, you don't have fast enough response time. So, you know, you've got to really kind of like customers in some ways set that goal for you. And then obviously you got to measure against it.
It's not quite as in vogue anymore, but I am still a big proponent of NPS. I think if you do it in a, again, consistent, like transparent goes out to everyone, like I've worked at organizations that like gained that number. But if you do it in like a consistent wide net way, it actually is really helpful for you to kind of see. And then I think doing the effort to look at like what drives, what creates promoters, what creates detractors, it's really valuable. Yeah.
Employee retention is really important to me. I think if you're going to run a customer experience organization, customer success, it's usually going to be a larger portion of the organization. Having really high employee retention is important. There are definitely a ton of anecdotal things around customer sentiment, their individual metrics within surveys themselves that you want. But I think for me, customer satisfaction is the most important thing.
It's really interesting how NPS is like such a hot topic these days because it's, I mean, it's definitely a lagging indicator. There's other factors that can also help us to actually understand the customer's satisfaction. It only tells us, it tells us some, it can also tell us a lot to your point, but
I'm curious to know what you think about, like, I don't know, some of the other thoughts that are out there around, you know, just abandoning NPS and only looking at these other more leading indicators to tell us how the customer is being satisfied. Like, why do you prefer NPS or...
What else do you look at? My general thought on people that don't like NPS or don't like other surveys is probably one of two things. Either one, they don't do them consistently enough to actually be able to track how it performs. They don't know like how new features roll out or new products launch as things change, how that actually impacted the score. Or they have communicated either in process
probably unintentionally to their customers that they don't listen to their feedback. And so surprise, surprise, people stop responding. They stop giving you feedback. And now it really actually does become a useless metric.
But I think, again, like a lot of this goes back to like cultures and values, which it's just foundational. If you have communicated, so I have this concept of a customer feedback flywheel. If you take customer feedback and you share it with your product organization and it gets implemented, customers see that. They're like, oh, wow, they actually did something with my feedback. I'm going to give them more feedback. And it just spins and spins and spins.
And so organizations that use MPS surveys, CSAT surveys, CES surveys, tickets, support fund, like those organizations often don't have a lot of escalations. They don't get a lot of like these random escalations
new places where customers are forcing feedback on them because they've communicated to customers that like, hey, we have these avenues and we actually listen to you and we action and we do something with it. It doesn't mean you have to like implement every single idea a customer gives you, but like you have to communicate with them that you hear them. They need to know that you actually like listen to them. I don't know if this is universally true, but like a lot of organizations that I think are starting to abandon some of those customer listening tools is because they abandoned
customer feedback way before that. There is definitely a process to follow when you're doing NPS and
exactly what you just said. It's the follow through, like the follow up, the closed loop. If someone's taking their time to give you their feedback, that's very precious time. And we need to respect and honor that. So I love the concept of the customer feedback flywheel. I wrote it down. It's a good one. So I have two last questions for you that we like to ask all of our guests.
So firstly, I always want to know what is a recent experience that you've had with a brand that left you impressed? My...
wife wanted to get a new coat. We were at the mall and we went into Aritzia and outside of it being the kind of Gen Z millennial woman's Mecca of fashion, it is incredible how thoughtful they've designed the in-store experience to not be just great for the shopper, but for everyone who's around it. So when you walk in, when I walked into Aritzia,
they had a video game that my son could play and I actually had to like drag him away from it. And it was a Ritzia game. Like it had, and I was like, did they design their own video game? They have comfy couches. They have an unbelievably helpful staff. They have a lot of
that makes it clear that you are welcome to stay as long as you want and that everyone's part of this experience. It's a beautifully designed store. It's thoughtfully laid out. It is very communal. I don't know how much people love it, but they don't have mirrors in the dress rooms themselves. You have to come out into this communal area. When I thought about being in there
It was the one of the first times I ever like went into a store and it wasn't, that wasn't for me that I wasn't thinking about leaving. Like I said, my son was really enjoying the video game. I was comfortable. Like we could have spent as much time as we were on there. So it really had me thinking about like, they've thought a lot about
The person who wears their clothes is not the only person who decides here. How do I make this experience great for everyone who comes in? You've recently launched a retail store with Figs, didn't you? Yes. Yes. Yeah. A couple months ago. So how has that experience been? I am asking you more than two questions now because I wanted to double click on this. But how has that experience been moving from e-commerce into retail? And what are some of the key things that you've really had to adjust in your customer experience approach?
Historically, we've had pop-ups, we've had short-term in-person retail experiences that have been incredible lines around the corners, people flying in from all over to have an opportunity to actually shop figs in person. So I had an expectation that it would be really successful and it's been all of that. We're at a really popular mall in Century City, which is in Los Angeles.
And there will be lines out the door to get into the Fig store. This was our first permanent retail. You know, we're obviously like learning a ton about the layout and what's needed and product availability and, you know, kind of what our customers expect when they walk into it. And, you know, we'll have more to come and we'll use all of those learnings to make those future retail experiences even better. But it's been really exciting to have something like
always there that customers can go to and be a destination for people that are coming to Los Angeles that are kind of brand loyalists and brand evangelists and for them to be excited to like
have the fig store be one of their stops. Cool. What is some of the things that you've done in that store to make it really feel like figs to like really pull the brand into the experience? Yeah, I think because, because we only make products for healthcare professionals, we can be, and we've always been this way and this is true of the website and everything. We can be really intentional with the branding. So we have a pill wall.
We have just features and aesthetics that are in the retail setting that are very specific to healthcare professionals and nomenclature. You know, we do this in a bunch of places, like the email for our customer experience team is stat at wearafigs.com. And so we intentionally try to find
where their language, their visuals, their day-to-day kind of nomenclature we can use in the retail setting and everywhere in their experience. Awesome. Well, I live in LA, so I'll definitely go and check it out next time I'm in Century City. It's fun. It's right between See's Candy, too, so you can get your candy fix right next door. Okay, great. And there's a Din Fai Tong. Din Fai Tong. Yeah. Yeah.
It's so good. It's the best dumplings. Yes. Also, they will have a line too. Exactly. All right. Actual last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear?
I would say die on the hill for your customers. I think your role in an organization if you're a customer experience leader is to be the voice of the customer in the organizations. And we talked about this a little bit earlier. And a lot of organizations will say they care about customers and
hopefully a lot do, but there's some that just care that they keep buying. I think that is a hill that's worth dying on. We've been trading quotes, but Tim Cook has an amazing quote that in the long arc of time, you're only relevant if customers love you. And I think as a customer experience leader, you have to force that culture and force that
in the organization because that is the only way that company will become great. So, you know, there's a lot of hills everyone can die on, but the one I will always go down for is customers. And that's what makes a great customer experience when they feel like you are thinking in their best interest and you really have them in mind. That's what builds that super sticky connection and the sales will follow.
Yes, I agree. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wealth of CX and customer success knowledge with us. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.
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