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Great customer service starts with supporting your frontline team. Dave Hoekstra and Nate Brown, Senior Director of CX at Arise, discuss how to find the spark of customer service in your agents while offering training to close information gaps.
In this series we will discuss Contact Center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
Using CX to Defend Your Brand with Nate Brown
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[00:00:00] Dave Hoekstra: Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
[00:00:17] Dave Hoekstra: My name is Dave Hoekstra product Evangelist for Calabrio. I am super excited to have Nate Brown here now, who is? Nate is the senior director of CX at Arise, but more importantly, Nate's that fedora and weird suit guy, right? He's the guy that if you've ever been to any trade show or event, and there's this super ball of energy walking around that's wearing insane suits and fedoras. That's Nate. Nate, how are you today buddy?
[00:00:44] Nate Brown: I'm great Dave, and thank you for that introduction. Yeah hopefully I'm starting to gain a bit of a reputation with the ginger beard and hat and suit. If that's not enough, then forget it.
[00:00:53] Dave Hoekstra: You are. If you've ever seen the Ted Lasso episode where Coach Beard goes on his wild night, that is what it's like hanging out with Nate at a trade show because you know, there is, I've always been known as the energetic.
[00:01:08] Dave Hoekstra: Everybody's all like, oh my gosh. And when I look at you, I'm like, man, this guy has got it right. Whatever it is, whether you're using the Energizer, extra lithium batteries or whatever the case may be it's working for you.
[00:01:20] Nate Brown: Oh, I'm definitely not always like that, David. It's funny cuz you know, I just get so fired up when I'm with my people and when we're talking about CX.
[00:01:28] Nate Brown: I know I don't walk around my house this way. I just, I love being at these shows and with our tribe.
[00:01:35] Dave Hoekstra: It is just awesome. Yeah and guys, a lot of times when we do this podcast or you listen to podcasts and you hear people that are clearly putting on a persona, this is not a persona for Nate.
[00:01:44] Dave Hoekstra: This is who he is. And that's why we're super excited to have you here on The Calabrio podcast because, you know, we want to talk about CX, which. You and I do get fired up for and people should get fired up for because it's kind of, it's kind of the thing now. But before we go too far I really wanna dig into Nate a little bit, right?
[00:02:02] Dave Hoekstra: Okay. So do me, give me the gimme the you know, two minute version of how you got here. What, where'd you start? Where'd you get to this point where you're so fired up about CX that you want to come on podcasts and talk about it?
[00:02:14] Nate Brown: Right on. Well, it started with selling postage meters on the streets of Jacksonville, Florida.
[00:02:19] Nate Brown: Which didn't go very well for me. Turns out it was very hard to sell postage meters and strip malls on the streets of Florida. So I tapped outta that fairly quickly after about 10 months. But while I did discover one thing in that process, those that had one of our postage meters, I loved going in there and just being like, Hey, how you doing?
[00:02:37] Nate Brown: How's it working for you? Is there anything we could do better for you? And I've discovered that I had this customer service nature kind of inside of me. So that next role I jumped into a help desk type of role and I was actually serving inside the Tennessee Farmer's Co-op. Through an outsourced vendor and loved it, had so much fun through that process of customer service and learning these complicated batch fertilizer transactions and like, just stuff I never thought I would care about.
[00:03:04] Nate Brown: Suddenly I cared about a lot cuz it gave me an opportunity to help these people with their everyday stuff that they needed to overcome. And I love that cycle. And then I jumped over into a big safety science company where I worked for 12 years and was able to just grow. Inside of that organization from a frontline customer service rep to then taking ownership of that team to then acquiring several teams into us that were healthcare related.
[00:03:28] Nate Brown: We went from just adult learning to now occupational health and the complexity and the type of problems we got to solve were tremendous. So just learned so much in that process and then got to take ownership of the training department for a period of time and really got to learn more of that l and d type of function and then was able to take on a CX role.
[00:03:49] Nate Brown: But you know, not until we really started to do CX organically first. And to prove it out and really demonstrate and show, wow if we take a holistic view of our customers instead of more of this departmental approach that we're taking, the results are fantastic. So in that discovered the power of CX started doing it and bringing it to that organization.
[00:04:11] Nate Brown: And then was able to jump into more of an evangelistic and consultant role through Officium Labs and work with some of the top gaming clients in the world in terms of enhancing their player experience, which has been so much fun in the past couple of years. And then just last November got acquired by Arise.
[00:04:28] Nate Brown: And so here I am.
[00:04:30] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, That's fantastic. By the way, I did not have batch fertilizer transactions on my working smarter Bingo card, so I'm gonna have to mark that down. But no, you know, it's funny. Let's, without getting too deep into CX yet When you and I are probably near the same age and we've probably we have a fairly similar journey now, my most of my journey was in contact centers, but it was in customer experience and customer service, and I remember back in the day it was really just a customer, good customer experience was really just a matter of the individual.
[00:05:01] Dave Hoekstra: Like, wow, that person's really good at it. Right? And so we would find people that are good and we would tell our hiring people find people like this, right? And it, it was never a, it was never a wait a minute, how do we take what's going on? And expand it to a more you know, programmatical approach.
[00:05:21] Dave Hoekstra: It was really just find more people like this. And I had the same, I had kind of the same experience as you back when I was young and I started working. I used to work at a photo lab. Right. Nice. And, you know, and I would have people, you, you're pretty good at this. Like you're you seem to get this and I.
[00:05:36] Dave Hoekstra: I didn't think it was great. I was just like, I'm just being nice. And it's like, oh, that's how you do it, right, . But you know, when we talk about the general and CX, that's really the, what's happening in the last probably decade or so is companies are starting to say, Hey, we can learn from these people that are good at this and then have them kind of share that approach.
[00:05:59] Dave Hoekstra: And let me ask you, have you found it difficult? Put it down on paper. What makes a good CX experience to be able to teach
[00:06:08] Nate Brown: Well, sure. I mean, you just gave the example of just be nice. Yeah. So, you know, we, we always say how simple it is to just be nice. Well, let's reverse engineer that.
[00:06:18] Nate Brown: In order for somebody to be nice, think about how you have to feel. Niceness is an overflow of you caring about the other person, caring enough about your environment and your workplace to where you have the overflow of energy to actually give to another person. And you're not always in a self-preservation mode and just burned out and just trying to get through the day.
[00:06:41] Nate Brown: I mean, there's so much psychology that has to be in place before you can quote unquote, just be nice. So .
[00:06:50] Dave Hoekstra: It's funny because like I said, I think some people are just inherently good at it. Yeah. And some people are inherently bad at it, and, but, you know, I always appreciated, okay, let me change what I just said.
[00:07:03] Dave Hoekstra: I don't think they were bad at it. Just some people didn't have. The, maybe it's just me and my constant need to be liked. I, you know, I'm desperately seeking the approval of people and that to me was probably what made me pretty good at customer service was I wanted to make the person on the other side of the counter, on the other side of the phone happy with their experience.
[00:07:29] Dave Hoekstra: And, but there are people who don't care about. And I'm not saying that those people aren't good at customer service because you sometimes need those people because of the types of customers we have to deal with from time to time. But what's really kind of the important part is When companies are trying to figure this out.
[00:07:47] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. When companies are, you know, looking at hiring a Nate Brown to kind of run their CX. Right. You know, Calabrio recently made a pretty pretty important hire in our CX approach. I don't know, you know, for those of you who are the timing of this particular episode, Calabrio recently brought in Jim Davies from his Gartner.
[00:08:07] Dave Hoekstra: To help run the Calabrio customer experience program. But you know what we talk about you said you, you used a key word there and you kind of talked about defending, right? And it's interesting to talk about from a base point, what an organization needs to defend. To work through that.
[00:08:26] Dave Hoekstra: So I'm interested in maybe your approach to teaching an organization how to really spend the time teaching them what to care about.
[00:08:37] Nate Brown: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of the things that we would, I mean, that's an extended cycle of education and evaluation and other things but definitely some milestones on that journey.
[00:08:47] Nate Brown: It's what is the ideal definition of CX look like? And I love the metaphor that comes from building a story brand by Donald Miller. He talks about the customers, the hero of the story. So let's stop focusing on ourselves all the time. It's like driving around with a dome light on in your car.
[00:09:02] Nate Brown: Let's turn that off so we can look outside and see who we're actually serving. So the customers the hero of the story. So what does that make us then Dave? It makes us the guide. We get to guide the customer towards their definition of success. So how can we then do that as an organization? How can we be the guide in a way that nobody else.
[00:09:24] Nate Brown: And we define attributes to that here. Here's what it looks like for us to be the guide. And we know that when we do these things, we bring the customer down their journey in an accelerated format, a better format, a more exciting format, whatever that looks like, we bring them to their journey point destination in a way that nobody else can. Those attributes are so important. So once we identify some of those attributes, then yes, we gotta train people to 'em. We, and we do need to bring people in. They kind have a natural propensity towards some of those, because things like empathy, you know, it's really hard to train and embed that in.
[00:10:03] Nate Brown: It can be done. I've seen it done. But you wanna make that training burden as low as possible. So you're bringing in people that, that kind of have those attributes already. Now that you've defined them, it makes it a lot easier for you to identify the right people to bring into the tribe. And then you together are working on how can we remove friction in this journey, both for ourselves and for the customer.
[00:10:28] Nate Brown: I mean, so many people, Dave they come in and they are excited to serve. They have these capabilities, but then there's so many barriers to them being able to do their job well. That they burn out. They tap out.
[00:10:39] Dave Hoekstra: Now these are these are internal barriers? Yes. Not external barriers. Like what, what's a good example of maybe some internal barriers that would keep someone from delivering that?
[00:10:49] Nate Brown: Knowledge, knowledge name. I mean, if we think about what customer service is, it's a mini marriage ceremony between the hero of the story and the organization has this thing, this product, this service information, whatever it is, the customer service rep has the ability to officiate a mini marriage ceremony.
[00:11:07] Nate Brown: Between the hero of the story and the organization and what they have to bring to that hero. So in order for us to be the efficient in this marriage ceremony, it requires us to have the knowledge available to do it. We've gotta know who this customer is and what their definition of success is. We have to know the products and services of this business better than anybody else.
[00:11:27] Nate Brown: So that we can make this thing happen. And when we're restricted from seeing this customer in their journey, when we're restricted from knowing the things inside of our own organization, cuz they've been siloed off and trapped inside of tools and inside of people, it prevents us from doing our job.
[00:11:43] Nate Brown: Well, Nate, I absolutely love
[00:11:47] Dave Hoekstra: the marriage metaphor. It's so apt that you know, you. You are creating a relationship. You are marrying these two concepts together in a long term piece and that's what's fun. But how do you get a, somebody who makes $17 an hour to care as much.
[00:12:08] Dave Hoekstra: Nate Brown does. Yeah. How do you give them the information? You know, knowledge is important, right? But the, what's the next phase to to doing that?
[00:12:16] Nate Brown: So, I'm holding up a book and it's called Prime to Perform and this resource has really revolutionize my own thinking on this.
[00:12:22] Nate Brown: Great question, Dave. How do we make people care? I was actually teaching a workshop at ICMI recently. And as I do at the beginning of this workshop we're gonna be in a room together for four hours. Why did you come in my workshop? What brought you in here? What are you struggling with? What, what made you choose this one and two people right out of the gate were like feels like the give a darn is broken.
[00:12:42] Nate Brown: in our contact center, we can't get people to care anymore. What's going on here? And you just threw out, you know, the compensation factor. Well, money is a weak glue. . Yeah. We can always make more money through means positive and explicit. We can always make more money. But what we cannot do inside of every organization, only great organizations, is intrinsically motivate people to be the guide really well, to do that because they want to do that.
[00:13:09] Nate Brown: They want to serve. And it requires an organization who has the ability to create this compelling brand core. Here's the promise that we started in the begin. Here's why we're a business. This is what the heck we're doing. And now we get to protect this promise. We, as customer service people, we are responsible for making this organization act in integrity towards, its the promise that we're making out in the world.
[00:13:35] Nate Brown: We're either making this organization a liar or we're making this promise come true. And that's a huge responsibility. And if you care about the promise, you're gonna take a lot of pride in that. You're gonna want to do that really well. And now we get into this idea, Dave, of like it's protection.
[00:13:52] Nate Brown: We wanna have brand guardians and ambassadors who care enough about that promise to where they're gonna, they're gonna transcend their own selfish. To make sure that the needs of the customer and the needs of the brand are taken care of Very. Yeah
[00:14:08] Dave Hoekstra: there's I love getting into the intrinsic, detailed language.
[00:14:12] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. Right. And the concept of defending a brand versus promoting a brand. Right. And, you know, I think a lot of us are like, oh the brand's under attack, but no. It you, you know, building strong defense. Even when you're not being attacked is a huge part of defense. Right. And, you know, okay, we can get nerdy about this if we want to, which I'm perfectly comfortable doing if you want to but that is, that's the key.
[00:14:41] Dave Hoekstra: And it's funny, I think back to my first call center job. I worked for a pager company right. That made, provided service for pagers and that kind of stuff. So, the, I never ever, in my entire, probably five years that I worked in and out of this company. Never had any concept of what the particular, what our brand was like, what our mission statement was what's the point, right?
[00:15:08] Dave Hoekstra: And I'm sure that in some marketing boardroom in San Francisco or something they probably said, oh, our mission statement is connecting the world, or something like that. But that was never, ever made apparent to me. And to be honest, I had a job. I kind of liked doing it and that's what it was.
[00:15:26] Dave Hoekstra: So do you think it's important for organizations to spend time educating, you know, every employee. What that brand statement is, what that mission statement, what the point is of the organization? Yeah.
[00:15:41] Nate Brown: I mean, and it transcends the statement itself, right? I mean, that definitely unifies people. And I loved tribal leadership when it talks about the attribute the trademark of a great tribe is the common language that it uses together.
[00:15:53] Nate Brown: That's almost what defines a people group is the words that they choose, the words that they use with one another. So there is a lot of power in these languages. And Dave, I do love how you're talking about almost defense versus offense. I think it is especially relevant in a customer service context.
[00:16:09] Nate Brown: And I do, I am reminded by the old Simon Sinek metaphor that he talks about the Spartans, that they don't win with the sharpness of their sword. They win with the strength of their shield. Around one another. They're galvanizing around one another so that this person can focus forward on the actual competition.
[00:16:27] Nate Brown: I can fight forward instead of having to always watch my back and watch my flank. I've got people beside me with a strong shield that are going to protect me and I trust them. That's so critical in a customer service role with multiple. I mean, number one, you're not gonna survive in a customer service role unless you are in the trench with people that care about you and are there to help protect you.
[00:16:50] Nate Brown: You've gotta draw that energy from one another. I mean, think about like nurses lately and people in the medical field, and if you talk to them and you ask them, how did you get through the craziness? That has been the last two years. With everything that is going on. They will tell you almost every time, it was my coworkers, it was the people around me.
[00:17:07] Nate Brown: We did it for each other and we had to pull each other through this, and the contact center can feel like that at times. We gotta pull each other up and remind each other why this is so important, the brand core that we're serving, and how we get to defend one another, defend this brand because customer service is defensive in nature.
[00:17:26] Nate Brown: I mean, it says this in the effortless experience. But people generally, when you're reaching out to a contact center environment the ideal path, the ideal journey that we talked about before, the customer's, the hero of the story. Something darn happened. , we got knocked off the path a little bit, Dave. So it's like, okay now our role is the guide is to get them back on the path.
[00:17:45] Nate Brown: And that's a hard job. A lot of times that's really difficult and it's not the funnest job in many. But, and it is defensive in nature, you know, we're not taking steps forward. We took steps sideways. Now we need to get 'em back on the path so that we can take steps forward again together.
[00:18:01] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah.
[00:18:01] Dave Hoekstra: And a lot of times you gotta teach 'em what the path is. Right. How to recognize that path. And that's what I love so much is when, you know, when you've got some of these great brands that are out there.
[00:18:11] Dave Hoekstra: Right. And I used to work for a let's call it a high end.
[00:18:16] Nate Brown: Retail
[00:18:17] Dave Hoekstra: provider. Yeah. Right.
[00:18:18] Dave Hoekstra: That's famous for putting out a catalog every year. So, and I used to, they, we used to have these company meetings where they would talk about some of the things that the companies going through. And they talked about how they were in effect suing a small dog grooming organization for using their brand.
[00:18:39] Dave Hoekstra: Right. And of course, you know, younger me is like, oh, these they're, there's this big corporate America like squeezing out the little guy. And it's funny, as I get closer and understand the concept of the brain guardianship they just didn't want this organization doing something that would reflect poorly on their.
[00:18:59] Dave Hoekstra: And I get it now. I'm like, okay. It really wasn't you know, they, their name was a pun on the larger name. And I'm being vague on purpose cuz you know, we're being recorded . But the the it's funny how. Brand guardianship goes from the concept maybe high up with a, in a legal sense, but all the way down to the last person and taking the last call of the day and what that means.
[00:19:23] Dave Hoekstra: And, you know, we hear at Calabrio speak a lot about this and not necessarily the teaching of people how to do that, but how to help organizations find the ways they should be defending the brand. Right. And, you know, the things like competitive mentions, the things. So let's get into some of the real the nitty gritty here.
[00:19:43] Dave Hoekstra: What are some things that an organization. Let's even take it specifically to contact center organizations. Cause I know you, you know, a thing or two about that. What are some specific things that a contact center organization can do to really define their brand guardians? Right. What are some specific tests, specific steps they can take?
[00:20:02] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, I mean,
[00:20:02] Nate Brown: it really, here's a mistake I made in this, Dave. I mean, early on I was thinking so much about voice of customer. And we have to learn everything we can about friction. The customer and I actually created these little buttons even where when people got meaningful customer feedback, they would hit this little button, it's a USB web key thing, and it would flash on their desks.
[00:20:23] Nate Brown: It was like in their face, like as a physical manifestation of you are the voice of the customer personified straight up pavlo. Yeah. Boom. Yeah. I mean, there's great power connecting a mental thing. You're trying to make somebody do to a physical. It helps to trigger that. So, I mean, there's still a lot of power there, but I'm giving this button to somebody beyond the contact center actually, cuz it, it was working well enough to where we started to branch out.
[00:20:48] Nate Brown: And she's like, so you're saying that whenever I get meaningful customer feedback, I gotta hit this button and I just, you know, type in what the customer said and how they feel about it, and we're gonna help close the loop on this, right? Yes, that's exactly right. She goes, where's my button?
[00:21:04] Nate Brown: Because we weren't doing much at all Okay. To really account for her feedback and the voice of our own people and the friction that they were experiencing in trying to service the hero of the story, the customer. So I mean, it really begins, Dave if we wanna think about brand guardianship and brand ambassadorship and how to generate it.
[00:21:22] Nate Brown: Yeah. There, there is this intrinsic motivation overflow that we're trying to create. And a lot of that comes from voice of customer, the positive kind, the reinforcing kind. Of, wow, here's all the ways that we've served our customers really well. Here's the difference we made for them. We don't do that enough with our voice of customer engine to demonstrate how we're making a difference together.
[00:21:43] Nate Brown: But then the other side of it is that VOE engine, that voice of employee engine. What are the barriers to service here to where we can't do our jobs? Well, we can't defend this brand cuz it's indefensible in these areas. And when you isolate those and you start to work on those it just elevates the experience all around and suddenly together you're able to focus on the things that actually matter.
[00:22:07] Dave Hoekstra: Wow. I think about that. The identification of indefensible things. Yes. Right. The concept of how, you know, You know, let's take an organization like Apple. You know, the iPhone brand is one of the strongest brands out there, right? I mean, people are insanely loyal to it, but if you go online, you can find things that
[00:22:33] Dave Hoekstra: even the best Apple support representative cannot defend. Right? And so how do we find those things? And quick plug, that's what Calabrio does. Yeah, right? It Calabrio helps find those indefensible things because, you know, somebody calls in and says, Hey, my bill is messed up. The agent looks. Yep.
[00:22:53] Dave Hoekstra: Your bill is messed up. I'm gonna fix it. Great. Thank you. Positive customer experience. But somebody calls in and says, my bill is messed up, and it's because there is a billing charge that the agent is not allowed to refund. Yeah. Yeah. The policy says you cannot refund this. That's an indefensible brand.
[00:23:12] Dave Hoekstra: There's nothing, I can't, it doesn't matter how good of a brand guardian I am as a representative of the company, I have been told I'm not allowed to. That's like in using our battle metaphor, that is the hole in the wall that I'm literally with like neon signs that says, you know, go here to defeat us.
[00:23:29] Dave Hoekstra: Right? That's and so that's a great place. So, how can, you know, obviously with Calabrio, but in your experience, what are some ways that companies can identify these indefensible attack points?
[00:23:42] Nate Brown: Yeah, no I love your metaphor here of like almost approaching the castle as a brand.
[00:23:47] Nate Brown: Yes. It's like, and if you're fired up, if you wanna do damage to the brand, it's like where do I enter ? Yeah. And it's, there's channel. There's channels or doors in this castle and we want to guide the customer to the best resolution path, again, using an effortless experience ism here. And we so often fail to do this to where we put up barriers to what we could predict to be the best resolution path.
[00:24:11] Nate Brown: And I'll give you the iconic example of situations where I've been navigating on a mobile device or something and before I'm able to interact. With an agent or somebody that I need help from personally, I have to go through this whole knowledge base cycle and there was a moment not too long back where I was doing this, forced to go through a knowledge base interaction before I could actually get the help that I needed.
[00:24:35] Nate Brown: And if you looked, it would actually rate at the bottom, it would tell you how helpful the knowledge base article is. Because there's a major CRM that's out there that by default gives you the ability to vote on the helpfulness of a knowledge based, AR based article and actually gives you a public view of the helpfulness of that article.
[00:24:55] Nate Brown: And it's a visible, when you look at that so often, it's like two out of 4,000 people found this article helpful, and yet everybody's being channeled. Before you can get to the next stage of service, it's like, what have we done here? This is crazy. This is not helping people. In fact, what it's doing is pissing 'em off and then by the time they get to the person that can actually help 'em, they are fired up and they're territorial they're puffed up, they're defensive and that agent's gonna have a heck of a time now having to deescalate that to get them back on the journey.
[00:25:28] Dave Hoekstra: Especially because the agent is being told to suggest the same thing that the chat bot said to do. Yeah, I know. It's it and it is funny. I literally, it's funny you mention that I had almost this exact same experience not two days ago. It was having a problem with a piece of tech. Went to their support, got chatbot fed.
[00:25:47] Dave Hoekstra: The KB articles, finally said, Nope, we're gonna pass you over to a live agent. The live agent, the first thing the live agent did was send me the exact same KB articles and it was like, oh, now it turns out I will. I'm publicly admitting here that. It turns out that my problem was, is that my network cable was unplugged
[00:26:07] Dave Hoekstra: But yes, but because I am such a techy guy, and I understand this couldn't have possibly been my fault, but that's neither here nor there. But it's funny how, in that particular example, I appreciated the patience of the live agent. Yeah. Because it was, that was opening the door to breaking their brand and not them.
[00:26:28] Dave Hoekstra: So we can talk about this all day long. Right. And so I, what I want to ask you question is, do you have an example. Of customer that you've worked with that did a particularly good job. And then also on the flip side, maybe a company that didn't do so hot that learned from their mistakes.
[00:26:47] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah,
[00:26:48] Nate Brown: I do have that. I can offer that. So a great example of this that I've had recently was ring.com. You wanna talk about brand guardians and just a seamless extension of their experience from digital into the human experie. It was blown away recently when I received my equipment, which I was responsible for setting up myself, which if you think back in the day, people didn't install their own home security stuff, it's a complicated deal.
[00:27:16] Nate Brown: The digital experience that guided me through that was remarkable, and I was off and running within an hour with this relatively complicated technology. Well, then I did get stuck at some point with which of these cameras. Is recording to the cloud cuz I, I couldn't see the footage on one of the cameras, so I did need to call the contact center to understand the plan that I was on and how it was being captured.
[00:27:41] Nate Brown: I, I was greeted as a neighbor because in the digital experience, they're talking about neighbors, protecting neighbors, and creating this human safety net. It's not just digital. We're talking about people being able to protect one another in a neighborly. And their contact center. The brand ambassador in that contact center knew exactly how to speak in that tone of voice and make me feel protected, make me feel confident in the service that I was using and helped me.
[00:28:06] Nate Brown: It helped me immediately with the question that I needed to get answered. Was just remarkable. So proactive too. Even thinking through next issue, avoidance, you know, what's gonna happen next in, in Nate Brown's journey here and was able to help give me some helpful guidance there too. So I, it's just awesome when a brand marries these things.
[00:28:26] Dave Hoekstra: And the beautiful thing is, you know, we've talked about creating brand guardians. The beautiful thing is now Nate Brown is a brand guardian of ring.com. As a customer and you're talking to someone and we do not need to get into the, oh a happy customer tells two people. But you know, we've covered that extensively.
[00:28:45] Dave Hoekstra: There's plenty of information out there when it comes to the concept of a brand guardian, though every interaction matters. Every single one down to the person navigating their website and looking for self-service options. Yeah. The person calling into the contact center, the person chatting, the person sending an email.
[00:29:03] Dave Hoekstra: I, as positive as I get about some of these things, I also have been part of some of the worst experiences of my life and how that turns me away. And I'm curious, have you worked with a customer who maybe. Didn't quite
[00:29:17] Nate Brown: get it. I haven't worked with one recently. I've gotten phenomenal clients and we're going from good to great , which is so fun.
[00:29:23] Nate Brown: But I do have a very very recent example of a major national brand who seems to be missing the mark a bit in this area of brand guardianship. And it's it's a major grocery store. And so I had a really bad experience in there with my. It was it was pretty bad.
[00:29:40] Nate Brown: And, you know, wanted to kind of explain some of these things to the customer service desk, walking out and maybe even talk to a manager at that time so that somebody could know that I felt like one of their employees was in a really bad spot. And but the, there just wasn't really an opportunity to do that in the store.
[00:29:59] Nate Brown: So I came back. Yeah. And found the feedback portal on their major national website and found their feedback portal to be broken. Oh, it would of course, force you to do the store locator process, and then it would wipe out the entire form. And that was like one of the last fields. So I tried to do this two different ways and got wiped out two different times and was like, what the heck?
[00:30:24] Nate Brown: At this point you're getting a little angry, like, I'm doing this for you. I'm doing this out of kindness for this employee that I'm a little concerned about, and now I'm being restricted. From being able to do the right thing, this feels very wrong to me. So I did find a phone number and I did call, and I got a very capable, after some period of time, I got a very capable contact center agent who said the right things in terms of, I'm gonna take this information and I will extend this to a store manager who will be reaching out to you.
[00:30:55] Nate Brown: So that, that was an okay interaction, did set an expectation with me that would happen within 48 hours, about 120 hours. I did get a call from the store manager and her attitude made it very clear why a lot of this was going on. You would not believe how defensive she was just right out of the gate.
[00:31:15] Nate Brown: Didn't even really know what I was gonna say. Didn't know any the darn thing about me yet, but just, you could tell she just hated having to make this phone call.
[00:31:23] Dave Hoekstra: It's funny how, you know, we talk a lot. The, you know, in this case you have a customer who has gone significantly out of their own way to try Yeah. To give you that, that feedback. And I'm a lot of the same way. There's a local, semi-local fast food restaurant here that in recent times has failed to get my order right, like 10 times in a row.
[00:31:49] Dave Hoekstra: And I'm like, I don't even know. All I did was. Complain about it on Twitter. Sure. Right. It was like that. That's as far as I was willing to go in this particular example. But that is in the business, what we call well, I guess in this case you could call it unsolicited feedback because you, they did not ask for your information.
[00:32:08] Dave Hoekstra: But what I'm more interested in is the feedback that we don't get. How can an organization tap into. That feedback that where somebody's not willing to do it, what's what are some ways that we could potentially solve that particular problem? Yeah, so
[00:32:24] Nate Brown: one, one more quick element to that story and I'll absolutely answer that.
[00:32:27] Nate Brown: So, I was able to, in this case, disarm her and be like, Hey, I just want you to know, I've been shopping in that store for years and we've had a great experience almost every single. Th this was an unusually poor experience, and I just feel compelled to tell you about it in regards to this one employee in particular who I'm a little concerned about.
[00:32:45] Nate Brown: And so, of course, you know, she came down from that defensive attitude was like, oh, Well, okay, well, well, so, so, so, so then the question, okay, so tell me what actually happened , and now she's actually listening for the first time , she was
[00:33:01] Dave Hoekstra: expecting Nate, Karen Brown and got just regular old Nate
[00:33:05] Nate Brown: Brown.
[00:33:05] Nate Brown: Exactly. My name is Daniel and yeah, . But the funny thing happens. So here's what happened. At the end of the call though, she goes, Hey, next time you have feedback like this, don't go to the. Just contact me. And at first I was like, oh, that's cool. That's kind of nice. You know, I have this direct connection.
[00:33:21] Nate Brown: Not cool. Because that is the very opposite of brand guardianship. Yes. She's saying, I want you to bypass the brand process. I don't want you to go through the proper channel because then I have to deal with it in the way that they dictate.
[00:33:36] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, cuz I don't want my supervisor to know exactly that's what she was telling you.
[00:33:41] Dave Hoekstra: She's like, I would rather you come straight to me because I'm gonna get in trouble if you go the other way. And you know, that's, it's the whole new avenue of this is when you get the feedback that negatively impacts the customer experience. Are you handling it appropriately? Yeah. Are you punishing people or are you taking that, you know what, we have got to do better.
[00:34:05] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. We as an organization, not you, not your store, not your team, not your calls. Yeah. But we as an organization have to do better. And so I think that's, you know, it really does reinforce the point about this, you know, CX and brand guardianship, these things are happening every. You know, and if we're talking contact center, you know, if a contact center takes 2000 calls in a day, how many of those 2000 calls are actually being.
[00:34:34] Dave Hoekstra: Reviewed or listened to. I mean, the other I think when we were together at QATC as part of part of my session, yeah. I had everybody literally get out their phones and do some calculations and not one person in the room got to 1%. Wow. Everybody was under 1%. Yeah. If they did the, how many of those get reviewed and the 99.4% of interactions that are happening outside, , that's that's the unsolicited feedback that you can really tap into.
[00:35:03] Dave Hoekstra: And in a context center world, we have amazing tools that can help really get their arms around that. And that's what we really want to focus on as creating these brand guardians. Is understanding how those different pieces go through. So, I love that story. I love the. The concept and the passion that you bring to this it's really fantastic.
[00:35:23] Dave Hoekstra: I feel like we could go for months talking about this kind of stuff, and maybe we should, right? Maybe we should do the monthly Nate and Dave
[00:35:30] Nate Brown: podcast. I think everybody's unsubscribing right now. Dave . Yeah,
[00:35:33] Dave Hoekstra: I know. It's like, ah, punching out. Punching out. But so my last question for you as a lot of you.
[00:35:39] Dave Hoekstra: May or may not know. Nate is a fairly accomplished mandolin player. . And I wanted to ask you, can you play anything besides losing my religion or going to California ? Let me
[00:35:49] Nate Brown: grab,
[00:35:51] Dave Hoekstra: oh. So he's grabbing his mandolin and we're gonna, we're gonna
[00:35:55] Nate Brown: hear it. Yeah. I don't even know if it's in tune right now and I don't have my strap on's.
[00:35:59] Nate Brown: It's excuse
[00:36:00] Dave Hoekstra: I,
[00:36:01] Nate Brown: Nate stripping. I can't get the polyester to grab.
[00:36:12] Nate Brown: I, I can't do it right now. Dave. I'm,
[00:36:13] Dave Hoekstra: that's no, that's it. Now how did you get into the mandolin?
[00:36:16] Nate Brown: Oh, you know, it's a funny story. So I was leading worship at a church and playing guitar. I wasn't very good. And and the church, unbeknownst to me hired an actual worship leader who came in.
[00:36:26] Nate Brown: And he was like you're playing guitar. He's like, I play guitar, so you can't do that too. And then he goes, why don't you go buy a man? And like I was fine. I went, why did you go buy a mandolin? Why you buy a Mandoline? So I drove over to the outlet mall in northeast Georgia and bought a $200 Ibanez mandolin and fell in love with it, and was absolutely awesome.
[00:36:49] Nate Brown: So, you know. Thanks man, . That's
[00:36:51] Dave Hoekstra: great. That's great. All right. Well, Nate, we really do appreciate you joining us here on the Working Smarter Podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure to have. Hopefully we've given some really good insight and tips into, you know, CX is such a broad topic and we could, you know, there's so many different ways it could go, but what we want, what we try to do is give people the ability to really hone in and find things.
[00:37:13] Dave Hoekstra: So really do appreciate you joining us. Thanks
[00:37:16] Nate Brown: so much for coming on. My pleasure, Dave. Thanks for everything you're doing and thanks everybody out there listening. Have a great day.
[00:37:22] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. And from the Calabrio team here, we appreciate it. Nate, thank you for joining us. If there's ever any more questions that we can hand handle for you or available@Calabrio.com you can follow follow us on Twitter.
[00:37:34] Dave Hoekstra: You can join us on LinkedIn, that there's so many different ways to connect as well as with Nate. Make sure you find his profile on LinkedIn and give him a quick follow. It's always some great information. From him. So we do appreciate the time to those of you who are out there, thanks for so much for spending some time with us, and we'll talk to you on the next episode of Working Smarter from Calabrio.
[00:37:53] Dave Hoekstra: Thanks everybody.