Ollie

Building a Customer-Centric Organization from the Ground Up

I built my career from the ground up, starting on the front lines as a Phone Agent. Navigating various service philosophies across multiple organizations allowed me to stress-test what works—and what doesn't.

When I transitioned to building my first CX organization, I leveraged that 'in-thetrenches' perspective. I used it to design a strategy where world-class Customer Experience is fueled by an equally intentional Employee Experience.

Turning Customer Insights into End-to-End Improvements

I believe the best customer service is the kind the customer never has to use. My team focuses on understanding the “why” behind each customer outreach.

We use those insights to bridge the gap between the Contact Center and the rest of the organization. Whether it’s a digital bug or a physical product tweak, we use frontline intelligence to drive improvements further upstream.

Rising Customer Expectations in the Directto-Consumer Market

Speed is one of the ways we are seeing expectations increase. No matter the channel, consumers want to be able to get a hold of the team quickly. Even more so, we have to be focused on Average Response times by channel.

  Speed is one of the ways we are seeing expectations increase. No matter the channel, consumers want to be able to get a hold of the team quickly.  

We also focus on the max wait time we allow per channel to try our best to ensure we are always getting back to our consumer base in a timely manner. Customers are also very interested in us knowing their loyalty history. Customers who have spent quite a bit with Ollie, they expected different treatment. You cannot use policies against them; they immediately expect considerations to be made due to their customer history.

Balancing Operational Efficiency with Personalized Service

You have to focus on Employee engagement; disengaged agents will lead to inefficiencies in a host of different ways. Disengaged agents will find a lot of ways to avoid work or do a great job with their consumers. Having clear expectations for team members is critical and having KPIS that help to balance our efficiency along with quality is critical. An example of balancing metrics is that if I have a strong metric, such as how many contacts/ calls an agent has to take per hour, I balance that out with a strong quality measurement. That way, metrics cannot be gamed and burn through contacts without considering the quality of those interactions.

Another thing to consider is not to boil the ocean. Try to keep everything simple for the team. I have seen agents who have been responsible for upwards of 10-11 metrics. That can almost make it impossible for agents to track and focus on. We work really hard on making sure that it is simple for the team. The simpler it is for the team, the better.

What It Really Takes to Lead CX

Make sure you understand from the ground up. If a leader comes in who has never done the job, it's easy to make decisions without understanding the day-to-day impact on the team. These changes can make it more difficult for the teams to do their job. Also, keep putting yourself in the customer's shoes and going through your own customer flows to identify opportunities to improve the experience.

This will ensure you never create poor flows that can end up being like the death of a thousand papercuts. It is essentially similar to the golden rule, create the type of customer experience that you want to have when working with your favorite brand.