1. Building customer loyalty through understanding: Prioritize empathy in customer interactions to create positive experiences, as understanding customers fosters loyalty and connection.
2. The link between employee well-being and success: Invest in team well-being, recognizing that happy employees translate to satisfied customers, ultimately benefiting the bottom line.
3. Equipping teams for effective problem-solving: Equip your team with the necessary tools to resolve issues, empowering them to feel capable and reducing frustration during difficult situations.
4. How belief in your product fuels growth: Develop a passionate team that believes in the product, as this enthusiasm drives both customer engagement and revenue growth.
5. Enhancing communication skills for authentic connections: Diversify life experiences to enhance communication skills, which helps create authentic connections with customers and improves service quality.
Joe Dobbs has gone from making coffee to crafting flawless cocktail experiences. He combines passion, tenacity, and a hint of creativity in his story. Learn how Joe is transforming Bartesian customer service with his unique flair.
Meet Joe, the Customer Service Manager at Bartesian!
Bartesian’s mission is to assist individuals in crafting their own cocktails. They’ve streamlined the cocktail-making process by offering a simple solution: a machine that creates cocktails using convenient, user-friendly capsules. With Bartesian, mixology is as easy as pressing a button.
When Joe first started working, he began as a barista at Starbucks, marking the start of his extensive journey in customer service. From there, he worked his way to managing accounts for a large association management company, before finding his way to Bartesian.
He describes working at Bartesian as a “dream,” where he appreciates the opportunity to serve as a manager for a team of exceptional customer service representatives and to help provide customers with the experience that will keep them coming back.
With a smile, Joe looks back on his trajectory, where he went from “slinging lattes to helping folks sling their own cocktails.”
Joe’s view of CX is a person-centric one. He aims to not only solve the problems Bartesian’s customers face, but also to work with them empathetically to create a positive experience.
He found that as he got better at communicating with people during his previous sales role, the more he wanted to “have a little bit more of the ability to meet customers in the middle,” and “help make everything right.”
“The ultimate goal of any customer experience representative is to take difficult situations and make them right for the customer. So that way they come back to you and say, you know, I really loved talking to Joe or talking to Justin…”
But Joe’s person-centric approach doesn’t begin and end with customers only. He also recognizes the critical importance, and complexity, of balancing company goals with the morale of his team.
“[The importance of] the well-being of your team can’t be overstated, because you need to take care of your team in order for them to take care of the customers,” he says. “If your team is underserved, then the customers are going to be underserved as well.”
Joe recognizes the difficulty in managing expectations for results and team morale, and so he takes into consideration many different factors. From the comfort of his team, to the feedback received from customers, to the individual results of team members versus systemic results, his approach to keeping that balance is holistic.
One avenue he has used to help keep that balance is by giving his team the tools they need to resolve customer issues. Through giving his team discount codes they can give to customers, or giving his team access to a higher-up they can refer a customer to, among other solutions, he aims to make it so that his team can succeed.
He recognizes that inevitably there are going to be times where someone on his team has 4 or 5 difficult and tricky calls in a row, and that can be demoralizing. By giving them the tools they need to succeed, he notes that it helps his team feel like there’s nothing that can get in their way and that they can resolve any issue that might arise. In that way, he helps keep his team on track even in difficult circumstances.
As a remote worker, who lives in commuting distance, Joe also uses trips into the office and a flexible work schedule to help keep the team’s morale up and the results flowing in. Whereas 3 of the 5 people on the CX team are in the office on a daily basis, Joe goes a few times a month, to touch base with everyone and manage expectations, something Joe views as critical. And, with the ability to work remotely, Joe supplements his team by working the early hours, when tickets first start coming in but the rest of the team hasn’t made it to the office.
Keeping the CX team balanced and operating at their best is fundamental to the results his team, and Bartesian by extension, get. “Once you’ve found that balance, find a way to keep feeding it and to keep that morale up. Happy workers will make happy customers will make for happy bottom lines. And that’s just the truth of it.”
For Joe, having a team that is passionate about the product is paramount for driving revenue. “When you have something that you believe in, that you’re passionate about, you can’t not sell it.”
And the importance of passion is also evident when looking at the customer side of things, Joe points out. Developing an audience of customers that really cares about your product is a great way to increase revenue.
“Saying, ‘hey, I know that you’ve been a customer for a long time and we’ve got this referral program that we notice you’ve never taken advantage of and yet here you are ordering for these parties with all your friends, how can we make it so that when they decide to buy a Bartesian, you get a cut of that?”
To Joe, adding that incentive, and demonstrating interest in working with customers is a great way to turn one-time buyers into subscribers.
Some of the KPIs that Joe tracks include CSAT scores, which he highlights as crucial indicators of customer satisfaction and service quality. Additionally, he monitors ticket volume and call breakdown versus emails to manage workload effectively and assess communication channels. Taking all of those metrics together, Joe affirms, is critical to using any of it at all.
“It's also important to keep in mind the context, because if your customer satisfaction score drops by 0.5 and you've answered 2,000 tickets for the day, that's not that crazy.” Whereas “if it drops by a lot and you're not seeing a ton of tickets coming in, then there might be an issue with either the service that the customers are receiving or the product that they're trying to purchase.”
Like Joe’s general approach to CX, his views on AI are holistic. As a tool, he sees the value in it, and its potential, something he regularly experiences given how frequently Bartesian introduces new tools that rely on AI to streamline the CX process.
Whether it’s using an AI to help with crafting an email, or to translate certain concepts into something digestible, there is a lot of utility to AI in Joe’s view.
But he is wary of people advertising it like a one-size-fits-all solution and stresses the importance of white-glove service.
“People can tell when they’re not dealing with a person… I’m sure you’ve seen at least one email where someone says ‘I don’t want to talk to a robot anymore I want to talk to a person.”
That’s something that Joe doesn’t see going away, because he understands that people want someone who can sympathize with them, to internalize their problem and help them with it. He sees the connection as something that likely can’t ever be completely replaced by an AI.
Joe’s main advice is to avoid getting caught up in the specifics. Reading every article about CX won’t make you a master, he says. Instead, prioritize diversifying your life experiences, and place yourself in uncomfortable situations. That will help improve your communication skills and make you more authentic to customers, which in turn will help keep customers happy and returning in the future.
And as Joe puts it, “getting and keeping a customer is the dream.”
Gorgias
Zoom
ChatGPT
Can’t-Live-Without Tool: Gorgias.
Key Hiring Trait: The ability to de-escalate.
Favorite Book: Steal Like an Artist By Austin Cleon.
Favorite Communication Channel: Emails, with phone calls as a close second.
AI or No AI? “If it’s a choice between all AI or no AI, I think no AI for now… but if it’s about whether to use AI as a tool, I certainly think you should.”
#1 Challenge as a CX Leader: Balancing the morale of the team with the goals of the company.
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