Who Is Ari?

Meet Ari, the Training and Quality Coordinator at Birdy Grey!

About Birdy Grey

Birdy Grey is an answer to the prayers of brides and bridesmaids seeking affordable, stylish dresses. With all options priced under $100, the brand allows brides to select a color scheme while leaving the style choice to individual bridesmaids.

Ari’s CX Journey

Ari’s journey in customer experience spans several years, beginning with service roles in high school and college. They climbed the career ladder at Third Love, transitioning from a customer service agent to a floor manager and eventually into workforce management, overseeing a team of over 200 agents.

After losing their job due to COVID, Ari focused on furthering their education by earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Education—a perspective that now informs their role at Birdy Grey. Coupling their passion for CX with their educational background, Ari naturally transitioned to leading training and quality assurance at Birdy Grey.

Structure Of The Birdy Grey Team

Ari works with four other internal employees spread across social media management, operations, the CX manager, and the CX director.

In addition to their internal team, Birdy Grey also works with Awesome CX to outsource customer service. The Awesome CX team at Birdy Grey is currently 18 people strong, including SMEs and Team Leads, but that number can spike as high as 30+ during the busy season.

What Ari Likes About Outsourcing CX

Ari loves working with the outsourced agents from Awesome CX! They even took a trip out to the Philippines earlier this year to meet some of the team and lead training workshops in person.

Ari ensures that the CX team at Birdy Grey is properly trained and prepared to handle customer inquiries by sending products to their outsourced agents, allowing them to see and feel the fabrics that the dresses are made of.

Ari says, “We really want them to feel like they’re a part of Birdy Grey and a part of Awesome CX, not just Awesome CX working for Birdie Grey.”

Opportunities In Outsourcing CX

The main issue Ari sees with outsourcing to Awesome CX is productivity. It can be difficult to keep tabs on what everyone is working on when they are in office, but take that overseas and it becomes nearly impossible for the QA team.

Ari also acknowledges challenges in communicating policy changes to the outsourced team. They have been proactive in addressing these issues, clarifying that agents shouldn’t fear making decisions like offering refunds. The goal is to keep CSAT scores high and ensure alignment with Birdy Grey’s policies.

If agents do hit their quality and productivity metrics, they get an additional bonus for that month. (Sign us up for Ari’s team!)

How Ari Quality-Checks Agents Before Hiring

Awesome CX sends a list of candidates to the Birdy Grey team including a few essay and short answer responses and each candidate’s resume. From there, Ari meets with these candidates over a Zoom interview, where they say they can further vet the candidates based on their “vibe.”

While Ari admits it may sound silly, the candidate’s vibe is really most important besides general English fluency and grammatical proficiency!

Ari says the candidates who stand out show enthusiasm for the brand, have looked at the Birdy Grey website, and can communicate how they align with the brand.

Training At Birdy Grey

Ari uses Rise, an online learning platform, to help train their remote team. They have created all of the necessary lessons in the Rise platform, everything from product knowledge to platform training.

Ari supplements these self-guided trainings with additional live demos through Zoom to really make sure the team understands the full process.

One thing that Ari has found to be super helpful in the knowledge retention of their team is a fun exercise through mood boarding. The new agents can use pictures from the website or Pinterest and color palettes they discovered during training to build a physical representation of the Birdy Grey mood. We LOVE this idea! (Taking notes as we speak, Ari…)

When training new internal team members, even outside of the CX team, Ari is in charge of training them on answering tickets and plans on continuing to do this with everyone internally every quarter, saying, “[Then] everyone has constant views on what’s happening in CX so that they can get ideas and we can really work cross-functionally to help solve customer issues.” 👏

CX Tech Stack

Zendesk

Shopify

Maestro

To AI Or Not To AI

AI is something that the team at Birdy Grey is not currently utilizing, but is very strongly considering. Ari would love to get a live chat channel set up and sees a big potential for AI on that channel.

Ideally, they said it would help direct customers to the right self-service option before needing to speak with a human.