Who is Paige?

Meet Paige, Director of Customer Experience at Canopy!

About Canopy

Canopy helps customers unlock the full potential of at-home beauty and wellness routines. The brand offers skin-friendly, healthy, and clean humidifiers that encourage easy breathing and better sleep, among other benefits.

Paige’s CX Journey

Paige has worked in some form of customer experience since she was 17 years old. She started at Handybook as an agent, quickly moved up the leadership ladder and stayed for seven years. After a while, she looked for another start-up with a team of people looking to innovate business, and found Canopy, which began four years ago.

Over the years, the company has expanded its range of products. Paige has loved being able to watch the company grow.

“It’s been very exciting to watch… the brand grow a significant amount and be able to build documentation and support with entirely new products,” she says.

Paige loves the problem-solving aspect of CX, which she views as an exciting puzzle. She enjoys trying to figure out the problems that might arise for customers, getting to know each customer, and helping them get accustomed to the brand and its products.

“You want to find the match of what is the best solution for the largest number of people that leaves everybody happy,” she says. “... Getting to know the user at ground level is really exciting, and [so is] figuring out how to fix problems quickly and effectively.”

The CX Team at Canopy

The Canopy CX team is entirely offshore and operates from a third-party BPO. At Canopy, the team runs bare-bones operations. They hire external team leads that provide support from day-to-day in areas like QA, attendance, and PTO, which has been very helpful for Paige. 

With the extra help, she can manage one-on-one meetings with team members, focus on customer communications, prioritize knowledge-based building, and build help center articles — which is already a large helping of responsibilities. 

The top challenges Paige faces while managing her team is staying on top agents and making sure helpful documentation is present for customers. The documentation has to be detailed but not overwhelming — overall, it must maintain a good level of clarity for customers.

“[It’s about] finding a level of communication that is appropriate, clear, [and] maintains consistency across all products and topics,” she explains.

Paige’s CX Strategy

Typically, Paige looks at emails per hour, CSAT, QA scores, and first response time, which should be within the first six to 24 hours of receiving a ticket. Paige uses CSAT as a brand marker rather than an agent marker because every agent can have a bad interaction with a customer that will result in a negative CSAT score. Paige doesn’t hold CSAT scores to the same level that she does other KPI measurements. 

“CSAT, I think, is a really good marker of [whether] our policies are good, [if] our products are good, [if] our response time is good,” she says.

Otherwise, Paige shares CSAT scores with her agents to see how they compare with other team members, but the team’s priorities are emails per hour, QA, and response time.

Prioritizing Proactive CX

When it comes to the volume of customer inbound requests, Paige explains that it depends on the topic. She tries to break down interactions based on what customers are asking for, which include general information inquiries, account management, and order management. 

If most of the customer interactions relate to information requests, then Paige will deduce that maybe the website’s informational material isn’t clear for customers. As for account management concerns, because the vast majority of it can be managed by customers on their own, something on the website could be broken or information isn’t clear when there’s an increase in this type of inbound. 

Usually, if the team’s inbound requests are down, Paige considers it a green flag, considering that most of the customer’s information is self-serving.

“Ideally, if either of those things went down, I think that would be a green flag,” she says. “I think it would mean our information that we provide customers with is good… It means that people’s products are working, it means they’re able to access their accounts.”

Driving Revenue Through Customer Experience

If something goes wrong — especially with a customer’s subscription service — it’s an opportunity for Canopy’s CX team to excel. They can turn a negative situation into a lifelong customer. Because things can go poorly sometimes, a successful CX team has to be as helpful to that customer as possible. If the team isn’t as helpful as they could be, then the company may lose a customer.

“I think most customers are not going to leave a brand just because there’s one problem. I think a lot of customers will leave a brand if there’s one problem and then they’re met with poor solutions,” she says.

Integrating AI into Customer Experience

Paige’s team works with an AI brand to help the team refresh email templates, which is very resourceful and efficient for agents. If 100 customers ask the same question everyday, it’s easy for agents to repeat the same responses. 

“AI is helpful to tweak a response slightly to make it feel fresh and new without having the full-time agent re-handling every single ticket,” she says.

The team’s AI allows some leeway between sending generic macros to every customer and having agents take ten minutes to write a response when they get the same questions. AI keeps communication fresh and specific for customer inquiries.

The team also has a basic AI chatbot on the website’s help center that answers general customer questions. 

Overall, Paige thinks AI is a great tool. At this point in time, even the smartest AI is a little dumb, but is great at rewording the same sentence over and over again.

Advice for CX Leaders

According to Paige, being the voice of the customer in the room with the developers or thought leaders of your company is important, but you have to explain the customer’s perspective without being negative or saying no. She explains this concept as saying the improv acting line “Yes, and,” but instead, “No, but.”

“You want to be the voice of the customer and make sure that people understand how users think about your products, your services, or whatever it is that you’re providing without stopping innovation or without trying something,” she says.

You should have solutions for your worst-case scenarios when something new comes down the line, but don’t let the possibility of something going wrong stop you from trying something new.

Tech Stack

Gorgias

Shopify

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