Who is Roma?

Meet Roma, Customer Experience Manager at Dr. Squatch!

About Dr. Squatch

Dr. Squatch Soap Co. is cleaning up the personal care industry. The company strives to create a wide range of products that customers can trust by using organic and healthy ingredients. Founder Jack Haldrup created his natural soap in his garage and soon realized that others might also enjoy his products. As the company grows, Dr. Squatch's mission remains to raise the bar for natural products and change how men and women look at their personal care.

Roma's CX Journey

Before she began working at Dr. Squatch, Roma worked in influencer marketing. It took her some time to discover her passion for customer experience, but she remembers always enjoying interacting with customers. In college, she worked for a few retail companies and worked her way up to management positions. Eventually, Roma realized that she enjoyed developing customer engagement. She loved learning about her customers and team members by getting to know them and understanding their goals, which helped her grow and develop her team. Additionally, Roma realized she was passionate about serving the organization she worked for by using effective feedback to improve the company.

The ability to connect with customers and put herself in their shoes motivates Roma about the CX space. She says it takes a lot of empathy and perspective to do these things, and that's what makes customer experience so impactful. There's never a dull moment in CX, but it's a newer focus for companies to be client-oriented. This change has allowed for a unique type of innovation that has improved companies to a greater level. 

Roma considers it an achievement when CX teams efficiently handle challenges like emergencies and severe escalations. It's her personal challenge to be proactive in any situation, offer surprise and delight for all of her customers, and galvanize action with VoC insights in her organization.

The CX Team at Dr. Squatch

Three people, including Roma, work internally within the Dr. Squatch CX team while the company partners with a near-shore vendor based in the Caribbean. The near-shore team is the frontline point of contact for the company's support operations. Throughout the year and depending on the season, the team's size can range from 70 to 200 support agents.

Although she's known as the resident office dweller, Roma enjoys traveling and working for the company from other places worldwide when she is able to. This is another exciting aspect of CX—the field's cross-functional collaboration can be completed from wherever a person is based.

While other leaders' main concern is working collaboratively despite time differences within their team, Roma doesn't find this aspect of CX management challenging. She says that the solutions to working on a remote team are adaptability and creating a personal connection with your team; taking the time to get to know your team outside of the workplace can improve their quality of life.

KPIs Roma is Tracking

Roma explains that the one thing that drives change is creating a good ticket tagging system that helps your team understand what customers want in support. This tactic allows leaders to see high-level drivers of customer issues and how their team can provide solutions to those problems. 

The tagging system helps Roma's team drill down on drivers to the most granular data points to help them find key insights to continue tracking or help drive other initiatives that benefit their organization. Furthermore, when she and her team review customer satisfaction feedback, a more detailed tagging system makes it easier to discern whether a recurring pain point relates to an organizational policy or if the customer wasn't satisfied with the support interaction they received.

Roma and the Dr. Squatch QA team primarily examine customer satisfaction scores in-depth to understand how the team needs to improve based on a low score. The QA team also measures coherence, including reading comprehension, using the correct macros, and tagging tickets correctly, which all contribute to a high-quality support experience.

With the use of this data, the company has been able to transition to new vendors for various services if they see that performance expectations aren't lining up.

Feedback loops are essential to customer experience teams because continuous improvement always benefits a company. Roma also explains that there's a boundary between tracking CSAT scores and finding out that the team is sending superfluous emails during an interaction, so she and the team monitor interactions sent per ticket to understand the issue and whether the solution was administered in an efficient way while driving customer satisfaction upward.

Dr. Squatch's Growth Strategies

Elevating to the Next Level of CX

When Roma joined the CX team at Dr. Squatch, she and her team wanted to figure out what they wanted the company's customer service to look like. Now, over two years later, she feels that the team's CX is very organized with stellar data structures, which is a positive indicator of progress and what the customers want in terms of being heard. Moving forward, Roma wants to improve her team's support experience, data integrity, and expand their support channels to include newer social platforms.

The company has gained a new customer base through TikTok shop, which has different, fast-paced engagement cycles compared to other social media platforms like Instagram. On TikTok, Roma explains that while Dr. Squatch has a great content team that can keep up with the fast-changing trends, there are many groups of users to appeal to, from education and comedy to pet memes and more. 

The company aims to ensure a seamless experience for everyone on any platform, whether purchasing items on TikTok shop or in person at Costco and Target. She wants customers to be able to have an omni-channel presence where they can check in with the support team, ask for a recommendation, and go about their day after receiving top-tier support, wherever they may be making their purchase.

Prioritizing Proactive CX

In a situation where there is less customer inquiry volume, and given that Roma has checked the team's integrations and everything is as expected, she considers a decrease in customers reaching out to be neutral. Other support leaders might be a bit concerned in this situation because many customers chat with their team regularly. Roma finds it to be a positive, since it would be an indicator that the team has been able to anticipate and work towards proactively addressing most issues before they’ve even reached the support inbox. Even if there aren't any tickets, there's always something for Roma and her team to do, such as reviewing past tickets and seeing how they can continue to improve.

Integrating AI into Customer Experience

Roma says that she's split on the conversation about AI because it depends on the type of organization and what specific need they are looking to amend. A team whose CX is organized with a highly predictable ticket nature can try AI to improve their support by deflecting and offering self-service flexibility. On the other hand, a team still figuring out what works for them should wait to test AI because there isn't a standard set of operations they can train with AI.

In her opinion, AI is not a total solution to any problem but rather a tool that enhances customer support. Before an organization begins using AI or introducing any automation method, the company should first know who its target customer base is. The reason for this is that with the use of an AI agent, a company cannot gauge who its customers are and what they like in terms of brand voice for support. 

As for the Dr. Squatch team, Roma says they are working closely with Gorgias, their CRM tool, to try out a new AI agent function. An AI integration depends on a team's needs. Because Roma prioritizes data integrity, she's wary about how much information an AI agent can genuinely track, but she is looking forward to collaborating with the team to create new pathways for this.

Considering the Future of CX

Roma hopes that customer experience will become very personalized in the next ten years. She thinks it would be fun to have innovative systems for their customers, like scent card samplers based on recent purchases, so they can test out product scents. 

Regarding Dr. Squatch, personalization is essential to the company's CX because it’s tricky to showcase the product in an online environment. One of the main  reasons why some customers shop in-store is that, if they have an essential question about the product they're considering buying, they can interact with the product in-store. Roma explains that the ability to try the product bridges the gap between in-person and online shopping, and some companies have been able to use AR filters to solve this issue. In time, she hopes companies can implement various solutions no matter the product type. Ultimately, customers want a personal touch with the support they are able receive on all parts of the customer journey. 

Customers want to purchase products that speak to their lifestyles and say something about who they are, and this fits the bill for Dr. Squatch's customers, Roma says. When customers shop from the brand, it says they care about what they consume and choose to put on their bodies, since they tend to strive to be more informed on their personal care journey. To sustain this need, companies have to prioritize understanding and evolving with their customer and personalizing their experience according to their needs.

Advice for CX Leaders

Roma has three pieces of advice for CX professionals looking to be a better leader:

First, leaders should get to know the people on their team very well because it will help them communicate future goals in a more collaborative way. Your job as a leader is to understand your team and push their growth in a direction that suits them. 

Second, successful leaders should practice ruthless prioritization by re-aligning what is impactful in the scope of their organization. Roma says that in the CX space, you tend to encounter many negative escalations, and because of this, she focuses more on volume and impact rather than individual inquiries whenever applicable. 

Lastly, the third piece of advice Roma has for other leaders is to communicate their team's values throughout the organization, which can be difficult. Leaders need to be vocal about their team's priorities and be able to communicate the importance of these initiatives, which keeps everyone in the company on the same page; ultimately, they should ideally be contributing to the same goals.