At A Glance

Erin Gray’s Senior VP of Customer Experience at Endy, has changed the climate of CX in the mattress space. From overcoming challenges in a young company to implementing cutting-edge CX strategies, Erin’s journey is filled with insights on creating memorable customer experiences and building a motivated, hybrid team. Her approach offers a fresh perspective on the evolving world of customer service.

Who is Erin?

Meet Erin, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Endy!

About Endy

Endy is the largest DTC mattress-in-a-box company in Canada. In 2018, the company was purchased by Sleep Country Canada, the largest mattress retailer in the country. Approaching its 10th anniversary, the company now sells accessories and furniture that complements its award-winning mattresses.

Erin’s CX Journey

Erin recalls that she entered the CX career “by accident,” but she has found a lot of success in her 25-year-long career.

After receiving her degree in public relations and communications, she landed a job as a customer service representative. Although she originally planned to move on from the position, she ended up working her way up into junior management roles and stayed with the company for almost a decade.

Then, she went to other companies like President’s Choice Financial, where she managed outsourcing accounts, and Walmart, where she handled financial services. Not long after, Erin transitioned to the retail side of Walmart’s CX and handled the feedback for the company’s brick-and-mortar stores, using her BPO management skills all the while.

Following her work with Walmart, Erin worked in the senior living industry, which was a huge leap for her career. She remembers her time in the industry as “very rewarding.”

She went back to financial services for a while after that but was then recruited by Endy to join the company’s CX team where she now serves as the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience.

Erin’s transition from working at Walmart, a large conglomerate, to Endy, a newer company, was a bit of a challenge. When she joined the CX team, the two founders left to explore other ventures. The younger team worked from an entrepreneurial mindset and prioritized a commitment to a healthy work-life balance, which was much different than the environment Erin was used to.

“... It was also a generational thing,” she says. “[Endy] is the youngest organization I’ve ever worked for… [and] the age demographic of the employees is also very young. They look at things differently, and they approach work differently than I was used to.”

“I was used to a far more traditional way of working and that was probably the biggest challenge. One where I almost was suspect of it — it seemed too good to be true.”

CX – A Rewarding Career Path 

Erin loves customer experience because of the ability to make an impression on someone’s life. She worked in the travel insurance division during major events like 9/11 and the 2004 Thailand tsunami. At that time, Erin interacted with some customers that she’ll never forget because she had to support them in a moment when their lives were forever changed.

“You work for a company where you’re the one who delivers on the promise that the company has [and] offers,” she says. “Sometimes [these moments] are not as dramatic, [but] they can be just as impactful and just as important to that customer.”

“That has hooked me — the ability to deliver on the promise and deliver a service that absolutely delights a customer and quite possibly will leave an impact for the rest of their days.”

Erin looks for a sense of pride throughout all of her work. When it comes to Endy, she thinks about the intimate times in her life that took place while in bed, such as nursing her first child, or learning that her father unexpectedly passed away. Keeping those moments in mind, she understands that purchasing a mattress is a big decision for everyone. She emphasizes this idea for her team, which helps them to think about their CX from that mindset and relate to each customer on a deeper level.

“There’s been some moments in my life I will never, ever forget that happened in my bed,” she says, “It is a spot in your home where your most intimate moments happen… a space that we provide to our customers. In that sense, there’s [pride and purpose] that I look for everything [and] anything I do.”

The CX Team at Endy

Erin leads a 25-member team, which consists of a traditional contact center where agents field support, answer presale calls, and assist customers who have questions about the products. Endy also has a CX strategy team that manages tools and helps the team’s overall service. Each team member is located in Canada with the exception of two that relocated to Mexico. 

The CX team is a breeding ground for other positions within the company. Now, former CX agents work in other departments, like marketing and operations. At Endy, the customer experience team serves as a stepping stone for other opportunities that agents can explore later in their careers.

“It’s a very entry-level role within the company,” she says. “We want people who want to look at it as a stepping stone and then move on to other areas within the organization.”

When she first began working at Endy two years ago, Erin’s team was smaller, which was a challenge for her. With the boost in popularity after the company’s Black Friday sale last year, the CX team didn’t have enough staff to handle the influx of customer calls that came in. 

Additionally, Erin also notes that while hiring new team members can be a challenge due to the difficulty in finding quality employees who want to commit to a short-term contract, outsourcing is just as challenging. Because Endy is based in Canada, the team has to account for less than 10% of customers who are native French speakers.

To help with these challenges, the team looks to find more support from a strategic lens that will also help with sales boosts in the future.

“How do we strategically get some support that is cost-effective, [but] also still a good customer experience?”

KPIs Erin Is Tracking

When it comes to KPIs, Erin’s team looks at CSAT scores and tracks customer performance. They also send out Yotpo reviews to customers 21 days after their purchase, record their feedback, and put it on the website so potential customers can see it. Erin emphasizes that the team takes the good and bad reviews because customer honesty is important.

For a while, the team thought about using NPS scoring, but they decided against it because it can be time-consuming. Erin found that it’s more valuable to ask customers for a Google review. Since making that change, the company’s number of Google reviews have doubled, and their score is at a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.

 “What we found to be more valuable is instead of saying to them, ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend us,’ we simply say, ‘Would you recommend us?’”

Customer Service as a Revenue Generator

When Erin first joined Endy, the CX team was just a support center. From her experience, Erin learned that you have to show a support team the value of creating revenue, which can stem from simply providing excellent customer service. Although the idea of sales made some of her agents feel uncomfortable, Erin gave each of them a discount that they could leverage when interacting with customers. This tactic, which was carried out through Shopify, increased the company’s revenue. At one point, $2 million in sales per year could be attributed to the CX team!

When the team became more comfortable with incorporating sales and service, Erin gave them bonuses depending on the percentages of however many sales each agent made. Now, there’s a defined sales team, of which each agent feels comfortable pushing sales. For every successful purchase, the agent earns a commission, which motivates them to work harder.

“[It] didn’t happen overnight, but we [now] have the evolution of creating a true hybrid team where you have a group of team members who are really good at it and are motivated by the commission,” she says. “They are able to seamlessly give both service and sales.”

Creating Memorable Customer Experiences

The CX team at Endy also uses a surprise and delight program that curates a selection of gifts that are outside of the company’s product line, like ceramic mugs, stuffed animals, and pet toys. Through the service, agents can send customers a complimentary gift whenever they feel the need — for instance, if there’s an issue with a product, or if they had a great interaction with them. This service is a great way for the team to strengthen the connection with each customer, thanking them for giving the team a glimpse into their lives.

“I would like to think that every morning they [see their Endy mug] and think, ‘That nice person at Endy sent that to me,’” she says. “It doesn’t have to be for a complaint, it could just be [that] you had a lovely interaction with a customer and you wanted to send it along.”

Tech Stack

Ada

Yotpo

Zendesk

Assembled

Maestro

Implementing AI to Enhance CX

The Endy CX team collaborates with the AI system Ada for their chatbox system. At the height of the ChatGPT craze, Erin began looking at the idea of incorporating AI within the team’s customer experience but wasn’t overly impressed with her previous experiences. For the most part, she thought it was obvious when you were talking to a bot and believed it was glorified machine learning, which can sacrifice the level of service. 

Because the company was beginning to grow and add assortment to its product line, the team saw more customers and an overall spike in volume. Erin decided to bring on AI to help with the customer increase and saw that the technology was more streamlined. Since then, the team has used Ada’s AI as a means to grow without adding headcount, and in turn, the team has grown with the platform as it continues to improve its technology. With the success of their chatbox feature, Erin is planning to add AI to the team’s email service as well.

“We were coming up just as [Ada] was starting to launch an upgrade to their service and really started the advancement of their products,” she says. “Early next quarter, we might expand it to mail… having some chat AI there would be really, really helpful.”