Who is Will?

Meet Will Goodrich, CX Leader of Füm!

About Füm

Füm is on a mission to accelerate humanity’s breakup with destructive habits. Specializing in a wide range of flavored air products, the brand helps customers quit their vaping and smoking habits by educating, offering 30-day habit trackers, and a fidget function to increase focus and lessen anxiety.

Will’s Journey

Before he joined the Füm team, Will worked in inside sales for a managed service provider and volunteered as a firefighter. After that, he worked at Shopify for just under five years as a Mentor Team Lead. In May 2023, he left the company and spent some time off. 

Will began working with Füm at the beginning of the year, which has been providing a flavored air alternative to vaping/smoking for people trying to build better habits for the past six years. When he began his role, he was interested in having the ability to build out the CX department. In general, CX has always interested him because he loves to help people. In Will’s eyes, every ticket is like a puzzle, and the challenge for CX agents is to solve it while creating a genuine connection with the customer. When Will is able to successfully find the correct solution, he finds it rewarding.

The CX Team at Füm

The Füm CX team is made up of 8 people including Will. While most are customer service representatives, one team member works in knowledge management and another in social engagement. The team works remotely and are spread all over Canada. 

Will says the main challenge with his team are the different time zones. He would love to have a team that can meet more often, but with everyone based in separate areas, the team can only meet for a weekly huddle during which they go over goals and upcoming events. Coincidentally, the team’s various time zones stagger each member’s work days, which maximizes the amount of time they can help customers during the day.

“The department used to be people who were pretty much just in Alberta, and then some of my first hires was one in Ontario, and one in Quebec so it kind of spread us out a little bit more. It wasn’t intentional, but kind of a happy accident. I’ll always take talent over time zones,” he says.

Hiring New Members

When hiring new members, one of the most important qualities Will looks for is resourcefulness. Communication is a second trait he finds important in his team members, and he says it’s a skill that can be coached and guided into the right direction. 

“Communication can sometimes be a pretty innate skill that people have,” Will says. “It's not necessarily crucial that they have a long history in customer service, but if they can communicate in a way that’s in line with the brand and I know it’s going to work for the team, that’s a huge component.”

New team members participate in two weeks of training. They shadow other team members and get acclimated to the team’s tools. This year, the team implemented a learning management system, which will allow them to build out lessons that are more structured for incoming team members.

Tech Stack

Gorgias — Keeps track of customer tickets

Slack — Uses for team communication

Fulfil  — ERP and WMS

Shopify — Brand management

1-800-Flowers — The team has a WOW budget where they have a certain amount of money they can spend per month on customers.

The CX Philosophy at Füm

The team handles chat, email, phone calls, and Facebook Messenger to connect with customers. The social engagement team member uses every social media platform the company has to ensure customers are being heard and their questions are answered. 

“There’s nothing worse than a question or thought being put out into the world that goes unanswered that we could have helped with or provided correct information,” he says. “We try to benefit them.”

Flavored air is a new industry that many people want to know more about, and because of this, the company has the responsibility to not only answer general questions like other E-Commerce brands would, but it also gets to educate people on the product itself.

“People will have questions like, ‘Well, what does it do? How does it compare to vaping or smoking and things like that?’ It’s kind of cool just to be able to share some of that info with them and say, ‘Nope, there’s no vapor, there’s no nicotine. It’s just flavored air,’” he says.

Füm’s main demographic are people who want to build better habits. The brand focuses on fidget and fixation, which helps people break their vaping or smoking vices. The company’s demographic can range from younger customers, who vape, or older customers, who smoke.

At Füm, the CX team’s first response time is one of the primary metrics Will looks at, and customer satisfaction is another. Recently, Will introduced quality assurance, making sure that the team’s tickets match the criteria they’ve set for the metrics they want to achieve. 

Throughout the CX team, everyone ranges in years of experience. While there isn’t a formal process where a specific team member handles customer escalations, usually, a more seasoned agent will step in. If the interaction escalates further, then Will will get involved. 

Prioritizing Customer Feedback

The post-purchase side of CX is a big part of Füm’s philosophy. To help customers learn more about the industry, the company offers a monthly subscription to a Cores Club. Additionally, Füm provides a 30-day habit tracker with every order. Customers can fill it everyday as they use their Füm and send the team a picture of themselves with their habit tracker. The team posts customers’ pictures on their wall, and it’s rewarding to see it accumulate over time. 

Elevating to the Next Level of CX

As his team continues to grow, Will wants them to also keep being consistent. The team looks at their historical data and have seen positive changes. With his guidance, the team can handle volume changes, and they’ve arrived at a point where Will wants to implement consistent growth and progress.

“A lot of what I brought in is structure and consistency,” he says. “Now, we can handle volume differences — we’ve gotten to that point. That’s one of the big focuses, just maintaining a really fast response time for people.”

Will predicts that CX teams will begin to diversify the platforms and channels that people work together on. Historically, customers can call companies when they have issues, and in the 80s and 90s, email became a popular channel. The rate of technology is exponential and will continue to grow, and Will thinks that how teams interact with customers will continue to change. It will become faster and more convenient than it already is.

“If I could 100% accurately predict [the future of CX,] I think diversifying the platforms that people work together on [would be a great thing to have.] The rate of technology is exponential,” he says. “I think that how we interact with people is going to change where it becomes faster.”

Advice for CX Leaders

Will reminds CX leaders that they can’t treat every team member the same in regard to goals, motivations, and challenges. What works for one team member may not work for another. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is that they try to zone out of their jobs or ignore the coaching aspect of their position. Will says that leaders shouldn’t lose sight of personalizing their coaching and leadership styles. 

“Don’t use a broad brush on everything,” he says. “There are some policies that you have to enforce team-wide of course, but you can’t treat everybody the exact same way when it comes to things like goals or what motivates them or the things you know might be difficult for one rep and much easier for another.”