Who is Jonah?

Meet Jonah Lambert, Customer Experience Team Lead at Good Ranchers!

About Good Ranchers

Good Ranchers believes that great food has a way of bringing people together. Knowing this, the company sources its meat from local, independent farms across the country. With the fresh meat it provides, Good Ranchers wants to strengthen the bridge from farm to table.

Jonah’s CX Journey

Jonah began his journey with Good Ranchers as a CX representative. In the position, he took care of the company’s customers over multiple channels. He feels that he has a good personality for the job because he can effectively connect with people.

Over time, Jonah has learned a lot about the business and politics of meat. The company’s founder, Ben Spell is passionate and genuine in the way he represents himself and the company. In extension, Good Ranchers hopes to be a shining light in the meat industry.

Customer experience is the heartbeat of the company, he explains. Through his experience, Jonah has become not only passionate about customer experience, but also the company as a whole. Along with the Good Ranchers team, he wants to bridge the gap between the American family and family farms and ranches that are across the U.S. 

Overall, Jonah’s passion is “bringing families to the table.” As the CX Team Lead for Good Ranchers, Jonah is able to connect with families and express his passion to every customer he interacts with. 

“We want to bring people to the table,” he says. “Getting to have an actual touch with customers over the phone, I’m able to express this passion to them and I get to hear how they’ve enjoyed the product with their family.”

The CX Team at Good Ranchers

Jonah manages 15 customer experience agents who all work in person because culture is an important facet to the company.

“Overall, the team is in office,” he says, “so what’s really cool about that is we do a lot of things as a company. We all have a gym membership where we can go play sports together and we do company kind of events and different things.”

“The culture here really is something that a lot of people enjoy, so that’s why we kind of stray away from [a remote setting] because we want people to enjoy the company and the community that we build here.”

Top Challenges as a CX Leader

One of the challenges that Jonah faces in his role is trying to get his team to buy into the idea that their work affects customers’ lives, and that it’s amazing to have a huge role in providing food to people. Jonah has adopted this perspective through his experience with the company, but it wasn’t immediate.

“It’s a human necessity at the end of the day,” he says. “When you really think about that, it’s huge. You hear enough of customer’s stories where you start to realize, ‘Wow, this is amazing,’ so [it’s important to get] everyone to buy into that perspective. Not everyone has it initially, but you see them come around and really appreciate all the things that we get to offer.”

Hiring New Team Members

Jonah looks for people who are willing to join the Good Ranchers community and the culture. He wants to hire people who want to do the work and enjoy it. Potential team members should be hardworking, willing to collaborate, humble and smart — in the sense that they are a lead learner, and want to learn new things all the time.

“Everyone, you know, we all mess up along our career,” he says, “so being humble enough to say, ‘Hey, I messed up’ really shows humility. That’s something we really want to see — people that are willing to admit that they’ve messed up or made a mistake.”

When it comes to the onboarding process, Jonah has a general discussion with the new hire about the company and its values. The new hire then meets with a trainer, and they shadow them to learn different procedures and platforms that the hire will work with. After this, the new hire will try working with a customer and the trainer will give them tips and advice as they work through each process.

“I enjoy this process because you get to see if the new hire is really retaining the information [by] watching and then doing it themselves,” he says.

CX Team Success Factors

KPIs Jonah is Tracking

KPIs go across the entire company, Jonah says. Management checks the number of calls made and tickets handled, but it isn’t just about volume — it’s about the quality of service that the agent provides the customer. 

Instead of moving toward AI, the Good Rancher’s CX team wants to make sure that they can really connect with customers and give them a human response. The team is quality-driven more than anything. Where a lot of CX teams focus on volume, Jonah’s team focuses on customer relationships.

“We want to make sure that we have good relationships with these customers because they have a subscription with us,” he says. “They are getting something on a recurring basis, so we need to make sure as a department, we’re giving them a certain level of service that is satisfactory for them.”

Prioritizing Proactive CX

Customer updates are sent out through SMS and email platforms, Jonah explains. SMS is extremely effective and can be checked at any time. In some cases, like shipments, if a delivery is affected, it’s better to send an update to the customer before they reach out.

Both the winter and summer seasons can cause some delivery complications. In the summer, the product’s freshness decreases at a faster rate, and in the winter, drivers can have issues with icy roads or inclement weather. Because of this, it’s crucial to keep the customer updated and be transparent with them.

“We really do strive to make sure those updates get sent out prior to the issues occurring and touch base with the customer afterwards to clean up anything that may have gone wrong or was just unsatisfactory,” he says.

Maintaining Customer Retention

Customer retention is something the team is actively working on refining. Quality is the team’s main focus, and it goes in hand with retention. Jonah’s team wants to make sure that subscribers have an open line of communication if they ever need anything, so they also reach out to people who canceled their subscription because they value feedback and want to know how the customer’s experience went.

Jonah appreciates this because it shows a level of honesty, transparency and humility, which truly speaks volumes.

“Showing that humility, even if this person never joins us again, if they have friends and family that are considering Good Ranchers, what’s really cool is they don’t really have tons of bad things to say,” he says. “In the end, we tried our absolute best to win them back with the tools that we had available.”

More than anything, Jonah explains, the customer wants to be heard. He compares this idea to car salesmen — say that you’re looking for a new car, but there’s no high level of service from the salesman. Even if the car is great, no one will want to conduct business with the company.

“[Customers] love getting to share the feedback and then being surprised. [They think,] ‘Oh wow, they actually listen to me. I may actually just rejoin because of that level of service, not even because of the product.’”

Topics of Interest

Integrating AI into Customer Experience

Jonah’s team uses various platforms for ticketing and phone calls. Some of the platforms use AI, which has allowed the team to hit a new level of quality and track different stats they weren’t able to before. Using AI is time-effective and makes some tasks easier for the agent.

Considering the Future of CX

Because of the speed in which AI is growing, Jonah thinks that companies will begin moving toward automating their CX departments. Although he doesn’t see anything wrong with this type of innovation, he does think that companies lose the value of connection with their customer base when there’s no level of human interaction.

“It causes a lot of [companies] to go downhill because at the end of the day, you’ve got to hear your customers,” he says. “You’ve got to know that they want to have a good experience if something goes wrong. If they can’t reach out to a live person, then it just causes frustration.”

Advice for CX Leaders

Jonah advises other CX leaders to be honest with their team. It’s important to show your team the same level of transparency that you do with your customers.

“Showing a level of humility goes a long way as a leader. You get to see your team really start to buy into your ideas,” he says. “They’re more likely to because you are so transparent and honest with them.”