1. Hire for passion and alignment with values: Sarah believes hiring team members who genuinely care about customer experience and resonate with company values leads to better outcomes.
2. Empathy and conflict resolution are key in CX: Sarah emphasizes the importance of empathizing with customers, even over small concerns, to foster long-term brand loyalty.
3. Automation can reduce team workload by up to 35%: Sarah's experience shows that integrating AI tools can streamline tasks and reduce the need for additional staffing, especially during busy seasons.
4. Customer feedback transforms companies: Sarah believes that consistently listening to customer feedback and sharing it with leadership leads to meaningful change.
5. Balance AI with human interaction for scalable growth: Sarah advocates for finding the right balance between automation and personal touch, ensuring both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Sarah Hertz's intriguing journey at Loud Cup, where her knowledge is revolutionizing the field of customer experience. Sarah's story is an inspiration to empathy and creativity, from her background in hospitality to her handling of the challenges of a business. You won't want to miss her encouraging supporters to applaud more loudly!
Meet Sarah Hertz, Director of Customer Experience at Loud Cup!
Loud Cup is a cup made for noisy fans. The tumbler mug comes in various colors, cleverly hiding a horn for the most passionate fans to cheer the loudest during sporting games and events. With the help of the Loud Cup, your cheers have never sounded better!
When Sarah finished school, she went into hospitality and dreamed of working in a castle and living in Scotland. Eventually, she moved to Scotland and stumbled upon a job in E-Commerce, working for Pela Case, a Canadian-based phone case company. After her hire, the start-up company boomed as it experienced rapid growth and built other brands.
As time went on, Sarah continued working in E-Commerce and got to know other industry professionals at different levels. She attended conferences and learned more about curating better tech stacks. After a while, she parted ways with the brand she had worked for previously and began consulting for Loud Cup.
Although the young company was quickly successful, having started on Kickstarter and exploded on TikTok, it could have had a better customer support system. Sarah used her expertise to help. She uplifted the sales department and improved the company's SOPs and formatting. She ended up extending her contract with the company twice, and at the beginning of February, she was asked to join the team permanently.
Sarah says it's been a fun journey coming from a more prominent brand and helping another start-up grow after spending the last five years in her previous position. She gets to apply the knowledge she acquired over her career to a new and unique situation.
Hiring New Members
In her career, Sarah has adopted a traction mentality, a values-based set of ideals. In that mindset, CX leaders want an employee whose values align with the company and has a real passion to make someone’s day better. They also have the confidence to question decisions and communicate when they see trends.
Additionally, Sarah values a team member's ability to empathize with the customer, even if it seems like a trivial request. Conflict resolution is also an essential skill in customer experience, and she looks for someone who promotes the brand. A team member's passion for the brand should come across in customer interactions.
From there, Sarah prefers team members who are efficient, dedicated, and adept at recording data and monitoring trends.
KPIs Sarah is Tracking
Because Sarah is very data-driven, she finds that CSAT and NPS scores are instrumental but don't provide a complete picture of the team's performance. Although this is true, the two measurements help CX agents understand how an individual interaction went and help the team understand how customers feel about the team's CX overall.
Sarah also pays attention to product reviews because they outline feedback for service and the customer journey on a holistic level. She also allows some leeway, understanding that the timing of an interaction isn't as important as making a customer's experience the best it can be.
Understandably, she has standards for her team, such as responding to emails in less than 12 hours, but in specific cases where the response time is closer to 10, and the customer satisfaction score is high, she allows some give-and-take.
Besides the core KPI metrics, Sarah looks at product issues, returns, and customer surveys to monitor customer feedback.
Collecting Customer Feedback
Sarah has found that calculating the number of customers contacting the team regarding issues compared to the number of orders the company has that month helps her understand how many are engaging with the team socially and how many are reaching out due to a product concern or issue.
Knowing the cause of the team's customer engagement can effectively improve the customer journey.
Over time, Sarah has learned that weekly and monthly data sharing and listening to customers is a great mix that can transform a company for the better. Taking customer feedback into account can transform a company and its customer relationship.
Combining these metrics and including the voice of the customers as well as customer reports creates the true story of the customer that you can present to CEOs. When they ask for proof, give them three quotes from customers. That’s what’s going to really push them to make change.
Integrating AI into Customer Experience
Looking back, Sarah remembers that Pela Case was one of the first companies to partner with Gorgias and use the now popular automation platform. More recently, she has been experimenting with Gorgias's automation options and has scaled down some of the team's tasks by 35%. The integration has been so successful that once the team fully onboard AI tools, Sarah says they will only have to hire a third of their usual team members for the holiday season.
Elevating to the Next Level of CX
Soon, Sarah wants to ensure better and more scalable growth with the Loud Cup CX team by finding innovative ways to incorporate AI and automation tools. Sarah has always been a proponent of offering customers self-service and discovering a balance, understanding that customers enjoy talking to humans and interacting with them.
Sarah says the company has grown so much in the past year. At this point, the future of the CX team is all about balancing the risks and benefits of scaling the team and implementing AI tools.
In her experience, Sarah has learned that growing companies must consider survival strategies, which can be as simple as using tools to refine SOPs and onboarding processes.
On the other hand, the company would like to expand its product line and find ways to reconnect with its growing customer base. Although the Loud Cup customer base is made up of sports fans, when the company introduces new products, new customers of different demographics will begin interacting with it. Sarah thinks getting to know a new subset of customers will be exciting for herself and the Loud Cup team.
Favorite Communication Channel: Social media platforms
Can’t-Live-Without-Tool: Shopify
Favorite Book or Podcast: On the way to a work trip the company was sponsoring, she realized how much a face-to-face experience can have a lasting impact on someone. Doing something charitable and going above and beyond in that one moment can mean a lot to the person you’re helping.
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