At A Glance

Tanner Coombs, Head of CX at Mysa, is utilizing a combination of traditional hospitality and state-of-the-art technology to address the difficulties of customer experience. Tanner's method demonstrates the subtleties of contemporary CX management, from overseeing a geographically dispersed workforce to incorporating AI and maximizing seasonal hiring.

Who is Tanner?

Tanner is head of CX at Mysa!

Tanner’s CX Journey

Tanner’s professional career always revolved around hospitality, from the time he spent in the restaurant business through a few start-ups, including his family’s bed and breakfast. 

He joined Mysa 5 years ago, as the fourth CX team member, during a time of hands-on challenges and strategic considerations involved in steering the course of CX. “It's been quite a journey from the start to where we are now, from really having no major platforms to working through all the automations and figuring out how to best reach our customers, everywhere,” he says. 

With both hardware and software to support at Mysa, Tanner sees the rewards coming from comprehensive CX. "Here, we’re almost the face of the company,” he says of his team. “Dealing with feature requests for software, managing hardware aspects…,” he muses, “It's a rewarding experience. Despite the challenges, it's really great to see people being happy that we're helping them.” 

Tanner clearly has a passion for understanding customer perspectives and fostering positive experiences. “There’s a difference between those in customer service, those in customer experience, and those who don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole,” he laughs. “It’s the genuine love of making people happy, problem-solving, and putting the customer first in every interaction."

Building The Team

Mysa’s CX has tripled in size since Tanner joined the team, though it has fluctuated more than ever over the past couple of years. "It's been an up-and-down journey of understanding how much can be handled per agent and trying not to overhire,” he says of the dynamic nature of team scaling and resource management. “This year, we're in about our sweet spot, handling the same ticket load as we did last year with about five members less.” 

The team is geographically distributed to cater to specific language requirements and to cover extended operational hours. "Overall, we have seven agents that are local to Newfoundland, where we are, and two agents in Quebec who primarily handle our French-speaking customers. So, there's a total of nine agents within Canada. Additionally, we have three agents offshore, based in Jamaica,” he reports. “This structure allows us to cover various shifts effectively throughout the day.”

Mysa decided to implement outsourcing to handle seasonal fluctuations, which mainly occur as winter in North America sets in. "Mysa is highly seasonal, particularly with our main product being a baseboard heating thermostat. The majority of our sales occur in Q4 when people typically realize their heaters need attention. However, we've introduced a new product, the Mysa AC, which has been out for a year, helping us balance the seasonal peaks,” he explains. "From a company perspective, obviously, financial considerations played a significant role in outsourcing,” Tanner admits. 

Mysa also began working with an outsourced agency to gain some flexibility in CX staffing levels. “Balancing internal and outsourced capacities became a key strategy in optimizing our team size,” he says, adding that he has the numbers to back that up. “We tracked our productivity and identified areas where we could maintain efficiency with a slightly smaller team."

“It's challenging to bring in on-site staff for short-term fluctuations,” he says, and working with an offshore team provides the necessary flexibility. “This partnership also alleviates some of the training responsibilities from our end, considering our smaller team and limited resources."

Top Challenges with An Outsourced Team

Tanner cites operational SLAs, training management, and team communications as challenges with adding outsourced agents to the team. 

“The challenge lies in the communication aspect,” he says. “Working with fully remote teams, especially in the context of fast-paced software, presents a learning curve. Information, such as bug reports, has to be disseminated promptly.” 

"In the local team, training is a bit easier. We can meet and go through things, physically seeing the processes. For the offshores, we collaborate with their team and also have a dedicated person assisting with the training,” he says. The Training and QA Specialist is a recently added internal role, and the outsourced team also does its own QA. “The Training Specialist handles all the training and simultaneously performs QA. Being involved in both aspects, they can incorporate feedback from both our internal and external teams. It's crucial to ensure that training is effective and not disregarded by the teams."

“Despite these challenges,” he says, “Many of the outsourced agents show eagerness to learn and often go above and beyond expectations. I wouldn't say I've seen anything on the negative side that significantly affects the customer experience.”

KPI

"I'm still pretty basic,” he says about tracking key performance indicators, noting he mainly focuses on CSAT and response time. “There's more I'm slowly trying to learn, especially to be on top of measuring the outsourced CX,” he admits. “Given our seasonal nature, we also closely monitor ticket loads to determine the appropriate staffing levels. When issues arise or if we observe a dip in response times or CSAT scores, whether from outsourced or internal teams, we initiate additional QA ticket processing. This allows us to identify areas for improvement and enhance our overall customer support.”

Tanner views the interdependency between KPIs as a potential minecraft. “These three KPIs are interlinked,” he asserts, “and changes in one often impact the others, providing valuable insights into our performance dynamics."

“Our biggest concern, of course,” he says, when evaluating tickets, “is ‘Did we give the correct answer?’ but we also look at tickets to analyze whether we can make information easier to understand or more accessible on the website, so the customer doesn’t have to reach out.”

Tech Stack

Gorgias - “Unlike Zendesk, Gorgias offers a more flexible pricing model, which is beneficial for us. Gorgias has an unlimited seat option, where Zendesk is per seat per year."

Yuma AI

Shopify

Moodle - Used for training the team 

Google Meet - Used for guiding the customer through installation 

Route This - Used for troubleshooting thermostat-Wi-Fi connectivity issues

AI or Not To AI?

Tanner’s team has experimented with AI, and Tanner acknowledges its potential while highlighting the need for careful implementation and continuous refinement. "I believe AI definitely has a place in customer experience, and in the coming years, we'll see its evolution,” he says. “We've been using Gorgias Yuma AI, which learns from our conversations and articles. It's been beneficial, but the key challenge is monitoring and not just trusting it,” he cautions. “It's a fine line, and we've learned that implementing it requires careful tuning. In our case, the AI-generated questions and answers didn't always match our products 100%,” he reports. “We're only 1 year into this journey, and I think the ticketing software, like Gorgias, will play a crucial role in leading the charge for AI in customer experience."

Challenges as a CX Leader

As customer service transforms into customer experience at Mysa, Tanner sees the need for a more unified approach across diverse teams, noting, "There's never a single direct area to find CX stuff; it's very divided among all the different teams. It's something I notice quite a lot," he says, shedding light on the potentially collaborative nature of CX within the organization.

Tanner suggests CX leadership steer away from unnecessary restrictions and look at more than just the numbers. 

“I see a lot of companies moving towards a data-driven state, which obviously makes a lot of sense,” Tanner says. “But customer experience is an interesting area where not everything can be data because there is emotion involved. It's a fine line between making data-driven decisions and aligning that with emotion,” he cautions, adding, “You can't let emotion run things, but if everyone's writing in about something specific, there might be a bigger issue occurring—one that might not be as serious—that drives more reviews.” He sums up the weighting of data and emotion by stating, “You have two different scales that can suggest whether an issue is more important than maybe the numbers suggest.”