Who Is Mark?

Mark Galvez is the Customer Experience Manager at Taste Salud!

About Taste Salud

Taste Salud is an E-commerce business selling powdered Agua Fresca mix—with a healthy twist. Fusing traditional flavors with premium ingredients, Salud optimizes your health with vegan, gluten-free, and soy-free formulations with no artificial colors. Best of all, they only have 1g of sugar!

Mark’s CX Journey

Mark can look back and see how customer experience surrounded him from the very start. “My parents were both in real estate,” he explains. “I grew up with them always talking to customers, trying to help them, doing open houses.” 

When it was his turn to start working, he took a job at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, CA as the stadium’s bar back. He got to work all across the stadium working with bartenders. He transitioned into a supervisory position that allowed him to speak with customers and address their issues. “I noticed I really liked to talk with people,” he says. “Seeing the smile on their face really makes me happy.”

He continued his passion for helping people and putting a smile on their faces by working in customer service at Target, then later transitioned to real estate for a few years. “It was a great way to get my life on track,” he says. He was happy with this career development, and content to continue selling houses.

Then came an announcement from his brother: He was starting a hydration company, one that incorporated their Mexican heritage and culture by selling Agua Frescas, a delicious but normally unhealthy beverage. His brother’s Agua Frescas, however, were to be infused with electrolytes and contain no artificial dyes. He developed a Jamaica (hibiscus) Agua Fresca and ordered a small amount that ended up selling out in a matter of two days. Next came the horchata flavor. Again, it was a hit.

However, more orders mean more customer questions, comments, and concerns. So Mark, with both a knack and a passion for helping people, began working part-time to address customer needs. “They just threw me in there,” he says. "With a tiny bit of training, they just gave me an email address and I started answering tickets."

And he truly enjoyed it. “Little by little I started falling in love with customer experience,” he says. Soon enough he transitioned into a full-time position at Taste Salud. 

At this point, the company was a total of five. They all wore many hats. It became time to onboard someone new. They recruited a cousin who had studied management and customer service in school and spoke Spanish (a definite plus) to help with tickets part-time, allowing Mark to look at the big picture of Taste Salud’s CX. After a period of research and mentorship, bringing on Jess Cervellon, a total CX pro, he rose to the challenge as CX manager. 

The CX Team at Taste Salud

As tickets continued to ramp up and Mark’s position in the company demanded him to take a more strategic approach to CX instead of being in the ticket queue all day, the team decided it was time to hire another customer service agent. 

They posted the open role on LinkedIn and Instagram—and received 2,700 applicants. Overwhelmed with the task of sifting through the resumes, Mark began meticulously reviewing every one of them, fearing that if he overlooked even one application, he would be missing the best person for the job. They managed to find just the woman for the job, Pricila. Her interview stood out and her energy matched that of their workplace culture: fun, happy, and vibrant.

“It just felt so natural,” he says. “She just seemed to be right there with us, like we were just having a conversation.” She didn’t just align with the culture, she had a treasure trove of experience and ideas to bring to the table. 

Today, Taste Salud’s CX team consists of four—Mark (CX Manager), Jess (VP of CX), and two CX advocates, his cousin Elizabeth, and Pricila. They each work remotely and in fact, live all across the country. “We did that on purpose,” he says. Together, they span Pacific Time to Eastern Time. 

The Taste Salud Family

At its core a family business, Taste Salud fosters a community within the company, its social media influencers, and its customers—it’s an authentic Mexican drink mixture coming from an authentic Mexican family, promoted on social by authentic Latino influencers. They sell that feeling of community, not just a product. From ensuring bilingual customer service to prioritizing customer satisfaction in every interaction, the Taste Salud community feels represented and taken care of.

“Killing the customer with kindness is our biggest thing. We just want to take care of the customer. Customer-first, whether or not we’re going to lose money on this order,” he says. 

“We are a very giving company,” he says. “We’ll happily throw in samples of other flavors in customers’ orders. We want to get it out there.” They have donated to bridal showers, weddings, bachelor parties, and baseball teams to name a few. 

“The Salud family is not just the team,” he emphasizes.

This giving mentality permeates how they interact with customers. “We definitely embrace the Taste Salud family,” he says. And they embrace Taste Salud in return, behaving less like customers and more like a fan base that appreciates the company’s work, whether it’s video content, web design, or the product itself. Ultimately, it’s a supportive, vibrant family thriving in a strong community. 

KPIs Mark is Tracking

Taste Salud is diligent in tracking not just performance indicators, but also their trends, meeting weekly for an executive review. For example, “What’s our biggest ticket field? Why did that go up?” he asks. First response time, average handle time, ticket quantity, and CSAT scores are also in the mix. At events, they use QR codes to track participants. 

“Our reviews, too,” he says. “Reviews on our products are very key. 99% they’re gonna be positive, but that 1% we want to look at,” he says. 

Becoming a CX Leader

It wasn’t long ago that Mark didn’t even know what a KPI was, let alone regularly discuss CSAT scores. And as a CX leader on the rise, he has learned a lot in a short amount of time, wising up to CX principles and strategies some brands don’t even pay attention to. Looking back, he has some advice to his younger self—advice you may find helpful should you happen to be self-starting or jumpstarting a career in CX.

At the start, he relied on himself to get up to speed. If he didn’t understand something on a call, he would research. “If I had just asked in the moment, I would have had more clarity and could have given more to the conversation,” he says. 

Along with combing the internet after meetings to make sure he understood the verbiage of the conversation, he also proactively dug deep into the world of CX through reading and couldn’t recommend it more to other budding professionals. “If I had known I was going to transition into CX, I would’ve been reading books before that. I would have gotten more CX newsletters. I just would have done more research,” he says.

“Stay curious. Learn it. Do it.” 

Tech Stack

Gorgias

Post Script

Skio

Wonderment — “It’s definitely cut our tickets by a lot.”

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