Who Is Cate?

Cate Marques, the Chief Experience Officer at Terra Kaffe!

About Terra Kaffe

Terra Kaffe provides high-end and user-friendly coffee experiences with its catalog of espresso machines and coffees.

Cate’s CX Journey

Cate’s resume may seem sporadic. “You look and you're like, ‘Is this five different people?’” she says. But the key to her career? It’s always been a customer-facing position. 

She found her passion after working in a role pretty far removed from the end user. “I felt I was really missing out on key touch points. I like to be as close as possible to the end result of what I'm doing,” she explains.

So, she moved in another direction—off to the front lines. Four years ago she joined the Terra Kaffe team as a CX specialist, and has quickly risen through the ranks. “It’s good to be in a position where this is our response to our community: We hear you and we built this for you,” she says. 

Terra Kaffe released their first bean-to-cup espresso machine (TK-01), quickly moving to development on TK-02—this time with a conjoining app. She says, “There’s not a feature or function that exists on this machine that didn’t come from direct feedback from our existing community.”

She plans to stick to CX, too. “What really appeals to me about customer service is the experiential side—how do we take this and develop every part of the business’ strategy around it?” she says.

The CX Team at Terra Kaffe

Cate joined Terra Kaffe as its second employee. “I think it says a lot about our culture, that CX was the second employee, that our CEO and founder thought ahead to realize where customer experience was going as a valuable pillar for brands,” she says. Today, the CX team has grown to seven, making up nearly a quarter of Terra Kaffe’s 30 staff members. 

CX holistically drives revenue at Terra Kaffe. Their products are a big investment for a lot of households, so word of mouth has been incredibly lucrative. “Last I checked, 15% of our sales were through straight referrals,” she shares. 

But the CX team isn’t always just facing the customer front and center. “Everybody on the team has a dual role,” she explains. There’s traditional CX, and then there’s project-based work they don’t specifically hire for.

Take Amanda, who developed a coffee quiz for their website. “It was like a personality quiz,” she says, “but it tells you what coffee beans you should buy.” Live on their website, It has massively boosted coffee subscription add-ons and straight revenue numbers, connecting with customers creatively—and successfully. 

Or take Tyler, a CX manager, who produces their in-house instructional videos. Or Ernest, who is developing a shadowing program where everyone in the company takes a day to shadow the CX team to learn the voice of the customer. With time, everyone learns the brands, the community, the systems, and the product itself.

“People start to naturally form specialties because we like to look at the customer journey more holistically and identify which touch points along the way that we can really enhance.”

KPIs Cate is Tracking

Their CX team mainly monitors CSAT and DSAT to identify emerging trends, and a manager assembles their CX monthly report, which is presented to all the department heads.

Using these metrics, Cate and her team can identify areas of opportunity. For example, their products come with a warranty. Once out of the warranty window, the customer can pay for a repair through Terra Kaffe. But they found a key insight: customers were not converting for those repairs. 

“Do people not want the inconvenience? Maybe they don't think it's worth it to repair their machine?” she asks. Combing through the data and anecdotal evidence, they found a key insight: repairs were priced slightly too high.

So they ran an A/B test for a couple of months with one slightly lower price and one slightly higher price. They used that evidence to inform their policies and processes and prioritize projects. “There’s never any shortage of projects you could pursue,” she says, “So we use the data to inform which ones should make the top of the stack.”

Tech Stack

Kustomer: “Kustomer really stood out to us because of the timeline aspect. Because of the nature of our product, we tend to get a lot of repeat inquiries. We don't hear from them. They reach back out. They need to repair. So having everything in a timeline instead of a ticket was key for us.”

Dialpad

Yotpo

Loop

Referral Candy 

Siena.ai

AI or Not to AI?

“It’s endlessly fascinating,” she says. “There are so many CX AI tools popping up these days.” She tried Loris, Klaus, and now works with Siena. “We are floored by it. It’s terrifying. But it’s amazing,” she says. She recalls spending the weekend reading responses, nerding out over her new AI platform.

“I think there's not a widespread knowledge of how sophisticated these tools have become,” she says. Most exciting to her is the time-saving automated responses to simple inquiries.

But as an early-stage startup, her team is scrappy. “I think it's pretty challenging for AI to come and navigate that. But I do think it could handle a lot of the lower level, very straightforward inquiries,” she says.

She continues, “I think what we have found is that our customers, above all else, want answers really quickly.” So, they are open to any tool that will help respond to customers more efficiently, quickly, and accurately.

Overall she views AI as a way to free up her team to pursue more interesting projects, like the coffee quiz. Her team has the time to focus on key questions that enhance the customer’s journey, most importantly what immediate, actionable things they can do to make their morning coffee.

Advice For Other CX Leaders

“Keep CX agents engaged.” CX agents do a lot of emotionally draining work, and it’s no wonder there’s notoriously high turnover in CX—it’s a lot of work with little glory. She suggests giving them more actionable opportunities and integrating them as critical components in R&D. 

“You might be the lowest CX associate on the totem pole, but you have more information on our customer base than the CEO,” she says. As a CX leader, Cate says it’s important to recognize that you have a team of people who provide a real service to the company, so listen to and engage them accordingly. 

“Empowering the CX team to really be that voice in as many different channels as you can possibly find has untold amounts of benefits.”