← Experts of Experience
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
00:46:05
Wildfires, floods, total loss — what happens when disaster strikes and people need help navigating the chaos? Gavin Blair, COO of Bright Harbor and former CX leader at Lemonade, joins Lauren Wood to break down why disaster recovery is failing the empathy test — and what needs to change.
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
Gavin Blair
I have been blown away by the resilience, focus and even, at times, optimism around folks who have just lost everything that they have. In Southern California, some residents are finally.
- [00:13]
Lauren Wood
Getting to see what's left of their homes. I want to get into how you support people through this insanely crazy time.
- [00:21]
Gavin Blair
There's nothing more awkward than jumping on the phone with a disaster survivor and saying, how's it going? It really doesn't land well. And you learn that very fast.
- [00:30]
Lauren Wood
It's not enough to just land. Listen to someone. They need to get that you're listening.
- [00:35]
Gavin Blair
We're starting every conversation with, how are you holding up? And it just lets people immediately know what you're acknowledging about their situation. And even in the formalities of starting.
- [00:44]
Lauren Wood
The conversation when there is a disaster happening, that we just change our tone and show that empathy, ask a different question. How are you hanging in there? It's such a small shift, but it has a massive impact how that customer. Customer is going to feel. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today we are speaking to Gavin Blair, the COO of Bright harbor, where we will be exploring how Gavin and his team are rebuilding trust in moments of total loss, quite literally. After helping Lemonade reinvent their customer experience, Gavin's now tackling one of the most emotionally charged challenges in business, guiding families through wildfires, floods, and climate disasters. We're going to dig into how frontline teams are showing up for customers in these dire situations, how AI is enhancing human connection, and why most disaster recovery operations fail the empathy test. And I will say that this is an extra special episode for me because after the devastating California wildfires that have impacted many of my close friends and new neighbors, as well as just barely missing my home, we are going to talk about really what's happening in California and how Bright harbor is supporting so many people in need. Gavin, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [02:15]
Gavin Blair
Thank you for having me.
- [02:17]
Lauren Wood
So I want to just introduce to everyone what Bright harbor is all about, and then we can talk about some of the things that you're currently working on. So can you tell us the story behind Bright Harbor's inception?
- [02:30]
Gavin Blair
Bright harbor started through an experience our CEO had with one of his very close friends who lost his home in the Marshall Fire in Colorado. And our CEO, Joel, was, you know, kind of supporting his friend through his recovery journey and just really taken aback by the amount of complexity and challenges and steps that it involved for his close friend to. To get back on his feet. I think he had Two children. And out of that was just this revelation around how much support is needed and where it's obvious that, you know, you pay all these other services in your life for things a bit less consequential, like an accountant to do your taxes. But when you have an experience that's, you know, up there in terms of impact and trauma, you don't have one service that can guide you and support you and kind of lay out the recovery map and journey. So that was the real impetus for Bright Harbor.
- [03:35]
Lauren Wood
And Joel is actually a good friend of mine and so I've seen him build Bright harbor and kind of what was inspiring him to create this company, which is in this moment, I am really, really seeing the incredible impacts that Bright harbor has. And so in this moment, obviously with everything that's happened in Los Angeles of late, there are so many people who are in need. And as you just explained, the complexity of the aftermath is quite insane. And so I'm curious to know, because you've worked in the insurance industry for a long time, can you tell us a little bit about why it's so difficult for people who have dealt with a natural disaster affecting their home? Why is it so difficult for them to actually get the insurance support that they've been paying into?
- [04:28]
Gavin Blair
It's kind of a confluence of events happening. One, the insurers in and of themselves are overwhelmed and they deal with unprecedented amount of demand and support that's needed. And some of these insurers are the larger employers in the us they have hundreds and thousands of customer facing roles, but they still take advantage of third party resources to help flex up when these events happen. Because the art and science of trying to anticipate catastrophes and then how to staff against them is I don't think, something that will ever necessarily be solved. So there's that piece, I think then there's in and of itself the already kind of convoluted and difficult path of navigating your insurance policy and your coverages and the workflow there, that itself is already difficult in normal times. And then I think the third layer to it is ultimately the unique set of circumstances and needs that each person has that the system is not built around. And I'm sure we'll talk more about it later. But it's, it's one of the big things that's missing is just that lens that is looking at what you're dealing with, with your family, your financial situation, your needs, you know, all the.
- [05:50]
Lauren Wood
And I think that's why I. Part of the reason Why I wanted to have you on the show is that the experience of going like the loss itself is a terrible experience. I have many people close to me who are going through this right now, but then the actual rebuilding experience is also awful. And that is such a moment where we can be helping people to navigate such a complex situation, which is exactly what Bright harbor is here to do. And so I'd love to learn a little bit about how are you supporting clients through that. Can you give us a bit more of a picture in terms of what is the experience you are trying to create for those who are working with you?
- [06:31]
Gavin Blair
Yeah, absolutely. I think first and foremost we are trying to be something that gives them confidence as they are navigating and making decisions. It's really great for folks who are ultimately trying to take the steps themselves and they need to just have that support mechanism and confidence in the decision making that they have. So the exact services support from a highly trained specialist on our team who has been through these disasters many times and kind of has the, the path and the tips and tricks all lined up. There's support through our product, which offers just some streamlined ways to organize yourself, your information, the steps that you need to navigate. And we're there basically, you know, through ongoing kind of support with the customers answering questions as they come up. But what it really starts with for us is the, is the beginning. We have this kind of onboarding call which is the most important part of the experience. And it's where we're really capturing everything that we feel like they're going through and we're really mapping out something that then feels like a recovery plan for them. And based on that recovery plan, they start to get a sense of organization and sequence and timing to everything. And then we are just as they're going through those steps alongside them, step by step, acting as an advocate in their corner, a trusted friend, someone to give them advice and feedback. And as I'm sure you can appreciate, this is the type of journey that has a lot of ups and downs and ebbs and flows. And so a lot of it is about knowing when those milestones are. And that's when we really engage heavily to make sure that we're supportive of those kinds of big crossroads and big decision points. For them, it's expectation, expectation management. For them, it's, it's understanding the process and just knowing what is going to be asked of you when that is so powerful for people versus feeling like they're only looking like one step in front of each other at A time. I mean, that is often how the way that is the way to get things done right, is to focus one step at a time. But in this circumstance, you've got stakes that are much bigger. You've got family or loved ones or other things that really need you to be much more situationally aware, you know, of what's, what's going to need to be done.
- [09:01]
Lauren Wood
And I can imagine, I mean, even myself having been so near to the fires happening and there being this huge rebuilding effort, it's very difficult for people to see what is the next month gonna look like? What is the next year gonna look like. I, you know, people have children in schools and there's so many. The complexities of life just compound and so giving people an element of control when so often they don't have that control, where they're just dealing with, you know, request after request. I can really understand that that's giving people peace of mind. And so you're really reshaping this awful experience into something that's much more manageable.
- [09:44]
Gavin Blair
And I'll give you an example of kind of where we often zoom in. You know, you've got a lot of important first steps you take. But like you highlighted with, with people who have children, a number of schools were, you know, destroyed in the, in the, in the fires. And so the kids aren't just dealing with the displacement from their home, they're dealing with the displacement from where they went to school every day. And as a person is considering where they're going to live short term or medium term, we help them really focus on a place in a location that's going to allow them to be able to continue having their children go to the place that they need to go to for school. That the proximity to that, that there's just that kind of like, you know, in addition to finding a place, it's making sure the location can support what you need to be doing. When you have some semblance of a routine again day to day, and you're, you're close to where your kids need to be. And sometimes that means we've got to offer extra support in finding those kinds of locations or resources that let them be there. But it's just an example of something that kind of reflects a bit of the short term for putting yourself in a place where you can then focus on what you need to focus on and you can start to actually take the steps to recovery.
- [11:00]
Lauren Wood
I want to get into how you support people through this insanely crazy time. But before I do, I Want to just ask, how are people in LA doing? You are speaking to people in such a tender moment and I want to check in. How, how have you been feeling, the Los Angeles folks handling all of this?
- [11:22]
Gavin Blair
Very much appreciate that question. I think I have been blown away by the resilience and the focus and even at times optimism around folks who have just lost everything that they have. It's really just kind of like touching, you know, moment of like reflection on how people are able to be resilient and bounce back. As much as we've been there to talk to folks about what is the traumatic, you know, situation they're going through, I'm so blown away by how many people are focused on what do I need to do to get going, like, what do I need to do, get this plan together. They're action oriented, they're focused and at times they're, they're almost positive and it's just an incredible thing. So I think there's a lot of layers to this and there's clearly deep challenges emotionally and otherwise. But LA is showing up, people are showing up, they're thinking about the right things, they're being very community oriented in a lot of ways. And I see a lot of organic things happening community wise. For example, neighbors teaming up to figure out how they're going to get debris removed from their street and doing it together as neighbors. Like things like that that are just, just amazing.
- [12:43]
Lauren Wood
I share that sentiment and I haven't been talking to as many people as you and your team have by any means, but I've been so incredibly blown away at how LA is showing up. And like you said, it's really this community effort to support one another. And it's moments like these, I think, where we, we need to come together and we really see the beauty of humanity despite immense devastation. So I'm happy to hear that. So let's talk a little bit about how you create your experience and really usher people through this difficult time. And I know you and I had chatted about how at Lemonade, as you were building up the CX team, you really learned how to speak to people when they are going through these difficult moments and how your frontline team, your agents are, can really communicate in a way that empathizes with where someone is at. So can you tell us a little bit about how you are training your team, both in how you have in the past as well as at Bright harbor, to really communicate when you have a customer or client or who is going through a very difficult time? I think this is an important lesson for everyone in cx, just to put that out there before I let Gavin answer because we've all had those really difficult customers and in this type of moment it's like the extreme because of what the customer is going through. So tell us a little bit about how you approach it, Gavin.
- [14:22]
Gavin Blair
Yeah, I want to highlight that I think you get a lot of the best version of people showing up in these instances, which is again incredible. I think there's a few key elements to what we're talking about. A, it's being very deliberate and having a plan around what quality and what interactions look like to a level of specificity where people can take the values you have as an organization or as a team and see its direct application. You're training them on when to acknowledge, you know, the emotional side of feedback. It's often at the very beginning of an interaction with a customer you want to almost like level set with them in a way that isn't pandering to them either. It's I see you, I understand and I'm giving you the, the right level of empathy and sensitivity to what your situation is. And it's also then about knowing when to switch that off and move forward and to not play an outsized role in trying to, you know, dwell on or reflect on something that, you know, look at the end of the day we think people are working with us because they want structure and they want actions and they want answers. And so that's very much the focus of what we try to do. So we're very clear about how conversations start. We're very clear to our team about what it means to be organized and to be able to then manage a plan for them. And that's a nice, real vehicle. Ultimately for us it's not an open ended thing. We have a recovery plan that is the main kind of artifact of what we provide. We're able to turn attention and focus to that plan and we're immediately able to start giving them context where in this plan they see what it looks like for 612 plus months. They understand along each track of what they're trying to do and rebuild, what the milestones are, how long it's going to take to get there, what the requirements are. And so that's definitely like a helpful way that we're able to drop right into some structured ways and some very actionable, you know, insights and stuff like that. But you know, I think as you can appreciate what really makes people feel disconnected and frustrated. These are just some, some clear things when they're talking to someone who feels that it's like they're unaware of your background, you've got to repeat yourself. That's something that we have to just immediately eliminate. They're looking for timely and actionable advice. They're looking for their emotions again to be acknowledged, but without overly being kind of coddled. They desire efficiency from us when their concerns, how the concerns are being addressed. There's organization to our approach and they sense that in us. When you're in this kind of error, at times it feels like where the rise of AI and sophisticated IVRs means that it's almost like a decline in the customer experience. There's like a layer now, a buffer between me getting to what my issue is and what you're doing in order to help me. We're really just trying to cut through that. So we've been very careful and conscious of how we layer on what would otherwise be easy wins from a technology perspective in terms of the tooling and in terms of the systems to just make sure that we're not compromising it for the sake of, you know, cost and efficiency. As we scale the team, I want.
- [17:47]
Lauren Wood
To dive into that deeper. In one moment, an AI agent your customers actually enjoy talking to. Salesforce has you covered. Meet AgentForce Service Agent, the AI agent that can resolve cases in conversational language anytime on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com agentforce but before we do, how when it comes to that, not coddling but showing empathy, it's this very fine line and I'm curious to know if you can share some even like statements that you train your team on saying I know you had shared with me earlier, like how do you open the conversation in a way that shows that empathy but also is like, we're getting down to business.
- [18:35]
Gavin Blair
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's nothing more awkward than jumping on the phone with a disaster, you know, survivor and saying, how's it going? It really doesn't land well. And you learn that very fast after a 10 second pause where they're like, you know, it's going okay. So there's an obvious, you've got to not have any kind of ability to identify social keys to be in that. But yeah, this is how you are interacting with everyone else in your life with the easy hellos and the easy goodbyes. So right off the bat it's again, we're starting every conversation with how are you holding up? And it just lets people immediately know what you're acknowledging about their situation. And even in the Formalities of starting the conversation. Our goal is that there isn't a single moment that you feel tone deaf from us in how we're delivering news and how we're communicating objectives and how we're greeting you and how we're. And we're doing that. And what we talked about was some playbooks around the use of empathy in conversations. I found it to be incredibly powerful in the insurance space, to actually be very clear and to kind of revamp that. It allowed me to build a claims team at Lemonade that had a higher NPS for denied claims than most carriers had for their total insurance. If you can imagine, an approved versus denied claim has a corollary to how happy people tend to be. And our denied claim NPS was so high because we were able to just be tacticians ultimately in how expectations were set, news was delivered, and a big thing again around that for us was empathy. So there's two kind of sides to empathy that we talk to the team about. The first is, you know, for. They don't have the sexiest kind of monikers, but it's upfront empathy. It's your ability to identify first thing in the conversation what the person has said. And it's not just to say, oh, I'm sorry, it's to repeat back what you're sorry about, oh, I'm so sorry that this has happened to you. Like, give it some context. Right. And then the second part to empathy is really situational. When the customer offers you a chance to acknowledge something, you acknowledge it. Even if you're in the middle of getting down to business with answers and questions, if they say something about their pet or they share an anecdote about something that they're going, that's going on in their life, even well down the path with you, you have to nail that 100% of the time. And so there's two. Those two kinds of sides to it end up, I think, communicating a lot about your awareness and your intent and your ability to just, just calibrate to the right level with people.
- [21:24]
Lauren Wood
I always say that it's not enough to just listen to someone. They need to get that you're listening. People need to know and be assured that, yes, I understood what you said and I'm repeating it back to you. And that creates this connection where they feel like, ah, okay, you're not just sitting here zoning out. You actually are here with me in this experience. And it's something that I think it's such an easy thing to do, but it's something that so few teams in my experience are really taught to do. And so that's such a great lesson. And I will also say that in my experience of living in LA throughout these fires and through that period of time, I spoke to quite a number of different customer service teams for different things because I thought I was losing my home and had to, you know, deal with, navigate different things. And I'm not going to name any names, but there were some companies who did this really well and there were other companies who did it so poorly. And I understand they're not trained like your team is to deal with these types of situations, but they know where I live, they know my address, they know what I'm calling about. And I think it's so important for any team who has that information when there is a disaster happening that we just change our tone and show that empathy. Ask a different question instead of how are you doing today? How are you hanging in there? It's such a small shift, but it has a massive impact on how that customer is going to feel. So I want to talk a little bit about where technology comes into play because as we bring more and more AI into the picture, I have this question of where does empathy play a role and how do we find the efficiencies of AI while if like increasing the level of empathy? Because I actually think we have quite a deficit of empathy when it comes to customer experience as a whole. And so how are you approaching that?
- [23:35]
Gavin Blair
I think it's very timely because even independent of what Bright harbor is doing for disaster victims in this circumstance, I'm finding very strong trends with major consumer brands around. My ability to call them or interact with them and not be navigating through, frankly, a labyrinth of IVR prompts and questions. And what I can see in the background being these, these tiered teams in locations all over the world gate kept from actually ultimately being able to solve your problem. They're literally gate kept and the team that they need to be able to communicate with, to actually do what they need to do is is a location or a time zone away. It's funny how things kind of come back a little bit. As you know, I'm sure there's that point where the rise of the first touch resolution was like a nice thing in the cxmt. It's like bringing it back to that, by the way, and actually thinking about how your systems and your tools optimize for that would be most welcome to me. So I think coming into Bright harbor and designing what we have, I'm paranoid about how technology does play a role in all these things. There are so many easy wins ultimately to have with introducing these tools in the right way. It lets you scale quicker, it lets you hire less, it lets you improve quality and efficiency in what you deliver to customers. But for me, the baseline obviously starts with a end to end human experience. The baseline, the measurements for what that quality is are established there and then you're fitting in the tools against that benchmark. And that's just a sequence that's just kind of like working through a sequence there. I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that AI is not a binary. And it's talked a lot about that way, like it's a cold replacement of something or it's just a switchover. It's very much a scale. And that's something that I learned at Lemonade. In the insurance and claims space, where as Lemonade was kind of pioneering the use of AI to settle claims and to be technology within the insurance industry, there is this scale mostly around complexity of what AI can just get to and where it is ultimately in my mind going to kind of stay it maybe is that like 60 max, 70% mark, where on the top of this tier is just difficult, complex situations like a total fire loss of your home, a total loss of your home. That is an example where you're not going to have AI solve everything. And so it's a hybrid thing for me. It's about the interplay very much between the humans in the systems. It's about the power suit of armor, power suit that you put in a person into where AI enhances and amplifies everything they do, but ultimately isn't replacing it. So as an organization you're kind of drawing the line and being very clear with yourselves around where the touch of a person and the capabilities of a human are just integral. And in doing everything to begin with, as we have with just people, it was very quick for us to identify. You know, during these onboarding calls, like you could hear people's voices, like settle. It started off as we were talking to them for the first time about what was going on in la. It's tense and it's, it's more frantic and as you talk to them, your voice is doing that. You are, you are bringing them down to a level of focus and capability and stuff. So and so we're just going to be methodical about this, I think very careful with what we introduce. There's a lot of easy wins, but just don't you know, you can't go too far on it.
- [27:34]
Lauren Wood
Think it's so important to have empathy in our tech stack, like thinking about how can we, what is it that the customer or the client really needs and how can we use technology to help to get them that when they need it. So for example, in not sending you through a big IVR menu where you have to wait on hold and do all these things like getting back to someone immediately, I actually think is the kindest thing that you can do instead of having them sit there and wait. And so how can we leverage AI to really support people and their needs? And I think that what that requires is for our teams to think about what is the customer experiencing at this moment. If a customer just had a total loss and now they're sitting, pressing all these buttons and then waiting on hold for a really long time, is that the most empathetic experience? How can we speed that up? How can we reallocate our resources so that our team can be there right away and we can have AI take care of some of the low hanging fruit that don't require a human to be involved? And so, yeah, I completely agree with you. It's definitely a hybrid approach. And where I think things get dicey is when we're talking about AI as a replacement. Even if it can, should it replace the human touch and a human voice? I say no. But I'm sure that there's some people who disagree with me.
- [29:08]
Gavin Blair
I don't know what you think about the difference that like channels make because I actually think they're quite, you know, between phone and text and email. I think that's a big additional element to all of this. Totally, you know, presents some of the better formats to find that balance or to still, I think people we're trying to show up in the place they want us to, in the ways that they want us to, where the conversation is. And for example, you know, texting as a way to kind of really bridge those big milestones that someone's going through as they're on a recovery journey. The short transactional conversations, being able to be accomplished so easily through texting, which provides the live qualities at an asynchronous cost, so to speak. That's really, I think too where the channels play like a huge role in all of this. And with texting you have the opportunity to really be efficient with what words can be, how words can be analyzed, how team members can be prepped to answer those questions based on themes and all those other things. And so I think I'm very optimistic that for example SMS is a way is a great platform for finding and striking that balance.
- [30:22]
Lauren Wood
Oh my God. I, I so I totally agree with this. When I was at Too Good to Go, which is a global surplus food marketplace who works with everything from big large enterprise grocery stores to small mom and pop shops, we found that texting kind of obviously was the best way to communicate with our independent customers because they're small business owners, they're running around their stores, they're going out to like pick up more supplies. They don't, they're not on their email. And when we, it was kind of this like major aha moment of oh, if we text them, 1 they respond to us and 2 they are more engaged with us and 3 they are happier talking to us because we're meeting them where they're at. And I've seen some amazing use cases of sms, especially recently. I think I'm not exactly sure the mechanics of this but I'm sure AI is helping to enable us to have better texting capabilities. So I don't know if you know much about what's happening in the back end. If so, I'd love to hear about it.
- [31:30]
Gavin Blair
Yeah, well, I mean first for what I think has been a popular channel for a long time among professionals, texting is very much still underutilized and very few brands use them. Part of it in my opinion I think may be around there's actually technical difficulties to implementing a good texting SMS platform. As much as Twilio stands out as this incredible platform for sms. I've also just had various trouble with implementing Twilio in a way that like is, is, is effective. So I think there's that side of it. But, but then to your point, I mean moving anything to a text based format, the way that you build your product, the database and the kind of you know, software that you build, it just allows your large language models in your air to, to analyze and consume that information. And it also, you know, there's a lot of out of the box tools that are great at this being able to use that kind of chat text based workflow to auto populate, you know, macros and answers and insights and decision trees and stuff like that. So I think there's a few different paths to get there with it. It's whether it's third party or it's something you're building yourself. There's still some hurdles ultimately I feel like to it being used in the best way that it can but for me it seems like in these spaces in between, especially where you're trying to get through short transactional updates. It's just absolutely amazing.
- [33:00]
Lauren Wood
Just to add on to that as well, because I totally agree. The tech abilities, there's, I mean there's also restrictions for how many text messages you can send per day and like regulations around text messaging that makes it a little bit confusing. And I find a lot of the legacy CX tools have. You kind of, you have to get creative with your tech stack, but the juice is well worth the squeeze. And something else I will say that I found in working with international teams is the WhatsApp hack. Because using WhatsApp, I mean for Americans, we don't use it as much, but pretty much everywhere else in the world your customers are on WhatsApp. And so using that as well is really amazing. But again, another channel to deal with. But I don't. I totally agree with you on the, on the channel front. So couple last questions for you. I wanted to talk a little bit about analytics and what are some of the metrics that you think are really important to be tracking, especially as we start implementing more AI into our systems? What are you looking at to make sure that your team is not only responding in a timely manner, but also creating a great experience?
- [34:11]
Gavin Blair
Yeah, it's a great question in large part for me. It doesn't deviate too much between different businesses. I feel the, the thing with the KPIs and even landing on these success metrics is to actually be unequivocal about them and to not. They are, they are the ultimate reflection of what you want an employee or a team member to prioritize and to do. It's. It's like there are often two conversations. One is the we want to be this, we want to do that. And then there's the we're sitting down and looking at your interactions and measuring you against something. I imagine that that is a different thing so often. And so for me it means that if you're looking at like a pyramid, you can only really have one top KPI and everything else needs to kind of cascade from that and that has to reflect your values. The very obvious one for me first and foremost is the NPS metric. And I even find that as you know, it's, it's, I'm sure, great and fancy for smaller companies to optimize for nps and then they get bigger and they have to compromise and do all these other. I find it's all still complimentary and you can have, you can be very effective at measuring cost and efficiency and all these other things while letting NPS reign supreme. And this is for me very, again, this is very much about what I think some of these industries are still very stuck in, especially the insurance industry with just understanding that the priority is the first thing, the customer experience. But then it's a win win for them still. So I start with nps. There's a lot also to just implementing nps. Well, looking at, it's not just putting it in, it's, it's looking at the, even the response rates and utilization of customers when you prompt them for mps. It's figuring out the exact timing and delivery of your surveying and really paying attention to the numbers so that you're not just capturing some 10%, 5%, you know, token. You're actually in like as, like as you'd even measure email engagement or other things from a marketing perspective. You're capturing like a robust number. And so that's very important, like the implementation of a metric like nps. And then I think there's just a lot of powerful things from there. So I tend to have, you know, the NPS metric, I have the metric that measures productivity for the team. And this is maybe a little bit more variable, you know, and it evolves as you grow as an organization. So in the world of Bright harbor, it is the amount of customers one specialist is supporting. You tend to start smaller with that number and you grow to where you're, you're optimizing it and you're introducing maybe the technology that lets that rise. And then the third leg to this stool for me is of course the efficiency metric, which is a lot around how you're allowing people to do the most efficient job, the quickest actions, the least amount of clicks, everything laddering up ultimately to strong NPS across the board.
- [37:24]
Lauren Wood
And that efficiency piece, I just want to double click on that because when we think about customer effort, and I don't know if that's a metric that you're measuring at this stage in the game, but customer effort, how much effort does a customer need to put into taking the action that we want them to take? The same thing applies for the employees. If we make it really difficult for our team to take the action that they need to do to do their work well, we are not helping them. And I think it's a really important measure to be looking at because if that is really challenging for our team to take an action, it's going to be challenging for the customer to get the support they need. And so it all intersects. And so I love that efficiency metric internal efficiency.
- [38:11]
Gavin Blair
It's a great point around the how hard is it? Kind of measurement. And you know, if you think about it, there's only really the typical way that and the only format that that's really measured is where you're looking at things like wait time on the phones and you're kind of saying I only really seen it in the standard world measured against ivrs. Right. But it's not measured in other channels very well. What you tend to do in the other channels is instead measure against how many times did somebody need to ask something or how many, how many touches did they need? Or how many times was the ticket reopened. But that doesn't capture the same as that level of effort measuring for customers or for employees. So I think that's a really great one. And one other just insight I wanted to share about what I felt really drove NPS in the insurance industry and now has kind of helped me take it elsewhere. We did a lot of measuring and actual high level business analysis against this. And the number one corollary for NPS above and beyond the speed at which things were solved, the ultimate decision that was made, for example a denied versus approved claim is 100% hands down responsiveness. I will take responsiveness over everything else. I'll take it over the time it takes to reply. I'll take it over all these other very important things. Because if you are dialed into and your organization is optimized for responsiveness, you are just forcing other things to fall into place and you're giving the customer the thing that is the most common failure point for you, which is the lack of engagement or the lack of timeliness or the, the instinct that every person starting off in CX has, which is I don't have the right answer yet and I'm going to wait till I have it. I mean, you've got no, but you got to break. It's like that's awesome. Get the right answer. But if it's been six hours or four hours or two, or if it's been the end of the day and it's carrying forward into the next, respond, the exercise isn't the right answer. The exercise is some semblance of a normal back and forth responsive communication with somebody and that rules the day, that it rules supreme, that crushes the X satisfaction levels. So they're very deliberate decisions though you need to make and what you prioritize as an organization to have this be true. But if responsiveness was more of the forefront and focus. You are driving higher NPS all the time.
- [40:54]
Lauren Wood
I have found this out the hard way so many times where I'm like, the NPS is down for some other reason. It must be something. And then we just totally change the way that we're working so that we're responding in two hours instead of 24. And guess what happens completely. It is the ultimate NPS hack. So that's so awesome. Thanks for sharing that. I could not agree more.
- [41:19]
Gavin Blair
More.
- [41:20]
Lauren Wood
All right, Gavin, we have two last lightning round questions for you. The first is I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. Tell us about that experience.
- [41:32]
Gavin Blair
I had a support experience recently with Home Depot, as I'm sure most Americans do. I go into Home Depot and I come out spending eight times more than I anticipated in terms of the amount of purchases I've made. So I made. I'm a reluctant and happy Home. Home Depot customer. Home Depot uses. I don't know that I quite understand why this is more utilized, but Apple has a iMessage business feature.
- [42:01]
Lauren Wood
It's the best.
- [42:02]
Gavin Blair
Yeah, I think at the start it was actually kind of gatekept by Apple, like what brands could use it. It almost felt like it was in this prolonged beta because it's been on my radar for years and when it was first on my radar, I actually couldn't get my company into it somehow. But now I think it's more expansively used. And by the way, Android has a similar tool we're talking about within the framework and features and excellence of iMessage, a fully branded and enhanced text message experience. You've got the Home Depot orange across the top. You feel like you've dropped into a different thing. You've got information that you can click through to actually see contact information about Home Depot. You're doing your normal texting with them, but they're also able to plug in calendar scheduling right into the imessage. They're able to then convert the imessage to your support tool seamlessly with a recap. Okay, moving this over to chat with our team internally on a different system. Here's what you talked about. It's the thing of beauty. I want to figure out why it's not being used more and how I can use it, because I think it's actually just a very cool out of the box solution to some of the things we've identified around the use of SMS in general and then the difficulty of interacting sms. So I'm a big fan of that and kudos to Home Depot for figuring that out. I love it.
- [43:24]
Lauren Wood
Now you're inspiring me. I want to figure this out. I'm making it a mission to have an episode about it. We're getting someone from Apple on the show. We're going to do it, we're going to do it. And then my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
- [43:39]
Gavin Blair
I think the one piece of advice is something not even necessarily specific to customer experience. It's specific to any time you're trying to solve an experience or a problem. In general. I'm just such a big fan of first principles. I really believe that for a lot of reasons you feel forced to or compelled to work off of established protocol or doctrine or steps. But giving yourself the time and the space to almost be irreverent about what everything has been to this point and to be a little bit audacious allows you to revisit and revalidate all the really important bits of what a problem is and what problem you're trying to solve. And so as much as a CX leader can come in and be willing to kind of go against the brain, challenge thinking and use first principles to reconstruct, it's the better. And I'll actually use an example of this. For me, there is a lot of thinking and psychology and courses and a lot out there in the non profit world around how to interact with disaster and trauma victims. There's a lot of thinking out there and I love it and it certainly will be a resource for us to ultimately engage with and utilize. But I'm actually going to be, I'm going to take my time for a minute and not tap into those, you know, because they tend to be like really well labeled things and they tend to be online courses for government assistance, whatever. And so I'm trying to like reconstruct it myself. I'm trying to see whether the things we've talked about actually are true and effective. And then I'm going to figure out what the gap is if I have to. But I'm not going to jump into the onboarding a new class with a pre existing format for how to talk best to people. Of course, if we're really missing something and putting someone in a bad position on either side, we will do that. It's not to be reckless, but it's just to be original. So be original.
- [45:40]
Lauren Wood
We can't innovate if we're following the herd. We need to rethink how things are done. And I think that that is one of the beautiful challenges that AI Is actually bringing to the table is it's forcing us to rethink how we're doing things. But then there's also companies like Bright harbor, not necessarily AI but that's exactly what you guys are doing. And I'm so grateful for all of the work that you're doing to support not only Los Angeles, but all the areas in the United States and soon the world that are struggling with these types of disasters. So really appreciate all the work you're doing. And thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing these wonderful insights.
- [46:21]
Gavin Blair
Thank you. It's a pleasure.