We’re excited to bring you an interview with Vykintas Glodenis, Head of Customer Support at Mindvalley – a learning experience company that publishes ideas and teachings by the best authors in personal growth, health and fitness, spirituality, productivity, mindfulness and more.
What does good customer service mean to you?
We don’t have a “customer support” team in Mindvalley’s structure, instead we call ourselves the WOW team and this is the reaction we strive to get from every single interaction with our customers.
We set the bar high and we believe that Good customer service is the one which achieves the optimal balance between the 4 basic support criteria:
Speed (how fast do customers receive the 1st response and the resolution)
Convenience (how easy it is for customers to contact support)
WOW Effect / Personalisation (how personalised and caring are our interactions with the customers)
Professionalism (how professional support agents are in delivering resolutions to the customers)
Whenever we’re making operational and/or strategic decisions – we tend to look at how we can maximise the overall customer experience with the resources at our possession.
What was the difference between supporting your customers in early days of Mindvalley and how is it today?
We used to entirely focus on providing the WOW-style direct customer support through human interactions until we understood that along with a growing company customer support needs to go hand in hand with the technological progress. We’re facing a continuous and exciting challenge to strive for the right balance between efficiency (mostly through technological innovations) and authentic personal interactions with our customers.
We proactively design the optimal customer support system architecture to ensure that customers receive the right combination between automatic and personal responses. On the one hand, we analyse customer inquiry data and prepare instant answers to the majority of questions customers may face at any given point. On the other – whenever a customer needs a live human being to talk to – we go the extra mile to provide the most caring and loving interaction.
All our support agents are encouraged to have their own style of communication with our customers. One agent may share her favourite poem, another – personal life story on how he found his life purpose in Mindvalley. Even while writing articles for Mindvalley’s support center – we add the personal touch to show our customers that our agents are not official spokesmen with robotic “efficient” answers – we are all individuals, each with his/her own style and emotions.
Nevertheless, there is one thing we all have in common – sincere love for our customers – which unites us all striving to achieve the best quality customer support. As part of the Mindvalley manifesto, we are breaking down the walls between our customers, our people, our authors and our leadership and creating a global community without boundaries.
What KPIs are you using to measure your customer service performance?
We measure time-to-first response (email), abandonment (call & chat), self-service resolution rates (support center), and customer satisfaction scores (all channels) along with a bunch of other metrics that help us make the right decisions on day-to-day basis.
Do you set any weekly/monthly goals that you’re trying to achieve with your team?
Our experience taught us a lesson that focusing on short-term goals, despite bringing results for the moment, may also delay the necessary structural changes through innovation. Therefore, we tend to focus on the longer perspective and the strategic projects to help us bring our operations to the entire new levels.
Nevertheless, we have a “smart number” which is a combination of the weekly averages of time-to-first-response and Nicereply customer satisfaction score. Each week we evaluate ourselves of where we stand in terms of our minimum, target, and outrageous smart number goals.
How has Nicereply helped your customer service team?
Nicereply is the critical component of our email customer support (which is by far the largest of our channels). Nicereply provides us with the major KPI of customer satisfaction which is like a heartbeat monitor of our customer support. This allows us to track and improve our team performance, as well as to help our agents grow and perform at the expected quality levels.
Thanks to the feature improvements of Nicereply, we managed to significantly increase the amount of “nicereplies” we receive from our customers. This allows us to have a statistically representative data on our customer satisfaction.
How do you motivate your team?
First of all, we focus on the selection process even before support agents join our team. The key to success is to select only the people with the right customer-centric mindset and a pure love and care for Mindvalley customers. All our employees are purpose-driven. This helps to make sure that our team members enjoy serving our customers on a day-to-day basis.
Once they join the team, we gamify their work experience and appreciate people who hit a new high score or upgrade one of our processes. we focus on creating strong WOW customer support team culture through team shouts, values, Mindvalley’s mission and lots of crazy traditions and interpersonal interactions. In order to bond the team even stronger, we organise quarterly team outings (travelling somewhere further each quarter), weekly team lunches, and we often spend time together after work.
Finally, the essence our team is to turn customers into raving fans. Our team is motivated by the impact they make on other people’s lives by just serving them and hearing their stories how Mindvalley’s products helped to transform their lives.
Is there any advice that you’d give to your past-self?
To our past-self we would give 2 pieces of advice. First, always use software as a service (SaaS) tools and outsourcing (instead of relying on internal company resources) to achieve significant customer support structural changes. Second, don’t get completely immersed into a firefighting mode whenever operational results are low – always have part of your resources allocated for the long-term innovations.
What would you recommend to other companies that aim to improve their customer service?
We recommend to plug Nicereply feedback call-to-actions (CTAs) to each email you send to your customers. In order to make it more effective – we implemented a proactive sentence in the end of our email asking customers to rate us and click on one of the colourful faces evaluating the support we provide. It moved the call to provide us with a customer feedback up above our email signatures (making Nicereply CTA a part of the support text). The following changes have helped to increase the amount of Nicereplies we collect by a few hundred percent. And thus we now have a much more representative data.
Thank you, Vykintas for sharing these interesting points with us! Stay tuned for more Nicereply customer stories.