We’re excited to bring you an interview with Antonio King, Director of Experience at Shinesty – a rad online clothing retailer which brings out the most outlandish collection of clothing for the world to see.
What does good customer service mean to you?
Good customer service to me means a seamless and frictionless process. Often times, customer service interactions are riddled with hoops the customer has to go through to get their issue solved. All this does is cause more friction in what they’re ultimately attempting to do: get their problem fixed.
What was the difference between supporting your customers in early days of Shinesty and how is it today?
Fortunately, not too much has changed. We’ve gotten much better at defining the tone and personality we’re looking for, which has made it much easier to consistently ensure across the board. Aside from that, we made huge strides in the Self Service arena.
As a company that’s frequented primarily by a lot millennials, and as a company that’s completely run by millennials, we know as a demographic what we like vs what we don’t like.
You could argue that most people don’t want to have to contact someone if they could help it, but we at least know this to be the truth with the millennial demographic. With that in mind, a lot of our strategy is to make things easy or self serviceable, and it’s worked wonders.
What KPIs are you using to measure your customer service performance?
There are a few different things we look at. Some of those metrics are at the department level, and some are at the CX Guru level.
Department level metrics:
- Customer Effort Score
- Customer Satisfaction Score
- First Reply Time
- Full Resolution Time
- Contact Per Order Percentage
- Phone Service Level
Agent level metrics:
- CSAT
- Ticket Handle Time
- Phone Availability
- QA Score
Do you set any weekly/monthly goals that you’re trying to achieve with your team?
We have weekly “Targets” for everyone’s individual metrics as well as the overall.
For example: the individual target for CSAT is 95%, while the overall target is 98%.
How has Nicereply helped your customer service team?
Nicereply has helped us in a couple different facets:
We saw roughly a 30%-40% increase in our CSAT response rate, which enables us to get more visibility into what we’re doing well, and what we’re not doing so well.
In addition, we were able to employ our Customer Effort survey without sacrificing the loss of another important survey, without inundating the customer with yet another transactional survey. It’s a hard one to articulate, but this was one of the main reasons they were sought out, and they have not disappointed.
How do you motivate your team?
I’m fortunate to have a team that feeds off of one another. We really promote teamwork to its fullest extent. My team members understand the nuances of the role, and handle all challenges with grace and aplomb.
We believe heavily in empowerment here. My team understands that they have full range to fix the situation as they see fit, and I support them and their decisions.
I also look to challenge them in areas of career development, so I get to expose them to areas that they may normally not get to do in the day-to-day (e.g. performing a cost benefit analysis on support software).
Is there any advice that you’d give to your past-self?
I would probably say to establish the importance of CS/CX right away. Often times, CS is an afterthought and often downplayed to be unimportant, or a cost center. If you leverage the department correctly, it can be your strongest tool in retaining.
What would you recommend to other companies that aim to improve their customer service?
Customer service interactions sometimes have negative connotations. Figure out what you can do to make your department, interaction unique and stand out. That’s what we do at Shinesty, and it helps differentiate us from our competition.
Support doesn’t have always be just solving issues. Yes, that’s part of the role and the department’s purpose, but figure out how to make true lasting impressions that are unique outside of the standard good interaction.
Thank you, Antonio and Shinesty for sharing interesting customer service tips with us! Stay tuned for more Nicereply customer stories.
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