Swimming With Sharks: Customer Ops Unplugged - S2 Episode 7: Amber Vaden

In this episode of Swimming with Sharks, Kevin Dean, CEO of ManoByte, welcomes Amber Vaden, a dynamic leader in customer operations and success with nearly a decade of experience in the field. Amber brings a unique perspective to customer service, blending her background in education with a deep passion for creating impactful customer experiences.

Introduction:

Kevin introduces Amber Vaden, who has made a significant impact in the world of customer success and operations. Amber's journey began with a desire to teach, which seamlessly transitioned into a career in customer service. Her role allows her to blend empathy with creativity, helping both customers and internal teams achieve success. Known for her innovative approach and commitment to understanding customer needs, Amber is excited to share her insights and experiences on the show.

Interview Highlights:

• Amber’s Path: Amber shares her unique journey from a potential career in teaching to becoming a key player in customer service. She discusses how her background in education informs her approach to creating impactful customer experiences and fostering internal success.
• Core Challenges: Amber identifies a major challenge in customer operations: the difficulty of truly understanding and addressing individual customer needs. She advocates for customized solutions and ongoing feedback to ensure that customer interactions are meaningful and effective.
• Technology vs. Empathy: Amber offers her perspective on the role of technology in customer service, emphasizing that while AI can support operational efficiency, it lacks the empathy that human interactions provide. She stresses the importance of balancing technological tools with a human touch to enhance customer satisfaction.
• Effective Strategies: The conversation delves into practical strategies for managing customer relationships and balancing various responsibilities. Amber highlights the importance of setting realistic expectations and maintaining organization to deliver consistent and thoughtful customer support.
• Empathy in Action: Amber underscores the significance of treating every customer interaction with the same care and respect one would offer to a loved one. She believes that building genuine trust and empathy can transform customer experiences and foster long-term loyalty.
• Looking Forward: Amber is excited about the future of customer service as new technologies and innovative companies emerge. She anticipates that these advancements will offer new ways to enhance customer experiences and drive success.

Key Takeaways:

• Personalized Approach: Understanding and addressing individual customer needs through tailored solutions and feedback is essential for effective customer service.
• Human Touch: While technology can aid in customer service, it should be complemented by the empathy and personal connection that only humans can provide.
• Strategic Balance: Effective customer support involves balancing organizational demands with the need for realistic expectations and consistent, empathetic interactions.
• Future Innovations: Embracing new technologies and strategies will continue to shape and improve the customer service landscape, offering exciting opportunities for growth and enhancement.

Transcript

0:01

Hey there and welcome to Swimming with Sharks, a deep dive into customer ops. I'm your host, Kevin Dean, a CEO of Manabyte, and I'm thrilled to have you join us for this exciting journey through the dynamic world of customer operations. On this podcast today, I am super excited to talk to Amber. Amber, great to have you on the show. I'm super excited to just hang out and chat for a little So can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your journey in the customer service, customer ops world? Yes, so I have been interested in customer success, customer operations, customer service. I've been in this for almost a decade now. I really enjoy being in this industry. I used to want to be a teacher, so I felt like me getting catapulted into this was just like a dream come true because I still get to have empathy, I still get to create content, I still get to kind of go down the pool of being able to create things that help customers succeed while also helping internal people succeed. I think it was just a match made for me. I really do love being in the industry. I can't really see myself being anywhere else, so I love it. And I'm still pretty young, for the foreseeable future, I don't think I'd ever want to leave this industry. Well, that is awesome. you know, right before we started the record button, we talked about how, know, we're, yeah, we've got jobs and roles that we have, but we're also humans. We have life outside of work. Can you share an interesting fact about yourself that people may not Yeah, so funny enough, I used to competitively like artistic roller skate and figure skate when I was younger. I won national championships twice. So it's kind of funny that most people don't know that about me because it's never a time really for me to bring it up. But I love still like ice skating and roller skating. I love doing that so much. So that's a fun fact most people don't know. If you're my family, you usually know that, but nobody else really knows. yeah, so roll bounds. I would love to see some skating going on. I love to do it. And when I used to live in Austin, they had an adult skate night. So people like me and people that just love to skate would just go out on, I think it was a Tuesday. And we would do that. And it was so much fun. I met so many people. And I think it was a great way to also get to know people in my age range and up that maybe I just wouldn't have the opportunity to meet any other way. So yeah, I love it. I love it. That is so fun. I'm going to be in Austin next month speaking at the Forrester Conference. So maybe I'll have to give me that spot and I'll go and check it Yes, I definitely will. I can let you know all the good food spots, not the mainstream food spots, but the real good food spots in Austin. I love it. Yeah, no, we're going to have to get the hook up on that. So tell me, what do you see as the biggest challenge facing customer ops I feel like at the end of the day, something that I've seen a pattern on is mostly not being able to really get into the mind of the actual customer and how things need to operate to best fit them. It's something that also kind of doubles into like ops and success is being able to have the correct playbook and knowing that not everything is one size fits all. think that's the biggest letdown I see in most companies is that even if you have a company A and company B and they're kind of similar, they're still could have way different structures and just not really taking the time to be in their shoes, kind of doing smaller focus groups to test things out to see what could work best and maybe have a big playbook, but then kind of have like little bitty playbooks here and there and things you can do to really just operate on a much better level and just more optimally at the end of the day. So I would say the biggest issue is just not really putting themselves in the customer or buyer's shoes more often and figuring out how is their opinion of the company after they just went through this onboarding process you've done for them, implementation, like how are you making this easier for them so that they can be your word of mouth for your product because they're like, hey, I got onboarded, everything was implemented, great, this was smooth, I'm quick enough to get to the product because I don't need to use every single product they've got. They came here for a solution, so that's it. don't need to, you know, I need to be able to make it as easy for them to use the solution as quick as possible. So yeah, that would probably be the biggest challenge, honestly. Yeah, you I love that putting yourself in the customer's shoes as something that needs to happen a lot more than it actually does. And what I feel like, and you can tell me what you think, I feel like the challenge is that you've got, you know, what the customer wants, what the customer needs, but I've only got so much time in the day. Like, how do you balance that? Like meeting the customer's needs? thinking about them, putting yourselves in their shoes versus all the other things that I've got to do every single day. How do you balance think in that regard, it's kind of twofold, at least for me in my experience, is one, most of the people that we're dealing with are adults on different intellectual levels, but at the end of the day, they're still adults. So being able to be real with them and just not sugarcoat stuff, not have BS involved into it, give them the truth. Set realistic expectations. If their goals are something that... would take multiple quarters, you need to let them know that. You need to let them know and at least have something to back it up with. If you don't have data, you need to go off your experience of what you've seen, maybe giving them data from other companies that are kind of similar to them, being able to do that, but also staying ahead by having templates. So at every job that I've had, I've tried to create a template that works best. Like anytime I have QBRs or any calls with them, I do want to always have a template there to say, this is the high level of what we went over. This is the next steps of what needs to be going on in our own success plan for that specific customer. And then also something that I've done that's really just yielded so much success is to figure out the timeline to speak to them. Because a lot of the times if I think, I can give them a call like in a week or two or however long I need to give them a call, what if that doesn't work? What if they're onboarding people at the time? Whatever it could be, just kind of trying show that I'm still flexible enough to try to work with them, but I'm still giving them realistic expectations of what the product can and can't do and what can be done in that timeframe that they're expecting. So that's how I kind of keep up with it and stay on track as best as I can. And just if I'm gonna say I'm gonna do something, I need to do it. I need to follow up with it. It sounds like something basic, but it is something that doesn't, know, it gets away from you sometimes maybe you're like, I'll follow up with them in a week, you know, and I'll check in and whatnot, but are you actually doing that? Are you actually giving them the word of mouth and doing what you're saying to them because they're going to remember that. They're going to say, why didn't I get a call that Friday? I was a little bit busy. So then they already are feeling that there's a disconnect in what you feel that their business is, you know, to them. It's like, no, this business is important to me. I need to show up every single time I say I'm going to show up. So that's pretty much how I stay organized and keep at it and just try to keep the customer in mind while also being realistic of what I can do. I like that a lot and I like the thought of, you you've got templates in place that you use to help you be more effective in your job on a day -to -day basis. Let's have this discussion, right? How does technology help you be better and do your job better? And that's actually a really good question. So something that's really good about technology is being able to use it to your advantage. To be quite honest, and I think it's controversial, but I do not think that AI would ever take over customer success. There's something that AI can't give, and that's empathy. It can be like just base level empathy, but it doesn't even feel that way. It feels scripted. It feels robotic, exactly what it is. But it's different that if you and I are speaking to a customer, they're seeing face to face or even hearing a voice. That's why most of the time when you call customer service, people say they want to speak to a representative. They don't want to speak to the robot or the automated system. So I think really implementing really good CRM tools and things like that are an advantage. And that just kind of is putting another tool in the toolbox for customer success, customer operations, implementation, anybody. I think if you can use it to your advantage, I think that you should. But I think just being smart about you know, and kind of just only using it for what you really need and how it can help you, not just trying to get rid of tasks that really do still need that empathetic approach because people can see it. People can tell when it's just a scripted response or if you just type something in chat, GPT, like at least if you're going to use something like that, you need to adjust it to your needs. You need to make it sound more like you. need to be able to, you know, and at the end of the day, you still need to be able to know how to do it even without them. so without that kind of help. So I I'm all for it, but within reason, for sure. You know, I like that perspective and I love the controversy because right now there's a lot of hype about technology and there's a lot of, you know, doubts and there's a, it's an interesting topic for sure. You know, other thing that like that you said is that, you know, when people call in, they don't like talking to, you know, agents, chat bots, things of that nature. I'll share a quick experience. we're trying to get something solved. And every time I call it, I get one of these automated systems, which again is kind of contrary because, I'm going to take tech space and we. But the problem is this, that every time you call, you get these bots that don't have the right answer. And it's more frustrating and you've got to sit, you know, waiting for, you know, long periods of time. I come up, just can I get to an operator's I can get this one thing. And then. because I didn't put the prompt in correctly, like it hung up on me. So I didn't even get my problem solved, right? And so I had to like, so I get the frustration that people have with the way that technology is today. Do you think that that will change over the next year or so with the way that technology is going life speeds ahead. Do think that's gonna be a difference? know, as these things may get smarter and learn, what do you think? Really, I hope that it does because we're in a world now where I think a lot of companies are realizing, hey, we have feedback and ways to get feedback from customers. We always have, but I think now more than ever companies are really realizing how crucial it is because these people that are buying your product and that are a free word of mouth, they're free marketing, you know? And so. your example of how just calling in and then not doing the correct prompt at the end of the day, it's making the customer more irritated. So by the time they do talk to your customer service rep, they're on level 10 and there is really, even if you've solved stuff for them, they're still kind of getting down from the levels, but they're still upset. So I would hope and think that with, you know, so much technology forward, like things that we have now that things would get a lot better. But I think at the end of the day, people have to do the research and figure out how it is and go back to what I was saying before, like putting yourself in the customer's shoes. That's what I've always said to some people. I'm like, anytime that I'm like going into any other job, I want to call customer service and see how I feel. Like at my company, I want to call customer service and see the, you know, the treatment that I'm getting. Do I feel like they're listening to my problems? Do I feel like it's hard for me to even get into a rep? If it is, that's a pain point that we need to fix, you know, because most people are calling customer service because there's an issue that's coming in. The harder we make it when we're trying to make things simple by just doing, automate it, you don't even have to call someone. Someone would rather sit on hold to talk with a human, because I've done it. I've sat on hold for an hour or so just to make sure I would talk to it rather than getting it fixed in five seconds with just any type of chat bot or AI or recorded person there. And I think that that speaks volumes because most people, I'm sure, I think there was a study about that, that most people would rather sit there on the phone for a numerous amount of time to talk to an actual person than to have just an automated system do that. So I hope in the future we can expect that, you know, as far developed as a lot of these tech companies are and a lot of these like, you know, extensions that we can have in our computers and on our phones and stuff like that we could have a better understanding of how to make the client experience a lot better, instead of it just being very lackluster like it is now and people are just, they would rather cancel than go through with it. And I think that speaks numbers too, you brought up something else I'll come back to in a minute. do you think that the issue is a matter of trust? Like, I feel like I can trust a human more than I can trust the technology right now. Do you think that that has something to do with yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's knowing that like, I at least can speak to like, I'm speaking to you. I know that we can talk and I can tell you about like, this is the issue I've been going on with for months. Like you see the cases that have came in as many times I've called, like they can trust in knowing that you've had that issue so many times versus if I just talk to a chatbot, they're not gonna know maybe the past months that I've been having an issue with this product and seeing all the issues that I've had and it not get resolved. They're just gonna try to do whatever they can. to quickly give me off the phone. And that is taking away the empathetic approach. It's you need to have empathy in a company. You need to have customer support. You need to have technical support. You need to have CS, CS operations. Like you need to have all of these things and people need to be taught that is the empathetic approach to how to handle customers. They also need to know how to talk to customers. That's a big difference. And people may think it's easy. I've done a customer service job. I've worked in retail, I've done this, and while those things are very transferable, you still need to be able to know that there's gonna be plenty of times that people are going to be coming at you cursing, upset, irate, as all get out. And they're that way, and not even at you. They're that way because of how they've been treated with the company and the things that they've had to do just to get to you. So I do think that if trust was more at the forefront, I think it would customers more happy and proud to say, yeah, I'm with whatever company and I've been using their product and while I love the product, I also love their customer service. And I think that would be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the trust in my mind, I feel it's on multi levels and I think that companies need to be a better job of enabling trust in both whether you're using technology or whether you on humans. I've been in situations where I'm talking to a human and they don't have the right information that they need in order to solve my problem too. So I think that trust is is a big thing. All right. So, you know, we've talked so far about how it's important to be planned, prepare, have templates to help. We talked about the importance of empathy, the importance of trust. All of these are really keys for people to think about how they can deliver and companies to deliver great customer service. Can you tell me what's one piece of it companies? to help them deliver better customer service. I would say one valuable piece that just goes for I feel like any industry is pretend that it is a loved one at the company and they're calling in and build your customer service, customer success, get your implementation team, operate whoever else in there. Act as if it is a loved one, a grandmother, grandfather, someone else like that that just does not know the product and they are going to call in about it. Treat it like that and you'll be able to succeed because no one is going to want someone that they care about and they love or anything else like that to call in and get cursed out to not have their needs being heard or their issues being heard or even cared about. They're not going to want to have a system like You don't want to be a CEO of the company and knowing that your grandmother is calling in and your CS rep or your customer success rep is being very dismissive, lacking empathy, not caring about their solution and not either noticing that they have long -term loyalty or really understanding what it is and going away from just scripted and just lacklusterness and roboticness. The moment that they can do think that would just make a big change in the companies and how they operate for their customer service, customer success, anything. I think that would be a really, really big step for any of them. Yeah, I think that that is really solid advice. So when you look out into this space, what's something that you're excited about that's coming up? What are you excited I really think the biggest excitement is seeing all of the new companies kind of emerge. You're having all of these new companies for so many different things that back in the day we have never had companies for. Things that were like, I wish that I had this, or I wish I had this web browser that helped me with this, or this extension, or this application, whatever it is. And now we're seeing so many of the things that we wish we could have had back in the day kind of come to fruition now. So I think that excitement of just knowing that there's so many good companies coming on the horizon and there's more chances to be able to kind of have someone create a company that really does put CS to a forefront of knowing that that's the people that are really talking to your customers every single day. Now every other part of the company is super important. It's all a puzzle piece to the end, but I think really making sure that the customers feel heard is how you retain. how you retain customers, how you keep making the customers come back and have that renewal. That's it. I'm excited for the new companies coming in and just new opportunities to be able to just make the company succeed in all aspects other than just revenue. That'd be great. I love that and that's a really good thing to look forward to in the future. And I agree with you. I think there's so many systems and processes and strategies out there that we didn't have before that are really gonna help us rethink how we deliver great customer experiences and deliver on customer success truly. So Amber, know I'm a big music fan, right? And I'm always looking for something new to pop and listen to. Tell me, what should I be listening to right Well, a song that I've had on replay for a while and it just makes me think of summers in Austin because I was in Austin for a couple of years. And the song that I've had on replay is something else. It's by Jordan Keith, I think his name is. And I've been listening to that on repeat. And it's just kind of like a, I don't know, it's kind of like an upbeat song. It's something that reminds me of when I was in Austin and just kind of at Zilker Park just... having a good time seeing the skyline, you know, and just relaxing. It's just so, so, so much like just fun being in there and just having that in the background, like your own music video. I love it. I love that. I'm going to have to check that song out. And the truth is, because you are from Austin, Austin, they know more about music than almost anybody else. You guys are new Tshianos. Yes, I love it. I love it. It's so and the fact that you're going there, I'm telling you, it's so much fun. And honestly, a lot of the events that go on in Austin have just been like, they're just, it's just so nice to kind of have like more of like an outside type of people, people that love to be outside and do things outside. And I think there's so many opportunities to do so many things like outside, like going to the parks and having festivals outside and I know, it's just really, really nice. So yeah, you gotta listen to it. I think you'll like it. Yeah, I definitely will for sure. Amber, this has been so much fun. Thank you for spending some time with me today, and I'm sure that you and I will be connected again soon. Thanks, everybody. Bye.