October 2023 Summaries

Ostrom is a German company driving the green energy transition by making renewable energy accessible and inclusive. They have created a seamless, multilingual energy management platform to help consumers effortlessly switch, track, and reduce their electricity consumption. Rahel Kunkel, Operations Lead at Ostrom, has valuable insights into customer service, including the importance of patience, understanding customers' problems, and staying focused during her workday. She also emphasizes the need for empathy and creative problem-solving in customer interactions, highlighting that these are skills that bots cannot replicate. Throughout our conversation with Rahel, she shares her personal experiences, productivity hacks, and what makes a great customer service interaction, offering a unique perspective on this often-misunderstood field.

Brand consistency is crucial for any company's success, as it fosters trust, loyalty, and retention among customers. Achieving brand consistency across every touchpoint, including the help center, is essential to create a seamless customer experience. A modern help center that incorporates branding elements such as customizability, multi-brand support, cross-channel consistency, ease of use, discoverability, and next-gen reporting can make a significant difference in brand consistency and customer satisfaction. By prioritizing these features, companies can ensure their customers receive a consistent and personalized experience across every channel, ultimately driving business growth and success.

Hunter.io is an all-in-one cold email software that includes an email finder, email verifier, and cold email sending capabilities. The company's mission is to help businesses get in touch with people who matter to their businesses while staying compliant. As the Head of Customer Success, Giovanni Lepori leads a small team focused on user satisfaction, retention, and engagement. He believes Keanu Reeves would be great at his job due to his reputation for being down-to-earth, empathetic, and easy to approach. Working in customer service has taught him the importance of treating every user as a top priority, regardless of their subscription level, and actively listening to them to gain insights that shape future releases and identify potential issues proactively. His greatest productivity hack is teaming up with teammates to handle customer queries, which brings benefits such as sharing know-how, getting on the same page with exceptions, and involving the whole team. He values excellent customer service from Customer.io, particularly when dealing with technical inquiries, and has received positive feedback for his own customer interactions, including a quote about genuinely listening to customers. He wishes people knew that working in customer service is more than just addressing issues, but also building connections with users and showcasing empathy, creative problem-solving, and constant learning.

The customer service landscape is experiencing a monumental shift as AI becomes more advanced, enabling support teams to focus on activities that create additional value for their customers. Traditional metrics such as first response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and cases handled are evolving to reflect the changing nature of customer interactions. New metrics like automated resolution rate, first contact resolution (FCR), time to resolution (TTR), content views, net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), internal quality score (IQS), return on investment (ROI), bot involvement rate, bot engagement rate, and conversational insights are emerging as a result of AI. Support leaders must adapt their reporting approach to measure the right things in this unfolding era of customer service, focusing on both customer and teammate experiences. By leveraging data from AI-powered chatbots, support teams can gain valuable insights to improve their systems and processes, enhance their reporting capabilities, and unlock easier ways to measure quality and performance.