Ep86: Gold Dust Archive - Riding the Waves with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein

Speaker A: Welcome to the Customer Service Goldust podcast. This is the UK's only podcast where customer experience professionals share their journey, insights, challenges and current focus in an ever changing customer service landscape. My name is Gavin Scott and I invite you to join us as we delve into another great conversation. Whether you want to increase customer satisfaction or decrease customer complaints, sure to be plenty of gold dust that will help you to stand out. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Customer Service Gold Dust podcast. And I'm m your host, Gavin Scott. Now, before I introduce you to our next guest, I would like to share two pieces, not one, two pieces of good news about the podcast. So the first one is this. By the time this episode goes live, we will have surpassed 5,000 downloads. I mean, 5,000 downloads, can you believe that? And so a big thank you to all of you for tuning in each week and listening to some of the great conversations that we've had. And if you know of any guests or you want to be a guest yourself, then drop me an email at, uh, gavinscott. And one thing about being a podcast host is that you are always on the lookout for guests. And so please do send me a message or get connected with me on LinkedIn and we can make that happen. Now secondly, the podcast recently appeared in the top 30 list of customer service podcasts from across the world. This list is compiled by Feedspot, which is the Internet's largest human curated database of bloggers and podcasts. And the podcasts, they're ranked by web traffic, social media, followers, domain authority and freshness. And this podcast, the Customer Service Guilders podcast, was ranked number seven. What was even more impressive is that the Customer Service Guilders podcast was the only one from England in the top 10. The rest were mostly from the USA. And so that's a great result. I'm chuffed a bit. And again, thank you for listening. And I will add the link to Feedspot in the show notes so you can take a look at the rest of the podcasts and see where our sits for yourself. Now, my next guest is the founder of Surfboard. They provide simpler, smarter and fairer planning tools for customer service teams. And I know from my time with previous organizations that planning and forecasting for customer service teams can be a bit of a headache. And so I was keen to get her onto the show and tell us more about what Surfpour do. And also my friend Seb, he's a keen surfer and he talks a lot about doing a 520 spin and stuff like that. And he's a cool Guy. And I'm sure my next guest will be a cool lady to interview. So let's give it up for Natasha Ratanshi Stein. Welcome to the show, Natasha.

Speaker B: Thanks a lot, Gavin. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here today.

Speaker A: Hey, great to have you and thank you for making time. Now, uh, although I'm itching. I'm itching to find out where the name Surfboard came from. But before we do that, tell me a bit more about you and your background.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So I am Canadian originally. I have lived in London for 12 years, but many people have pointed out I have not picked up any hint of an accent. As you said. I am, um, the founder and CEO of Surfboard. We started the business just under a year and a half ago at, uh, the end of 2020, and as you say, to provide simpler, smarter, and fairer scheduling software, really disrupting the legacy, what's called workforce management space, as well as the spreadsheet processes.

Speaker A: Right, okay. And, um, I'm just thinking now I'm just gonna rack my brains. I don't think we've had a Canadian on the show. We've had, like, 56 guests so far. And I think, if memory serves me right, you're the first Canadian. Natasha, how does that feel?

Speaker B: Fantastic. Hopefully not the only, but glad to be the first. I have to apologize to Seb that I am actually not a surfer. I have never been surfing. But given I now run a company called Surfboard, I think that also probably needs to change.

Speaker A: You need to get yourself a surfboard, Natasha.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. Ride those waves.

Speaker A: Ride those waves. And I think this 520 spin is definitely a spin that only the professionals can do. I think it's two turns, but, yeah, it sounds. I mean, I don't even think I could get onto a surfboard for two seconds, let alone do two spins on the top of a wave. But that's something that you could, uh, A goal that you can set yourself in the future.

Speaker B: Right, Exactly. Maybe not this year, but for the future, for sure.

Speaker A: Great stuff. Good stuff. So Surfboard, you've been going now, you said, since the end of 2020. So just a year and a half. Uh, and so what was the reason why you started Surfboard and started to do the stuff that you do?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So my, I guess, foray into customer service started off in 2019. I joined Bulb, the energy company, as chief of staff, at a point where scaling the customer service was the biggest priority for the company. We had to grow that team from 75. When I joined in in April 2019 to about 750 within a year. As you can imagine, that, uh, 10x growth put a lot of pressure on processes. Internally became an important priority for the company and especially a big focus for me. And what I saw out there was that you had great tooling like Zendesk for ticketing scales, really well. Twilio for phone service scales really well. The planning, forecasting and scheduling bits were really left behind and meant that that growth and that scaling journey was made so much more difficult without having the right tooling in place. And so I talked a bit at the beginning about transitioning, um, from spreadsheets to legacy software and how Surfboard is looking to make those processes better. But what I learned in that scaling journey was that not having the right tooling was the biggest challenge for us in that. And so off the back of that, really thought something better needed to exist. And so started Surfboard.

Speaker A: Wow. There you go. And I can't step over this. I am still a Bulb customer, although I'm not 100% sure who's looking after me. But Bolb definitely provide great service and I've been with him for a number of years. I was a bit disappointed with their whole situation, but I'm still, I still got my invoices from Bulb and the service is just simple, easy. You clearly played a part in that because you managed to scale them up from 75 to 700m 50 in. What did you say, one year, 12 months?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It was a quick growth journey. And of course the overall company, but also specifically the customer service team headcount. Funnily enough, I actually became a customer of bulb in 2018 and was so amazed by the signup process. And then I once had to call in because I had a meter read issue and they picked up within 10 seconds. They fixed my account immediately. And so the precedent they had set around providing really great customer service, I think has. Has lifted the standard in, in the rest of the industry, of course, despite current circumstances in that industry.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I must admit, each time I contacted Bulb or any correspondence that I got through from them, the language was always simple, easy, effortless. There's a lot of changes happening in the world today.

Speaker B: Right, Exactly.

Speaker A: Where did the name Surfboard come from then?

Speaker B: Natasha, great question. So in customer service teams, I'm sure your listeners will resonate with this. You often refer to the contact volume as coming in waves. You have a wave of calls coming in. And that was a term that I had heard a lot. And so when I thought about navigating these waves. The word surfboard just felt extremely natural the first time I said it. I just thought, that's the. That's the perfect name. Contacts come in waves. We're providing the tool to be able to navigate the waves. And that tool is the surfboard.

Speaker A: Love it. Love it. Every name has a bit of a story, doesn't it? That's a great story. So, you know, I can. As you were telling me that then, I was just picturing that in my head. Yes. You know, the calls do come in. In waves, don't they? So if you can provide customers with a tool that will help them to seamlessly surf those waves, then it makes sense to call it Surfboard, right?

Speaker B: Exactly. I wish I was a surfer. But apart from that, the name, I think is perfect for what we do.

Speaker A: That's great. And so surfboard, they provide simpler, smarter and fairer planning tools for customer service teams. But how do you go about doing that? You know, you mentioned systems like workforce manager and so what is it that you do exactly, Natasha?

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess I'll take each of those components one by one to start with. Simpler. When you use traditional workforce management software, and I know this because I had to implement one of them at Bulb, it can take 12 weeks, even longer sometimes to implement. You require dedicated sessions with implementation specialists to come in, teach you how to start using it, set up your systems, connect them, and integrate them to your existing systems. We at Surfboard have basically taken the attitude that we want to create something that has a set it and forget it mentality, which means that as a user, you can get up and running within minutes. We link via your API into your Zendesk or your Twilio or your Intercom or your Salesforce or your front or numerous other integrations. You then can create your ticket groups extremely quickly, matching the way you work. So whether you do it by channel, whether you do it by language, whether you do it over case topic, or a mix of all three, you can set those up within minutes. It'll create a forecast for you. It will translate the forecast into staffing requirements, and then you simply just add who's on your team. You can do a bulk upload if you want, and you match. You add in your shift patterns, you add in which activities your team members can do, which of your surfers can do each activity or work each shift pattern, and then we do the rest, which leads to smarter. And so smarter really refers to the full automation and the data science that goes into that. The product as you know, and as many of your listeners would know, scheduling, capacity, management, shift planning has a lot of complexity and the constraints that go into the backend. We automate all of that so that the heavy lifting is done by surfboard. You have an automatically generated shift plan which you can see eight weeks in advance. You have an automatically generated intraday schedule which provides your. Sorry, just to clarify, we call customer service agents surfers in our platform just because we're conscious. Many different companies call them different things and of course the surfers are the ones navigating the waves, to bring it back to the metaphor. But the surfers automatically get allocated their, their intraday activities, which is the smarter piece. And so we really want to reduce the time spent on scheduling by at least 75. So all you have to do is tweak when those last minute changes happen, like somebody calls in sick or there's a quick swap you want to do. And then finally with fairer, which is an extremely important facet to us, it's really about building the constraints in so that you automatically have rules in there. Like it is compliant with labor laws. You can't work a late shift followed by an early shift. There's an even distribution of the shift patterns. They match people's preferences. You don't have the same people working on phones all day every day. You can set minimum and maximum working hours per activity. And so all the stuff that, from what we've seen, managers really want to do, but the existing tooling just optimizes for, I mean, for lack of better term, thumbs on seats. And so managers have to eyeball to make sure that they're fair and they don't cause burnout within their team.

Speaker A: Yeah. And as you were talking through them, there was a couple of things that I picked up there. So you call them surface. I mean, I love that, you know, we're no longer customer service agents agents or customer service operatives with surfers. Now that in itself is going to make people feel a bit more cooler, isn't it? Right.

Speaker B: I think so. I think it's quite nice. Yeah, I think it just generalizes the role a little bit more. I think it also allows for, again, just the, uh, feeling rewarded for navigating those waves and the difficulty that comes with that. I think being, being a surfer, as you say, is. It is cool.

Speaker A: Good. Uh, and then is this something, you know, if you think about the world that we live in today with remote working, the solutions that you provide accommodate for that.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I think with remote working, we've Seen two different things. Number one, there's been access to a broader talent pool because you're not constrained by who can access your office or how much space your office can facilitate. And so what that means is that you've had different constructs of working patterns, not just a, uh, nine to five, Monday to Friday. With certain shift patterns, you've got more people working flexibly. You've also got more of a need to organize activities and really understand when people are taking lunches, when people are working on training and development, how that's going to be facilitated. And I mean, training and development is a really good example because you can no longer turn to someone behind you and say, hey, do you want to go over how you talk about this case topic? Or hey, should we talk about quality assurance right now? It's something that you have to be a lot more deliberate and scheduling in. So I think that the combination of both those factors, number one, that change in people's working patterns and more flexibility of that, and then number two, the need for more granular scheduling far out in advance, has made the need for precise scheduling much more important. And in the absence of software, if you're doing this on spreadsheets, for example, it just takes that much longer.

Speaker A: Yeah. And uh, if I think about certainly some of the time that I've spent working in call centers, you know, often when you have things like coaching and one to ones and team meetings that are all scheduled in and you know, people are looking forward, I guess to those times when they're off the phones, when those waves of calls came through. I mean, that was often, you know, the first thing that would go, you know, we can't do any more coaching, we can't do any more one to ones, we can't do any more team meetings. So how do your solutions help with those sort of situations and making sure that that personal development time is still being provided?

Speaker B: It's a great question, Gavin. I think that's the exact reason why we've built activity scheduling the way we did. And just to go into a little bit of detail on that, what you described as the exact phenomenon that we had seen was that either it was scheduled but not treated as important, or it just wasn't scheduled and people had to figure out on their own time when those one on ones, when that coaching, when those team meetings would happen. And so when you set up an activity in Surfboard, you set its priority level. And we highly recommend that people put one on ones or coaching and development as high priority. And then on A per surfer basis, you put in the number of hours or the amount of time per week you want spent on that and that can be done as a percentage of time. You can say you want 10 or 20% of someone's working hours spent on that, or that can be done in a minimum and maximum number of hours. And so if suddenly the waves mean that, that gets deprioritized, it gets moved automatically to another time when the inflow forecast allows for that. But I think the more important piece is that with the end to end system of uh, forecasting, staffing, scheduling, those are automatically baked in at times when the forecast shows there's the most leeway for those activities to happen to avoid the need for them to be canceled and rescheduled. And so from what we've seen with, with our customers so far is that using the forecast to automatically build schedules around that and automatically put in that training, that coaching, that one on one time, it means that it, it does get prioritized, it gets put in at the most optimal time and that reduces the need for it to get moved or just glossed over in a way that we've seen it traditionally has been.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's massively important that we spend time, you know, certainly with surfers, as you call them, you know, spending time developing them and allowing them just to press the pause button and benefit from, you know, some one to one coaching, some feedback, uh, a bit of prai ease on some of the things that they're doing well and you know, getting them together as a team meeting and sharing, you know, announcements and updates of what's going on with the business and whatnot. So you know, not providing the opportunity to do that, it's, you know, it's a big loss for those people. So it certainly sounds like you're ticking all the boxes in that space.

Speaker B: Right, I agree. I think a feature that we're really excited about building this year as well is the surfer. I mean we're currently calling it ENPS for employee nps, but we'll probably rename it to something a little bit less jargony. But we want surfers to also give feedback on what case topics they find difficult, how they're finding their schedules, how they're finding their shift plans, where they want, their training focus, so that there really is that two way feedback loop and they can input into how they're feeling about their progression and their development in a very specific way to customer service. Because it operates unlike any other industry. Given the real time pressure, the variety of topics the scheduling challenges around this type of field. And so we're really enthusiastic about making sure that, I mean, we have this mission. Happy team, happy customers. And to create a happy team, you've really got to prioritize the balance and the fulfillment in their roles.

Speaker A: And just thinking about this, you know, certainly some of the conversations that um, I've had with clients in the past, you know, sometimes we get too rigid with some of the systems that we put in place and we think to ourselves, okay, well the system says that we should be able to answer this many calls at this time, but it's actually not working, you know, and there needs to be a level of adjustment here and there. It sounds like from what you've already said, Natasha, that there is a bit of flexibility. But you know, how do you accommodate that and get over that? Because sometimes what the system says is going to work actually doesn't work in reality, does it?

Speaker B: Completely. I mean, I think that most customer service managers probably get very used to writing postmortems, um, after, after a bad service day around what happened? Was the forecast wrong? Did you have enough people scheduled? Was productiv not high enough? And really trying to, trying to course correct that. I would say that as you say, rigidity is a really big issue. And I think the way that we build Surfboard is very much around flexibility whilst making sure that teams have the right processes in place to scale and balancing meeting their SLAs and delighting customers with excellent response, but also in a way that is fair and sustainable and doesn't cause burnout within their team. And a good example around flexibility is probably the ability to tweak SLAs and service levels. And so one thing we've seen with customer service teams is that they don't want to increase utilization or occupancy to an extent that it causes burnout. And so what other lever do they have? And so some of them ask themselves, okay, my target response time is 30 seconds. Now what would happen if I moved that to a minute and a half? How much would that change the experience for the end customer versus what it means for the team? And we at Surfboard really believe in providing them and equipping them with the data to be able to do that analysis and assess those trade offs of delighting customers and meeting their SLAs versus also making sure, as I've said previously, they're not burning out their team, they're not increasing utilization to a rate that is unsustainable.

Speaker A: Tell me what's been some of the impact that you've had then with some of the clients that you've been working with so far in the year and a half that you've been in business for then, Natasha?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I think the three metrics that we measure are, number one, time saved. And so we ask, we ask our customers to tell us anecdotally how much time they've saved. The other thing that we look at within the usage data is the number of tweaks and changes. And we want to make it really easy for them to make tweaks and changes. But that also reflects our schedule accuracy and what improvements we can make to our schedules. And so we've seen a reduction of 75% of time that managers were spending on scheduling, forecasting, and planning activities. The second metric is an improvement in service levels. And so most of that really comes from the forecasting piece, because obviously if you're understaffing, then that is going to impact your service levels. If you overstaff, that leads to. The third metric that we measure is cost. But overstaffing can lead to spending too much money on your customer service organization. And that especially happens. And we see that the most when our customers use outsourcing agencies. And so what we saw prior to Surfboard was that they had broad estimates they would give to their outsourcing agencies based on their growth plans. With Surfboard, we've seen an average of 20% improvements in forecasting accuracy. And so especially where they were previously overstaffing, they were able to give lower numbers of reliance to their BPOs and outsourcing agencies to make sure that they had the right number of people and not drawing on too much external resource, which can be costly to the business, especially at scale.

Speaker A: Wow. So a 75% reduction in the time taken when it comes to, um, doing the resource. And I think you said 25% improvement in forecast or 20% improvement in forecasting, right?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Wow. So that's definitely a, uh, massive impact.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think the next metric that we're extremely focused on, and we actually recently became a, uh, certified B corp. So we're really trying to put our money where our mouth is on this, is that improvement in the fulfillment of the surfer side. So we're starting to develop a set of metrics around how much more time surfers are getting on training and development and how much more feedback they're getting on their performance. We have a fairness score within our scheduling algorithm that looks at how fair are our schedules relative to, like a round robin random assignment to make sure we're always at least as fair as a random assignment to make sure certain surfers aren't more overwhelmed on tasks or certain shift patterns than others. So I think our next step in impact is to get a lot more granular on measuring the impact on the surfer side as well.

Speaker A: Um, and for the uneducated like me, what is a certified B Corp?

Speaker B: M sure. B Corp is a global organization that encourages companies to focus not just on profit, but all their stakeholders, which means the society upon which they, they live in the overall environment and the planet. So we, we as, uh, surfboard, obviously the, the side of that is, is the people in the community we live in. There's actually a UN development goal which is to improve decent work for everyone. And that's something that we're really focused on, is improving the dignity of work, the fulfillment of jobs within, within the sectors in which surfboard operates.

Speaker A: Love it. So, yeah. So in terms of the future then, for surfboard, you know, what, uh, what are the plans then for the next five years? Where, where do you see things going?

Speaker B: Yeah, five years is a, is a long period of time. We are super early in our mission. I talked a bit about happy team, happy customers. We have a broader mission which is to make work more human. We're starting off using scheduling to do that because, as you know, having done this before, scheduling and shift planning can be one of the most dehumanizing parts of organizing a team. And then we, we want to look at other sectors that have similar adjacencies to customer service. I mean, already within customer service teams, you also have adjacent operations teams, you have adjacent outbound teams with HA which have similar amounts of pressure. And so those are the directions that we want to go in. But there's a lot of opportunity. I mean, I talked a little bit about the, the Surfer ENPS products, but really going super deep into what is it that makes a team happy, what is it that within that improves the ultimate customer experience? And how do you balance a customer service world we live in that is having increasing levels of automation with humanizing the experience for the end customer. So they're still getting the great service they expect, but also managing a team accordingly, where you have part automation, part humans, et cetera?

Speaker A: Yeah, certainly, you know, making work more human is definitely a great approach to take. And uh, you know, like you say, if you can you get that right balance when it comes to the approach you take with that, that in itself is going to increase customer satisfaction and also increase employee satisfaction at the same Time.

Speaker B: Right, Exactly.

Speaker A: Brilliant. How can our listeners find out more about Surfboard? What's the best way to get in touch then, Natasha?

Speaker B: Yeah, so our email address. Well, my email address is natashaemsurfboard.com so always open to hear from listeners and talk more about what we're doing and hear their views. Our website is www.dotteam surfboard.com and you can also find me on LinkedIn. My name is Natasha Ratanji Stein. There's a hyphen between Ratan Stein and I think I'm the only Natasha Ratan Stein in the world, gratefully. So. Should be, should be easy to find on LinkedIn.

Speaker A: You have that privilege. There's certainly many Gavin Scotts across the world. And so, uh, it does get. Frustrates you when I just say to people, yeah, just, just see if you can find me on LinkedIn. They're like, yeah, well, there's, that there's a lot of Gavin Scotts on here. Which one are you? Uh, and I can't even find my. Myself sometimes. The fact is, just one of you. That's probably a good thing, Natasha. Right? That's the easy. Easy to find.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: We'll, we'll make sure that we put those details in the show notes. And so before we, we finish off then, what are your, what are your bits of gold dust or your top tips for the listeners when it comes to creating exceptional customer experiences?

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say there's two things. Number one, staying human. There is a temptation that we're seeing more and more in the world to automate everything. There are great opportunities for automation. They can be great for customer service. They can also be great for teams because you can have your team work on the really challenging problems that are intellectually stimulating and they enjoy. But often we see customers or companies overdo automation. And so I think resisting that temptation and realizing where customers really want to be, speaking to a human and prioritizing that and organizing and scheduling your team accordingly. And number two is just being where your customers are, I think. I mean, we often see a temptation of companies to avoid certain channels, but you want to be convenient. And customers are in more and more different places, different social media channels. You see companies that avoid phones, but actually you have large demographics that like using phones. So I think really making sure it's as convenient as possible. Because if customer wants to get in touch, they will. There's no reason to make it difficult for them.

Speaker A: No. And that was confirmed in a recent podcast that I did with Mads Vesalius. They've got a piece on reconnecting the customer experience and he shared some statistics about how customers still want to have contact on the phone. So you need to make sure you facilitate that and provide that, uh, as an option for them and not just totally automate what it is you do with them. So, yeah, some great bits of gold shared there, Natasha. So listen, m. Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing a picture of you stood next to a surfboard one day and saying, here's my new surfboard. Maybe on LinkedIn or something like that. Is that something we'll see?

Speaker B: Do you think we should. You asked about five year goals. I'll make a five year goal to get on a surfboard, but at least get a picture within. Within the next year I think would be. Would be good.

Speaker A: Love it, love it. Well, listen, I can't wait to see that and it'll be a great little way of doing some extra bits of marketing as well, I'm sure. So, uh, Natasha, it's, it's great to have you. Thanks for your time and look after yourself and good luck for the future with surfboard. It sounds like you're doing some great things there and um, you know, the approach that you take in, you know, making work more human is definitely one that I'm absolutely on board with.

Speaker B: Thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me, Gavin. It was really great speaking and have a lovely weekend.

Speaker A: Likewise. Yes, you're more than welcome. You take care. Bye for now.

Speaker B: Bye bye.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the customer Service Goldust podcast. I'm sure that there were plenty of ideas you can take away and apply to your business today. Three things to do now subscribe to the podcast so that you can benefit from every episode. I'd also love to see a little review as well. This helps to spread the word and um, the Goldust. Of course. Head over to Amazon to get a copy of my latest book, Finding Goldust how to create exceptional Customer experiences. The book is endorsed by a former Executive Vice president of Walt Disney Resorts. And finally, visit my website and at www.gavinscott me and sign up for some more free content. Until next time, stay memorable.