Unresolved.cx - Acting on Voice of the Customer still requires a human - Cati Brunell-Brutman

Speaker A: Welcome to Unresolved, the podcast for customer experience Leaders by customer experience Leaders. In this podcast, we discuss how different companies view and measure their customer experiences, how they manage their teams, and then we dive deeper into the unresolved issues that they're facing today. We are specifically calling this podcast Unresolved because so many CX leaders are testing with AI, they're rebuilding with AI as their foundation. And every one of us have to reinvent everything we've ever known about customer experience systems and processes. You're not alone. So let's do this journey together. Today we have Katie Brunell Brutman, who has managed and led customer experience at Glossier, Birchbox, Headway and Daily Harvest. She is passionate about people management, coaching people and providing growth opportunities for team members. And today we are diving into the voice of the customer. Katie, welcome to Unresolved.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk about the voice of the customer.

Speaker A: It's such an exciting topic, right?

Speaker B: It really is. And I think as, as a customer experience leader, like I remember early in my career, people being like, that is your job. Like every room you're in, you are the customer's voice. And I think with technology and tools these days, it's even more fun and exciting to dive into that.

Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. So, and before we dive into the deeper questions, I'd like to connect listeners with your mindset, with your processes so they can relate right away with you. And uh, so I was curious, can you share with me the team structures that you, that you've led and what's worked for you?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think most recently, um, I led CX at Glossier and we had a kind of fun, unique, we called it a team of teams. So I had an internal team of agents who had been with the company like five to seven years, super high level, really like knowledge experts and function owners. I had a BPO uh, that I was working with that was remote. And then we also had a program where folks in our retail stores could do a six month rotation with my team to learn digital CX community management. And so they got that kind of like internal growth and learning opportunity. We also got these amazing insights from people who were on the floor with the products and the customers on the days they launched. And so, um, I think having that kind of like people coming from different places really helped establish the way we, as the customer service team spoke to customers and the knowledge we had. I've also, you know, worked at companies where it's entirely in House. So my time at Daily Harvest I started and I was like employee number 10. And it was just a bunch of us in an office in New York together on a couch. And we expanded to a west coast team, but it was all internal. And so I had a little bit more control over where everybody was, what resources they had. But I think that the most important thing is that no matter how many kind of like teams in your team they have, it is one team and everybody should have the same access to products and the same training opportunities and the same knowledge opportunities. Um, and that's something that I was really passionate about at Blossii of like let's, let's all get in one room, even if it's virtually and talk and ask questions and share knowledge together.

Speaker A: I love that. Yeah, we, we created something called Customer Connect. And uh, and with that the idea was how can we get product, marketing, engineering, everybody experience, hands on experience, talking with customers, chatting with customers, and even understanding deeper metrics, deeper under, deeper knowledge of what they're facing. And we were able to start pulling in three folks from marketing, three folks from engineering and give uh, them a very, uh, unique experience and then share with them the voice of the customer, uh, specific to what they were working on. And uh, I loved being able to do that. Turning it into an eye opening experience versus oh man, I got to talk to customers. I'm just an engineer kind of a thing. People really enjoyed Customer Connect.

Speaker B: I love that so much. And I love that then you know that they have that kind of voice in the customer, in their head when they go back to whatever they're doing, whether it's building a feature on the website or coming up with a marketing email, like they've had that experience of the one to one customer interaction.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So before we dive too deep, uh, for those that are new to the term voice of the customer or voc, it really means like capturing customer feedback, those customer signals, customer expectations, and then turning it into actionable information for the rest of the company. And you could be surfacing insights for just the product team or you could be creating unique reports for multiple product teams, the marketing team, sales team and revenue too. So voc or voice of the customer, it can look very different for each and every company. Um, do you have preferred tools to surface or present the voice of the customer?

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that question and I think for me it always starts with looking at where are your customers talking to you? When, where is the kind of largest swath of customers talking to you? And um, where are the customers the loudest? So, you know, when I was jumping into building out VOC at Glossier, um, we were an omnichannel business. We were in wholesale, we had owned retail and we had E Comm. And what I was looking at is how can I make sure all of those customers voices are heard because they're having different experiences and I want to make sure they're all, they're all being heard. And so I actually sat down with uh, one of our retail directors and we made a list of every single place a customer talks to us, from a Google review to an email to an own social. And we looked at the month over month volume and what channels were covered and kind of pulled the top ones. So we made sure, we were making sure the voices that were going to represent the largest swath of customers were being heard. And I think that this is a great time for utilizing AI once you figure that out because there's so much data. And I know that you've also had the experience of, well, I have uh, an excel sheet with 5,000 cells and I have to manually go through everyone and color code it and pull out insights and that's going to be the next two weeks of my life. And I love utilizing AI to really dig down into once you have your data and your channels, like what are people saying? What are the trends? Um, uh, a tool that I'm really excited about right now is, uh, called Hark for Voc. And they are really helping kind of connect all of your channels and also using some of that AI to proactively surface it to you, which I love. And I think the more proactive customer support and customer experience can be, the better. Because if I can know what the customers are saying before it snowballs into a problem that I can solve that or I can get it to the people who, who can solve it. So big fan of AI analysis here and then just kind of using our customer experience brains and our knowledge to be smart about where we're pulling the data from.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I wasn't heavily using AI. I would say what back in 2019, 2020, but we were using Frame AI and we were Frame IO and our offices weren't that far apart and frequently they would get uh, folks in their office, we would get folks in our office and they looking for the other frame. That was pretty funny. But like I was working alongside them and they were developing that AI Voc and AI Voc was not a thing in 2019. Currently today, HubSpot acquired Frame AI and they're working over there. But they, they were early on in the AI game and they were also definitely early on in pulling signals. Um, and I was helping just share with them exactly what we needed, what were the tags, what's the taxonomy, what makes the most sense, how are we uncovering this to the product team? What, what, what does sales need, what does marketing need, et cetera. So like that's where I had early experience working with an AI vendor to be able to surface those kinds of insights. And uh, and it was always interesting to be able to have that back and forth and, and that was my first experience with AI uncovering voc. Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh, I love that, I love that it started with voc because I think that that is where I'm like seeing companies start to pivot to now. I think a lot of them were like, we're going to build your customer facing agent. And what I'm always asking when I'm seeing demos is, okay, cool, but where are the insights? Like, I love that you can help talk to our customers, but can you tell me what they're saying? Like how do I search for things, how do I tag things? Can you tell me stuff before I need to look for it? And I think more and more of those vendors are starting to be like, oh, VOC should actually be part of our product offering.

Speaker A: Definitely. Yeah, yeah. And so shifting a little bit here so companies say that they listen to their customers and for those in the CS industry, you simply know that's not always true. So some terms that I've seen on marketing marketing sites are customer centric, customer driven, customer led. But those phrases can only be accurate if they have a strong voice of the customer program, in my opinion. So what's the difference between a company that collects feedback and one that actually acts on it?

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I have also had that experience before and I've seen the like customer experience is embedded in everything we do and it's like, okay, but how? And nobody has an answer past that. And I think it's a, it's, for me it's a 2.1 is there needs to be accountability into what are the action steps we're taking from this data and like who is seeing that through. And as the person who has run voc, I often take that upon myself and I tell everybody I'm going to be really annoying and I'm going to need, I'm going to get status updates, I'm going to make a JIRA tracker, like let's get ready, we're going to make this actionable, I think you also have to tell tell your customers when you've done something with the feedback. And I have sent the emails, and I'm sure we've all gotten the emails that are like, thank you so much for your feedback. We'll pass it along to the right team. And, uh, I just assume that those go into a black hole somewhere. So when you can go back to those customers and be like, hey, remember that thing you wrote to us about a year ago? Well, we did it and we wanted to let you know and if you want to go even further, we'd love to send you the new product with love to give you a discount. We'd love to give you a behind the scenes or have you get feedback because you're not telling the customers that you're actually doing something with the feedback, they will be less inclined to give you the feedback. And I think that, like, that loop is the most important part to me.

Speaker A: I love that. That's so good. If you don't tell people that you're doing something with feedback, why would they give you any more? Like, right, exactly.

Speaker B: This is what I always say this about mps, is that everybody's like, oh, nobody reads the MPS surveys. And I would tell people Monday morning at Glossy, I would sit down with my coffee and I would pull up all of the NPS comments and I would personally read every single one. So I was like, you leave a comment, I will read it and do something with it, I promise.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And thinking about acting on feedback, uh, that you get. So you shared with me a story about in glossier, about a lipstick cap. Can you share with us about the lipstick cap?

Speaker B: Yeah, this is, I think, one of when people are like, tell me about a time when you actually did something with voc. And this was one of my favorites. Um, and it really started with that kind of channel audit and people not really realizing all of the info and data CX had. And so after I had been running our VOC and we had a monthly meeting that was basically four department heads. And then we kind of opened it up to anybody who wants to hear about vocal, come to this meeting. We'll talk it through. You could ask questions, you can ask for specific data. And the product team came to me and said, hey, we want to do a deep dive into our, like, top 10 SKUs. We know you have all this data. What can you pull for us? Um, and I said, you know, we have all of the reviews for the past five years for all these products. Let's do a deep dive into the reviews. Let's do an analysis of 5 years of reviews and just pull what are the positives, what are the negatives, what are the trends that keep coming up and put them into one document so you guys can think about it with product development and product marketing. And something that my team had been flagging on a small scale was we had these lipsticks called Ultralip. And if you Google Ultra lip caps, you will find many, many thoughts and opinions about this.

Speaker A: Reddit.

Speaker B: Uh, I, I read every post and I still do, um, where we had this. It's an amazing lipstick formula that's kind of a lipstick balm hybrid. But the caps were not secure and so they would fall off in people's bags. The bags ruined, they would fall off in people's drawers. The lipstick would break and get gross. And we had been flagging this for a couple of years just from CF's emails, but the volume there wasn't enough to move the needle on what we need to redo the whole. So I did the deep dive and I used an AI analysis, pulled out the positives, the negatives, and what we found was between 60 to 70% of customers said, I love this product so much, but I would not repurchase it because of the cash. And that was such a huge number considering it was one of our top 10 SKUs that we were able to put the dollars and the customer acquisition cost and their attention costs to it and bring it to the team. And they were like, oh, this is a huge issue. And one that's a really easy solve because the product is great. We don't need to redesign the product, we just need to redesign the cap. And so what we started doing, uh, was as we were coming out with new shades of it, we redeveloped the cap and had a new cap. And I remember on one of our posts for like a summer capsule, we put in the caption, we've heard you, and this has the new cap. And you could see the comments kind of turn around and people were like, oh my God, there's a new cap. Okay, I am going to buy it. It's going to happen. And then people on Reddit were reviewing it and saying, netflix, uh, now this is the best. They actually listened to us. And seeing, just seeing customers say they actually listened to us. I was like, oh, cool. That was, that was all I wanted. I wanted people to feel heard and listened to. Um, but also so great to see the power of, hey, here is a source of data. Let's use it to pull that hard data but also tell a story. And I think that that is kind of how I look at my job with VOC is besides just pulling the hard data and the numbers the finance team wants to see is I'm a storyteller for the customers, and the story that I could tell actually moved the needle.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that story. And so something that comes to mind, this question I haven't asked you or we haven't talked about this one. What is the. What was the power that CX had to be able to issue refunds or credits or something because, hey, my Louis Vuitton got ruined. Hey, this happened.

Speaker B: Or something like, yeah, we, um, had a really amazing partnership with our legal team, um, who, like, shout out to the lawyers, um, which I feel like usually doesn't happen when we would say, hey, like, this is technically, like, not our product is somebody's purse, but it's the right thing to do. Like, can we. Can we pay for their dry clean? And we really never got any pushback on that. And something that I really loved that I was surprised at when I got to Glossier is they were like, hey, if you can make the case for why we should give this customer a bigger refund or cover a dry cleaning cost or something like that, do it and we'll approve it. Nobody has ever gotten in trouble for compensating a customer too much. And it took me a while to get used to that because I'd worked at Orgs where it's like, okay, you have to look at the lifetime value, and you can only give them this bunch. That's it. And the attitude of Glossier was really like, let's work to find out the best solution for the customer, because it's the right thing to do versus, well, we want to make sure we're going to nickel and dime everybody. We got to save the most money. So we would. We would often, you know, say, okay, cool. We. This is. We understand our part in this, and we will happily cover the dry cleaning of that item for you. And, you know, here are some tips on getting stains out of things, because we've all been there.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And the customer's LTV or lifetime value doesn't have to do with just how much they've paid. You don't know what kind of reach they actually have on their network. They could easily post this story about, hey, this, uh, this happened and they made it right. And then, bam, Sales go up by a few hundred bucks more than what they're actually paying. For on a monthly basis or something like that.

Speaker B: So yeah, and I would, I always look out for those things on, on Reddit or TikTok. Yeah, companies. I'm working with other companies too that are like people say, hey, I had this really amazing experience with this customer service team and that to me as a consumer I'm like, oh, I'm going to remember that. And I am more likely to shop there because they treated the person like a human and not just a number in a spreadsheet.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. So when you brought CX data to a team that didn't ask for it, like product finance, marketing, what made them pay attention?

Speaker B: So I have this um, this a joke, uh, with my, my husband who also is a people manager and works at an E commerce company. But more on the design side we talk about uh, working cross functionally as being problem oriented or solution oriented and both are basically the same things. Is you're going and you're saying, well we got an issue. Um, but I think a lot of people can see surfacing an issue as being kind of like problem oriented of well, CX is coming and telling us there's an issue and we did something wrong and we are the bad guys. And for me it's approaching your cross functional partners and you know, doing a little bit of the work beforehand and making sure that you understand what their goals are, what they want, what they value and coming to them, being like, I know that this is important to you and I have some data that I think could help move the needle on that. Um, and I think, you know, we had a really amazing relationship with our social and our marketing teams between CX and social. At Glossier, we actually ended up establishing a meeting where we would go over all of the social posts for the week in advance so CX could see what was coming up and could give feedback similarly to two emails. And I remember even simple things like being like, hey, this product that we're going to put in a social post is actually out of stock in the uk. It's maybe a less great customer experience to be promoting it right now. Can we switch it out with something else? And knowing that the social team would have to deal with less of a headache of um, well, we promoted this and then it didn't sell because it's out of stock and you know, this is like, doesn't look good for our team and for us on the team getting all the comments of I want to buy it but it's out of stock and getting ahead of that was Something that benefited both of our teams. So coming with data or insights, but being able to really approach people as people and be like, I know this will benefit your team and your goals and my team and my goals. Let's work together versus, hey, this is a problem. You have to solve it for me.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You meet them where they're, uh, at. And I think that early on in my career, I didn't really, uh, fully understand that. I just kind of said, you should be paying attention to customer support. You should be paying attention to the data that we're providing you. And whenever they wouldn't. Whenever they wouldn't ask for it, I would get my feelings hurt. And that's not how it works. Not at all.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's really hard when you're so invested in the data as the person on the customer service, because you're like, well, obviously this matters. Why does nobody care?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly it. This matters 100% to me. Why are we at 10% for you? And, uh, the case is you're not meeting them where they're at because their product is focused on the product they're not focused on. Oh, what does Brett think? Again, that's not at all the case. But I feel like with conversations that I'm having as an advisor to different leaders, that still seems to be the case in some, like, smaller company mentalities. And, uh, and that's something I would just want to point out is meet them where they're at. And that is so important if you want customer data to matter in your company. Meet them where they're at.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's advice I always give to people who I think are kind of, like, early in their careers as leaders. Because I'm sure you had this experience. Nobody really prepares you. You're like, oh, I know cx. And now you're in charge of cx, and you have to figure out how to make everybody else care about it is just have those conversations and establish those relationships early and say, hey, marketing team, what's on your plate right now? That's a problem. Like, can I help with anything? Because, uh, creating those relationships and establishing that trust is so important when you are in the weeds and you need to, you know, push something, get something done, or you might need to ask somebody to help you. You might be really stuck with something and be like, man, if I could just get somebody in marketing to help me with this. And if you've established those relationships, it's so much easier.

Speaker A: Yeah. Love that. You know, uh, at Frame IO I was meeting with for product managers all at the same time. And I'd go over the list of bugs, I'd go over the type of issues that support was managing, and one by one, the PM's stopped attending. My meeting was about mitigating support, and it was not about involving the creation of the product. And realizing my mistake, I worked with support specialists to meet with, uh, the individual PMs to share the top five bugs that were very specific to their department, their PM department, and uncover trends that were specific for those projects. And eventually they worked their way into the Sprint planning meetings, too. They were. They were bringing in UX and UI customer insights. The initial meetings, they were. They were not influential, but I had to realize that the problem was the way that I presented information. The issue was not the lack of interest by the PMs. You could change others by changing yourself. And I had to see these meetings through their eyes.

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, I had a similar experience. Uh, actually, it's funny, I talk about data so much now, and I very specifically remember being a new manager at Daily Harvest and being like, I'm not like, two in the weeds with data in cx and, like, I don't think it's that important. And I look back to, you know, Katie from 2019, and I'm like, oh, my sweet summer child, data is so important. But I think for me, I was like, oh, no. Just like, listening to the anecdotal, like, customer voice should be enough, but realizing that that was my perspective and that somebody on a finance team or, you know, an ops and logistics team, that's not how they process information. And so if I compare the information that makes sense to me with the information that makes sense to them, they are so much more likely to engage with me and work with me.

Speaker A: Yeah. Measure what matters.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: How much influence does your team actually have on a product? And what does it take to go from being heard to actually changing something?

Speaker B: I have been really lucky to work at companies where it has a lot of influence. Um, and I think, uh, Daily Harvest is a great example of this, uh, where we had such an amazing relationship with our chefs that they would prep versions of smoothies in the kitchen. And the first people they'd bring it to was the CX agents. And they'd be like, okay, we've got three versions. Can you taste test them? And you tell us what you think the customers will like and what you think they will not like, what questions they have? Um, and we were actually like, kind of the first ones on the like cross functional taste testing list because they trusted our insights so much. And I think similarly that was like a building up of trust, that was us really giving them data. And as soon as, you know, a new product came out, this is what people are loving, this is what they're confused about, this is what we could change and approaching them with, hey, we want to help you be better and establishing that trust. But you know, knowing that we, uh, had a bowl that came out when I was there that was broccoli and cheese. C H E E Z E because it was vegan. Ch and uh, one of the things that the CX team said is we gotta call out that it's vegan cheese because people are just gonna think that we spelled cheese wrong and it's not vegan. So knowing, you know, telling the team that like this is a brilliant idea, people will eat this, but we need to pitch it the right way and have education the right way. And that became part of, you know, the rollout of that product. And they still sell it to this day. It's still on the website. So uh, clearly people, people did love that product. But you know, having people come to us and say, before we even release this, what does CX think is such a cool relationship to have? Um, and I think as a CX leader, it's very cool for me to see my team realize that they have an impact on the product, the customer experiences. And I think that that is, um, you know, we talked a little bit about, about people leadership and management, but I think that's one of the things that helps retain people on a CX team is when they can see and feel the impact of their work. It's not just I answer my 12 emails an hour and I'm in the weeds, but it's also, hey, I have the power to help shape the customer experience and the product that we're putting out there.

Speaker A: So if a CX leader wanted to start a VOC program tomorrow with zero budget and no executive buy in, Katie, where do they start?

Speaker B: That's such a great question. Um, and I'm going to say you might need like a little bit of budget, but I'm going to say it's, it's, it's not, it's, it's a negligible amount of budget. My first thing is identify a low lift, high impact problem that needs to be solved. Um, and I like to like actually write out a chart of like high lift, low lift, high, low impact, high impact. And I just spitball and I Will talk to my team and I'll talk to cross functional partners and I'll be like, hey, what's the problem you wish you could solve? Um, and this is actually an answer or a question that I always ask in job interviews too, is I'm like, if you had a magic wand and time and money were no object, what would you solve right now? Like, what would you just like, take off your plate or fix and do kind of a listening tour and figure out what are the things that like, would move the needle that I could help do and prove. Basically be my proof of concept for why this is necessary. Um, and I think getting that kind of CX buy in before you even pitch it, but like, learning what other people care about is such a big part of it. And then dive into your CX data and see if you can make the case for why and how to solve this. Because once you can show, oh, I, I've solved a problem with this thing that I think is important. People are going to realize that they can come to you for data, they can rely on you. You will, you will have shown them how valuable this is and you will get so much more. And I, I say maybe a little bit of budget because I think that that's where like, you know, I have a personal Claude subscription that I use for. Let's analyze, you know, the 5,000 sheet, uh, 5,000 cells of data in the Excel. So I, hey, you don't have to spend all weekend doing that. But you know, I think with your, if you have one system for AI analysis and you've got your Google sheets and you're talking to your people, that's all you need. You don't need a fancy program to build it out. But I think once you show, oh, using the customer data, we were able to solve this problem. It's a very easy conversation to be like, it would be great if I could have a VOC platform. That would be cool. And let me show you how much I could move the needle if I had these tools.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think that it could be like twofold. One. Uh, my tagging taxonomy was too overgrown and I wanted everything tagged with multiple tags. And then I'm like, why are we up to five tags per conversation whenever? It doesn't really need that much volume. And then there's the autonomy that people give AI to say, oh, we'll just let AI take care of all the tagging and we don't condition it, we don't actually assess it, we just say whatever it says. Great, we'll roll with that. And it's that middle ground of, uh, to your point, going to the people first and being like, what can I solve for you? What can I answer for you? Like, what is a question as you're building or as you're thinking about the future? Sprints, what do you want to know? How people are using things and are we actually tagging it? Is there a way that we can measure that? Can we pull that insight now with AI, yeah, you could have a general tag and then dive a little bit deeper and say, like, let's just say iOS app. You could pull iOS and how they're using the product page or something like that. And so in that particular case, you could pull Insights without having to have so many extra tags. But it's a balance between your overgrown tagging and then letting AI figure everything out for you and then finding that middle spot of what works best for the company. What works best for you, the CX leader.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that, um, if you're. We're thinking work smarter, not harder too, like, there are ways to build some of that tag auditing into work you're already doing. I remember when we switched, um, help Desk platforms at Glossier, one of the things that we did was we were like, do we need all of these tags? Do we need to import all of them? And that was a project. We had somebody go and audit all of our tags because we were going to have to import them anyway. Let's build this into the work. And I think that there are times when you can build, um, additional things that will support your customer insights and your voc into work that's already happening, which gets so much easier. Buy in from your leadership.

Speaker A: I have one last question for you here. And AI has made it faster to surface what customers are saying, but does it change what actually happens with that information? Like what's still unresolved in this loop?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that AI is an amazing tool to get the data that you need in front of you. What I think is unresolved is that AI doesn't have the human experience and the critical thinking skills that you as a CX leader has. So you need to know how to query and slice and dice that data. You need to know what to ask for and then you need to know what to do. And I think that this is something that I worry about a little bit in the AI conversation is that if we get to reliant on AI, we're not going to have those critical thinking skills. And I think that that's why I personally don't think CX leadership is ever going to be replaced with AI. Because AI can surface your data, but it can't figure out what to do with.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And you as the CX leader have the decade of experience and talk to the customers every day. And so you are the ones who can say, I've used AI to find this data and to make it pretty, here is what to do with it. And I think that that is what is still unresolved in the AI to VoC data conversation is that you need that person who is using their critical thinking skills and their lived experience to make those recommendations.

Speaker A: Katie, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today and I love your perspective on cross functional influence. And you can connect with Katie on LinkedIn and that link is down in the description. Katie, is there anywhere else that people can find you?

Speaker B: Um, feel free to follow me on Instagram ateebrunow. Um, I talk about a lot of things, but one of those things I talk about is great customer experiences. Um, thank you so much for having me. This was such a fun conversation, Brett. Um, and I love that we are both CX data nerds at heart.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Awesome. And so that wraps up today's episode. Subscribe to hear more incredible stories in the era of unresolved. Have a great day and a productive week.