Gavin Blair
Appearances
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I have been blown away by the resilience, focus, and even at times, optimism around folks who have just lost everything that they have. In Southern California, some residents are finally getting to see what's left of their homes.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
When they're talking to someone who feels that it's like they're unaware of your background, you've got to repeat yourself. That's something that we have to just immediately eliminate. They're looking for timely and actionable advice. They're looking for their emotions, again, to be acknowledged, but without overly being kind of coddled. They desire efficiency from us.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
when the concerns how the concerns are being addressed there's organization to our approach and they sense that in us when you're in this kind of error at times it feels like where the rise of ai and sophisticated ivrs means that it's almost like a decline in the customer experience there's like a layer now a buffer between me getting to what my issue is and what you're doing
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
In order to help me, we're really just trying to cut through that. So we've been very careful and conscious of how we layer on what would otherwise be easy wins from a technology perspective in terms of the tooling and in terms of the systems to just make sure that we're not compromising it for the sake of, you know, cost and efficiency as we scale the team.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. there's nothing more awkward than jumping on the phone with the disaster, you know, survivor and saying, how's it going? It really doesn't land well. And you learn that very fast after a 10 second pause where they're like, it's, you know, it's going, it's going okay.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So there's, there's a, there's an obvious, you've got to not have any kind of ability to identify social cues to be met. But, but yeah, this is how you are interacting with everyone else in your life with the easy hellos and the easy goodbyes. So right off the bat, it's again, you know, we're starting every conversation with how are you holding up?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And it just lets people immediately know what you're acknowledging about their situation. And even in the formalities of starting the conversation, our goal is that there isn't a single moment that you feel tone deaf from us in how we're delivering news and how we're communicating objectives and how we're greeting you and how we're doing that conversation.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And what we talked about was some playbooks around the use of empathy in conversations. I found it to be incredibly powerful in the insurance space to actually be very clear and to kind of revamp that. It allowed me to build a claims team at Lemonade that had a higher NPS for denied claims than most carriers had for their total claims.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Insurance, as you can imagine, an approved versus a denied claim has a corollary to how happy people tend to be. And our denied claim NPS was so high because we were able to just be tacticians ultimately in how expectations were set, news was delivered. And a big thing, again, around us for us was empathy. So there's two kind of sides to empathy that we talked to the team about.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
The first is, you know, they don't have the sexiest kind of monikers, but it's upfront empathy. It's your ability to identify first thing in the conversation what the person has said. And it's not just to say, oh, I'm sorry. It's to repeat back what you're sorry about.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
oh i'm so sorry that this has happened to you like give it some context right and then the second part to empathy is really situational when the customer offers you a chance to acknowledge something you acknowledge it
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Even if you're in the middle of getting down to business with answers and questions, if they say something about their pet or they share an anecdote about something that's going on in their life, even well down the path with you, you have to nail that 100% of the time.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so those two kinds of sides to it end up, I think, communicating a lot about your awareness and your intent and your ability to just calibrate to the right level with people.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think it's very timely because even independent of what Bright Harbor is doing for disaster victims in this circumstance, I'm finding very strong trends with major consumer brands around
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
my ability to call them or interact with them and not be navigating through, frankly, a labyrinth of IVR prompts and questions and what I can see in the background being these tiered teams in locations all over the world. gatekept from actually ultimately being able to solve your problem.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
They're literally gatekept and the team that they need to be able to communicate with to actually do what they need to do is a location or a time zone away. It's the
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
know it's funny how things kind of come back a little bit as in as you know i'm sure there there's that point where the rise of the uh first touch resolution was like a nice thing and you know in the cx into it's like bringing it back to that by the way and actually thinking about how your systems and your tools optimize for that uh would be most welcome to me so i think coming into bright harbor and designing what we have
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I'm paranoid about how technology does play a role in all these things. There are so many easy wins ultimately to have with introducing these tools in the right way. It lets you scale quicker. It lets you hire less. It lets you improve quality and efficiency in what you deliver to customers. But for me, the baseline obviously starts with a end-to-end human experience and
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Bright Harbor started... through an experience our CEO had with one of his very close friends who lost his home in the Marshall fire in Colorado. And our CEO, Joel was, you know, kind of supporting his friend through his recovery journey and just really taken aback by the amount of complexity and challenges and steps that involved for his close friend to, to get back on his feet.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
The baseline, the measurements for what that quality is are established there. And then you're fitting in the tools against that benchmark. And that's just a sequence. That's just kind of like working through a sequence there. I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that AI is not a binary and it's talked a lot about that way. Like it's a cold replacement of something or it's just a switchover.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's very much a scale. And that's something that I learned at Lemonade in the insurance and claims space. where as Lemonade was kind of pioneering the use of AI to settle claims and to be technology within the insurance industry, there is this scale, mostly around complexity, of what AI can just get to and where it is ultimately, in my mind, going to kind of stay.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And maybe is that like 60 max, 70% mark, where on the top of this tier is just... difficult, complex situations like a total fire loss into your home, a total loss of your home. that is an example where you're not going to have AI solve everything. And so it's a hybrid thing for me. It's about the interplay very much between the humans and the systems.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's about the power suit of armor and a power suit that you put in a person into where AI enhances and amplifies everything they do, but ultimately isn't replacing it. So as an organization, you're kind of drawing the line and being very clear with yourselves.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
around where the touch of a person and the capabilities of a human are just integral and you know in doing everything to begin with as we have uh with just people we it was very quick for us to identify you know during these onboarding calls like you could hear people's voices like settle It started off as we were talking to them for the first time about what was going on in LA.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's tense and it's more frantic. And as you talk to them, your voice is doing that. You are bringing them down to a level of focus and capability and stuff. And so we're just going to be methodical about this. I think very careful with what we introduce. There's a lot of easy wins, but just don't, you know, you can't go too far on it.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I don't know what you think about the difference that like channels make, because I actually think they're quite, you know, between phone and text and email. I think that's a big additional element to all of this. Totally.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think, you know, presents some of the better formats to find that balance or to still, I think people were trying to show up in the place they want us to, in the ways that they want us to, where the conversation is. And, For example, you know, texting as a way to kind of really bridge those big milestones that someone's going through as they're on the recovery journey.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
The short transactional conversations being able to be accomplished so easily through texting, which guides the live qualities at an asynchronous cost, so to speak. That's really, I think, too, where the channels play like a huge role in all of this. And with texting, you have the opportunity to
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Um, I think he had a two children and out of that was just this revelation around, um, how much support is needed and where it's obvious that, you know, you pay all these other services in your life for things a bit less consequential, like an accountant to do your taxes and,
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
to really be efficient with what words can be, how words can be analyzed, how team members can be prepped to answer those questions based on themes and all those other things. And so I think I'm very optimistic that, for example, SMS is a way is a great platform for finding and striking that balance.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Yeah, well, I mean, first, for what I think has been a popular channel for a long time amongst CX professionals, texting is very much still underutilized and very few brands use them. Part of it, in my opinion, I think may be around there's actually technical difficulties to implementing a good texting SMS platform.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
As much as Twilio stands out as this incredible platform for SMS, I've also just had various... trouble with implementing Twilio in a way that is effective. So I think there's that side of it.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
But then to your point, I mean, moving anything to a text-based format, the way that you build your product, the database, and the kind of software that you build, it just allows your large language models and your AI to analyze and consume that information.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And it also, you know, there's a lot of out of the box tools that are great at this being able to use that kind of chat text based workflow to auto populate, you know, macros and answers and insights and decision trees and stuff like that. So I think there's a few different paths to get there with it, whether it's third party or it's something you're building yourself.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
There's still some hurdles, ultimately, I feel like, to it being used in the best way that it can. But for me, it seems like in these spaces in between, especially where you're trying to get through short transactional updates, it's just absolutely amazing.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
But when you have an experience that's up there in terms of impact and trauma, you don't have one service that can guide you and support you and kind of lay out the recovery map and journey. So that was the real impetus for Bright Harbor.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
There's nothing more awkward than jumping on the phone with a disaster survivor and saying, how's it going? It really doesn't land well. And you learn that very fast.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Yeah, it's a great question. In large part for me, it doesn't deviate too much between different businesses. I feel the thing with the KPIs and even landing on the success metrics is to actually be unequivocal about them and to not, they are the ultimate reflection of what you want an employer, a team member to prioritize and to do. It's like there are often two conversations.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
One is the, we want to be this, we want to do that. And then there's the, we're sitting down and looking at your interactions and measuring you against something. I imagine that that is a different thing so often. And so for me, it means that if you're looking at like a pyramid, you can only really have one top KPI and everything else needs to kind of cascade from that.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And that has to reflect your values. Yeah. The very obvious one for me, first and foremost, is the NPS metric. And I even find that as, you know, it's I'm sure great and fancy for smaller companies to optimize for NPS and then they get bigger and they have to compromise and do all these other.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I find it's all still complementary and you can have, you can be very effective at measuring cost and efficiency and all these other things while letting NPS reign supreme. And this is for me very, again,
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
This is very much about what I think some of these industries are still very stuck in, especially the insurance industry, with just understanding that the priority is the first thing, the customer experience, but then it's a win-win for them still. So I start with NPS. There's a lot also to just implementing NPS well. Looking at, it's not just putting it in, it's looking at the
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
even the response rates and utilization of customers when you prompt them for NPS, it's figuring out the exact timing and delivery of your surveying and really paying attention to the numbers so that you're not just capturing some 10%, 5% token. You're actually in like, as you'd even measure an email engagement or other things from a marketing perspective, you're capturing like a robust number.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so that's very important, like the implementation of a metric like NPS. And then I think there's just a lot of powerful things from there. So I tend to have the NPS metric. I have the metric that measures productivity. for the team. And this is maybe a little bit more variable, you know, and it evolves as you grow as an organization.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So in the world of Bright Harbor, it is the amount of customers one specialist is supporting. You tend to start smaller with that number and you grow to where you're optimizing it and you're introducing maybe the technology that lets that rise. And then the third leg to this stool for me is, of course, the efficiency metric.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
which is a lot around how you're allowing people to do the most efficient job, the quickest actions, the least amount of clicks, everything laddering up ultimately to strong NPS across the board.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's a great point around how hard is it kind of measurement. And, you know, if you think about it, there's only really the typical way that in the only format that that's really measured is where you're looking at things like wait time on the phones. And you're kind of saying, I only really seen it in a standard where like measured against this. IVRs, right?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
But it's not measured in other channels very well. What you tend to do in the other channels is instead measure against how many times did somebody need to ask something or how many touches did they need or how many times was the ticket reopened? But that doesn't capture the same as that level of effort measurement for customers or for employees. So I think that's a That's a really great one.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And one other just insight I wanted to share about what I felt really drove NPS in the insurance industry and now has kind of helped me take it elsewhere. We did a lot of measuring and actual high-level business analysis against this.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And the number one corollary for MTS above and beyond the speed at which things were solved, the ultimate decision that was made, for example, a denied versus approved claim, is 100% hands down responsiveness. I will take responsiveness over everything else. I'll take it over the time it takes to reply. I'll take it over all these other very important things.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Because if you are dialed into and your organization is optimized for responsiveness, You are just forcing other things to fall into place. And you're giving the customer the thing that is the most common failure point for you, which is the lack of engagement or the lack of timeliness or the instinct that every person starting off in CX has, which is, I don't have the right answer yet.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I'm going to wait till I have it. I mean, you've got to break. It's like... That's awesome. Get the right answer. But if it's been six hours or four hours or two, or if it's been the end of the day and it's carrying forward into the next, respond.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
The exercise isn't the right answer. The exercise is some semblance of a normal back and forth responsive communication with somebody. And that rules the day, that it rules supreme. That crushes the satisfaction levels. So they're very deliberate decisions that you need to make and what you prioritize as an organization to have this be true.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
But if responsiveness was more of the forefront focus, you are driving higher NPS all the time.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I had a support experience recently with Home Depot. As I'm sure most Americans do, I go into Home Depot and I come out spending eight times more than I anticipated in terms of the amount of purchases I've made. So I'm a reluctant and happy Home Depot customer. Home Depot uses, I don't know that I quite understand why this isn't more utilized, but Apple has a iMessage business feature.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think at the start, it was actually kind of gatekept by Apple, like what brands could use it. It almost felt like it was in this prolonged beta because it's been on my radar for years. And when it was first on my radar, I actually couldn't get my company into it somehow. But now I think it's more expansively used. And by the way, Android has a similar tool.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
We're talking about within the framework and features and excellence of iMessage, a fully branded and enhanced text message experience. You've got the Home Depot orange across the top. You feel like you've dropped into a different thing. You've got information that you can click through to actually see contact information about Home Depot.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
You're doing your normal texting with them, but they're also able to plug in calendar scheduling right into the iMessage. They're able to then convert the iMessage to your support tool seamlessly with a recap. Okay, moving this over to chat with our team internally on a different system. Here's what you talked about. It's the thing of beauty.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I want to figure out why it's not being used more and how I can use it because I think it's actually just a very cool out-of-the-box tool. solution to some of the things we've identified around the use of this SMS in general and then the difficulty of implementing SMS. So I'm a big fan of that and kudos to Home Depot for figuring it out.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think the one piece of advice is something not even necessarily specific to customer experience. It's specific to any time you're trying to solve an experience or a problem in general. I'm just such a big fan of first principles.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's kind of a confluence of events happening. One, the insurers in and of themselves are overwhelmed and they deal with unprecedented amount of demand and support that's needed. And Some of these insurers are the larger employers in the U.S.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I really believe that for a lot of reasons, you feel forced to or compelled to work off of established protocol or doctrine or steps, but giving yourself the time and the space to
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
to almost be irreverent about what everything has been to this point and to be a little bit audacious allows you to revisit and revalidate all the really important bits of what a problem is and what problem you're trying to solve. And so as much as a CX leader can come in and be willing to kind of go against the grain challenge thinking and use first principles to reconstruct, it's better.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I'll actually use an example of this for me. There is a lot of thinking and psychology and courses and a lot out there in the nonprofit world around how to interact with disaster and trauma victims. There's a lot of thinking out there and I love it.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And it certainly will be a resource for us to ultimately engage with and utilize, but I'm actually going to be, I'm going to take my time for a minute and not tap into those, you know, because they tend to be like really well-labeled things and they tend to be online courses for government assistance, whatever. And so I'm trying to like reconstruct it myself.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I'm trying to see whether the things we've talked about actually are are true and effective. And then I'm going to figure out where the gap is if I have to, but I'm not going to jump into the onboarding a new class with a pre-existing format for how to talk best to people. Of course, if we're really missing something and putting someone in a bad position on either side, we will do that.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's not to be reckless, but it's just to be original. So be original.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
They have hundreds and thousands of customer-facing roles, but they still take advantage of third-party resources to help flex up when these events happen because the art and science of trying to anticipate catastrophes and then how to staff against them is... I don't think something that will ever necessarily be solved. So there's that piece.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think then there's in and of itself the already kind of convoluted and difficult path of navigating your insurance policy and your coverages and the workflow there that itself is already difficult in normal times. And then I think the third layer to it is ultimately the unique set of circumstances and needs that each person has that the system is not built around.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I'm sure we'll talk more about it later, but it's one of the big things that's missing is just that lens that is looking at what you're dealing with, with your family, your financial situation. your needs, you know, all of the above.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
We're starting every conversation with, how are you holding up? And it just lets people immediately know what you're acknowledging about their situation. And even in the formalities of starting the conversation,
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Yeah, absolutely. I think first and foremost, we are trying to be something that gives them confidence as they are navigating and making decisions. It's really great for folks who are ultimately trying to take the steps themselves and they need to just have that support mechanism and confidence in the decision making that they have.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So the exact services, you know, support from a highly trained specialist on our team who has been through these disasters many times and kind of has the path and the tips and tricks all lined up. There's support through our product, which offers just some streamlined ways to organize yourself, your information, the steps that you need to navigate.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And we're there basically, you know, through ongoing kind of support with the customers, answering questions as they come up. But what it really starts with for us is the beginning. we have this kind of onboarding call, which is the most important part of the experience. And it's where we're really capturing everything that we feel like they're going through.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And we're really mapping out something that then feels like a recovery plan for them. And based on that recovery plan, they start to get a sense of organization and sequence and timing to everything. And then we are just as they're going through those steps alongside them, step by step, acting as an advocate in their corner, a trusted friend, someone to give them advice and feedback.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And as I'm sure you can appreciate, this is the type of journey that has a lot of ups and downs and ups. ebbs and flows. And so a lot of it is about knowing when those milestones are. And that's when we really engage heavily to make sure that we're supportive of those kinds of big crossroads and big decision points for them. It's expectation management for them. It's understanding the process.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And just knowing what is going to be asked of you when that is so powerful for people versus feeling like they're only looking like one step in front of each other at a time. I mean, that is often how the way that is the way to get things done, right? Is to focus one step at a time. But in this circumstance, you've got stakes that are much bigger. You've got.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
family or loved ones or other things that really need you to be much more situationally aware of what's going to need to be done.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I'll give you an example of kind of where we often zoom in. You know, you've got a lot of important first steps you take, but like you highlighted with people who have children, a number of schools were, you know, destroyed in the fires. And so the kids aren't just dealing with the displacement from their home, they're dealing with the displacement from where they went to school every day. And
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
As a person is considering where they're going to live short term or medium term, we help them really focus on a place and a location that's going to allow them to be able to continue having their children go to the place that they need to go to for school.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
That the proximity to that, that there's just that kind of like, you know, in addition to finding a place, it's making sure the location can support what you need to be doing when you have some semblance of a routine again day to day and you're you're close to where your kids need to be.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And sometimes that means we've got to offer extra support in finding those kinds of locations or resources that let them be there. But, you know, it's just an example of something that kind of reflects, you know, a bit of the short term for putting yourself in a place where you can then focus on what you need to focus on and you can start to actually take the steps to recover.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Very much appreciate that question. I think I've been blown away by the resilience and the focus and even at times optimism around folks who have just lost everything that they have.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's really is kind of like touching, you know, moment of like reflection on how people are able to be resilient and bounce back as much as we've been there to talk to folks about what is the traumatic situation they're going through. I'm so blown away by how many people are focused on what do I need to do to get going? Like, what do I need to do to get this plan together? They're action oriented.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
They're focused. and at times they're they're almost positive and it's just an incredible thing so i think there's a lot of layers to this and there's clearly deep challenges emotionally and otherwise but la is showing up people are showing up they're thinking about the right things they're being very community oriented in a lot of ways and i see a lot of organic things happening community-wise
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
For example, neighbors teaming up to figure out how they're going to get debris removed from their street and doing it together as neighbors. Things like that that are just amazing.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Yeah, I want to highlight that. I think you get a lot of the best version of people showing up in these instances, which is, again, incredible. I think there's a few key elements to what we're talking about. A, it's being very deliberate and having a plan around what...
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
quality and what interactions look like to a level of specificity where people can take the values you have as an organization or as a team and see its direct application. You're training them on when to acknowledge the emotional side of feedback. It's often at the very beginning of an interaction with a customer.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
You want to almost like level set with them in a way that isn't pandering to them either. It's, I see you, I understand, and I'm giving you the right level of empathy and sensitivity to what your situation is.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And it's also then about knowing when to switch that off and move forward and to not play an outsized role in trying to dwell on or reflect on something that, look, at the end of the day, we think people are working with us because they want structure and they want actions and they want answers. And so that's very much the focus of what we try to do.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So we're very clear about how conversations start. We're very clear to our team about what it means to be organized and to be able to then manage a plan for them. And that's a nice real vehicle ultimately for us. It's not an open-ended thing. We have a recovery plan that is the main kind of artifact of what we provide. We're able to like turn attention and focus to that plan.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And we're immediately able to start giving them context where in this plan, they see what it looks like for six, 12 plus months. They understand along each track of what they're trying to do and rebuild what the milestones are, how long it's going to take to get there, what the requirements are.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so that's definitely like a helpful way that, you know, we're able to drop right into some structured ways and some very actionable ways. insights and stuff like that. But I think as you can appreciate what really makes people feel disconnected and frustrated, these are just some clear things.