When Liz Hettler, Director of Customer Experience at Showroom and Feather visited Boldr's South African offices in Cape Town to engage with their extended Boldr team members, we asked some questions about Feather's outsourcing partnership with Boldr. Here's a video and a transcript of the conversation.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and ease of publication:
BOLDR: Can you tell us more about Showroom and Feather?
LIZ: Hi, my name is Liz Hettler. I’m the Director of Customer Experience at Showroom. We design and stage luxury homes in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and the Bay Area in California. We also have two sister companies, Feather and Fernish, that live within the rental space for furniture. What that means is, you can build your carts and have real furniture for real adults and a low monthly cost and no commitment. You can return the furniture or buy it at the end of your subscription.
We as a Customer Experience department strive in creating this world-class customer experience, meaning we want to make sure we're being empathetic, we're being personable, and that customers can rely on us to bring forth something as stressful as moving or selling your home and make it just a little bit easier. And that is what makes us so special that we can also cross-sell into Feather and Fernish.
Showroom is going through a lot of changes. There's just so much going on right now. It's the hustle and bustle, and everything is so exciting. Our North Star as a customer experience department is that we want to make sure we're tightening up our processes and streamlining our customer journey as much as possible, while still maintaining that world-class experience that everyone always strives for. Our client base is super high touch. So we've got a lot of people who need answers, and they need answers quickly. Making sure that we're supplying our agents with the quickest answer, that's also the best answer is something that we're really working on in the year to come..
We look for agents who express empathy. We also want them to be super personable and also professional. We deal with a lot of higher-end clients, so they require a higher touch. But we don't want to be so professional that we lose that personal touch. Bringing forth our wonderful personalities make us a little more human.
BOLDR: Tell us more about your tech stack.
LIZ: Right now we're using Gladly, Stella Connect or Medallia, and then we've also got the main chatting components like Slack and Google Chat. We also use Google Suite. In terms of CX tools, I loved my experience with Gladly.
BOLDR: Why did Feather decide to outsource?
LIZ: I've always preferred in-house customer experience, but we made this decision based on a couple of varying factors. The biggest one was that it took away from mine and my direct reports the need to constantly worry about the day-to-day and stressing about isolated customers, like what kind of tickets are coming through and making sure that that's all tight. Boldr’s really stepped in and helped us a lot in not worrying about that day-to-day, but rather focusing on the more strategic part of our jobs, making sure that our customers are having the best possible experience, and putting in the time to make sure our agents are having the best possible experience.
Boldr was actually my first BPO. So, there were a lot of surprises, such as working with a BPO. As someone who has been so driven into in-home customer experience departments, what surprised me the most was the ease and the sustainable partnership that we've created. If I need something I know exactly who to go to. I ask for it and in seconds, it feels like it's done. I think the biggest surprise was that ease and the sustainable partnership that we have. We just both want to see each other succeed.
BOLDR: How did Boldr help Showroom and Feather?
LIZ: I think hiring and interviewing is challenging regardless if it's outsourcing or not. Bolder’s really stepped in to make it a bit easier. We don't have to go through the filtering of 100 resumes and going through those phone screens. How Boldr and I specifically went about this, is really taking into account our values as a company. Not so much the tone of voice, of course, we're listening to that with our conversation with the candidates, but really asking questions that are geared towards our values.
We'll ask questions that are geared towards empathy and kind of figure out how your brain works when there's a difficult situation or a sensitive topic that a client is dealing with, and then listening to those answers and seeing if they plug into one of our values. Everything has been such a joy and I love our account manager. I love my team captain.
BOLDR: What do you like most about being a CX professional?
LIZ: I think what I like most is that every day is different. I get to think about the day-to-day of customer service and how each individual component within the company fits into this one gigantic picture of the customer journey. But, you know, every day a wrench gets thrown into something, and it keeps me on my toes, and isn't just like a dull spreadsheet every day.
