Moving from XANT to Kustomer to Tackle the Next Seismic Shift in Customer Service

On the spectrum of important life choices, the decision to leave an incredible team at XANT (formerly InsideSales.com) to take on the VP of marketing role at Kustomer ranked right at the top. And while there’s no doubt I’ll miss my friends and colleagues, my obsession with customer experience and my passion for helping customer service professionals won out. 

Most of my career has been built on the foundation of customer experience. My first project at Accenture was a $100 million customer transformation initiative to modernize the customer experience at CalPERS. At Goldman Sachs I experienced first hand the power of the customer as the financial crisis hit and words like ‘consumer confidence’ plagued big banks. At Gallup, I led the customer experience program for multiple international brands such as Toyota, Honda and Ikea and learned the power of what Dr. John Flemming called Human Sigma: managing the employee and customer encounter. And lastly, at XANT I taught thousands of sales reps that customers have changed, and focusing on buyer intent and communicating through buyer-preferred channels is the only way to win the sale.

If there is one thing I’ve learned throughout my career it is that a maniacal focus on the customer wins every time, and I’m not alone in my thinking. CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos said, “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.” 

But for many companies, exceptional customer service is simply a trendy phrase, as the experience they deliver is everything but customer-first. Treating customers as tickets, forcing them to repeat information, and pushing them to communicate through channels they are not comfortable with, are all examples of the daily struggles customer service reps face. 

If you talk to customer service leaders, they are fully aware of the above challenges and they want to make things easier and more personalized for their customers. But they can’t. The current customer service tool set was not built with the modern buyer in mind. And how could it have been as Zendesk and Salesforce are both approaching their 15th and 20th birthdays, respectively? 

Think about it, our lives are centered around instant communication. We buy something and we are immediately recommended other products to purchase. We use our phones to order cars and are picked up in minutes. We text our friends and family and get responses in seconds and we use Slack to communicate with our colleagues and have real-time conversations from anywhere in the world. 

As a result, our expectations of communicating with business have changed. We want companies to know us and guide us through the buying journey, we want companies to provide real-time conversations through the channels we use, and we want companies to proactively communicate with us like we do with our friends. The customer has the power, and because of this, they have certain expectations. That’s why forcing customers to talk to multiple agents, repeat information, and communicate with your business on your terms will ultimately damage your business.

Businesses have to change in order to meet the demands of the modern buyer, and that’s why we created Kustomer. When Kustomer was founded, it was the first customer service platform actually focused on the customer. The goal was not to build another customer service platform. That had already been done hundreds of times. The idea was to reimagine customer service by putting the customer at the center of it. Sounds kinda obvious, right? But previous tools like Salesforce and Zendesk didn’t do that. Instead they were built with the ticket or case at the center, pushing the customer to side. 

Let me show you what I mean:

• On Zendesk, a customer chats with a representative and then calls in. The result: two different agents giving two different solutions.
• On Kustomer, a customer chats with a representative and then calls in. The result: smart routing pushes the customer to the same rep who was chatting with the customer, and a solution is given.
• On Zendesk, a customer attempts to tweet at a company, send them a facebook message, and then tries to text them to get answers to a question. The result: crickets, as only archaic channels like phone and email are available through the platform.
• On Kustomer, a customer attempts to tweet at a company, send them a facebook message, and then tries to text them to get answers to a question. The result: all communication channels are associated with the customer and the representative can respond back immediately through whatever channel the customer prefers. 
• On Zendesk, a company notices issues with a certain number of orders and needs to proactively alert their customers of the issue. The result: marketing gets involved to send mass external communication days after the issue is out of control. 
• On Kustomer, a company notices issues with a certain number of orders and needs to proactively alert the customers of the issue. The result: the customer service team searches the customers impacted and an external message is sent out immediately. 

The list goes on, and we hear stories like this from our customers daily, saying the same thing. Like Sergi Mendez who runs live operations at Glovo and improved service level attainment by 20% and achieved 84% average satisfaction rating:

“Previously, we used three separate applications to support our customers, couriers, and partners. Now Kustomer lets us manage those relationships in one platform and ensures each conversation is sent to the right agent." 

Overall, there are now thousands of agents from around the world using Kustomer, including some of today’s most iconic, people-first brands, including Glossier, Ring, ThirdLove, Rent the Runway, Sweetgreen, Glovo, Away, and UNTUCKit. But this is just the beginning as we’ve only scratched the surface in our journey to reimagine customer service. I’m excited to join the Kustomer Krew, so get ready and buckle up. It’s going to be one hell of a ride.