Interview
The Gist
- Customer focus. A blend of empathy and data-driven insights is crucial in addressing customer concerns and improving tech products.
- Cross-team collaboration. Ensuring seamless customer experience requires an integrated approach that goes beyond ticket resolution and involves all departments.
- Business alignment. Tying customer feedback directly to a company's mission and long-term goals is essential for both improving user experience and sustaining growth.
Customer service in the technology sector has evolved from mere troubleshooting to a multifaceted role that involves empathy, data analytics, cross-departmental collaboration and a strong alignment with business objectives. Understanding customer needs and proactively addressing them is vital for both customer retention and overall growth.
To delve deeper into these pivotal themes revolving around customer feedback management, we have CMSWire Contributor Ruth Baril, a seasoned expert in the field and senior product specialist at Slack, who will share her invaluable insights and experience. You can read Ruth’s debut article “Mastering Customer Feedback Management for Better Products” on CMSWire.com.
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro, CMSWire managing editor here, with our new contributor from Slack, a senior product specialist. Her name is Ruth Baril. Ruth, what's going on?
Ruth Baril: Hi, Dom. So nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
Championing the Voice of the Customer in the Tech Industry
Nicastro: It's a pleasure. And I'm glad you joined the team here of contributing authors. Our community is a group of great practitioners who are doing the work of customer experience marketing kind of everything in between. And I know you're super focused on customer feedback, voice of the customer. And those are definitely things that are resonating with our readers, and get a lot of engagement on the site. So super happy to have you.
Let's start. We're gonna talk about your first article and the kind of the contents of it, voice of the customer. But let's start with a little bit about you, you know, how'd you land at Slack? And kind of give us a little bit of insight into your background.
Baril: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, Slack, believe it or not, is my first full-time role in tech at all. I started here seven and a half years ago, in a support role. When I was making a midlife career change. Prior to that I was a childbirth and early parenting educator at a hospital outside of Seattle. And I decided I wanted to do something different. Most of my friends are in tech, everybody was using this hot new tool called Slack that I thought was great and fun and exciting. And I really wanted to be a part of it. And I am so lucky that I was given that opportunity. And here I am.
Related Article: What Are Voice of Customer (VoC) Tools?
Leveraging Empathy and Data to Transform Customer Feedback
Nicastro: Yep. Same. We thought the tool was great, too. That's why we use it at over at CMSWire. And it's nice, but like I told you before, I did shut it off. So we can do this interview. Because we have to focus. We have to focus.
Baril: I'm fully focused.
Nicastro: Awesome. So you know, customer feedback, voice of the customer. In the article, you talk about a combination of data and empathy when presenting customer feedback. Can you think of a time when empathy in particular played a major role in how you kind of approach presenting feedback to the leadership team?
Baril: Yeah, absolutely. So one of our top issues at Slack that we get the most feedback about are our notifications, which is a huge area, because it includes like badges and push notifications, desktop notifications. ... And we were doing a lot of downstream troubleshooting and going to the product team and asking for all sorts of different improvements. And what we did was we took a step back kind of collectively as a product specialist team, and the engineering team looked at what the contents of these support tickets really look like. And we noticed that a large majority of them were solved with one reply. And that we realized that we could offer the customers an opportunity to self serve.
And the way we approached this was by asking the product team to prioritize work on our mobile diagnostics tool. So if you use Slack on mobile, you know that you can test your Slack notifications, and we've had that option for a long time. But that process wasn't super informative, prior to this project.
So we approached the leadership team with this idea that if we could improve the diagnostics, report and make it easier for customers to self serve, that would be obviously better for the customers, right? It's always better to not have to write in to support. That's, that's the ideal, better for our support team who could then spend more time dealing with like really gnarly, difficult issues and less time just sending one individual reply because all of our support tickets are hand written by human beings. We don't use automations.
And the big part here for product and for leadership was we would be able to adjust our feedback for them to focus more on how to improve the feature, as opposed to stopping the bleeding of just a poor notifications experience in general, like we would rather be working on making notifications work better and be more granular and help people focus and help people be productive. Not on just stopping the flow of all of the support tickets and these frustrated confused customers.
So we got that prioritized, finished the project. It was a fully cross functional efforts our support team helped contribute. And we managed to drop the overall rate of mobile support ticket notifications to get by 74%. And have been able to focus more; it was just a big win for everyone all around.
Related Article: AI in Decision Making: The Revitalization of Voice of the Customer
The Human Element in Making Sense of Massive Customer Data Sets
Nicastro: Yeah, like it's such a massive data set, right? Like to have, it's a good problem to have. You're like, oh, we have a lot of data. We know, we can make sense of this. Would you say like, making sense of all that data is a technological challenge? Or is it like a people and processes challenge? What's the biggest challenge in collecting all that customer feedback data? Is it having the right tools, or more like getting people on board kind of thing?
Baril: Um, that's hard. It's really mostly a people issue. Because you can have all the right tools, and you can have all the numbers and they're exactly correct. And you compare it against other numbers, but until you understand what a customer needs and why they're using the tool. So as I mentioned, notifications, for us, means so many different things. So we can look at all those different numbers. But until we hear from customers, the badging is important. The badging, like seeing those little number badges that tell you how many notifications? Understanding ... the why and how they use it is really just as important, if not more important than actually having the right tools and getting the right metrics.
Related Article: What Defines Customer Data Today?
Cultivating a Holistic Approach to Integrate Customer Feedback in Tech Teams
Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. So like taking the data set, like, OK, 65%, you know, of these folks don't like, you know, the fact that they hear a noise every five minutes or something like that. It's really collecting all that data and saying, all right, what's the real customer problem? Let's walk in their shoes. Right? Walk that walk in their shoes and see, we can troubleshoot it ourselves? Let's go through it ourselves. Can we do it? Well, no, we can't. Well, maybe they can't either. Right? And then how do you just ensure all your team members like understand, and they effectively integrate customer feedback into their work kind of like ingrain it into that culture?
Baril: Yeah, so I mean, this actually calls back to what we were just talking about, and is which is focusing on the user story. And so not just explaining, this is what our customers tell us they want, or this is where we're seeing the most errors, but helping the product teams understand why our customers want a specific thing.
Some people will ask for — we’ll see requests for four or five different improvements, or changes to Slack, that all actually have the same source, they're all answering the same problem. So if you go to the team with all these different solutions, ... but no explanation, like no user story, this is what they're doing, and this is why they're trying to do it that way, you're gonna get a real patchwork quilt of solutions that don't necessarily work with each other.
And sometimes we've all used software, where one part of the software makes a different part of it actually harder, because those, they're not talking to each other. And they're not thinking about the holistic experience of using that software. So yeah, keeping everybody focused. And then always, always, I know, I've been focusing a lot on the quantitative part of this and the why and how ... product teams at large companies that serve millions of people a day can't make changes based on vibes; ... you need to show your work is what I always say.
So it's again, it's that balance of quantitative and qualitative, to help keep everyone together. And I just have to emphasize how important that cross team collaboration is. So understanding what the other teams are working on, so that you don't accidentally inadvertently or subconsciously make another part of the experience worse by making your part better.
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Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes that you feel like customer experience, teams get lost and or customer support teams, more specifically get lost in ticket resolution. And if your ticket resolution is, you know, oh, we solve 95% of issues within a day. And that's like a good metric. Wow, we're doing a good job. Pat yourself on the back. But did you actually go to the granular data and say, What is the problem that's happening? And how to avoid these constant issues coming up over and over again? Like that kind of...
Baril: Yeah, thinking upstream? Yeah. Yeah.
Related Article: Conquering the Customer Feedback Gap
Aligning Customer Feedback With Business Strategy: A Look Inside Slack's Approach
Nicastro: And finally looking at how you tie in customer feedback, you know, back to the overall vision. So how does Slack and your teams kind of think about that when you're talking about integrating all this customer feedback into the overall vision and strategy of the entire business?
Baril: Well, I mean, we're kind of lucky in that what are, what Slack’s mission is, what Slack exists for is helping people get their work done, right. And we want to do that in a way that is pleasant and effective, and makes people want to come back and use the tool and feel comfortable, like they're being their best selves at work using this tool.
And so it's a very virtuous cycle for us. If people don't find Slack helpful in getting their work done, they will stop using it. And we and like, from a very business-y perspective we will just start losing money. So it is not difficult, honestly, for us to help product teams or say why it's important that our users and the admins like administering each of the Slack instances why they're hands-on experience is one of the most important parts of making product decisions. The hard part for us is how to choose what to do next, and how those all fit in with each other.
And like I was talking about before ... our leadership does a great job of sharing our mission and our vision for the upcoming three years. We do that every three years. And we set goals within Slack and within Salesforce. And we just can start at kind of a high level, like how does this fit in with the goals that you have told us we have? And that umbrella always includes our customers’ experience. And so again, I feel lucky, because I know not every company, it's as easy to connect those dots and participate in the virtuous cycle. But I feel pretty good. I mean, I've been here a long time. And we've been working on that the whole time.
Nicastro: Yeah. Well, before I let you go, one of one final question is going to be a real hardball question. It's gonna throw you for a loop. But what's your favorite channel in Slack?
Baril: Oh my favorite channel? We have a dogs channel and a cats channel, the dogs channel, you know, it's kind of, like if I don't want to pick up my phone and look at Instagram Reels of cute dogs and cats. I can just go in there. Get a little serotonin boost from all the cute pictures and videos.
Nicastro: Yeah, I have to say ours is similar to that. But it's called random. The dogs are in there, the cats, the travel, you know, a random thought like I saw a good movie this weekend and anyone see it, or just any kind of random thought. I mean, it's just we're all over the place of that. It's just fun to just, I guess that's not, I hate the water cooler scenario, like comparison. Like if like the water cooler — who talks over a water cooler? I don't even know why people say. I take my water and I go away. I don't talk to anybody. But it's like, the I don't know, maybe outside just chilling outside the office building kind of random chat. That's a random channel equivalent, I think for us.
