The Contact Center OG Running CX for a Luxury Women's Brand

Editor's note: This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.

From DiscoverCard to Cuyana: A Contact Center Career Built on Fundamentals

Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro here, editor in chief of CMSWire.com, back with another edition of CX Decoded. Catching up with Tyler Gardner, he's the Director of Customer Experience for Cuyana, Women's Clothing and Handbag Brand. What's going on, Tyler?

Tyler Gardner: Hey man, good to be here. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Dom Nicastro: Yeah, it's awesome to have you here. Director of CX, real deal, lots of dynamic changes and everything AI and in between. Is your world turned upside down these days or is it still good old blocking and tackling in customer experience despite what's happening in the tech world?

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, I think it's always about fundamentals. I mean, obviously it's changing. There's tons of technology out there and you're trying to make sure that you stay on top of it and that you're a part of it. But I think the great thing about customer experience in general is just about the customer's journey. So I think it is about making sure the customer is happy, they're taken care of and how do we do that? Well, we have to change with the times. So it's still email, it's still phones, it's still chat, it's still text. But now we have other options out there for technology. There's AI and a lot of other things that we're throwing at customers to see what their acceptance is. And so far, so far so good.

Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that's good to hear. I feel like you're a contact center OG. Am I correct? Like 15, 20 years? How many years have you been in the contact center customer experience world?

Tyler Gardner: I started taking calls for DiscoverCard like when I was 18. I'm in my 40s now. I've been in the call center environment for a really long time. And it's always been about just talking to people, having conversations and just understanding where they're coming from and how I can help them. So it's always been fun for me to be able to do it regardless of what the type of call is. I never thought I would be in the customer service world for almost my entire adult career life. But so far so good.

Dom Nicastro: Yeah, so we're talking about 25 years ago. You're there picking up phones for DiscoverCard.

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, we had dial sheets, man. The dial sheet that you're going through, you were either highlighting or crossing off and then you had the old black and green screen. So yeah, that's the gist of it.

Dom Nicastro: Do you have a call that you remember from that call center that you still take with you today? One that makes your stomach turn when you think about it?

Tyler Gardner: I mean, I did balance transfers and debt collection. I had a lot of gut-wrenching moments in my early call center career — moments that made me think, man, I definitely don't want to live my life like that. I want to make sure that whatever I do, my family's taken care of. And then when I started getting deeper into customer experience and customer service, it really was about when customers asked, why can't you do that return? And I thought about it and said, why can't we do it? Let me ask, let me figure it out.

That's when I started to dive into process improvement and trying to understand why things work the way they do. And the answer often is: we can, but the system limits it. System limitations are a lot of the problems that we run into.

Running a Small but Mighty CX Team at Cuyana

Dom Nicastro: Tell me about the team now — the Cuyana customer experience team. Who do you report up to? What does your team look like?

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, sure. So I actually report to the CEO, her name is Wendy Yu, and she's been with the company for a really long time. She comes from a marketing background, and she's fun to report to because you can have ideas, you can bounce them off each other, and then you can run with it. That's how we've been able to implement the AI technology that we have so far — let's see what happens, we'll go from there.

As far as the team, it's a really small team. It's the smallest team I've ever run, but we're small and mighty, as a lot of people will say. We make sure that we take care of the customer. Our response times are great. But that was part of why we really needed some type of AI or technology to assist our customers — because we wanted to make sure that our response times stayed good and that the customer experience stayed good.

Dom Nicastro: So that small but mighty team — what's keeping it busy? Where are customers inbounding when they have questions?

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, we have two main lines for them to reach out to us right now — well, three if you count the web form. We have tickets, which is email, and then we have voice. We're exploring other opportunities right now, but those are the two main channels they come through.

Dom Nicastro: So they can call or email. I'm a big call guy. And I'll tell you, in your world, I know a little bit about it because I see when my wife opens the boxes she orders and gets frustrated when something's not right and she wants to get to someone quick. So I'm imagining your volume skews more toward phone calls than email.

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, for our customer base, slightly, you're right. It is about 57% phone calls, and the flip side in tickets. But we do get a lot of phone calls. A lot of people want to say it's a dying practice and I don't believe that's true for a lot of organizations. I'm the same as you — I'm a phone call guy. If I have a problem, I pick up the phone. I try to find a phone number any way I can because I just feel like it's faster, it's quicker, and you get a better resolution.

Dom Nicastro: Yeah, I feel like a lot of the younger generation — Gen Z, Gen Y — they have email only because they have to sign up for things. I don't even know if they know their email address. Who are we talking about customer-wise? Is there a demographic that's really heavy at Cuyana, or is it pretty spread by age?

Tyler Gardner: I mean, it's really the targeted group of working women. Marketing might kill me for this, but I'd say anywhere from 30s to 60s, 70s. Any woman that's a working woman — that's what the product is made for. It's to make her life easier and better and make her feel the confidence she needs for the job. That is our customer.

Consistency, Coaching and the Playbook That Has to Be Written Down

Dom Nicastro: You're offering a valuable product but also the value of time. This is a working woman — I'm sure a lot of them are moms — they want their products and experiences to be good, quick, and easy. What are the guiding principles as the leader of customer experience? How do you rally the troops? What's the tone of those training sessions with agents?

Tyler Gardner: I try to coach and train them to think about going through everything with a fine-tooth comb. If somebody takes the time to write an email, you read everything thoroughly — once or twice — make sure you get all the bullet points and that all the answers are up front. Also make sure the options are given to the customer so that the back-and-forth doesn't have to happen and we're able to take care of her quickly. It's the speed to answer. It's the speed to resolution. It's making sure it's a good experience.

Everybody likes to throw out white-glove service or gold star, diamond, whatever. But I think at the end of the day, it's just making sure that the customer has a good experience regardless of what type of customer they are. That's the trick of the trade.

Dom Nicastro: Some of our contributors to CMSWire.com are talking a lot about consistency. Premium labels, five-star — that's all great. But I think of McDonald's. I go to McDonald's because I know what I'm going to get. Is consistency in customer experience just huge for you?

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, I think if you're not providing consistency, you're not going to be in business. At the end of the day, most customer service or customer experience organizations are a cost center. So what are you bringing to the table? Are you bringing feedback from customers back to marketing, back to product? Are you making sure the answers you're giving are standardized? I always tell my team — and everybody at the company knows this — if it's not written down, it doesn't exist.

That's one of my favorite quotes because if we're not all following the same playbook, we all have a problem. Consistency is very key, but it's thought out, it's targeted, and it takes a lot of hard work to make sure those experiences are delivered the same way every time.

Sentiment Analysis, CSAT and What the Call Tells You in Real Time

Dom Nicastro: And how do you know you're doing well? How do you know you're being consistent? The customers will tell you. But customer experience teams have to be good at gaining insights and getting actionable items out of them. There's a lot of talk in the industry right now about moving from survey-based to behavioral-based measurement. Surveys still have a place, but what happens in the moment on those calls tells you everything.

Tyler Gardner: It's very true. We do both. We have sentiment analysis that's pulled out of what's being said within the interaction with the customer — in tickets as well as in voice. It's so spot on as far as how the customer is doing in that moment. And then after the fact, I think CSAT surveys are great because it's asking how was that interaction overall.

But I think the meat and potatoes really is what's happening right now in that interaction between the customer and the service agent and how the customer is feeling at that time. When you're doing a more personalized purchase — something someone is really excited about — it's got to be more spot on than a fast food order.

Dom Nicastro: Exactly. So you're looking at sentiment from the calls a lot. With AI, you can take everything that happened in that call and bring it to the forefront.

Tyler Gardner: Yeah, absolutely. You've got detailed summaries of what actually happened on the call. With AI, it can take everything that happened and bring it to the forefront, then do analysis based on what those calls are about. Everybody has their top five to ten contact reasons. And it really depends on what you're willing to dive into and change about that experience — or what type of technology can be implemented to fix it. At the end of the day, customers aren't asking for anything crazy.

They're asking for a return on something outside the return window. They're asking for a repair on something that maybe wasn't normal wear and tear. You've got to weigh those options. And that's what's hard about AI — it's very much whatever is in the document is what it executes. It doesn't necessarily have the empathy built in yet the way a customer associate does. That's why customer experience is so hands-on. You really have to look at every individual customer journey, which is really hard to do without some type of reporting or analytical tool.

Agent Experience: Dad Talks, Turnover and the Will-or-Skill Question

Dom Nicastro: Agent experience is a big theme we're chasing on CMSWire — how do we keep agents happy, how do CX leaders crack that? What does agent experience mean to you?

Tyler Gardner: They've got to have the foundation of great tools at their disposal to be able to take care of the customer. On top of that, they've got to have training, experience, coaching, and the comfort of a good supervisor and manager they can sit down and talk with. In my former life, I was going to school for teaching — which is hilarious looking back — but I did take some psychology classes, and I really think there is a science behind customer interaction. Associates deal with hard things. They deal with hard instances and customers they have to try to take care of, and they're not always going to do it right. I call those coaching sessions dad talks.

We have touch bases, we have dad talks, and it's just trying to understand what they're not getting about how the customer experience is going and how they can do things better. Everyone wants to have the conversation about whether it's a will or a skill issue. I always think about what kind of tools and resources are you giving them to do their jobs to their full ability.

How much leeway do they have? How much say do they have in making it right for the customer? We do have turnover, but we have a lot of associates who've been with the company five, six, seven years. Some managers have been here a long time. We don't have a high turnover rate in customer experience. A lot of that is the company culture and values — and the type of leaders you have.

The Crescendo Rollout: Process First, Technology Second

Dom Nicastro: And part of taking care of them is ensuring they have the best tools. I know recently there was a tool implementation that helped email response times. Who was the vendor?

Tyler Gardner: The vendor is Crescendo. And I will say, change management is hard if you don't understand the process for it. I've been — I guess privileged, honored, or maybe unlucky — to do a lot of implementations in my career. It really is about making sure you do your research upfront with who you're partnering with and whether their tool is user-friendly. With Crescendo, I almost want to say it went off without a hitch. The biggest reason was their technology and how it was implemented.

Our tech team didn't have a heavy load. Their team really took the time and attention to detail to make sure it was done right and had their engineers develop and implement within our site. For the associates, it wasn't a huge change — now instead of looking at this, you look at this. They look at the summary, how the AI interacted with the customer, the voicemail or message from AI about what the customer was contacting about.

I always say it's like a pre-chat survey — it takes all of the information of what the customer is contacting about and puts it in front of the associate. Implementation wasn't that hard. It took some time to get used to going through the summary and making sure we were hitting on everything. But yeah, it went off pretty well.

Dom Nicastro: And obviously you're measuring email and phone response times to see what kind of value you're getting out of the tool. What were the results?

Tyler Gardner: So we launched in August and I was going through with a fine-tooth comb for the first two to three months — how the tickets went, how the voice went, making sure we were doing incremental change.

Crescendo was great with helping us make those changes. We had probably 40 to 45% of our tickets that were tier one — the easy questions, where's my order, types of things. A lot of those tier one tickets were being answered at first contact resolution 40 to 45% of the time. A lot of it now is making sure that at 30, 60, 90, 120 days out, we're able to go back and say, okay, what else do we need to change for the longer scale?

What the C-Suite Wants to Know and What CX Owes the Business

Dom Nicastro: That's huge. And what do the C-suite and CEO want out of the customer experience team these days? What kinds of questions do you get?

Tyler Gardner: It depends on the day. CSAT is always going to be there — if CSAT's low, almost everything else is off the table because that's what's driving repeat customers. With Cuyana it's a little different because of the brand and values. A lot of our customers really buy into what Cuyana stands for because of the way it was created, the way it's been run, and the products we have.

We have a lot of really loyal customers. Because of that, it's more about what else does she need — what colors is she asking about, what's she looking forward to in the next phase of her life? The questions we get asked most are: what types of products are customers asking about, what colors are they asking about, and what's the shipping experience like? I love to whiteboard it — look at all the touch points in the customer journey, see where it's halting, where there's an issue, what we can make better. And I try to make sure product, marketing, and my boss always have the top contact reasons — why are they contacting us, and what are we doing about it.

Dom Nicastro: Yeah, even after a purchase is made, there's still an experience happening. The customer is tracking the order, monitoring every touch point. And you have to rely on third parties — UPS, FedEx, USPS — and you can't just say FedEx screwed up when a customer calls.

Tyler Gardner: No, that's the hard part about being in customer service. We can do everything right as far as our company is concerned, but we still have to rely on it being delivered on time and in 100% great condition. A lot of companies also skimp on shipping because it's cheaper. I think that has to be part of the conversation — what is the cost of shipping and is it worth making sure it arrives within a couple of days with the added care of one of the big three? And I think that's where you hear a lot of companies now saying we forgot about the customer.

We forgot about the voice of the customer, what was happening in it. That's where a lot of customer service teams fail — they're working in their silo, taking care of the customer's problems, and then just going on about their day. If you can just raise your hand and say, hey, customers are saying this, or we're having shipping problems here — and quantify it, qualify it, have the data to back it up — that gives leadership something to actually chew on and act from.

What's Next: Chat AI, SMS and Going International

Dom Nicastro: What's the big fish now? You've improved email, you rolled out the tool, resolution times are up. What are you looking at next?

Tyler Gardner: So we do want to implement chat AI as a company focus. That would be beneficial for both customer experience and sales. And then the other thing we're looking to explore is international business. We have customers that love our products throughout the entire world and we're trying to make sure we're bringing that to the forefront — a better and easier shopping experience. For anybody not in sales, especially when you have to worry about tariffs, taxes, and fees, there's a lot that goes into that.

But yeah, there's the international piece. And as far as chat, we want to just offer the channel that the customer wants to contact us on, whatever that is. I would love to do something with SMS or text as well. I'm hoping to get chat AI implemented this year and make sure that for the holiday season we have one more contact channel for customers to reach out on. Crescendo — I'll give them another shout out — they do have a new sales engine they've launched recently. We're letting it bake a little bit more before the price point of Cuyana comes into play. But we're excited about the opportunity there.

Dom Nicastro: And you know what's great — you roll it out, you get it all ready, and the customers may still use email. They may still call. You just don't know until the customer tells you. That's music to my ears — we just want to be where the customers want to be, not just roll out a tool because everyone else is rolling one out.

Tyler Gardner: Exactly. I think in this day and age, we always try to guess how customers want to contact us, or we choose for them — and I think that's a disservice. With all of the technology out there, you really can have an experience where you might start chatting with them, then send them a text with a picture, then if it's easier for them to call, offer a callback.

I think it's going to be a mix of three or four contact channels. That is going to be the future of customer experience — whatever is easiest for the customer at that moment. If they're on a phone call and they've got to drive to work, they can shoot a text back. I think we're starting to see that already, and I think that's kind of where the industry is going.

Dom Nicastro: Lots of different directions for sure. Well, Tyler Gardner, Director of Customer Experience, Cuyana Women's Clothing and Handbag Brand — it's been a pleasure. I'm Dom Nicastro for CX Decoded by CMSWire. We'll be watching the progress and maybe we'll see you out there at an industry CX conference.

Tyler Gardner: I appreciate the time. Thank you very much.