Last week we had a conversation with Kathryn Mahdavi, Vice President of Customer Experience at Rinse, a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry service. Kathryn's approach to CX is both data-driven and deeply human-centered. Here's what we learned:
Last week we had a conversation with Kathryn Mahdavi, Vice President of Customer Experience at Rinse, a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry service. Kathryn's approach to CX is both data-driven and deeply human-centered. Here's what we learned:
Kathryn: I've been in the CX world for quite a long time. My career started at a marketing agency where I oversaw production and client relationships. This gave me a unique perspective early on - even 15-20 years ago, I understood the value of the customer voice in building the customer experience.
I also realized pretty quickly how much people don't know that customer voice unless you intentionally push it to them. People can live in a little bubble doing their job and not even really thinking about the customer until you force that to happen. If you allow your teams to just write code or drop off and deliver product, they're not forced to think about the customer. As a company culture, you have to make a point to push that information out to them to make everybody customer-voice centric.
Kathryn: We have the typical ways of surveying customers - at Rinse, we have more surveys than I can count. We ask for feedback all the time, and that information is very helpful. But what we do differently is we make a point to learn from the extremes.
We estimate only 0.03% of our customers ever have a very bad problem or experience. But if we dig into that and understand it deeply, it forces every team member who touched that experience to know what happened and focus on it. It gives you the opportunity to learn and improve every customer's experience, even if they've never had that issue.
It's easy for companies to dismiss rare occurrences as one-offs, but that's where you can really learn. That's where you can drive a focus on the customer voice because you're going into every little detail of what happened in that customer's experience.
Kathryn: We're lucky that our CEO, Ajay, is very customer-voice oriented. "The Customer is our North Star" is a key value of our company. Ajay has a direct line to customers - every new customer gets an email from Ajay's email address, and if they respond, it will go to Ajay. He reads every single one of those messages and often forwards them to me and other leaders. He makes sure that voice gets heard and shared.
Our customer care team is really a giant data collection team. We track everything that happens, how frequently it happens, and even the root cause. That information gets pushed out every week to leaders of each locale and leaders of each area of the product. We mine it every week, go over it, and talk about it as a team.
Kathryn: Everything for priorities is a scale of level of effort versus impact. How much impact will this have and how hard of a lift is it? Clearly, you want to go for the lower-lift things that have the highest impact.
In figuring out the impact, we look at retention. Of the customers who are experiencing these issues or problems, what is the retention impact? Ultimately, if you're trying to grow your company, you're looking at: Will customers sign up and use my product? Once they sign up and use my product, will we retain them? And then can we scale that? The retention part is all about the customer experience.
It can be hard to measure sometimes. How much of an impact on retention or customer acquisition is a horrible Yelp review? But we can look at how long until they transact again versus the normal customer, or if they're behaving differently against other cohorts.
Kathryn: When you're early, it can be hard to have enough data to be truly data-driven. If you're doing surveys, you're not getting a lot of engagement. You might not have the resources to go out and gather the data. In that moment, it's important to not be paralyzed by the lack of data. You're building the company. You know your product, you have your vision, you have your values. It's okay to go with your gut if you don't have the data when you're early.
Another thing is that people go to a scale mindset very quickly. But do you have to be able to scale right now? When you get into that scaling mindset too quickly, your customer experience team is going to become a cost center very quickly because it's the first thing that you can't really tie direct revenue to. Sometimes you just keep investing in doing the above and beyond for your customers, even though that solution will never scale in the long term. Until you get past a certain point, make sure that you're just backing that customer experience.
Kathryn: AI has potential to impact time to respond, ROI of time spent on any given issue, and quality. Those are really the three big things that you want to think through when you're thinking about the efficiency of your agents. So undeniably, AI has room to really help any care team.
What I worry about is that it's going to change the way that you interact with your customers inherently. As a leader, you want to think about what that means for your company culture and how you very intentionally make sure that that voice is not disregarded because it's taken care of by an AI. Just because you can handle it cheaply or efficiently, you need to make sure you're still feeling the weight of that customer's pain and you're still trying to solve the actual problem that they're feeling.
The inbound from the customer still represents a gap in your product or your customer experience, even if you can take care of it through a computer.
Talking to Kathryn was a masterclass in how to build a customer-centric organization. Here are the key takeaways:
1. Intentionally push customer insights to every team
2. Learn from the extremes
3. Make customer voice a company value
4. Prioritize based on effort vs. impact
5. Don't be paralyzed by lack of data early on
6. Be patient with scaling
7. Be cautious with AI implementation
By applying these principles, companies can create a more customer-centric approach to their products and services. As Kathryn put it, "The inbound from the customer still represents a gap in your product or your customer experience, even if you can take care of it through a computer." It's about creating a culture where everyone is focused on truly understanding and serving the customer, even as technology evolves.