I’ve spent much of the first few weeks in my new role listening. I’ve been talking to our customer care employees, our technicians, my regional counterparts and plenty of customers.
While it’s still early, a few things have already become clear, and I wanted to get in the habit of sharing my thoughts with you … and I’d love to hear your feedback as well. Some of my updates will be highly tactical, and some will be big picture, but all will give you a peek into how we are working to make the customer experience better.
To do this right, we need to be listening. And not listening to the good stuff … or even the ok stuff … but the really hard stuff. So I’ve been meeting with customers to talk about experiences they’ve had that just really didn’t go well, and reading their discussions online about how they’ve tried to address their issues. I’ve also been meeting with our customer care employees to understand what their experience is like, and how we can help them serve our customers better.
One of the things that’s been apparent from the get-go is that our employees truly care about our customers. They have a genuine desire to make customers happy. When things don’t go well, the disconnect – whether it’s missed handoffs or an inability to fully get at the root of an issue – typically isn’t the customer care employee. It’s the "tools" at their disposal.
So one of the key takeaways from all my listening … getting the right tools in the hands of all our employees, and employee empowerment, is a key area for us to double, or even triple down on in the months ahead. We’ve already made great progress. Every two weeks we are rolling out improvements to Einstein, our platform that makes it easier and faster for our customer care agents to help customers. But there is so much more we can – and will – do here so stay tuned for updates as we focus on this important area.