We’re back with part two of our conversation with Eli Weiss, Director of CX at Olipop.

Here’s what we’re covering: 👇

1. Bringing CX across the customer journey
2. Best practices
3. The qualities of a CX marketer
4. The future of CX

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Let’s go!

🗺 Bringing CX across the customer journey

In its most basic form, CX strategy is about meeting the expectations your brand has set across the customer journey. And, if you can, it’s about exceeding them.

Here are a few channels to consider when building your CX strategy:

✍️ Ad copy: Where are the customers finding you? Ex., Olipop ran ads that drove a lot of acquisition.

But most customers didn't repurchase because they had an expectation that it would taste exactly like Coca-Cola.

Eli explained that the team’s ad copy was creating that expectation, so they switched it up and went with a more educational approach.

🖥 Website: How clear and concise is your website? Are customers having issues with that? Is it answering their complaints and concerns?

📦 Shipping and delivery: If you're promising two-day shipping, make sure that you're delivering that. If not, change the wording.

💸 Returns and refunds: Make sure you're removing any friction.

Figure out where those pain points are – especially during this process, when customers may be upset.

📧 Email and SMS: Provide helpful and entertaining content, making sure you properly communicate everything your customers needs to know about your products, how they work, how to return them, etc.

Here’s an SMS campaign that educated Olipop customers about its ingredients, without even including a CTA to purchase the product.

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The approach was purely about providing value.

✅ CX best practices:

1) Appreciate and Apologize: Be generous with appreciation, and apologize/remedy if you mess up.

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2) Context: Understand the full message. See if you can reference any context to show you’re actively acknowledging the person.

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3) Engage: If customers are chatty, lean in and engage. As an example: What’s your favorite flavor? What flavor are you trying next?

These are great opportunities to LEARN about what customers like and don’t like.

4) Focus on Relationships: If a customer dislikes a product and leaves a negative review, offer to send a different product instead of refunding.

READ that again! ^ It’s a great idea.

5) Follow up: When necessary, follow up (snooze feature is a great way of reminding yourself to reach out).

6) Manage expectations: Always look to overdeliver instead of overpromising.

7) Personalize: Call customers by their name, add personalization to macros.

People love their own name, whether it’s hearing it in person, over text, or in an email. Use that to your advantage.

8) Listen: Listening to your customers is key to understanding if you’re doing it right, or if you’re just convincing yourself that you are.

You can start doing this by asking customers to give your feedback in a survey.

🤯 The qualities of a CX marketer

Many people think an extroverted personality is required to work in customer experience, but that’s far from the truth.

Eli, a self-proclaimed introvert, outlined the qualities he believes make someone a successful CX marketer:

The ability to read between the lines: "When somebody is pissed off about your product being two days delayed, it could be that they had a really bad day, but it could also be that they had the same issue with their last three orders. So it makes sense why this person is extremely frustrated."

Humility: You’re going to get thrown around in your inbox by all sorts of situations.

If you can acknowledge your mistakes and address each situation with humility it will prepare you to help customers better.

Empathy: Understand your customer’s pain points and have empathy for the frustrating experiences they’re going through –both with your brand and in their personal lives.

"I really, honestly feel terrible if a person bought something for $40 and didn't get it. Like, if somebody spent their hard earned money on a product and they felt like it was a waste of money, that hurts me."

Good listening skills: Talk to your customers, listen to their concerns, hear their feedback, and apply it to make their shopping experiences better.

The ability to think outside of the box: "You're not always just going to be able to refund someone. So you have to get creative with conflict resolution."

Here’s another very personal response the Olipop team received from a customer:

🚀 The future of CX calls for larger support teams

CX is about creating a comfortable space for consumers to engage with brands and coming up with unique ways to have conversations with them.

Eli suggests brands should have larger support and CX to make room for this level of creativity.

"If your job is support, and you’re running through 5,000 tickets in a day, you’ll never have that space.

I get told all the time, ‘we're over-resourced.’ And I'm like, I want people to have 10 tickets in an hour to think of creative ways to engage. But if you don't have the space because you have 5,000 tickets, you'll never be there.

When chatting with brands in the space that have been in the news for being massively overworked in CX, you hear them saying, ‘I didn't have the ability to think like that.’

If you found this helpful or want to learn more about CX, reply to this email. :)

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