Numbers and Narratives
Numbers and Narratives bridges the gap between the marketing/customer experience and data - come listen to marketing and CX experts talk about how to use data to better engage with your customers and provide a great experience.
Numbers and Narratives
AI's Impact on Customer Support and Authentic Connections - Justin Crosby, Tula
Hey everyone! This week on Numbers and Narratives, we have an exciting episode featuring Justin Crosby, the Head of CX at Tula Skincare. We delve into the crucial role of customer experience in omnichannel strategies and how Tula navigates the complexities of maintaining a consistent brand voice across diverse platforms like Amazon, Sephora, and Ulta.
Justin shares insights on the importance of understanding customer preferences in different channels, the power of a well-trained team, and the challenges of integrating AI into customer interactions. We also explore how Tula utilizes data and feedback from beauty advisors to refine their products and improve the overall customer journey.
Don't miss this episode packed with valuable advice for CX professionals and anyone interested in the evolving landscape of skincare retail. Tune in to learn more about how Tula is setting the bar for customer engagement and innovation!
Check out Tula Skincare: tula.com
I'm ibisayed I'm sean collins and this is numbers and narratives all right, justin, in the, in the length of the tweet or a tweet thread. What do we talk about?
Speaker 1:today the tweet.
Speaker 3:Tweet would read TLDR customers are everything.
Speaker 1:Hey, Justin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. You want to give our listeners a quick intro as to who you are and what you do.
Speaker 3:Sure, my name is Justin Crosby. I'm head of CX at Tula skincare. Tula is a brand of skincare based on the power of probiotic extracts. We are D2C, but also have present Amazon, sephora and Ulta in the US, as well as some international footprints, and I've been with the company for almost five years now, so I joined at a very early stage and kind of have supported the customer experience ecosystem here through our acquisition by Procter Gamble in 2022.
Speaker 2:When you're a D2C brand. I think CX is pretty straightforward. We understand exactly what that looks like. As you expand these other channels that are not owned and operated by you, what does CX look like in an omni-channel space?
Speaker 3:I think for me and for us at Tula, we've always known that our customers, even when shopping at D2C, are shopping for us elsewhere.
Speaker 3:So they're in Sephora, they're in Ulta, they may be shopping on Amazon so they can get it with Prime next day, and so it was important for us to understand that the Tulacom customer may also be the Ulta customer and the Sephora customer.
Speaker 3:So when we're thinking about how do we have kind of consistency and continuity in brand presence both online and in store, I think it's one obviously about like your marketing materials and making sure that that's consistent across touch points. But it's also about how we speak to our products and working kind of hand in hand with our field sales team in terms of customer feedback, how we want to speak to the products, whether or not that's education or upselling, and then how do we take that from brick and mortar and translate it to a digital landscape and vice versa. And then to really understand the niche differences between those customers is important. What is important to the Ulta customer when they're in that store may be different to what we need to focus on. For a customer on Tulacom that's a bit more committed to the brand. They don't have a million other skincare brands surrounding them, and so I think for us it's important to know that they're the same group of people, but their differences, or what's important to them, may vary. Channel to channel.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask how do you start to identify those differences? I think some of them. It becomes sort of straightforward, especially if it's another digital. Maybe you can kind of merge based off of shipping address and you can start to make some assumptions on the kind of discovery. Maybe they found you on this other website and then like the product, start going to your main store or whatever. But if someone's shopping in person in a brick and mortar that you don't own, how do you start to understand who that person is, what their concerns are, what their interests are and what's the same and different from an online shopper?
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean I think there's data solutions out there, but again, when working with retailers, you're only getting so much information back and I think the real strength for us comes in our strong network of beauty advisors that are in these stores talking to our customers, really engaging with them and understanding what the struggles are, whether that be skin concern or like problem skins that they're trying to solve for. Or is it something else? Is it that they're looking for an entirely new brand in there, just wants to like level up from? You know more of a mass, a mass brand, into something a bit more prestige, like Tula. And so, I think, having a strong connection to our field sales team, whether that be through, you know, consistent meetings with them where we're talking about the same thing.
Speaker 3:Our education team leads these amazing kind of not only for new launches, but consistent ongoing education about like the skin, the microbiome, and so being able to connect those dots through you know, qualitative feedback from the people who are hearing it from our customers and then being able to compare that to some of our more you know, systematic digital surveys. You know where we can really clearly see what customers want. I think that's where the magic is, where we can find out what's happening in both channels and really focus and lean in on that and then understand the differences and have channel owners kind of come back to us and say, well, this is what we think is best for this problem in this channel and try to kind of lift I guess a rising tide lifts all boats in that sense.
Speaker 1:Wait, that's absolutely wild, the fact that you have I mean you must have like can you give me a state of the scope of how many of these beauty advisors you might have? Because you said you guys have your product in Target and Ulta and Sephora and all sorts of different places Like that must be a massive network that you're trying to like gather feedback from all the time.
Speaker 3:Places like that must be a massive network that you're trying to like gather feedback from all the time. Yeah, there are, there are hundreds of advisors that bubble up into like regional executives that then can kind of parse out that part or that geography, and then they all kind of bubble up and are able to say like, oh, we're also seeing this here, we're also seeing this here, and you know, what's interesting is like because we are skincare that can change greatly across the country because of weather conditions or air quality, and so just to understand that difference, I think is really unique and definitely you wouldn't get that without having that face time with these customers and actually having the conversations in person.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine this is so fascinating and I can see a million rabbit holes. You can go down constantly. I can't imagine trying to wrangle all of this data in a pre-digital or even like pre-AI world Like now. It seems like there's so many data sources you could automate and I couldn't automate. Ibi and his team or someone of that ilk could figure out ways to automate things like that and taking it out like what is the average weather and cross-reference that with some sort of social listening tool in case an influencer talks about probiotics in the biome or whatever words I probably miss said. You could essentially create this whole map of what's popular, based on what's being said and why, and the weather and shopping experience, and then map that as like a leading indicator to sales in different places. How on earth did you ever do this without AI? Or, I guess, is AI, just did I overcomplicate it so much and you kind of have to just like ignore some things.
Speaker 3:I'd say, in respect to how we're connecting the dots between channels right now, like there's not much AI happening for us. I'd say, in respect to how we're connecting the dots between channels right now, like there's not much AI happening for us. I think we're leveraging it in different ways, but not necessarily trying to tie back any sort of like feedback from the field sales team, you know, to other channels. But I think there's definitely things that we use, you know, data for to help inform. You know whether it be skew performance or geography and what that means and where people are shopping and what they're shopping for. There's some work happening there, but I think there's definitely some work to be done.
Speaker 3:And I think, where you know, I think everyone is kind of on the work smarter, not harder train, and so I think we're always looking for opportunities just to be like what else can you tell us about this? That either helps us lean into something that's working, address something that's not, or reposition it based on what we're hearing from our customers and what's important to them. So I think, oftentimes, like we think we know, and oftentimes we're right, but sometimes we're surprised and you know that's kind of, I think, something that's always lurking on the background. It's like, well, what's underneath? And so I think using data to kind of look under the curtain or look behind the curtain a little bit more, I think has been telling as well.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's very, very cool. Justin, when you and I first met, we wrote up an interesting collaborative blog post on our site earlier, but you and I talked a lot about brand and the importance of having sort of a consistent like. Tula is a very, very premium product and your customers expect more from you than just buying skincare products. They're expecting advice, they're expecting all these different things. One question that came up and we'll dive into the brand and AI thing here in a second but one question that came up when you were speaking about the field service team how do you, when you have so many people in so many different locales, maintain that consistent brand voice and maintain that sort of like high barrier to high sort of bar of quality across so many different people? That must be a crazy training experience for everyone.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think it's twofold getting the right people on the team right. So these often are people who have skincare backgrounds. You know, on our digital support team we have a licensed esthetician cosmetologist, so we're really trying to bring in people who, one, are passionate about the product and can speak to it. And then, two, we have an amazing education team who helps unify that voice and training. So our digital support team gets the same education as our field sales team to ensure that we know the right points to hit on.
Speaker 3:We know what the conversation should be like if you're a skincare newbie, if you're somebody who's a bit more into it, or if they're, like you know, a skin intellectual, where you know they're very into product and they're very smart and aware of ingredients and function, and so I think having that in their toolkit has always been important.
Speaker 3:And then the other thing is just to trust that, even if they're not, you know, following a script, because as much as that can work in some instances, like, I think you should empower people to just have authentic conversations, and so I think, as a brand, I think you should empower people to just have authentic conversations, and so I think, as a brand, we've also been upfront about like listen, skin's not perfect, and I think we take that approach to kind of an ethos to everything, and so I think that probably plays into it too is like we're not saying we're perfect, we're not saying this is the solution for everyone.
Speaker 3:We're saying this is what this product does and we want you to try it. Obviously, skin and skincare is different for everyone, and so I think letting our teams lead kind of that conversation when they know what's right for a customer is best, and then just making sure that they have the information they need to do their job, um, but to your point of like the brand, I'd say we always would like to consider ourselves when talking about customers is like your skincare obsessed best friend, and so we, as much as we need to be authoritative, we want to be approachable and friendly and not take ourselves too seriously as well.
Speaker 1:You talked a little bit about. I mean, sean, when you and Sean were talking a second ago, you hinted at the fact that you guys are using AI for other things. I assume that a lot of that is, you know, taking the tier one questions, that you guys are getting across various support channels and automating some of those that brand voice is so important and being approachable is so important. How are you, in this sort of brand new AI world, maintaining that you know brand voice across both the automated channels and you know all of the other ones that you have to support?
Speaker 3:I think I mean, I'm not trying to fool anyone by saying like I want you to think you're talking to a person when, like, it's very clearly like you are seeking information that we can give to you in an instant and that is what you're looking for, Right? And so to me, when somebody is like, what's my tracking? Or I need to return this, it's a very easy interaction to be like here's the information you're looking for. Did this solve your problem, yes or no? Like, if it did, great. If it didn't, let's get you in touch with somebody.
Speaker 3:And so I think understanding the reasoning behind someone reaching out to us is important when deciding okay, is this something we should automate or not?
Speaker 3:Like, you should automate for convenience and efficiency for your customer, and so I think, to that respect, the brand voice can take a little bit of a backseat in terms of here's your tracking number.
Speaker 3:But I think, when it comes into play is like flip side of automation, is like the well trained, passionate people we have on the team are able to focus even more of their energy, even more on their time creating a connection with a customer who maybe they haven't purchased, maybe they're kind of in the consideration phase. They can sell them on. You know why they should try Tula. Maybe it's a trial kit, our free return? Really kind of take a holistic approach to like. I'm going to give it my best to like tell this customer why they need to use Tula, whereas if you're constantly just blasting off the same email to somebody with a tracking number, you know when you get to that ticket you may not have the same energy to put into it what it really deserves, and so I think that's where we're able to really lean into brand is in creating space for them to take a bit more time and allow the automation to kind of do its job as a information pusher to people who need it right away.
Speaker 2:I think that's so great. I think one of the things you mentioned earlier is we talked about the breadth of how many people you have to have, how complex the knowledge is, and so by being able to be a little bit more restrictive in what does go to a person, like you said, the well-trained, passionate people will focus and that allows them to bring their best selves, that authentic voice you were talking about, and be excited and not be distracted by the nonsense. But it also helps you control, because I think where brand always starts to fall off as you start adding headcount to try and answer things in mass, inevitably you start lowering the bar for who gets to be on the team. You have hard it's harder to do ua, uc on stuff it's hard to do education and mentorship, and so right away you you kind of raised what your bar is for what can be done by a team. I think that's so great.
Speaker 3:Totally, and I think there's like also as somebody in a past life who has been in an agent's role, you know like it's about. I think about their experience as well. Like I don't want you to be sending an email where you're copying and pasting, you know, a USTS trapping number over and over. I'd rather reward you to do the things that you like to do and if there's a little bit more time in your day, like for you to, you know, take a little wellness walk like, all the better, you know. And so I think having a team you know I'm always cognizant of how these things impact them as well?
Speaker 2:I also do. Do you remember probably like five or seven years you know something in that range when ai was not a big topic that everyone was talking about everywhere and like hubspot chat definitely had, I think, wix chat, I think you know a bunch of these kind of default chat plugins? You would upload either a person's fate photo or you can use like a stock photo and be like hey, I'm ivan and I'm here to like answer your questions, and it was just like some robo bot and every, everything. Everything was awful and it always felt gimmicky and it was the exact opposite of what you said, right? Like you explicitly said, we're not trying to trick you into thinking you're talking to a person.
Speaker 2:I love that is one of my favorite things about the growth of AI is that I think we've all become so much more comfortable with the idea Like I don't. I don't necessarily want to talk to a person. In fact, I explicitly don't want to talk to a person most of the day, and so if you can just give me an easy way to answer, you don't have to kind of posture anymore. You can make it very clear like hey, here's your bot, just ask the questions. You're going to get the answers you want, and if you need more help, then we can bring you to a person, and that alone already starts to improve the user experience, but also make it clear of the extra value they're getting when they do talk to someone on your team.
Speaker 3:People are smart. People are smart Like it's like you're not fooling anyone when you're like trying to make them think that they're like talking to somebody who's just sending them all these things like right after another. And so I think, yeah, it's about being kind of transparent and just like level-headed, about like, yes, everybody wants a more convenient world. These people are looking for information. We have the information. Just give it to them. And we've seen, you know, we're obviously measuring the impact of like do people who go through automations? Are they less happy? You know? And spoiler alert, they're not. And so I think we'll keep on.
Speaker 1:So this is something I kind of wanted to follow up on you. I keep seeing I mean there's tons of, there's tons of these companies now, right, like that, are doing the automation. Scorges has one, like pretty much every major CX platform has one. And I keep seeing, you know, stats on hey, the CSAT scores, the post, the post interaction CSAT scores for these folks are the same Like they're, they're very similar or higher, right, because you can get your answer quicker, people are a lot happier.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that it's given your team more time to develop those authentic connections. Are there stats that you can point and you can speak generally to this? You don't have to be super specific, but are there any stats or stories that you can tell about? Hey, we've actually improved our upsell rate because more like more agents can spend more time actually talking to a customer because they don't have to deal with the low level. You know the s anymore is that. Is there like, do you have any? Like I, because I haven't seen, actually, that many stats on hey, we were able to give our agents more time. They were able to focus on the things that actually mattered, and here's what. Yeah, I think directionally.
Speaker 3:We're seeing some glimmers of hope, and this is how it's manifesting itself is that with some of the automations that we made live over the last call it eight months some days, we're up to a 40% automation rate, which is huge.
Speaker 3:We were kind of hoping for 25. They said we could maybe push 30. And so we're really kind of over achieving our goal, which is nice, and what that has done is created more space for us to really expand our chat offering, and so we had hesitated for a bit in terms of where we wanted to put it, just based on volume, that the team couldn't maybe serve those as quickly as we wanted. But with this capacity that's opened up, we've really kind of been able to put that everywhere on site and really take this as a time to kind of test and learn where that's moving the needle. And whilst we don't have, you know, exact figures to share, we also tie back sales that stemmed from a support ticket with, you know, over the next 72 hours, and so we've seen that number kind of consistently get stronger as we put chat on more and more pages for our customer, and so I think for us that's an indicator of let's think of what else we can do with chat and I think there's some exciting.
Speaker 1:I assume chat is both support but also a place where you can just go and ask questions about really just ask questions from an expert right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally, and so I think we're trying to meet both those needs is like are you somebody new to brands and you're in kind of like a consideration phase and are we trying to just start maybe more high funnel in terms of like this is what the power of our products can do, this is what a probiotic extract does, and so I think for us there's that. And then there's also people who are not new to brand but are maybe looking to try something new. We've, you know, we continue to launch some new innovation, and so there's always questions about how does that fit into my existing routine? And so I think for the return customer, it's a bit more of like how does this fit into what they're already using and how do we sell them on that and get that buy-in? And then for I think you know the new customer, it's a bit more general at first and then trying to understand a bit more of what brought them to the site.
Speaker 1:So that we can help direct them. That's awesome, super interesting. Yeah, because I haven't heard a ton on the sort of hey, here are the effects that have fallen out of our Proc to automate and, you know, have ai talk to customers.
Speaker 2:that's awesome I think it's interesting that you are, you know, positioning the chat as an education tool as well and not just a support channel.
Speaker 2:I think that that's underutilized.
Speaker 2:When you think about how to train you know whether your custom, your custom chatbot and model, it's not just giving an access to order history and shipping details and you know, like FAQs, but giving it in-depth information about the products themselves and the problems they're solving, so that it can can actually be like a recommendation tool as well.
Speaker 2:Are the dots connected in any way? From like someone asks questions about product, does that then save to their profile in some manner and enable the marketing team to kind of follow up with? You know retargeting emails and ads and all sorts of stuff around the questions they asked and you know kind of shape it to like you know, for example, you know I know very little about skincare, but there would be different reasons or different questions someone might have about the same product, right, and so one might be like what are the side effects? And one might be like how long will this take? And if that's the question, does that then is that, is the marketing team enabled to take that and have a different flow or different automation that triggers, based on those kind of questions and concerns.
Speaker 3:I think we're working on connecting those dots.
Speaker 3:As it relates to like, you know, obviously we can retarget based on knowing what products you looked at.
Speaker 3:But in terms of getting that next level of like oh, and they asked about that, you know, we we tend to see the same questions about products if we don't already address them on site. So then for me that goes to like oh, you know, I'll check with the field team and they're like yeah, people are asking that for us too. And so for me it's like okay, this is a gap in education. And so from there we'll work with our brand team, our CRM team, and be like hey, for this product, this seems to be a great area for customers. So, like, let's send them a bit more on this.
Speaker 3:And on the inverse of that, like there's been times where we've launched products where, like, this benefit is really going to be juicy to customers, like, let's see. And then, you know, we start to hear from them. We see the reviews come in and we're like hey, this actually doesn't resonate as much as we thought it would. Like, perhaps that space in all of the marketing emails is better used to talk about this which we are seeing people mention, and so I think it works both ways.
Speaker 2:What is the format of that meeting and who's in that meeting or Slack channel or email? How consistently are you all meeting to talk about those insights? Who's in there? Is there a format or kind of free flow Like what does that actually look like?
Speaker 3:I'd say we're pretty heavy like consistent Slack users. So it feels like see something, say something, and it just kind of happens. And then we have obviously like regular meetings about education updates and you know whether if it's something like big and juicy enough, I'll share it out our all hands. But we have a fair amount of like heard from customers Slack channel that like people kind of no matter who you are, what your role is like. If you have something good or bad that you want me or someone to have eyes on, people typically go there. But then I'm in pretty close contact with our field sales team just to make sure, like knowing that that's kind of the second area I'd look to see like hey, are you also hearing this? And then with our social team as well, we're kind of just all hey, if you see this or let us know. So the structure is as it comes in and then obviously like given, if it's something urgent, we need to move on, and it becomes a bit more organized.
Speaker 1:I've started talking to a handful of CX people. We work with a handful of CX folks and I've started to see this like trend where companies are really realizing, hey, like the person that runs customer experience is kind of I'm not really a huge, I runs customer experience is kind of I'm not really a huge, I don't really know that much about sports, but they're the sort of quarterback of the, of sort of the customer, like the customer journey almost, where oftentimes they work with product. Like it sounds like you work pretty heavily with the marketing team. You said CRM and brand on developing. Hey, this is customer education.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering, is there a big tie back to product as well? So, hey, we're seeing, you know, people complain about maybe it's not complaints, maybe it's hey, like I don't know, I I use a you know walmart brand uh lotion plus sunscreen and it leaves somewhat this like filmy residue on my skin and I'm like very I'm trying to find something that doesn't leave that kind of thing and I kind of wish that they had. You know, engineer the thing to make it less residue e but you kind of see what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do, and so your question is like how does that, how would relevant feedback like that tie back to, like our digital team or digital product team?
Speaker 1:uh, no, your actual, yeah, the actual product team that physical product physical product product team.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, listen, we're a customer centric brand and I think we're true to that in the sense that, like, sometimes we think we develop products that we think our customers will like and we don't always get it 100%. So, like, there have been times where we've reformulated a product based on, you know, feedback from our customers and you know, whether that be through reformula or launching a different version. Like, two of our best sellers are cult classic cleanser uh and our 24-7 moisture. Both have fragrance and have you know historically, and we consistently heard from customers like, oh, you know, I want to try this, but you know, I don't, my skin's sensitive and I don't use fragrance, so we created those products.
Speaker 3:So, like, I think, yes, we are keen, like, we have our ears to the ground and if all of our, if all of your customers are saying a similar thing, you you've got to listen to them. I mean, you can't expect the product to be like flying off the shelves if everyone who's buying it is giving you this feedback and you're not doing anything about it. So, that being said, you know some people just products don't work for everyone, and so I think you also have to be like how many people are saying this, and how many? How large? How much does that represent in terms of people who have actually bought and use the?
Speaker 1:product. That makes a lot of sense. Cool, I think we're coming up on time. Justin, this is a great, great episode. Thank you so much for coming. I think I have a lot of notes here and I'm really, really excited to, really excited to hear what comes out of it. Before you jump off any anything to pub any. Where can I listen? Where can our listeners find you? Where can they find Tula? Give us, give us whatever you have to pub.
Speaker 3:Sure, you can find us at Tulacom, at your local Ulta Sephora, on Amazon and, you know, I hope it gives you the glow you're looking for Perhaps. Maybe we can send you some STF and cleansers so that you are no longer suffering from your residue.
Speaker 1:My Walmart bread. Yes, exactly, sunscreen and lotion. Yeah, justin, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.