Brett Frazer is Head of Customer Service at Sun Basket, a San Francisco-based healthy meal kit delivery company that was founded in 2014 and has grown rapidly since. At Sun Basket, he leads all aspects of the company’s customer service function and works directly with the organization’s C-suite and senior leaders. He has over 20 years of experience working with multinational organizations and startups to design, build or enhance their customer service processes. Regardless of role, position or organization, the focus and passion of his work has always been to create experiences that not only keep customers coming back but also lead them to recommend others to join them. Prior to joining Sun Basket in 2016, Brett was Director of Client Services at Sutherland Global Services, where he managed accounts for Microsoft and Postmates. Before that, he led Asia Pacific customer service and support organizations for Adobe and Microsoft. Additionally, Brett is a member of the Corporate Advisory Board of Execs In The Know, a global network of customer experience professionals. He also leads the organization’s Gig Economy focus group, which helps companies understand the power of incorporating the passion, knowledge and brand affinity of their existing customers and then leverage these attributes for their customer experience talent pool. A native of New Zealand, Brett has lived and worked in five countries, and is also an international award-winning photographer.

Interviewed by Uma Mageshwari

/ / How has the contact center function evolved in your company over the past few years?

There have been three core elements in the evolution of our contact center:

• Deepening the capability to provide the voice of our customers back into our product, marketing and operations teams.
• Expanding the channels through which our customers can contact us for support, and now starting to direct them to the channels that other customers have indicated are most successful in assisting with their specific issues.
• Utilizing technology to provide more customers the capability to self-resolve or have AI-assisted resolutions to their issues.

/ / What challenges do you face while planning your contact center strategy?

The first challenge, as with many organizations, is coordination across our company on what the ideal customer experience is across all touchpoints – our web experience, our food experience and our support experience. Once that is defined, it is then prioritizing the best balance of people and technology-related inputs to achieve that cohesive experience on a budget.

To be effective in the two outcomes above involves assessing your current and future customers’ expectations, the capabilities of your current people and technology infrastructure, as well as the short- and long-term advancements in technology that are expected.

Without this knowledge, it is hard to know what not to commit to, as much as what to. Even then it is hard to always predict every outcome along the way, so it requires the ability to adapt when commitments need to change.

/  / What are the key metrics you track to gauge the performance of your contact center?

There are three basic areas that most KPIs fall under in the contact center space – cost, quality and speed.

As we break these down for Sun Basket for cost, the primary two measures are cost per contact and cost per box sold. Quality has three components – customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction and quality monitoring accuracy. For speed, while we measure our response times across our channels, the single roll-up measurement I focus on is cases per hour per agent.

/ / What is the scope of cloud customer support in this industry?

The big focus on cloud has been the evolution of technology away from perpetual on-premise software deployments and data storage to subscription-based technologies that live in the cloud and are “always on.” This covers customer relationship management (CRM) systems, telephony solutions, quality monitoring/call recording systems, etc.

/ / Have you implemented an omnichannel approach in your contact center yet? What are the key areas you need to focus on while implementing an omnichannel approach?

Omnichannel is a very interesting topic that has a wide scope of meaning in the industry. In the purest sense of the word, we believe it means that if as a customer I start a conversation with a company through a particular channel, say chat, and I then decide to call to complete that conversation, the same “case” that I stated in chat would be presented automatically to the agent who answers my phone call and they can seamlessly pick up where the chat agent finished off.

What we have implemented at Sun Basket is a single CRM system into which all interactions that our customers have with us (across SMS, chat, phone, social and web feeds) are fed. Our agents have access to all the customers’ prior contacts, so that if a customer chooses to change channels within an issue, while a new case would be created in the system, by reading the prior interaction notes, a new agent can pick up and continue assisting that customer with as little friction as possible.

For Sun Basket, we have been lucky in that we are a relatively young organization. So, we have been able to build this integration from scratch. Organizations that have been around for 10-plus years find this harder when trying to integrate new support channels, like messaging, into their legacy systems.

/ / Has AI been introduced in your contact center? If it has, when was it introduced and how exactly has it helped your company?

We began utilizing AI in two capacities in 2018. First, from a customer-facing perspective, we have a chatbot, Sunny B, that helps to automate several common questions that customers have around their membership, deliveries or issues they may experience with the ingredients they receive. We started with a basic option-select bot and we are now in the final stages of rolling out our natural language process capabilities to allow our customers to have regular “conversations” with Sunny B. Once this is successfully in chat, we will extend it to our SMS channel.

On the backend, we have started integrating RPA (robotics process automation) tasks that allow us to automate actions or full cases. In some situations, we have the RPA backend enabling the AI chat functionality on the frontend.

The result of this: providing customers more opportunities to resolve their questions without having to speak to our team members. For our agents, it helps to remove some of the highly repetitive work and lets them focus on the more interesting and complex questions. Both outcomes help us reduce our cost.

/ / Which platform does your contact center currently function on? Why did you choose that platform?

We have three core platforms that we utilize – Genesys PureCloud, Sprout Social and SalesForce ServiceCloud. ServiceCloud is the primary CRM in which all our case data is stored and integrates with our proprietary customer platform. It is also where all our web, email and chat/chatbot cases natively occur. Sprout Social is our tool for managing our interactions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and for core customer cases, it integrates with ServiceCloud through APIs. PureCloud is our telephony and SMS system, again pushing case data into ServiceCloud through APIs.

We selected ServiceCloud primarily for its capability to easily capture and report on multiple problems in a single case. This is key in providing us with accurate performance data that is fed back to our distribution centers, as well as our Marketing, Product and Kitchen teams. Also, there are many other capabilities natively available within the product, including chat, bot and advanced reporting capabilities. This allows us to keep our product stack linked to a vital few providers.

When we were looking for a telephony provider, we wanted a cloud-based solution, as against an on-premise solution, and one that easily integrated with ServiceCloud. After evaluating a number of different providers, we decided that PureCloud best fit our needs. We reevaluate every year and continue to find that this product matches our requirements.

/ / What are the most effective ways in which your contact center captures customer feedback?

The primary method of capturing customer feedback is through a robust coding system that allows us to identify the reason, sub and sub-sub reason for which each customer had to contact us.

We utilize this information, not only for opportunities to improve the experience other customers run into while dealing with the same or similar problems, but more importantly, as a mechanism to provide feedback to our Marketing, Product, Kitchen and Operations teams. This helps them prioritize customer experience cases to stop or reduce those problems.

/  / What are the pain points with respect to delivery in your contact center?

This is where our post-service surveys come into play. We keep our survey to six questions, including a verbatim option. We then review the verbatim of both high- and low-scoring results, looking for any dissatisfaction that a customer mentions. After that, we categorize them, not only for what we can control within the contact center, but also for issues that are relevant to the other departments. The pain points that are related to our direct customer service control usually relate to the completeness of the solution provided, timeliness of response, personalization (or lack thereof) of the response and the amount of effort a customer believes he/she had to put in for solving the issue.

/ / What are the trends/technologies that you think will drive the contact center industry in the future? How should businesses gear up for this?

While there are many evolving areas in the contact center space, the three key trends that I believe will drive the future are

• The integration of human intelligence and AI. While AI technology will certainly be a driver in resolving many customer needs going forward, it is not a panacea that will eliminate the need for human intelligence, empathy and reassurance. All generations have certain areas in which they prefer a live connection with another person.
• The evolution of the gig worker economy within the global talent sphere is also changing things. It’s a combination of technology making it easier for people to work from anywhere; an increased desire across all generations for variety in work activities, locations, challenges and durations; and the realization that there is great knowledge and brand affinity that a company’s loyal customers have and that they may look for opportunities to work with companies they admire. Companies will begin to engage these loyal customers to help other customers.
• Expanding the value of customer service data into Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs for end-to-end customer experience improvement. Customer insights obtained through customer service are often the untapped goldmine for VoC and are relevant to every area of a customer’s interaction with your product or service. Part of the problem in the past has been to come up with techniques to assemble all the structured and unstructured data in a way so that this data can be easily translated into a customer story. Improvements in data mining and aggregating technology will make it easier to bring this wealth of insight to light.