Today’s interview is with Nick Misewicz, Customer Success Manager at Pura Vida Bracelets. The company was founded in Costa Rica in 2010 and is headquartered in La Jolla in California. They sell hand-crafted bracelets and jewelry online and through boutique stores. Their bracelets and jewellery are made by 800+ artisans worldwide with the proceeds going back to the artisans. Nick joins me today to talk about how they scaled their customer support and increased agent productivity without compromising on employee or customer satisfaction.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The current crisis has put a very pragmatic lens onto digital transformation – Interview with Tom Libretto of Pega – and is number 344 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

While PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems just taken place (June 2nd) you can still view the sessions on-demand so do head over to www.pegaworld.com to check them out.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Nick:

• Pura Vida, translated in Spanish means Pure Life.
• Pura Vida was able to decrease Average Email Response Time by switching to a new model of 24/7 email support, 12-hour phone support, and removing live chat.
• Nick was able to drop Pura Vida’s “First Reply Time” from 33+ hours to 4 hours (quickly responding to the majority of their inquiries which came in after standard business hours) and significantly increase their CSAT and NPS.
• Nick restructured teams by channels – In addition to creating an upper management team (Account Manager + 3 Team Leads [QA, Training and Continuing Education, Channel Operations, + Admin/Local HR Relations]), Nick restructured the rest of their team by channel (Email, Voice, and Chat) with a “lead” who handles questions and/or customer escalations. Creating channel-specific groups has allowed them to better serve their customers as well as to streamline employees’ responsibilities, and scale and train new employees during their busy season. It also allowed them to turn LiveChat back on as they could properly resource it.
• To transform the team into true advocates for their customers, Nick changed his department’s title to the Customer Advocacy Team and his team members from Customer Service Representatives to Customer Advocates. Nick also implemented daily morning meetings + encourages frequent communication between channels over Slack to help share updates and spot trends – which creates a culture of healthy + effective communication across every level, while empowering each respective team to own + resolve the issues that arise.
• His whole team were given and have  read the book: A Complaint Is A Gift.
• The general shelf life of a customer service rep is about a year so after 12 months they want more. So, you have keep growing and developing them and the work they do.
• Most people say they want to achieve simplicity but many keep adding channels without removing or archiving any.
• 75% of our incoming volume is email right now with the rest split between chat and the phone. However, the phone has been lower than trend in recent months.
• In terms of the response to the coronavirus pandemic, their outsourcer moved quickly to move to remote working making sure that all staff had the right devices and internet availability at home. They even offered to pay to have everyone’s internet upgraded.
• In discussion with their remote teams they agreed to up their QA and CSAT KPIs and scrutiny during this time to make sure that they were achieving consistency and maintaining a high level of performance. In parallel, they upped their level of one-on-one coaching to once a day to improve their support of their remote agents.
• As a result, their performance has stuck at 83 out of a 100 for NPS and 4.8/4.9 out of 5 for CSAT.
• Their experience with their outsourcer has been great and while Pura Vida is only one of their accounts they were able to transition over 3000 of their employees to work from home within a week.
• However, they also started hyper communicating early in January with their team around the likely impact of the virus as well as implementing heightened hygiene standards like hand-washing, hand sanitizers, cleaning and wiping down work stations after each shift etc.
• Nick focused on making sure the transition for the team was comfortable as possible. To do that he made sure he understood as much as he could about their new, home working environment and made sure that they developing a good new home working routine that included taking breaks and making sure that the team were still remembering to go to lunch.
• We need to be careful about some of the assumptions that we make around working from home (WFH).
• The more that you know about someone who works for you, their living situation and their interests outside of work, for example, then the more able you will be able to get the best out of them.
• This crisis is forcing companies to make changes that they never would have thought possible before including large scale automation that it is changing the landscape of the worker and the job.
• But, we should bear in mind that we are social creatures and will always value human connection.
• We won’t recognize what we’ve lost until we actually start missing it.
• Nick’s best advice: Do everything you can to spoil your team. For example, on International Women’s Day all of the women on the team (90% of the team) all had roses waiting for them when they walked into the office.
• Pura Vida’s credo: We are fun, We are happy. We are excited to make people smile, and that mantra has made it so much easier for us.
• So, find what makes your team happy and do it tenfold and do it every day and find new things to make them happy, because when you put a smile on their face guaranteed that’s going to translate to the next time they talked to a customer. Regardless of how that communication goes.
• Nick’s Punk CX word(s): Treating every individual like they’re a rock star
• Nick’s Punk CX brand: Tesla

About Nick

Nick Misewicz is the Customer Success Manager at Pura Vida Bracelets.

Pura Vida Bracelets was founded in Costa Rica in 2010 and is now headquartered in La Jolla in California. They sell hand-crafted bracelets and jewelry online and through boutique stores. Their bracelets and jewellery are made by 800+ artisans worldwide.

Nick describes himself as a leader in support and smiles.

He has an Associate of Arts (AA) degree in History and a BA in History from Arizona State University (ASU).

Check out Pura Vida Bracelets, say Hi to them on Twitter and Instagram @puravidabrac and @puravidabracelets and feel free to connect with Nick on LinkedIn here.

 
Image by 💛 Passt gut auf euch auf und bleibt gesund! 💛 from Pixabay