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Colin Crowley is the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, where he directs a two-hundred-person department across five locations in the United States and beyond. He specializes in building customer service departments from the ground up with a focus on scalability, infrastructure agility, technological innovation, and gold-standard quality and efficiency.
In this conversation, Colin shares the five key pillars of customer support that Freshly adopted, their cross-functional communication and how they involve customer service agents into their strategic process, how a voice of influence needs to have a good sense of the on the ground reality as well the strategic big picture, and more.
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Transcript
People of influence know that their voice matters and that they can make it matter more. I’m Andrea Wenburg, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Today, I’m speaking with Colin Crowley, the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, where he directs a two-hundred-person department across five locations in the United States and beyond. He specializes in building customer service departments from the ground up with a focus on scalability, infrastructure agility, technological innovation, and gold-standard quality and efficiency.
In this conversation, Colin is going to tell us a few things. You’re going to hear the five key pillars of customer support that Freshly adopted, and let me tell you right now that they are very applicable across customer experience. So, I really encourage you to listen and think about how you could apply some of these to your own company.
He talks about their cross-functional communication and how they involved customer service agents into their strategic process. And I ask a few direct questions about just how that plays out for them, and the benefit to both the customer service agent and to the organization and customer.
And then finally, he shares about how a voice of influence needs to have a good sense of the on the ground reality as well the strategic big picture.
Here’s my conversation with Colin about how Freshley’s focus on infrastructure allows them to grow fast.
Andrea: Colin, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Colin Crowley: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Andrea: Can you tell us a little bit about Freshly and your role there?
Colin Crowley: Sure. Freshly is a ready-made meal service that’s very active in what’s called the food tech space alongside companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh. We’re very different from those companies, though, because rather than shipping ingredients to customers that you can use to cook meals and have the experience of enjoying your kitchen, we ship ready-made meals that are already prepared.
So, essentially, you get the meals delivered in an insulated box, and you can pop them in the microwave for about three minutes. Or if you so desire, you could pop them in the oven instead if you don’t like the microwave, and then you’re all set and you’re ready to go. We really sit at the nexus of health and convenience, and we’re there to provide healthy meal options for consumers who otherwise are too busy in their lives or don’t have the time to get up and cook as much as they would like to or not like to as the case may be.
We know that there’s definitely the need for this sort of service in a very modern world like this that’s so very, very busy. We’re also healthy food, which I would define as all-natural and gluten-free. We’re actually the largest certified gluten-free meal producer in the country right now.
I’m the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, which is to say I’m in charge of our customer support function. We have approximately two hundred customer support agents, with some in the United States in New York and Arizona. And we also have two offices abroad that we use to supplement our customer support as well. We’re active on phone lines, webchat, email, text messaging, and even Apple Business Chats. So, we’re pretty active in all contact channels, and we’re available 24/7.
Andrea: I love the idea of your product. And it’s amazing to me how quickly you were able to scale and bring people on board in your customer experience function. How many people did you say are involved with that now?
Colin Crowley: We have approximately two hundred people.
Andrea: How do you help all of those people to not only… of course, they’re going to need to know about their product, your product and the answers that they need to provide, but to almost even be able to really represent you well as a brand?
Colin Crowley: Yeah. That’s actually a great question. A lot of what we did is we focused very early in growing customer support on infrastructure building. And I should also provide the caveat that when I joined Freshly, which was about four and a half years ago, we had just moved our headquarters to New York City. So, back then, we only had one other person in customer support, only a single person who’s answering all the phone calls and emails from Arizona.
So, I built up the team from the bottom up from there. So, we went from that one person in 2016 to about 12 people by the end of 2016, to about forty people by the end of 2017, and it’s just grown exponentially from there. We spent a lot of time investing very, very early in quality assurance at Freshly, knowing that if you really want to set standards for how you want your customers to be treated, it’s important to do so very early in the growth of a customer support organization.
Because once you grow an organization and you reach a certain size of even like fifty agents plus, it’s much harder to go back and then try to impose standards on those people almost as a second thought, because by then you have agents who have, you know, learned certain bad practices, let us say, and it’s just harder to get buy-in from agents on the ground. So, you really have to be proactive.
Very early on when we only had about six agents and this is at the end of 2015, I worked with the seniormost of those agents to establish a pretty intensive quality assurance program, which we’ve grown overtime to make it even more specific. But we really sat down to ask ourselves, “What do we value in the relationship with our customers, and what do our customers need from us as a customer support organization?”
And we define five key pillars of customer support. And then we ask questions like, “How do you realize those pillars in actuality as opposed to them being theoretical concepts?” So, one idea being that we focused on empathy as a key component, and of course, empathy is important in all aspects of customer service. But it’s especially important for us because we deal with the product, namely food, which is very personal and which directly impacts people’s health.
So, the ability to have a free-flowing, meaningful, friendly conversation with a customer support agent is important for our customers in particular, because they’re inviting us as a company into their lives in more intimate ways than perhaps if they were buying shoes. And we wanted to make sure that the customers felt comforted by that interaction, that we did the best we could to assist them.
Another example is that we are very conscious of the fact that as an organization, we were – and still are – in a very unique space where there really isn’t another company that’s doing what we’re doing – namely shipping fresh meals – not frozen on a national scale across all forty-eight states. Again, we have a lot of companies that are meal kit services, but we don’t really see companies that are actually in charge of such a vast operation in producing the meals themselves as opposed to outsourcing that to local vendors.
We are very conscious that customers may come into the relationship with us not quite knowing what service we provide and thinking we are a meal kit service. So, we put a lot of emphasis in our quality assurance program on what we call being outgoing or basically being proactive, and defining certain pieces of information that should be delivered to customers, even if it’s not directly relevant to the customer’s question or concern. That’s just making sure that customers fully understand the nature of our service, and that we’re trying to get ahead of future problems or future questions they may have rather than be reactive.
Andrea: I like that. So, what would one example be of an outgoing or proactive statement that you feel your customers would need to hear, even if that’s not what they’re necessarily calling about?
Colin Crowley: Sure. A perfect example is the fact that we’re a subscription service. So, you sign up with us, and you order a box of four, six, nine, or twelve meals that will actually be delivered every week. And of course, you choose the day of delivery that makes the most sense for you, and you can change that after the fact, and you can change your meals from week to week, etcetera. But we’re really designed to fit into someone’s lifestyle as opposed to being a one-time thing.
And of course, retention and loyalty is very important for us among our customers. It doesn’t mean that you get us every single week of your life because maybe you want to go and you do want to cook some weeks, etcetera, but we really aim to be a longer-term health solution for customers. But again, we have a lot of customers coming in not necessarily understanding the nature of our service.
And one thing that we identified early on is that we found customers were confused by the nature of the subscription process. One thing we do is we are a weekly subscription as opposed to a monthly, so when you order through us, we don’t kind of staple you into receiving meals for an entire month, but rather give you flexibility to skip week over week, which is meant to be more flexible for the customer. But it also can create more confusion because you have a quicker turnaround if you want to skip receiving meals one week and so forth.
So, we put as a standard in customer support that when you identify a customer as being a new customer – and we have definitions of what a new customer is; so you know, typically someone who’s on their first or their second order – and you have an interaction with those customers, you should proactively make sure that they are aware that we are a subscription service. And you should proactively assist them by mentioning the deadline that we have for every customer to either skip your next week or change your meals for your next week, knowing that that is a pain point for a lot of early customers who either don’t know we’re a subscription service or if they do, they may not be cognizant of how quickly they have to make decisions about what meals they want for the next week.
So, we’ve enforced that pretty regularly over the past four years. And it’s definitely helped us to get in front of problems and make sure customers have a better experience, because those customers that we’re informing about our subscription service are now less likely to be confused and suddenly they find that they’re charged.
Andrea: And were you able to kind of anticipate that ahead of time? You said it’s been going on for four years that you’ve been saying this particular thing, or is it something that you responded to once you realized there was a problem?
Colin Crowley: It’s something that we responded to when we realized it was a problem. It didn’t take long. I think that’s probably a truism, generally speaking, in customer support. I mean, in a lot of cases, data is important and the ability to collect data is obviously very important. But I think most companies probably find that the information about what your customers care about is pretty much there under your nose if you’re willing to spend just a little bit of time to find it.
So, it was very easy for us early on to identify, “Wow, these are some of the pain points that our customers have.” And it’s a logical pain point too because customer service challenges tend to go along with logic. So, we identified it reactively, so to speak, but it’s something that we acted to handle and address very quickly as well.
Andrea: Mm-hmm. So, would you mind sharing briefly the other three pillars?
Colin Crowley: Sure. So, aside from empathy and what we call outgoing, we also focus on interactions being clear, which we define as the agent making sure that they are fully understanding what the customer’s needs are. Because sometimes there could be ambiguity there, and if you don’t appropriately ask questions or appropriately understand what the customer needs, you can’t really address their concerns well.
So, making sure that the agent understands the customer’s concerns and also making sure in their response that they’re very clear; so removing unnecessary clutter from the communication, and not overwhelming the customer with information they may not need. And also, just making sure that – digitally speaking – if you’re writing an email to someone that it’s presented in such a way where it isn’t just this huge paragraph, but rather information is broken down where it’s more digestible.
Another pillar we have is a professional pillar, as we call it, which encompasses more of the standard QA type of stuff that a lot of companies engage in where we’re looking at spelling, and grammar, and syntax, and things of that nature. And we have certain standards as to what we expect from agents there and very typical phone etiquette. For example, also included under that last pillar we have is rational, which is to say we always want our agents to talk up and not down to customers, and explain to customers the reason that they may be limited in being able to assist so that we’re not just sitting there quoting policy at people, but we’re making sure that we’re explaining what we can and cannot do. And being honest and upfront in what we can and cannot do for them.
Andrea: Those are great. When you were first creating these pillars, was there… Do you have any tips for people who are looking at creating their own or refining their own? Do you have any specific things that you would suggest people look at?
Colin Crowley: Well, I think it’s definitely true that to some extent those pillars are relatively universal, where I think most organizations would discover that being clear, and being empathetic, and being professional and proactive, etcetera are all important characteristics of good customer support. But where I think it really may change from company to company is the weighting on where your emphasis is.
So, for instance, for us, empathy is important, to be outgoing and being proactive is very important, which is why they exist in separate pillars. And the fact that they exist as separate pillars is relevant because in our scoring system the pillars are all given equal weight, but you may have other companies that, you know, being outgoing is important. But there are other aspects of the service that are more important, especially if you’re in a very highly regulated, very sensitive field like a medical field or finance or what have you.
So, I can envision that in those particular cases, you may have other things that you want to weight appropriately, which are better justified as a pillar. So, I think it’s less that the principles are different and it’s more how you weight where your concerns are, because how you weight the concerns not only impacts how you handle scoring, but it also impacts what agents see because agents know what pillars we rate them on. And so, what we choose as pillars also is what is essentially a branded into the minds of agents as to what we overarchingly care about as an organization. So, it also helps to direct the people handling customer inquiries as to what you care most about as an organization.
Andrea: Okay. So, I know that Freshly is particularly good at cross-functional communication. Maybe in particular with your marketing department and customer experience departments; I’m curious, how do you guys pull together and do this cross-function communication well?
Colin Crowley: We adopt an approach that encourages what I would basically call a liaison with other departments and teams. So, as an example, one area which is relevant for a lot of companies now, because even companies that are brick and mortar stores now have an e-commerce component – so more and more companies, and more and more customer service departments are dealing with people in the product world and people in engineering to get anything done.
So, we have someone in the department who is our kind of niftily titled Associate Director of Infrastructural Efficiency. And his job is to serve as a conduit between the customer support world, and the engineering and the product world, where typically in a lot of companies, it’s very easy to have a wall that exists between customer support and engineering and product – and of course, customer support, really, and anyone; but, especially, when it comes to engineering and product.
So, this gentleman, who served as a supervisor for many years with us, has a great understanding of customer support operations. So, he brings that with him, and then he went through project management training. So, he also understands the nature of project management and he’s able to bring the customer support knowledge with him to serve as our voice in product and engineering discussions when it comes to our backlog, and items to prioritize, and various innovations to our backend order management system. And he, in turn, also works to coordinate more granular feedback.
So, we have this thing called pod, where customer support agents in all our locations can raise their hand and volunteer to be a member of this pod where they are given like sneak peak access, so to speak, at some of the technological developments coming down the pipe, be these changes to our website or changes to our backend order management system or anything of that nature. And they have the ability to test run those and to provide comments on them from a customer support perspective. So, maybe they notice that, you know, this feature could be confusing to customers based on our knowledge of what customers need.
So, they’re able to provide ground-level feedback to product people and engineers who otherwise would not have such an easy way to get that feedback, and at the same time, these agents – because they have a sneak-peek into these different innovations – they’re also able to be used as trainers when these changes go live. So, they can be there to assist other agents on the ground in understanding the nature of any new features that are premiered and make the learning curve a little less steep. So that model has been very successful with us in terms of bridging the gap.
Andrea: How do you choose the people… or you said that they volunteered themselves to be in the pod?
Colin Crowley: Yes. In the case of the agents, they volunteer. So, it’s on a quarterly basis. So, every quarter, we send out an invitation for agents to raise their hands. And they have to go through, like, not a too onerous application process, but they do have to spend some time explaining why they would be a good candidate to be in this pod. And, you know, we’re looking for people who had opinions, and we’re looking for people who are good at expressing opinions. And we’re looking for people who have some degree of tenure; if not with us, just with customer service generally, so they’d be a good advocate or voice for the customer.
And of course, we’re looking for people across our different offices, because we know that different people in different locations can bring different observations to the field. So, it’s literally a form that agents fill out, and they volunteer themselves, and there’s an internal discussion as to who would be best suited. And when you’re chosen, you’re in the position of being in this pod for a quarter. And you can reapply at the end of the quarter if you so desire, but at least it gives the opportunity for new people to join the fray and to have their voice heard.
Andrea: Have you had any feedback from the people that have participated in pods in the past and their sense of loyalty or importance of how they feel about Freshly?
Colin Crowley: Oh yeah, definitely. I would say that it’s a huge benefit in a lot of ways aside from the informational benefit I mentioned where people in product and engineering get more on the ground feedback from people who actually deal with customers. But yeah, it is definitely a morale booster for agents because it’s very typical at a lot of organizations where customer support people are kind of isolated in the corner someplace and aren’t particularly consulted on much. And it’s not particularly unusual for customer support people to feel less valued than other people in an organization.
So, having something like this is really important because it helps these agents not to feel isolated and really to feel that they’re part of a larger organization with a larger purpose and a common objective. And it also helps, of course, because it enables people to feel that rather than just being reactive… which customer support people often feel is their lot in life because they’re dealing with issues from customers that are the result of changes made by someone in product or someone in marketing, or someone someplace else.
So, you kind of get this overwhelming feeling that you’re at the bottom of the hill, and everything’s flowing down to you, and there’s not much you can do to change that. This really puts them… not really in the driver’s seat, but it put them in the passenger seat at least, where you have the ability to impact what the company is doing and some of the decisions its making.
Andrea: Yeah, I really love that. I love that it also sounds like [it] kind of gives them the sense that their voice really does matter in not just with a particular customer, but within the context of the whole organization.
Colin Crowley: Definitely, definitely. And especially as, you know, like I said, our customer support organization is laid out all over the place. So, it’s not like even within Freshly we have one location where our customer support people live and breathe, but rather we have New York, we have Arizona and then we have two locations abroad. And even within the US, we have many people who work remotely, and I think that’s true in more and more companies. I mean, especially now, unfortunately, as a result of COVID-19, we have so many people working remotely.
But that’s just a truism for a lot of companies, and that just creates more challenges for anyone in an organization, but especially customer support people to feel that they’re a part of something larger. So we’ve found getting more customer support involvement through this pod process and through having designated liaison to the different areas of the business has been very successful.
Andrea: Yeah, it sounds great. Okay, so then another practical question. How do they receive this information and share back their ideas? Is this through a virtual medium? Is that through a group, or how do you do that?
Colin Crowley: Right. It’s usually through scheduled meetings weekly or bi-weekly. And of course, we make a lot of use of instant messaging. So, some of the feedback that agents provide when they’re testing a new product is through instant messaging; or if one of our product managers has an open question, then he’ll ask it broadly in a special instant messaging channel we have, specifically for this pod, and he’ll be able to get responses from the agents. So, it’s usually either through meetings for more official types of communications – like the premiering a new product or what have you – and then in between, there’s a lot of messaging back and forth.
Andrea: So, if giving people the opportunity to share their ideas and share their ideas with other people in other areas of the company is an important thing for you, how does that work when you’re training managers or directors? What are the kinds of characteristics do you look for in somebody when you’re hiring? And then also, do you have any particular things that you do to encourage them in these in this area?
Colin Crowley: Well, I would say one thing, which has definitely been consistently true… And this is true even of our hiring practices for agents, I would say as well is that we traditionally haven’t looked for people who are solely backgrounded in like call centers or contact centers. We found that the ideal candidate – and again, this is true for managers too – is generally someone who has some sort of mix between the two, where they have a background in contact centers so they can appreciate some of the nuances and context in our policy.
Like attendance policy, as an example, which – if you’re not coming from the industry – can appear too strict and too stringent, but makes sense if you understand the industry. So, that’s important, to get that ground-level understanding, but it’s also important to get someone who spent time outside the contact center because it’s true that a lot of contact centers may not be the best environments.
So, people can become very jaded being in the contact center environment too much in a company that didn’t particularly invest a lot in their customer service people. So, we also want to make sure that we get people with experience that’s a little bit broader from that. So, as a result, we try to have a balance between those two characteristics.
The gentleman who is the Associate Director for Infrastructural Efficiency, he’s someone who has a background in customer service, but it wasn’t initially in the commerce space but rather more in the face to face customer service space. So, he had great knowledge and great understanding of customer support, even though it wasn’t in an e-commerce context. And he also had a background in sports management, so a different field outside of customer support. So, it’s kind of a good example of someone who has a good balance.
I think another thing, broadly speaking is – especially when it comes to managers – looking for people who are just good at relating to other people generally. Because a lot of the goals we’ve set for our leaders to remove organizational silos really depends on people being good team players, and good team players meaning that they have the ability to build relationships and communicate their point of view, but also understand the point of view of others. And that, of course, is a quality you can’t really train someone, per se, or at least it’s very difficult to train them. So, there’s been a big emphasis on choosing leaders who are at heart very collaborational and who show a history of being collaborational in their past, I would say.
Andrea: Well, this has been really good. I feel like there are many other questions I could keep asking you, Colin. Let me kind of close with this particular question. When you think about yourself, you think about the people that you look to as a voice of influence in your own life, do you have any particular advice for somebody who really does want to have a voice of influence?
Colin Crowley: Yes, I think a few things that I would say are pretty key… the first is, broadly speaking, you have to know what you’re talking about. And I would define that specifically as having some sort of balance between being a manager, so you’re not in the weeds, but at the same time making sure that you connect yourself to on the ground realities because you really need a balance of both to be able to go and advocate for your organization when it matters. Because if you’re too far above the weeds and too much in strategy, then you’ll miss the operational nuances that are essential for your organization to smooth functionally and not appropriately represent those when it matters. And of course, if you’re too much in the weeds, then you can’t see the big picture and you won’t be taken seriously when it comes to the larger strategic meetings.
So, you really need someone who strategically maintains certain anchors in on the ground realities. I would say a second thing is you really have to focus a good deal on data if you want to have a voice of influence; because the great thing about data is if it’s done correctly, data is like a universal language. So, it’s a bit like music to some extent where you can have English, and French, and Spanish, etcetera; and you can get a bunch of people in a room and they can’t communicate together, but music is universal. And data is universal – where if you start talking about values and principles and theories with someone who’s in marketing or product and engineering, then you’ll get all sorts of different opinions in certain areas that are crucial.
But when you talk data, data is like a common language where as long as you’re tracking the right data points and you can make a case with data, you can get across to someone your position much better than if you argue theory. So that also is another important thing. I would say the last thing that strikes me as being pretty key is really to be a good listener. I think a lot of people [who] lose their ability to have a voice of influence, that they spend too much time talking.
And I would say this not only with colleagues in different departments… which, of course, is important to listen so you understand where they’re coming from, because sometimes a lot of communication challenges are created because there’s just a lack of understanding of someone else’s position and the relevance of that position. But also being a good listener within your organization so that people under you are able to surface the issues that matter and then have a substantive impact in on the ground reality.
So, if you have a good understanding of that and you’re willing to listen, it puts you in a much better position to be able to speak and makes other people more likely to listen to you in turn because they register that you’re taking their concerns seriously.
Andrea: Love it. Okay, Colin, is there any place that you would like to direct the listener to either find Freshly or even follow you?
Colin Crowley: Definitely. Firstly, it’s nice and easy, freshly.com. We’re up and running and doing very, very well during this period of time. And we know especially now with the COVID-19 that the interest in getting healthy meals delivered to your door is more frequent than ever. So, you can visit us right there, and we’d be honored to have people sign up. I’m freely available on LinkedIn, so people are more than happy to message me and connect, and I’d be happy to start some great conversations.
Andrea: Great! And we will link to that all those things in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being a voice of influence for our listeners today, Colin.
Colin Crowley: Thank you. I appreciate it.