The CX Leader Podcast: "CX for Small Businesses": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "CX for Small Businesses": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Pat:
When we talk about customer experience, it's often within the context of medium and larger sized companies.

Rebecca:
We have customers that started their business because of something that they love to do and it might not necessarily be interacting with customers that is the thing that they are super passionate about, but they might not be the best at answering their phone or following up on leads that come to them. And those things matter.

Pat:
How small businesses can improve their end to end customer experience. On this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Pat:
Hello, everyone, I'm Pat Gibbons. I'm the guest host of The CX Leader Podcast. Thank you for listening today. We like to say it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of customer experience. And what's more, it helps your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. You know, it can be argued that small businesses make up the backbone of the U.S. economy. In fact, according to a survey conducted by the Small Business Administration released in 2019, small businesses generated forty four percent of the U.S. economic activity and created two thirds of the net new jobs. Now, granted, those numbers may change given the reality of the COVID pandemic, but it still underscores the importance of small businesses in the U.S. But how does customer experience work in a small business? We've talked to many businesses and many customer experience leaders from larger companies, but in a small business it's different. They have limited resources and within small businesses, how can they make certain the customer's journey is frictionless? Joining me on this episode is Rebecca Grimes, chief revenue officer at Ruby, which provides small businesses with services, products and analytics to manage customer interactions and deliver exceptional experiences. Rebecca, thank you for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Rebecca:
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here today.

Pat:
Now you interact with a lot of small businesses, right?

Rebecca:
Yes, every day.

Pat:
In fact, if we were sitting around saying, you know what? We should talk to someone that really has lots of thoughts and opinions on experiences at small businesses. I think it sounds like you're a pretty good contact for that, right?

Rebecca:
I would say so. And also my first job in high school was working for a small business as well. And so it dates back way many more years than I'm willing to admit on this podcast.

Pat:
Well, that's great. Well, you know, from what what I've learned about Ruby, it's a fascinating business. Give us a little context and tell us a little bit about your organization.

Rebecca:
Yeah. You know, Ruby is an incredibly special company, and I joined in January of last year right before the pandemic and so grandiose plans for all the things we were going to do last year. And at its core, Ruby creates more opportunities for our customers by making meaningful and timely connections with their clients across any channel. So think about answering calls or responding to website chat interactions so that they can win new business, build trust and foster loyalty. And when the pandemic hit, those things all became more increasingly important as they started to navigate a work from home environment and a distributed workforce. And we're very proud of not only the support that we've provided small businesses that are our customers, but the new customers that that have found Ruby over the last 20 months and and the growth that they've achieved because of that.

Pat:
Yeah, it's it was fascinating just hearing, you know, you've got some interesting information on your website, and I hear that it kind of genuine nature of some of the people. They must interact with so many different types of people and organizations. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about the breadth of your business and how many clients you have that you represent.

Rebecca:
Yes, Ruby has been in business for 18 years and we work with more than thirteen thousand small businesses and we have over seven hundred rubies that all come to work every day in service of our small business community and the way that we like to think about it as our people are, our secret sauce, combined with our technology that enables anybody on our team to act as an extension of that small business. And so you might be calling your local HVAC company and actually talking to a member of the Ruby team, and you would never know it. By design, we have an entire staff through our technology that can flip from supporting talking to an attorney, a legal office to an HVAC, to a plumber, to a fence contractor, to a COVID testing facility. So all over the place, when you think about small businesses that we could support, we have a way that we again very chameleon like behind the scenes are answering and interacting and not a traditional answering service. We have FAQ's. We have ways to do intake. And are you a new customer or are you looking to get an update on an existing relationship that you have with this small business? And so we affectionately are called rubies by by not only our internal teams, but by our customers as well?

Pat:
Oh no, it's fascinating. I mean, 13,000 businesses. Like I said, we have someone that interacts a lot with small businesses. So I'm curious customer experience at a small business level, it probably works in an entirely different way. And I think, you know, we were talking a little bit ahead of time entrepreneurs that that start a business. They're not always thinking ahead to what kind of experience I'm delivering. Is that what you found?

Rebecca:
It is. I mean, we have, you know, customers that started their business because of something that they love to do and it might not necessarily be interacting with customers that is the thing that they are uber passionate about. If they have started a landscaping business, what might bring them joy is creating an outdoor oasis for their customers, but they might not be the best at answering their phone or following up on leads that come to them. And those things matter, especially in this heightened post-pandemic customer expectation world that we're now living in, where you combine customer expectations with a workforce that is fatigued and understaffed and under-resourced. You now have this this challenge of immediacy that one needs are not met, and we know that 70 percent of consumers are going to make a decision within one hour of deciding that they are going to buy something or hire a service to do something for them. And so moments really matter, and that small business isn't necessarily building a business with that context in mind.

Pat:
Mm hmm. And in that, you know that call that your staff takes that interaction, it can make a huge difference in a person's day, right?

Rebecca:
I mean, it can are our people are hired because they are empathetic and they are trained to potentially de-escalate a frustrated caller or or be that kind of friendly counter balance to make sure that they're capturing the information. If you think about, you know, an HVAC technician, they could be in the guts of, you know, replacing equipment and then trying to capture or call in the middle of that, they aren't able to provide dedicated, devoted attention to that interaction and make sure that they are meeting that customer where they're at. It could be a crisis situation. It could be really cold outside and they have no heat and they have a newborn. And so, you know, missing that call or answering that call without again providing undivided attention, that's really hard for a solo entrepreneur to manage or even, you know, a small crew of four to five people. And so taking that responsibility on, you know, means that we are an extension of that brand. We are representing that brand. We take that very seriously and trust being established at not only the beginning of a relationship, but every interaction that you have with that customer, whether they're in a buying cycle or in a referring cycle to you really does matter.

Pat:
Yeah, that was something I was kind of where I was headed was, you know, every experience a customer has goes through a whole journey, you know, from, like you said, their decision to go with a particular company, a problem that they might be having with the service all the way to, in some cases, renewing or using them again. You span that whole journey. What do you I guess, what do you see as far as the importance of having a good, consistent journey along the way for a small business? And how hard is that for them to attain?

Rebecca:
Yeah, that whole customer journey experience is really critically important, in my opinion. And here's here's why. As a consumer researching businesses to meet a specific need, everything that you find on that business either validates or invalidate your decision to move forward. So that could be doing online research, scanning social media or actually trying to engage with that business in in an outbound way. And so thirty five percent of the time when you encounter a situation where your expectations were not met or you weren't treated the way you wanted to be. You talk about it, you leave a comment, you leave a review and you make it known that you were not happy. And it's going to take 12 positive experiences to counteract that one negative experience that exists out there. And if you're a small business potentially only servicing a dozen customers a week, that's a lot of good that you have to do to cancel out that one bad experience. And so not only do we take that incredibly seriously, but we also understand that as a small business, you don't have millions of interactions. So one, you know, disgruntled customer, no big deal to a large, you know, retail brand. But to that small business, sometimes that could lead to, you know, word of mouth referrals missed opportunities from that. And one of your strongest growth channels. And there's there's this changing dynamic for small businesses where their social media platforms and ratings and review platforms have created a megaphone for people to share their experiences. And that's a dynamic that is new that now needs to be managed by small businesses as well. It's different than when you had yellow pages and you opened up Yellow Pages and everybody was trying to be AAA plumbing because I wanted to be at the top of the list. That's not how it works anymore. It is incredibly different.

Pat:
No, you know you're you're absolutely right. I think it's fascinating how the whole referral industry has evolved. I know for a fact, you know, I was just talking with my wife the other day, we were talking about having our chimney cleaned. And so what's the first thing we do while we either look for referrals or we've got a little neighborhood social media platform and we put a message out who's used a chimney sweep that they like, you know, and people will chime in and say, I didn't like these, you know, and it could be for any number of reasons, but you know, they need to have that consistent experience across the board.

Rebecca:
Yeah, yeah. And when you see those people are sometimes even like piling on or counter balancing the the negative feedback or the positive feedback where that wasn't my experience, I had this experience. And so again, you have the opportunity to, you know, to crowdsource feedback before you even made a purchase decision, which is is so incredible if you think about it. But you know, it's also something that you don't you don't think about when you're starting a small business as an entrepreneur about how critical that could be to your growth trajectory.

Producer:
Hello CX Leader Podcast fans. Chris Higgins here, producer of The CX Leader Podcast, and I want to take a moment to thank you for listening. Just like any other CX professional, we here at The CX Leader Podcast want to make certain we're offering what you need. Take a minute to go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey to let us know how we're doing. You might even be able to score some CX Leader Podcast swag. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback. We can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Pat:
Today, we're talking to Rebecca Grimes. She is the chief revenue officer at Ruby, and they work with all kinds of small businesses. We're having a fascinating discussion about small businesses and their impact on customer experience. So Rebecca, you interact with so many businesses and you have so many clients, but you also have personal experiences. Can you give us an example where you had a great customer experience from a small business?

Rebecca:
I have a great example to share. You know, I was recently sideswiped in a parking lot and it was mostly like surface and paint damage. And so I don't want to go through my insurance, but I knew that I needed to get it fixed. And so I, you know, went online and started looking for a detail shop to do some color repair and do some buffing out. And so similar to you to my local Facebook community group and just did a quick search of detail shops and found a whole list of folks and started making calls to them. You know, some never got back to me. Some tried to push a price on me to either qualify me in or out or you're willing to spend this kind of money with us. Otherwise we don't take your business. But one in particular stood out and just said, Why don't you swing by? I'm local within a couple of miles from your house and we'll talk over what your options would be. And so just out of the gate, there was this disarming empathy that he provided to the situation that I was in. Let's have you instead of me, try to do something over the phone and guess, let's get you an accurate kind of estimate of what this what this could look like. He was prompt. He was responsive, and I ended up doing business with him after going through what my options are. So he said it was a busy week. He wasn't going to get to me till next week. But he established this trust and honesty and authenticity right out of the gate that I was willing to wait until the following week to work with him. So when I picked up my car, not only had he done the work and manage expectations, it wasn't going to look perfect, but he was going to do his best. And I brought in the touch up paint so that he can match the paint where he needed to. But he cleaned the inside of my car; didn't charge me for it. Didn't ask me ahead of time, but said I wanted you to experience, obviously, I got sideswiped and this was an unexpected, crappy thing that happened to me and he wanted me to experience like I was driving the car off the lot again. And so he went that extra mile to manage to my expectations and then exceed my expectations. And it just it left a lasting impression on me that not only will I be an advocate for him, but then I'm I'm going to go out of my way to be an advocate for him. And so what that looked like for me was, I went on social media and I created my own post, and I shared before and after photos, I tagged his small business. I talked about the work that I needed to have done, and I talked about him as a small business owner because I love to do this. I love to talk to small businesses, and I'm like, How did you get started? What drove you to wanting to detail cars? And he got laid off in the middle of a pandemic last year and said, I'm betting on myself and I hear that and I love that, and it warms my heart when I think about why I get up out of bed every day. It's because there is some company just like him that is getting started and they are going to need help. And seven out of ten small businesses don't last ten years. And I think Ruby is a competitive advantage, and we aim to change those outcomes for small businesses. And this this, I'm confident this gentleman got business because of my post. I had folks asking like, What did you pay and how how bad really was the damage? Because I don't see much damage from those photos. He worked miracles. Can he do that for me? And and just this dialog started, and now it's forever online. Somebody in the future is going to go look for a post similar to the post that I found, and they're going to see this. And like that is the dynamics and the difference that you have to contend with. If it had gone a different direction, if he had managed expectations, that he was going to buff out most of it out. And I showed up and it looked the same and I just spent all this money with him. I would have talked about it potentially. And you know, and and so I think that that word of mouth and small business is really an interesting dynamic and customer experience is right at the center of that. Either you're awesome or you're not.

Pat:
Well, and it's a great example, first of all, and it highlights the opportunities that small businesses have because given that they are smaller, given that sometimes they're solo owned or, you know, whatever, it's not like they have to go through a an entire process to develop or get approvals up the ladder. They have the authority to go out and deliver a great experience. They just have to kind of have that attitude that I really want to, in that case, I want this person to feel like they're driving off the lot. What a refreshing approach. And to know that it's things like that that can build their business or tear it, tear it down, really so totally.

Rebecca:
And the reason why he did it is because he's passionate, and that's what we find day in and day out when we talked to small business owners. They are passionate. They got into doing what they're doing, not by accident, by choice. They've made a decision to be part of the local community and to deliver services even when the odds are stacked against them. And I think that that's where, you know, I go back to my roots when I was in high school working for that small business. You know, I had this fantasy at the time of how, you know, the optometrist that I work for was this rich, this rich man. And he owned two locations, and I saw him at the end of the night never writing a check to himself, making sure everybody else was paid, which probably left very little for him at the end of the day, and that we find that day in and day out with our small businesses that we work with, like they are doing this because they are passionate about it. They don't have know whimsical dreams of becoming millionaires and retiring. They do things that they love to do.

Pat:
So if I'm curious, you know, given those examples and taking it outside of your business, let's say that you're talking to someone who's considering starting their own business. Maybe they like baking. Maybe they like working on cars and they say, You know, I think I'm passionate about this. I'm going to go out and I'm going to start this up. When it comes to the perspective of customer experience, what advice would you chime in and say, you know, have you thought about this?

Rebecca:
Yeah, I mean, we talked about managing expectations a lot, and I think trust loyalty and managing expectations all go hand in hand. And so, you know, I have a local plumber that I trust explicitly, but he is not great at customer experience. But I've known that the entire time I have used his services. I value his honesty, his availability, his fairness of price. And that overindex is on the fact that sometimes I'm going to get a grumpy plumber on the other end that doesn't want to talk to me who's under a sink, and I didn't know he was under a sink. And why do you want? And so I know that about him and I accept that because I value these other things. But somebody new that's calling him for the first time has no trust established, doesn't know that you know that I'm likely catching him in the middle of a job and their their tolerance and their expectations are likely very different than what my expectations are. And so it really is about managing expectations. And it really, you know, when I think about it, it starts from mapping out what you want people to say about you and then working backwards into how you can deliver that experience and having an honest conversation. Am I best suited to deliver that experience? Am I going to be able to have people say those things about me? Not because I want them to say it, but because demonstrably they see me do those things and I earn the right for them to say that about my business.

Rebecca:
And so when you when you unwind that and you work backwards, then you have an honest conversation about how does that get done? Is it as simple as, you know, I'm never going to answer my calls. I'm going to have a voicemail message that's going to say I am busy servicing customers right now and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Your business is really important to me instead of leaving me a voicemail. Text me, this is a mobile number that you can text me on, and I will respond when I can about setting up a call to do to follow up. And so again, the best thing is to just acknowledge working backwards. What do you want people to say about you and then how do you actually make that a reality? And it isn't easy, and sometimes it is acknowledging I'm not the best person to do that work. Sometimes it ends up being a family member that that does that. Does that work for you? And sometimes it ends up being a company like Ruby or or it's the voicemail scenario where it's I can't answer your call right now. Leave me a voicemail message and I will. I'll get back to you when I can. Yeah.

Pat:
So you've already given us some great advice, but we're at that point of the show where we ask what we call the take home value question. And that is, you know, your one tip that, you know, a customer experience professional or an entrepreneur could put to to use right away. So Rebecca Grimes, what's your take home value?

Rebecca:
It sounds so simple. And and it and it really kind of is: just talk to your customers and your prospective customers and listen. And I mean, really actually listen to their feedback, positive and negative. There's this foundational approach in pragmatic marketing that talks about inside-out versus outside-in thinking and talking to your customers just lets you either validate the assumptions that you had about their needs, wants and desires for your products or services. Or it shows you that you're going down the wrong path and you need to course correct and come back over to the other side. And it's it's more than just surveys. It's interactions when you are closing out a deal or you are finishing up the project work that you've done for them, making sure that their expectations were met, hopefully exceeded and then and then leaving a lasting impression that makes them want to tell people about your business. It isn't complicated survey tools and making sure people are leaving reviews for you. It is just caring so deeply that you ask for that feedback and then you action on it.

Pat:
Well, it may be simple, but that's excellent advice. So, Rebecca, for the benefit of our listeners, if anybody wants to reach out to you, can they get a hold of you either through the website or LinkedIn? What's what's the best way for them to find you?

Rebecca:
Yeah, you can find us at Ruby.com Or you can find me Rebecca Grimes on LinkedIn.

Pat:
Wonderful. Rebecca Grimes is the Chief Revenue Officer at Ruby. Rebecca, thank you for being on the CX Leader podcast.

Rebecca:
Thank you for having me. Great conversation.

Pat:
And if you want to talk about anything you've heard on the podcast or how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series, and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success, and you can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening today and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. We'll see you next time.

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