 Hello. I'm Anastasia, and customer experience for me is more than just a topic. It's passion. In Mexico City, where I live now, I have this favorite pizza restaurant. And pizza is, of course, great there. They also have this amazing dessert, which has soft ice cream, pistachio flavor. Well, real gelato, if you will, and they serve it with a little bit of salt and a splash of olive oil, and it's delicious. But what is more important is how they treat me as a customer, as a user. They know my name, they know the name of my daughter, they even know the name of my dog. And when I walk by that place, because it's one quarter away from my home, and I am walking my dog, they say hi to both of us. And as funny as it sounds, it feels very nice. I'm absolutely sure that every single one of you has a place like that. Maybe it is a coffee shop, maybe it's a restaurant, maybe it's a bar. It doesn't matter. It's a place where you feel welcomed, where you feel known. And it is so much more than just a product. It is something very special. It's something human, there is something personal about it. And it is experience. And these experiences, they create and drive loyalty. So this is what I want to talk to you about. And when I started my career, customer experience wasn't really a defined discipline. You wouldn't see a customer experience team, you wouldn't see this title. It was kind of unknown. And so I started my career in consulting. I learned how to build growth strategies. Then I moved to marketing because I was very curious about loyalty specifically and how to build it because all the growth strategy, eventually they need customers to adapt the strategy to become loyal in order for this growth to happen. And so what I learned is that customer loyalty is so much more than marketing. So that was the moment when I found my professional purpose and that was the moment when DoorDash in pre-IPO stage was trying to build a team, was looking to build a team and customer experience and to build that experience as a differentiator to drive growth. So I joined and it has been my passion ever since. It's been an incredible journey of scaling, of building this loyalty and building the right experience for millions of customers and not just customers, also all the users of the platform because you know it's a marketplace. So here I am to talk to you about that, about scaling and about customer experience as a lever to scale. I also want to say thank you to all of you and to Slush because for me it's very personal. Ten years ago this topic wasn't really a thing. It wasn't clear what customer experience means and today we are in this incredible event for so many startups and we have this topic on the agenda and you're here and that means that we all understand the importance of the topic. So it's really amazing progress and I'm very grateful for it. So talking about customer experience, usually presentations start with the definition of a term but here it is very much about how users perceive it. It's actually a feeling so instead of giving a definition I asked my 10,000 people network what are the brands, the well-known ones, the ones that scale successfully that they associate with great customer experience. And it was very interesting because there were three companies that stood out, these are all well-known names and I want to talk to you about them and to discuss what we can learn from those. So out of three do you want to guess the first one? This is Apple and I'm sure that even if you haven't thought about this brand you're not surprised to see the logo in this conversation and it says a lot and let's talk a little bit more about why Apple and what it means. So what I did, I followed up with a question and I asked the users, people who mentioned Apple what is it that is so special about Apple customer support that makes the experience great, that makes it stand out? And there was something that all those people who mentioned Apple they had in common. In fact 90% of them said that they never contacted customer support at Apple because they never had to. So the interesting part here is if you think about it it's obvious because we all use this brand, we all use multiple products produced by this brand for many years yet many many customers of Apple never contacted their customer support and it's on purpose. Why is that? Because the product is flawless, it's designed well, it's very reliable, it's intuitive, it's easy to use. So there is simply no need to contact customer support and that is how users perceive the experience. So if there is one thing that I want you to take away from this presentation today is that customer experience does not equal customer support or call center. And then what is it? Customer experience is the whole user journey and every single touch point that you have with a customer or with a user and the perception that they're left with after they interact with your brand and your products. Great, Apple has amazing products, we all know that. How do we repeat? How do we build a company with products that are so perfect and that there is no need to use customer support? Have you ever heard of Voice of the Customer? It's a term that is getting really popular recently. I see it mentioned a lot in articles and pretty much everywhere. And so oftentimes it is used to refer to collecting feedback from the users. And in fact, very specifically oftentimes I see this term when experts or companies talk about surveying users and asking them to rate them or give them some sort of feedback. And don't get me wrong, surveys are great because you can learn a lot. But then the question is how do you make these insights actionable? How do you get the feedback that actually matters and how do you return it back to the business to then act on that feedback? And I want to share one small example. When my team looked into the support contacts that were happening and they saw that there is a small portion of contacts where users are asking how to be eligible for a specific promotion. And so the classic customer support approach would be to go and train support agents to give amazing answer to that question so that when you then ask how satisfied the users were when they were attended they would give you a five-star review. And we did a different thing. We went and we worked back with marketing with product team to understand what was the root cause of this question because when users ask you something like that that simply means that the design of communication the experience they get in the app is not flawless. If they're asking you a question, how to be eligible for a promotion or how does it work or anything like that that means you did not communicate well. So we went back and we reworked the communication and we made the app guide the user so that every single user ends up being eligible for a promotion if we want them to. And so that this contact never happens. So while surveys are very helpful don't forget that you have customer support as an incredible channel of feedback where not only you hear what didn't work for the user you can also always tie it to a specific transaction to a specific order, to a specific interaction and you can make that feedback actionable and if you can take it from support and then bring it back to the business. And in fact Apple that we mentioned here did exactly that. When they launched their first iPhone Steve Jobs insisted that they build a support center call center that will be available 24-7 and it's very easy to contact that would collect all the questions that users would ask about the product and then take it directly back to the product team so that product team can iterate and come up with a second version of the product which would be so great that users will not contact support even if they have access 24-7 and it's very easy to find that contact. So voice of the customer to me is exactly that. It's making feedback actionable and it's making sure that your whole business is connected with the source of that feedback that you make it easy for users to communicate and then you immediately act on it. Now you might say okay Apple is great yes but not all the companies are like that and can be like that because there are other industries there are other types of businesses and not always we have the luxury of producing a small range of products or like a relatively small range of products and polishing them to perfection and so what about other types of companies? So let's talk about a completely different company that actually does not own most of the products that it offers to its users and has completely different challenges yet it was another brand that was brought up by many many people who answered my question from different countries as an example of a company that offers exceptional customer experience. So this company is very well known and it is Amazon. Amazon that has more than 300 million users that ships 1.5 million orders daily so that's 18 per second and operates in more than 100 countries so how did they nail it? And we're all users of Amazon so we know especially if we place many orders that there are moments when you want to contact their support because we need to make some changes or something like that. So I followed the same logic as in the first brand as with Apple and I asked what is it about Amazon that makes their customer support and customer experience so good and here's the answer that I got. Speed and accessibility. Now this might sound very simple but let's think a little bit about what it means. Speed and accessibility is in fact how respected your customer feels. We've all been there when we cannot contact support for something really important for us and we're told to call back next day or to wait, we feel disrespected. We don't feel valued, we don't feel known and that every minute, every hour of waiting for a certain resolution that we need creates anxiety and even after it's resolved you remember that anxiety so this is something you don't want your users to experience. Now, okay, how do you achieve that and why if it is so simple and obvious a lot of companies still don't offer that and that's very true. The other day I had 11 p.m. flight and I needed to make a change and it was really urgent so it was 6 p.m. I was trying to contact support of an airline, a really big airline and what I heard was a voice message saying that they only offer service from 9 a.m. till 4 p.m. Eastern time and I was like, okay, what do I do? There's no answer to that question and it doesn't feel great so how do you make your support accessible? It is really difficult that's why a lot of companies still don't offer that it's difficult, it is very expensive also because you need to have people staffed in multiple languages if you're operating in more than one country you need it 24-7, how do you do it? The only way, if we're talking about scaling because the example here is a scaling, scaled company, is to invest into technology and it's two-folded. First part of investment I want to talk about is automation. I expect a lot of skepticism right now here because we've all been in situations where we see a chatbot and the first thought we're having is oh my god, I'm not going to get any support today this is just a dead end and that's true because a lot of automated solutions and probably the best example is a chatbot but there are also some self-help flows and other things but let's use chatbot as an example they are built in order to reduce costs that's how they're pitched and that's how they are evaluated they are actually built as like a plug as a solution for the company not to scale their support and not to go through all this pain of having a lot of agents especially in a stage of growth when there are certain moments when you are exponentially growing and having more and more customers daily, weekly so here's my perspective on automation on chatbots for example you really need to treat it as a customer-facing product in exactly the same way you build products that you want your users to adapt you want to build it and you want to offer it to the user and you want to seek for adoption you always want to offer an alternative which is an access to a support agent and you want to iterate until your users actually adopt the technology because that would mean that you build it to perfection and you build it to provide great experience in the first place and then the cost reduction will follow but you really need users to adopt you cannot push it to them and tell them well we don't have support but here's a chatbot and like deal with it so that's the first part second part is tooling tooling for support agents because if you are following this path and you are seeking for adoption then you still have another support channel which is with live agents which is an alternative to chatbot that you offer and in many businesses some portion of support that requires live agent being present will always remain so the tooling for support agents is extremely important have you ever been in a situation where you put on a long hold while the agent is scrambling through information or trying to get confirmation from a supervisor or you're asked one million basic questions like your email or your name or your phone number that the agent should have already had that is not because the agent is bad that is because they don't have good technology they are not equipped with anything really to provide great experience and it's pretty ridiculous in an era where we champion intuitive solutions where we champion really great UX and we build those products for our users but many companies do not build it for their support agents in fact it takes an average 15 days for a support agent to get familiar with some tooling that is widely used out there and think about it these agents they are in the front line with the users that you acquired you've already invested money into having them placed in order and they are now experiencing something not so good not so pleasant and the agents oftentimes don't have anything at hand to help them so this is the investment that I highly recommend that you make and you might say well what does my startup have to do with Amazon at this point like really different scale and yes of course Amazon has the luxury of investing into things like that and you know my reality is that I need to invest into my core product I'm not ready for this I cannot prioritize it right now the only thing I can say here is that Amazon did not invest into this technology at a point when they fully scaled and they were like well there's probably nothing else to do here so let's just invest into this technology they did it in order to enable scaling they did it in order to continue growing as they were scaling to keep offering great experience to their users that already trusted them and that they wanted to maintain trust with and we did it at DoorDash as DoorDash was growing and going from pre-IPO to post-IPO we were doing it during the COVID moment and the insane growth that we were experiencing and now I'm doing it at Rapi which is a Latin American super app that operates in last mile delivery space and I'm very excited the company is in earlier stage than DoorDash was when I joined and we have big dreams and we're building things now we're prioritizing these things now in order to enable growth in order to delight our customers as we're growing so I promised three companies and three insights and so let's jump to the last example there is this company that actually became recently like a case of great customer experience and the company is Chewy I hope you heard about them but if not it's a pet food and pet products company operating in the US they were founded in 2010 they're currently valued at $7.5 billion and they themselves multiple times attributed their success to being customer obsessed so let's talk a little bit about what it means I will just tell you a story or read it this is a tweet from Chewy customer I contacted Chewy last week to see if I could return in an open bag of my dog's food after he died they first gave me a full refund second told me to donate the food to the shelter and third had flowers delivered today with a gift note signed by the person I talked to and is there anything else I need to say here you see this tweet went viral think about that Anna, the customer is grieving yet the experience she had with the brand that actually serves millions of customers was so personal that she decided to share her experience out there and think about the 700,000 users that saw this tweet and I actually think it was way more than that because it got reshared and there were articles written about this case all these users will now remember that Chewy is a customer obsessed company they don't just say it that they are customer obsessed they actually practice it every day and this is the proof so the question we might ask is how do we do it at scale because with the example I gave with pizza restaurant of course they can remember my name because they probably have a couple of hundreds of clients and it's possible to just remember how do you do it when you have thousands of users hundreds of thousands of users and hopefully millions of users and the answer is you build, you invest into personalization now how do you do it it's also two-fold a thing at least in my version the first part is data and segmentation so you invest into data you take most out of the data that you have about your users what are the differences about their use cases you don't just segment users by demographics you segment them by their needs by their use cases by their habits so that then you can actually create offerings that resonate with them and you understand why they order from you they buy from you what are they looking for what is important to them that really matter what impacts their retention and their engagement and what doesn't so that then you can offer personalized strategies and personalized communication to them now how do you actually deliver that and the answer is artificial intelligence this topic does not require advertising we all understand that this is future this is incredible technology the only thing I want to mention here is that customer experience is one of these functions one of these areas which is a perfect use case for AI because if a human being can probably remember an average 150-200 names and maybe faces AI can remember thousands and not only AI can remember the name of each user AI can remember what was the last comment they gave you when they reviewed the order what was that they mentioned in a chat with your support and many other details you can get all put it in a context and use it in their next communication with the user which can go through automated channel through chatbot or it can go through an agent because you can use AI to create training models and to offer certain communication strategies to the agent who will then interact with your user and so this is how you can offer amazing personalized experience now to summarize three strategies that we covered pretty briefly today but they're all very powerful and great customer experience consist of putting voice of the customer putting CX into the DNA of your brand so making sure you invest into every single touch point you have with the user and make it a feedback loop where you keep learning from the user and then you put it back into product and business and marketing and communications and you make it better all the time great customer CX is when support is fast and accessible great customer experience that delights and surprises and becomes memorable is personalized that's what we're all looking for as humans that's what we value and great customer experience drives growth there are a lot of studies out there there are a lot of stats it's measurable it's not just you know a fluffy title it's not just although it is a feeling but that feeling translates into growth it translates into profit it translates into retention engagement you can measure it there is a lot of information out there on the metrics and so I highly recommend you invest into it because this is how you build loyalty and loyalty is what will drive organic growth so with that said the last thing I want to share is that these three strategies that I mentioned today they work I saw them work in different companies and in small startups and of course there are like different things you need to customize when it comes to your business because maybe you're a B2B and maybe for you segmentation is not such a big thing because you maybe have very narrow market and there is not much to segment there maybe automation will not be a huge thing for you it all depends so you will have to create your own mix of things out of these strategies and along the way what you will need is passion you need a fuel to keep you engaged to keep you excited to keep exploring because it's all about dealing with people and it's all about building relationship with them and you can use strategies but you will constantly seek for feedback and adapt and change and so fuel your customer experience strategy with passion and with curiosity and make sure that the team you're building is passionate and curious and that passion is for the user not for the product not only for the product because end of day you need users to love that product so it's as good as they say it is so be passionate about it if you go to another country and launch a market there make sure your team goes there make sure they speak the language make sure you talk to customers every day you make it easy for them to talk to you and you appreciate their feedback and it's going to be great you're going to grow as a result thank you very much