Experts of Experience - #24 Customer Experience Resurgence: The MoviePass Story
Episode Date: April 3, 2024On this episode, Frances Molina, the CX manager at MoviePass, discusses the history and revival of MoviePass, the challenges of resetting customer expectations, and the importance of cross-functional ...collaboration in delivering a great customer experience. She shares insights on creating a knowledge base and simplifying information for customers, as well as the significance of customer journey mapping. Plus, she and Lauren dive deep into various aspects of customer experience and how to effectively address customer needs while also looking after your CX team.Tune in to learn:The history of MoviePassHow to reset customer expectations for returning customersNew implementations that helped re-educate customersHow to create a knowledge base that is easy to understandWhat is the most important thing to remember when building a customer journey mapWays to approach cross-functional collaborationHow to manage customer problems that don’t reach the scale that other teams find importantWhat are the huge obstacles for MoviePass 2.0--How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more.--Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at http://www.mission.org.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Your company, MoviePass, just achieved its first year of profitability,
and it wasn't too long ago that you bought this company out of bankruptcy.
In my first couple of months at MoviePass, when we were getting new customers in and
we were getting returning customers, there were a lot of people who were
complaining that they liked MoviePass 1 better. And it was always confusing to me because I'd
read those emails, you preferred the fraud? All of these people were horribly
defrauded. We were struggling a lot with customer expectations. The number one mistake that
companies make, in my opinion, is assuming we know what the customer is thinking. And how can you
sustain this profitability, especially when you're in an industry where we're seeing a lot of turmoil,
especially with the influx of streaming services? I think the biggest thing when mapping out a customer journey is don't assume that what
you know and intuit immediately is what other people know and intuit immediately.
The movie industry never takes a day off and neither do we.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience.
I'm your host, Lauren Wood.
Super quick PSA before we dive into this
episode. As we speak about customer experience on this show, we love customer feedback. And if you
didn't know, there are two ways that you can share your feedback with your favorite podcast.
One is subscribing to the show wherever you listen. and two, actually giving us feedback on the application that you
use to listen to your podcasts. So please go on over there and let us know what you think we would
love to hear from you and keep bringing you expert CX knowledge to your eyes and ears.
Alrighty. So without further ado today, I am speaking to Frances Molina, the manager of customer
experience at MoviePass, a pioneering movie subscription service that is reshaping how
audiences experience films in theaters.
Frances brings her expertise in CX to discuss MoviePass's history and latest innovations
in making movie access easy, fun, and affordable.
I'm really excited to talk about MoviePass's journey and the future of subscription models
in this ever-evolving landscape of cinema subscription services. So Frances, thank you
so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here.
So when I was doing some research about
MoviePass, I landed on MoviePass's About page on your website. And I really want to read the first
line of this because I think it tells a really clear story and an interesting history to where
MoviePass has been and where you are today. So if you will all
entertain me for just a moment, I want to read this, this first line. Dun, dun, dun. You might
think, you know, the story of MoviePass, but chances are you don't. We could give you all
the corporate gobbledygook about what our lawyers told us to say, but you deserve to know what
really went down.
And then it goes on to share how the business was bought by private equity at a certain point. The founders were ousted, a new pricing model drove the company into bankruptcy,
and then it was repurchased by one of the original founders and brought back to life.
How did the product and the offering shift?
The 2.0 was, it really started when Stacey Spikes, the current CEO and original founder,
re-bought MoviePass out of bankruptcy. And he kind of understood that in order for this product to
be reintroduced to the market, it had to be different and it had to be sustainable in a
way that it wasn't previously. So they kind of decided to do more of a tiered structure
of the product offerings. So rather than a single price point of $10 a month,
we changed the subscription to be $10, $20, $30, or $20, $30, $40 based on what area of the country
they live in. For example, movie tickets in Wichita might be cheaper than tickets in New York.
So it's kind of based on your area, et cetera, a multitude of different factors.
Again, with each subscription, customers are given a certain number of credits that they
can apply to a movie.
So instead of however many movies you might want to see in a month, we're kind of, you know, corralling customers a little bit more just so that we can keep an eye on our margins and we can, you know, make a brand promise, but not blow ourselves out of the water by over promising and under delivering, which I think is what happened with MoviePass 1.
We're approaching, I think, take two with a little bit more caution, a little bit more mindfulness. And I think it's difficult to balance that with the customer expectation that has been made for couple of months at MoviePass, when we were getting new customers in
and we were getting returning customers, and there were a lot of people who were complaining that
they liked MoviePass 1 better because of the different product offerings. I think they maybe
saw greater value in that first iteration. And it was always confusing to me because I was like,
you know, I'd read those emails and I'd be like, you preferred like the fraud? Like all of these people were like horribly defrauded.
We'd be getting simultaneous messages of people being like, you owe me this much money.
People who were really, really upset about putting their trust and their money into this
company for it to fall apart.
We were struggling a lot with customer expectations.
Yeah.
And I wanted to ask you about that, especially the experience of the legacy customers
who were loyal fans of MoviePass 1. And then they were excited for it to come back,
but experiencing something different that was ultimately better for both sides,
just in the fact that it is sustainable for MoviePass. So for MoviePass to
exist, you need to have a different type of offering, but where customer expectations
were kind of set by V1. And then how did you actually go about resetting those expectations?
Like what were some of the tactics or approaches that you took to those customers that had been
there before? It's very difficult. I think he spoke briefly to
brand trust kind of going into this and a lot of that, and I don't envy marketing for the amount
of work that they had to do to kind of reestablish ourselves in the marketplaces as not only like a
viable product, but a trustworthy brand. Like they had their work kind of cut out for them. So I took a lot of cues from them for the most part of how much I could and couldn't say,
of how much I could and could not promise. The product is obviously different. And when it
launched, it was, I think, less than a perfect offering too. It was kind of bare bones and there were a lot of features that are coming out now that weren't present before. And so I think to have customer expectations just kind of A, not met because the product isn't perfectly up to par and B, not met because they're dealing with a completely different product. I think we all really had our work cut out for us, but I've worked previously in the e-commerce space. And
I think customer expectations there are a little bit easier to confront, because customers want a
specific type of physical product and they're looking at it and they're holding it. And
there's only so much I as a CX person can do to kind of shift the product to meet their expectations or to communicate X, Y, and Z.
I think the biggest thing has always been just trying to level with the customer from a space of like honesty and empathy.
I don't really know what the original version of MoviePass is.
But what I know is that this is a new team.
This is kind of a new business. I think that's
really where I saw most of these conversations about legacy users coming into the new platform
is like, how is this different from MoviePass 1? How is it any different? How is it any better?
From what I could tell, I was like, well, I know that we're not participating in fraudulent
business practices. That's one of the ways it's way, way better.
And also, we have, I think, a more conscientious team that has really learned some important
lessons.
But it's difficult sometimes to communicate that with a customer because all they know
is that they have to suddenly pay more and suddenly there's this new credit system.
And so user education kind of braced with that honesty
and that empathy was, I think, just the most important for me to just kind of lay the groundwork
for legacy users and new users alike. Just realigning those expectations. I like what
you're saying about education. And that can be a tricky thing, especially if they've already
learned a version of the business. You almost have
to help them to like unlearn what they knew and relearn something else and understand the benefit
of that. What were some of the things that you implemented? And I'm open to hearing both what
worked and what didn't work in terms of kind of that re-education of your customers.
Yeah. So I think, you know, with a team as small as it is,
I kind of took on a lot of that education myself. I'd never worked at a company before. The CRM that
we have is called customer. And I never worked with a CRM that allowed us to publish a knowledge
base. I don't even believe that to my knowledge. I don't think a knowledge base existed in our system before I arrived. And so kind of first things first was like, as I was learning the product for the first time, I was like, okay, I can take all of my own inexperience and what I'm currently learning about how the product functions, what the customer journey looks like, I can take all of these new learnings and just translate them into a brand new knowledge base. And going to make that accessible in its own help center,
I'm going to make that accessible in the app itself. I always think of knowledge bases as
kind of living, breathing documents. So they change as the product changes, it grows, it
lessens in some spaces, you have to continually prune it. But in addition to that as well, I think I also took on rebuilding and reaccumulating
knowledge on the website directly.
We have a very, very small team.
I think currently we're like maybe nine or 10 people.
Marketing is busy working on acquisition and growth.
And so there were all of these parts of the website that looked old and clunky and were full of old information prior to when the app launched nationwide.
So I was like, you know, I can do this. any kind of page that will provide customers with more information because from what we can tell
based on our analytics, the majority of people who sign up are signing up through the website.
So when they go there, how do we make sure that the website is optimized to provide them with the
best, most coherent, most up-to-date information? And I had a lot of conversations with marketing
and with other stakeholders in the company about how to
maintain customer attention. Because for me personally, I don't mind reading a chunk of
text of what I need to know. But a lot of people, we're in the attention marketplace.
It's all about putting together cute graphics or putting together like videos that will explain everything
you need to know in less than a minute, which is difficult for me as someone who is obviously
very verbose and like wants to get into the granularity. Like I joke all the time that I'm
like, I could be a technical writer. I could explain how to like put together a computer,
probably the level of detail. That's part of the role of a CX leader,
like is what you're explaining. You know, you had to kind of take on that role of
marketing in a way where, I mean, in some companies, marketing might do this in some
companies, product marketing might do this, but like in this, in this situation, you're like,
I know these customers need this information or else they're going to completely swamp my team
with asking it. And it is not scalable for us to
do that. So I'm going to get into the weeds. And then you're also highlighting something that's
really important, which is I can attest to my own attention span, which is next to zero. So if I
have to read more than two lines, I am lost and I'm just frustrated and I want someone to tell me what to do.
So simplifying those details is, it's a massive challenge.
How did you go about really doing that and creating a knowledge base that was like quick and easy to understand?
What is most important for me was kind of mapping out the customer journey
and how the product is used in every single one of those steps.
So what's the first step? What's the first
thing customers, what's the first thing I see when I open the app? How do I navigate to do the most
basic function? How do I navigate to make a reservation on the app? Essentially just kind of
really what it came down to was as I'm learning the app, what's the easiest way for
me to understand what I need to do? And how do I make that as universal as possible? How do I break
that down to someone who has never even owned an iPhone before? How do I make it that simple?
Did they have a customer journey map for you to work from or were you building that from scratch? I was kind of building that from scratch because I think that they kind of had the basics
of like, this is what the app does. These are its functions and its features. This is how a
customer might interact with the app. But as far as like really solidifying what steps the customer
might take and where those pain points and those friction points might be,
which is also a way, like for me personally, as I'm navigating the app, I'm like,
what do I not immediately understand? Boom, that's a pain point. How do I add information?
I think the biggest thing when mapping out a customer journey is don't assume that what you
know and intuit immediately is what other people know and intuit immediately. I'm like ringing my, my pretend bell right now. Like ding, ding, ding. This is the absolute most
essential thing that I see. I I'm a customer experience consultant and I coach a lot of
customer experience leaders. This is the number one thing that the number one mistake that
companies make, in my opinion, is assuming we know
what the customer is thinking. And the process of going through a customer journey map is so
essential. And it is not only for product teams. It is 100% for all teams who are thinking about
the customer, which is probably everyone in the company to some extent. And really walking through,
as you said, those pain points,
the opportunities to improve, what are the touch points that we're having? How can we make this
better for them? And then actually validating the assumptions that we make, because like you just
said, you can assume what they're thinking and feeling, but until we actually take the next step of going to ask them and take those
things that we think we're assuming and acknowledge their assumptions, but let's turn those into
questions. And then let's go and ask those questions so that we really can know if we're
on the marker. We're not like I've been in companies where we are building products because
we think those products are cool.
And that is not the same as your customer thinking it's cool because you are not your customer. Sometimes you are. Unfortunately. Sometimes you are. But as you just said,
I'm sure you have, you know, elderly people that are using MoviePass because they like to go,
you know, watch movies and the matinees and whatever. Like there's, and then you have
really young people that really runs the gamut. And so you need to check all those segments and see how are they experiencing this?
Because it is not the same for everyone. So I just, for everyone listening, underscoring,
you can assume all day, but you will not know until you ask.
You make an incredible point because there are certainly elderly people who are in our customer base who, you know, we're trying to troubleshoot an app with them. We're trying to troubleshoot a piece of technology and we're like, can you send us a screenshot of what you're seeing on your end? And they're like, I have no idea how to do that. It's just like, crap. Like, so what do I do? Like, how am I going to be able to, how are we going to be able to do this?
Now it's just like pure tech support.
Exactly. Exactly. And just a lot of people too, we made an update to the app,
trying to really motivate customers to check in prior to swiping their card at the theater.
Since we were seeing a lot of declines of people who were just kind of getting the card and and just swiping it and being like why am i experiencing a decline and it's like well you
have to make a reservation before you check like it's you know it's similar to what's the actual
movie there's steps involved and so when we made the change uh to like the check-in process on the
app we added this new feature where it's kind of where it's a pulsing button that says, unlock
your card to motivate people to be like, oh, that's the next step. That's something I need to
do. When we did that, when we introduced that language of unlock your card, while we did see
a decrease in the number of people who were experiencing declines as a result of not checking
in prior to swiping their card there was also a high degree
of confusion of people being like is my card locked like why is it why does it tell me i need
to do this like is there something wrong with my card can you help me unlock it and us being like
oh yeah okay yeah that makes total sense like if you were just kind of not you know if you had seen
a button that said check in before and now you're seeing a button that says unlock your card.
And like that would, I think it created a lot of panic for people that we didn't really
anticipate.
That's a similar case, but we're like, oh, we're going to make this so much easier for
people.
It's going to be so much clearer for what, you know, the steps they need to take to get
to their movie.
And it's like, oh, actually, this might be hugely confusing for people who are past users who are just waking up or people who are like,
super, maybe a little bit paranoid about what's going on with their apps.
When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals,
failure is simply not an option. That's why their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, are available to help
you succeed with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of the way. Learn more about
Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. And listening to the tickets. Like I
had just said, go and speak to your customers and get that feedback. And listening to the tickets. Like I had just said, go and speak
to your customers and get that feedback. And sometimes, often, you don't even need to because
they're coming to tell you. I mean, I'm always an advocate of both. Listen to the tickets. Listen
to the problems that they're bringing your way. And then also go and ask questions to validate
your assumptions. But in this case, you did something that you assumed was
the right language that was clear. And then you find out it's not. And it's all trial and error.
It's all iterating on how do we make this as easy as possible for as many people as possible.
And again, even if you use your product and you are a customer, you are not representative of every person and every type of person who is going to be using your product.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about cross-functional collaboration.
Because of course, in a customer experience role, you're receiving information and you're receiving products and changes and all of this from other teams.
And you're also giving information. And so how have you gone about really creating those relationships internally so that you can
understand what's coming down the pike so you can improve the knowledge base, for example,
as well as be prepared for tickets that are coming in?
I had my work cut out for me at MoviePass because the team is so small.
Certain companies that I've worked in to communicate the importance of CX,
it's obvious to everybody in CX how important CX is to a company's customer loyalty,
to the retention, to the revenue. It covers the board, in my opinion. It's hugely important.
But it can be hard at times to
advocate for the importance of your department when other people are like, actually, what's
most important is logistics or what's most important is our Amazon business. And so I
don't feel that I have ever had to advocate in that capacity with the MoviePass team because
we all kind of have an understanding that there are two prongs to
the business. There is the product itself, the app, and the customer experience. Those are kind
of like the baseline. And so with that understanding, with that understanding that
anything that Dev does, anything that the tech team produces is going to have an immediate effect
on the people that I interact with every day, will have an immediate effect on the people that I interact with every day will have an immediate effect on my agents and my leads because they have to learn a brand
new aspect of the product. There is kind of an immediate understanding of how this relationship,
how important communication is and how important really clear information is because we're all
learning it at the same time. What are some ways that you ensure that you're communicating clearly
and you're informing everyone of what's happening in the customer's experience?
The only people in my opinion that really know CX are CX people. It's a very specific
powder keg of knowledge. So I think being really,
really clear about here are KPIs that are important to me. What are the KPIs going to
key stakeholders, going to dev, going to marketing, going to the COO and the CEO and being like,
what do you all want to see represented? I guarantee that there is a way for me to extract
that information from the reporting
that I do and to serve it up to you.
What's important to you?
Because if, for example, our CEO, the only thing that he really, truly cares about from
the CX perspective is what are the response times on chat?
Chat is our main contact driver. And he is really only concerned with how long did
it take one of our agents to get back to a customer? That's his golden goose. And so for me,
I'm like, well, there's all these other factors involved and all these other things that I'm
really interested in discussing, but it really comes down to what's most important to the rest of the team and how can I make that as clear and concise as possible. When I have feedback for the dev team, it's all about how many customers are experiencing this specific pain point with the product. They're all about how many instances can you replicate it on your side? How many users are affected? affected gives me all of their information. So it's going to
a specific stakeholder and being like, what kind of information and in what style do you need from
me? And how can I best serve what you need from the CX department so that you can best serve the
CX department? So it's very circular in that regard, but you have to
be very specific because a lot of people want a lot of different things. For marketing, it's like,
oh, this person is talking on social about this. There's a lot more of a human aspect of like,
is there a buzz around this feature? Is there a buzz around this kind of complaint? So just
knowing who you're talking to and how best to deliver that information, I think is always certainly right. I always like to think of my peers in an organization as another customer. And we can
also segment those internal customers. Like what does sales need? What is sales focused on? What
are they thinking about? What are they worried about? How can I support them in that and really
build trust with that
team by showing up as a teammate? Same thing goes for marketing. Same thing goes for product.
I ask them for feedback. I work to understand what their pain points are. And then I work with
my team to ease any friction that we're having with them. I think it's so common that customer experience or customer
success teams are feeling like a little taken for granted or not fully listened to or that,
you know, they're just beholden to whatever product and marketing and sales decide to do today. And
we need to like pick up the pieces and deal with it. And, you know, I speak to a lot of CX leaders, obviously,
and there's a lot of frustration and a lot of resentment that gets held in the way that we're kind of at the end of the line. And then we hold all the pieces that weren't really thought of
earlier and have to deal with all of those issues, really. But I've found it's been really helpful for me to flip the script
and take my customer centric mindset and the empathy that I have for customers, which, you
know, great customer experience, leaders and employees, people who are in CX, we're all really
empathetic and that's our strong suit. And so taking that empathy and actually applying it to our peers can do wonders.
Like I was speaking to a woman earlier today and we were talking about in one of my last roles when
we had a sales team that was just really not thinking about retention. And it was my metric
was my main metric was retention. And I realized that a lot of people were leaving in like the critical first 90 days.
Of course, I take responsibility for that.
But also we need to get the sales team on board here because they're onboarding people incorrectly and they're setting wrong expectations.
And so like, how do we approach that?
The number one thing I did was just build a relationship. How can I make sure that that sales rep feels the impact of what they're doing to their peer by not setting a correct expectation or just skipping over some of the onboarding because they don't have time. If it's actually a human relationship between sales
and customer experience, then we're all really going to benefit. And that's always my approach
is like, how can we create a more human relationship and bring empathy into the picture
so that our sales and marketing and product counterparts are actually like can feel and
empathize with us.
And it goes both ways. We've got some cohesion, you know, because I've absolutely worked in spaces
where it's like, oh, I didn't know that this sale was suddenly launching. How much is off? And like
what products? And just kind of like the, oh, okay. Like I didn't know this was happening today.
Totally. I just got a ticket about a sale that we're offering. And they're
asking me about the terms and conditions. Like, what is that? And I'd be like, you know, just
going back to the customer. That's a great question. I have no idea. You know, like,
great question. Let me go ask my teammates. But no, I absolutely get it too. Because I think
recently, MoviePass has kind of been through quite a few
iterations and new product launches. And in my role, I think what would have been really useful
because we push out these product updates and there's all of this rigorous testing that happens
before the new product hits the market, but things slip through the cracks because it is tech and it is imperfect and there are plenty of edge cases. But with the cadence of product updates happening since
October, there has really been no time to sit down and do a post-mortem between CX and dev and be
like, these are the bits and pieces that are still breaking. We still see customers with this issue.
Gifting is a huge
example. We launched being able to gift subscriptions to customers right in time for
the holidays. And it was a big rush to push that out. And I think as successful as it was,
and as exciting as it was to push out that product update, we're still kind of seeing
issues with customers purchasing gifts and not getting the
code sent to them or getting multiple emails. And it's certainly not a big enough problem to impact
a wide swath of our customer base. But it is an issue that's going to continue to happen because
gifting was launched perennially. I'm sure there were people who bought a gift subscription for
Valentine's Day. Someone's birthday is every day of the year. So it's something that's going to
continue to happen. And I think that there is a temptation to be frustrated with my teammates
when that happens, when I'm like, we pushed this out. And now that it's done, we're moving on to the next thing.
And there doesn't seem to be a lot of consideration for the collateral of customers that are left
behind because truthfully, maybe it's 20, 30, 40, 50 customers. And so if it's not impacting
the full customer base, I think dev is very much of the mindset of like, okay, then it's not
catastrophic. We're not facing an app outage or a card outage or anything like that.
But to me, three customers experiencing an issue is a problem for me because I'm like,
if I'm thinking about the percentage of people that actually do contact us, like that three
is probably more like 300 of people who are experiencing the issue and not reaching out.
So, but at the same time, I'm like, well, you know, who sets the, I'm sure it's not
the dev team who's setting this cadence that makes them, you know, work however many long
hours.
Like this is, this is kind of like a, this isn't them being like, oh, we don't care that
customers are experiencing this issue.
Of course they care.
It's like, well, they're kind of being pushed onto the next thing and onto the next thing. And there's not a process in place for 30 days out from a product launch,
60 days, 90 days out. What problems are we still experiencing? Where do the holes exist that we
have to patch? There's not that process in place because we are working in a very dynamic
marketplace and we're working in our business dynamic. The movie industry never takes
a day off and neither do we. So it's just how do we carve out that space and time to really connect,
like you said, peer to peer to make sure that we're working cohesively and we can kind of
navigate those feelings of resentment and those feelings of being left out.
And take a moment to look back and say,
here are things that have cost us a lot of time. So how can we adjust that moving forward and
save that time? I mean, I think you bring up a really good point that I hear from a lot of
customer experience leaders that if three people are reaching out about this one thing, we know
that there are more and it's incontifiable. We can't quantify how many people are having this issue because they haven't
told us. And we can maybe go into the product and see things, but typically that data isn't,
those wires haven't been run, that data isn't fully accessible. So, you know, how do we,
how do we navigate that? It's a difficult, it's a really difficult thing because we also don't
want to take up time from the product team. if it's not something that we can prove is really an issue.
And I think this is where intuition really comes in around. We know the customer experience team
knows the customer best. We hear from them day in and day out. We feel the pains that they feel much more viscerally than any other team.
And I've definitely had experiences where we do a new product launch or update.
Then we send out an update that maybe I didn't even know about.
And then we start getting a bunch of tickets coming in.
And I'm like, this feels fishy.
And going with that feeling of this feels fishy. I need to look into this more.
I need to talk to my pals on the product team to see what changed because something's going on
here and I'm putting my finger in the air. Yes, it is not like a true science, but I know my people
and I know that this is something to look into.
And that has led me to dead ends.
And it's also led me to unraveling really big issues that are impacting a lot of customers
and maybe some really key metrics that we have.
And I'll give an example of this.
When I was working at a company called Too Good To Go, we were
launching in the US, it's a European company, we're launching in the US and we were really
struggling with our retention metrics. And those retention metrics, like we couldn't figure out
what was going on. And it was a very complex problem. Like there were many things at play
here. And so we're just peeling away the onion and saying, okay, like here's an
issue, here's an issue, here's an issue. And something that we kept hearing from our customers,
not a lot of them, but many of them, and this was a B2B business, a lot of them weren't getting
paid. Sorry, we were a marketplace. So we were accepting transactions and we were paying out
the businesses that had been utilizing the platform.
And they were like, we're not getting paid. We're confused. And we're like,
that doesn't make sense that you wouldn't be getting paid because we take your banking
information at onboarding. And then we would go in eventually and we're like, okay, there's enough
of these that it feels wrong. And the product team says there should be no issues. The, you know, the sales team says there should be no issues. But when we actually
looked at it, like a third of our customers had just never gotten around to inputting their
banking information because they weren't forced to in the product. And there was no one checking
the sales team to make sure that that was happening. And so it was like kind of everyone
was telling us it's not an issue, but when we looked into it, we realized that like, actually, there is a't have known if we didn't follow our gut in these customers or like there is
actually a problem. They're not just complaining or they're not just confused or they just like,
didn't look at their bank statement correctly. Um, which were some of the things that people
were telling us was wrong. That's, that's crazy. Cause I think too too that what's always difficult is a lot of people and I think a lot of people on certain teams and I think not out of genuine malice, but out of kind of like maybe just general exhaustion really do want to chalk a lot of problems up to user error, which is very common. Humans traditionally make mistakes. So I get it. My own agents have
kind of internalized that attitude as well. So they're like, oh, the customer must be messing
up in this that way. There's no way that this problem could be happening or that this could
be happening so often. And I think what you described in your experience is this capacity for goodwill for the
customer of like, I don't think this person is complaining just to complain. I don't think
they're just trying to get something. They're trying to grift me in some way or another of just
genuinely approaching the customer, hearing what the customer is saying and being like, okay,
I'll take this in good faith and see what I can do with this information.
Whereas just kind of writing them off as like, oh yeah, they didn't read their bank statement
correctly. Or like, they must be, you know, wrong somehow. Cause it's certainly not the product.
It could be. Stranger things have happened. Totally. And it's especially hard to do that
when you have someone who's like yelling at you
through email, you know, like this isn't working. Why is this product so stupid? And you're like,
okay, we have to acknowledge that this person is just angry and frustrated and they've been hurt
in some way, or they feel like they've been hurt in some way by us. What's really happening here?
And like being able to,
and this is, you know, one of the, I think the toughest and most essential skills for
anyone working in customer experience, anyone that's working with customers day in and day out
is to really put aside our defensiveness that naturally comes up when someone is angry at us
and really work to understand what is truly happening
underneath here. What is, what are the feelings that this person is like truly feeling or the
needs that are not actually being met and you know, what's, what's actually wrong here because
it can be difficult. And I know I've had to have many conversations with like customer support team
members where they're, they're upset because someone's been, you know, yelling at them in
all caps all day, sending them like 10 emails back and forth. And there's something else here
and we need to just, it's our job to get to the bottom of it. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's
just a less like a golden rule for CX and also just like life.
It's like my therapist always says, you know, like, oh, you're feeling this vitriolic emotion. Like, what is the wish there?
Like, what do you wish would happen, you know, when you're feeling this and feeling that?
But, you know, speaking to the defensiveness thing, I think that's been a really huge obstacle to overcome with MoviePass 2.0 is that we certainly were getting, you know,
the agents that were working when MoviePass 2.0 launched on the waitlist. So from January to May,
I didn't know these agents until I started in May. And he had been dealing with like extremely vitriolic,
angry, incensed, frustrated, betrayed customers
who were kind of being reintroduced to this new product,
but who were also, you know, had felt,
these were also non-customers who had felt badly burned
by what went down with MoviePass 1 with Mitch and Ted.
And we're not fully understanding that
this was kind of a brand new company. We're maybe thinking that this was kind of just
MoviePass One rearing its ugly head again. And so there was a lot of anger and a lot of
frustration, in some cases, a lot of abusive language of people who were demanding their
money, the money that they had invested
in the company, who were demanding refunds. And I think it was really difficult for our... I know
it was really difficult for my agents because they were just kind of facing that energy day in and
day out. And that can really, really wear on you. I was working at a wellness company, like a health
and wellness company for period products when the whole SYNC scandal happened with certain materials in their period
underwear. And I was like, my heart is truly going out to the people that work on that support team
because they are being, I'm sure they're being absolutely bombasted by all types of language.
And so, I think it's difficult because, you know,
you want to meet the customer where they are. You want to put aside that defensiveness. But I think
what I've also really instilled in my agents is like, we're not going to tolerate abuse.
Totally.
I think some CEOs and some managers and some leaders are like,
yeah, they're like fine with that. You know, they're okay with their agents weathering
that kind of language if it means that the customer ends up happy or ends up getting what
they want at the end. But it's like, no, no, no, that cannot stand. So like you don't reward that
type of behavior at all. Completely. The important thing here I think is making your team feel really safe. And that's the role of the
leader to create that safe environment and make sure that people know that they are respected,
like that they have respect from their peers, from the company that they're working for,
and that they're doing God's work speaking to these people who are really angry. And, you know, I think there's ways that we
can educate our team on how to talk people down. And there's also ways that we can create barriers
where we say, okay, if this type of language is being used, this is where it comes off your plate.
Like I've done this with my team before. It's like, if someone is swearing at you over the phone
or over email, we will respectfully end the
conversation and pass them on to someone else. I'm like, I'll take, I'll take that. Or my,
you know, my team lead will take that and just give the team that is in the trenches day in and
day out a break from that type of language. Because it really, when we think about the whole
and all the customers, it actually does everyone
a disservice to be exposing our team to that consistently. And I mean, I totally hear you in
companies. I'm sure if you were working at MoviePass during the bankruptcy and I'm not
exactly sure what happened to those customers or what went down, but I'm sure it was not pretty. And yeah, our hearts go out to those leaders and teams
who had to deal with those types of issues.
A couple last questions for you
because I know we're coming up on time here.
So we always like to ask,
what is one experience that you've had with a brand
or a company recently that left you impressed?
Honestly, and this has been kind of my go-to
answer because it just kind of continues to happen, but I have a cat. But I also have moved
around a bunch in New York since I moved here. And I am famous for not ever updating addresses
on shipping subscriptions. So Chewy has come through for me time and time again
and really displayed some incredible customer experience.
So if they've shipped me a $50 bag of cat food
to a location that is across the city from me,
it's already shipped.
And I'm like, I'm so sorry,
this is already shipped to the wrong address.
And I'm not really expecting them to do anything.
I'd maybe like to just refund me or give me a credit,
but I've interacted with them and there have been times where they've just sent me the food to my address,
which I wasn't expecting. Like I think my expectations of customer experience or just
kind of like human kindness in a lot of ways is very low. So when something like that happens,
I'm like, oh, this was so convenient. They were
completely understanding. And now the work that I have had to do to correct this issue is minimal.
And they obviously have a huge level of respect and consideration for their customers because
they're like, yeah, we'll just do this. What is it to us to just take care of this for you and
make you happy? And that's fabulous customer support right there.
Yeah.
I've heard people say Chewy to this answer many, many times.
And I think it really shows the amount of empathy and care and consideration that they
have for their customer and also how they want to make things easy for their customers.
Like what you're saying, you know, technically it was your fault and like, yeah, this, this is costing them money, but they know
in the value of your long-term customer value. And they're really, you know, they show that
they show you that they care. And I'm sure you will be loyal forever. Just like everyone who
said this to me before, because yeah, I've heard amazing stories from Chewy. So if you're listening and you have
a pet, definitely try Chewy on. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you
think every customer experience leader should hear? Take care of yourself. I think the type
of people that go into CX are not necessarily like always people pleasers to a certain extent, but they're
people that overextend themselves because they're looking after not only the brand,
keeping the brands interested heart, their co-stakeholders interested heart, their agents,
their leads, their co-managers. There's a huge hierarchy beneath them. And then beyond that,
the entirety of the customer base. So there's a lot of pressure to maintain. There's a lot of
pressure to make sure that information... Just to do the job, there's a lot of pressure.
And I think a lot of customer experience managers, people, customer experience leaders in general,
they can burn out pretty quickly,
not just because of the nature of the job, but just because of the type of people they are.
Very type A in my experience. So just to remember to take care of yourself and to fill your cup,
because I haven't taken a vacation in a billion years. I don't think I've ever taken a vacation,
but it shows your ability to be there and to advocate for your agents and for your brand and for your customers, you know, is of utmost importance. And you can't do that. You can't advocate for yourself. For all the people that we are supporting, we have to be filling our own cup. It is essential.
It is like the number one piece.
That is the number one piece of leadership advice that I give my coaching clients.
I'll always ask if they're really stressed.
Are you sleeping?
Are you eating?
Are you exercising?
Are you having fun?
Because if you're not doing those four things and fun is important, like you got to go out
and let loose and have some like some time with your friends and people you love
and just like enjoy life a little bit
because those are all the resources
to help us refill a cup
so that we can actually keep pouring from it.
Absolutely.
Well, Frances, it's been so wonderful
having you on the show.
Thank you for telling us the story of MoviePass
and really building back up that customer trust.
So really appreciated you coming
on the show and I'm sure we'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much, Lauren. Have a lovely rest of
your day. It was great talking to you. You are a business leader with vision.
You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data.
And it is bright.
Getting there?
It's a little fuzzier.
Don't worry.
Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI
and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support
from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.