Another exciting edition of The Hark Report as we dive into more content around Voice of the Customer with this week’s guest: Michael Bair, the SVP of Customer Experience at FIGS! I mean, who doesn’t love a nice pair of scrubs and some happy customers??
Michael discusses how he’s built a best in class VoC program at FIGS, why he feels it’s important, and how other CX leaders can encourage their organization to see the true value in the customer voice!
Here’s Michael to introduce the topic of this newsletter!
Emily Rosato (Hark): Please give us a brief intro on your background in the CX world!
Michael Bair (FIGS): I’m currently the SVP of Customer Experience at FIGS, a DTC healthcare apparel brand, leading all customer-facing functions. Before FIGS, I started my career in inside sales in banking, found my way to two energy startups that both successfully exited, and did 1-year leading customer success at a large B2B SaaS company in LA. I love customers and have spent my career serving them.
Emily: Voice of Customer seems to be something very important to you at FIGS, why is VoC something you take so seriously?
Michael: As a DTC and product-led company, it’s essential. VoC programs should share what customers love and what they do not love about your products and experiences every day. Through CX contacts, surveys, social media, and other touch points, sharing the voice of the customer can make your products and experience, thereby making your company, better every day.
Sharing the voice of the customer can make your products and experience–thereby making your company–better every day.
Emily: You launched the first VoC program at FIGS, why did you decide to invest time in starting this program and where did you start?
Michael: It’s job number one for a CX leader. I always viewed my role as being the voice of the customer and the voice of the CX’er in the organization. Sitting on the executive team, I had the opportunity to share feedback daily and leaned into that. I started by creating a bimonthly presentation. I quickly realized that was too slow and out of date by the time I finished it. I moved to a lower tech, but higher turn internal weekly newsletter. To this day, I think it’s one of the most important things I created at FIGS.
Emily: You also started a surprise and delight program called #FIGSLove, how do you think this contributes to VoC at FIGS?
Michael: Surprise and delight programs are the celebration of the voice of your customer. I always viewed FIGSLove, or any surprise and delight program, as an opportunity to celebrate the incredible interactions you have with customers. Customers share a lot with you. Major life milestones like graduating from school, losing a loved one, moving, all the way down to the mundane “I had a tough day at work”. It can all be met with a gift, physical or digital, that shows the customer you were listening.
“It can all be met with a gift, physical or digital, that shows the customer you were listening. “
Emily: What has been the most important part of FIGS’ VoC Program?
Michael: Consistency. Voice of the customer programs need to be two things: expected and consistent. You want to train the organization to expect they will hear what customers love and what they don’t love. They also need to be in a consistent format so people know to go look for the things that they can celebrate on their teams or help make them better. When people say, “customer service is everyone’s job”, I think this is what they ideally mean. Everyone is responsible for making the product and experiences better by listening and acting on customer feedback.
Emily: How do you take the feedback you’re compiling, and distribute it to other teams at FIGS?
Michael: I use email, but you can use anything. Slack works just as well. Try to think of it like a marketing email. You want high open rates and engagement. If I had a lot of people responding, asking for more details, new people asking to be added to the distribution list, that’s how I knew I was doing something right.
Emily: Have you ever found something like a product issue or a trend in the data that you think you might have missed before implementing a VoC program?
Michael: Literally every week. In a sea of thousands of daily CX tickets, survey responses, and social media content, you will find so many things you never knew. Or, it can help validate whispers. Particularly in apparel, we have to keep an ear out for the trending styles and what customers are looking for next.
Emily: What kind of actions have you taken based on things you’ve found in the data? What kind of actions have other teams taken like product, marketing, or leadership based on data you’ve collected?
Michael: You ideally want to build trust in the organization that your feedback is being actioned upon without your prompting. I saw this in leadership conversations, 1x1s, and more. We would change aspects of our product like drawstring color or waistband construction. We would update product description page content to address styling questions we heard. We would find operational delays in fulfillment and shipping. The examples are endless.
Emily: You mentioned on a podcast (S/O The Juice with Jess Cervellon) that your customer base “knows you're listening to them,”- how do you garner loyalty and trust in your customers to make them want to give you feedback?
Michael: Yes, big shout out Jess! I call that the feedback flywheel. You take customer feedback, implement the changes, tell them about the changes, and they feel rewarded. Because of that reward, they share more feedback. And the flywheel spins. That feedback can build your business as it builds trust and loyalty with customers. Rather than them looking at a competitor, if they know you will act on their request, they remain loyal to you.
S/O Feedback Flywheel
Emily: You spoke about using three tools for VoC: social listening, surveys, and CX tickets- how are you putting all of this data together to define the customer voice at FIGS? How would you recommend other teams to compile this data?
Michael: It’s about contextualizing it. Understanding what percent of your customer base it represents. Is that a channel that’s one to one like CX tickets or one to many like social? And does it validate or conflict with other channels? If you start with the volume in raw numbers, the percent of customers or orders it represents, and how that compares to the past, you’re off to a strong start.
Emily: Going back to social listening, FIGS has a huge following and tons of engagement across platforms.. How do you prioritize what’s important in the sea of comments and posts, and are there tools you use that have helped you?
Michael: I wouldn’t say I prioritize one channel over the other. I think more about the platform’s format. A private Facebook group is more like a small number (even if thousands) of customers that are less anonymous. Instagram or TikTok comments can be more anonymous and also have a social cache and clout-chasing aspect. The format matters a lot in determining what the customer hopes to achieve with the comment. In terms of tools, ideally, you pull all these into your contact center platform so that you can add properties for reporting and handling like CX tickets.
Emily: What advice would you give to others in your position to make their organization really see and understand the value in CX and the customer voice?
Michael: You must share more positive than negative. Find out what customers love about your products and why, and share that. It’s hard because CX tickets, by nature, are often about what’s wrong but you have to find a way in them and other channels to find out what customers love. If the business is playing offense, they will spend a lot of time figuring out how to expand upon what customers love vs. playing defense and just fixing what’s broken.
Emily: My last question is a fun one that I ask every CX leader… In your dream CX world, with no constraints, what is one thing you wish you had to make CX better?
Michael: A CRM/Helpdesk that shows you a 360-degree customer view. It would be incredible if a tool could tell you, regardless of how little info they gave you up front, who a customer is, what they spent, predict what they will spend in the future, their engagement and opinions on social, and more. Anything to not have to ask customers “Great and what’s your order/account number?”.
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