When Craig Crisler co-founded SupportNinja, he did something most new founders in the outsourcing space wouldn't: he sat down with the CEOs of some of the biggest BPOs in the world and asked how they did things. What he learned was mostly what not to do. Too often, the industry's answer to bad customer experience was simply to throw more people at it.
On Episode #285 of The CXChronicles Podcast, Craig joined host Adrian Brady-Cesana to talk about building a different kind of CX partner, and what he has learned across The Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process and Feedback.
Craig came to SupportNinja with 12 startups and four exits behind him, but no background in outsourcing. So he surrounded himself with people who understood the operational side of the industry, and tested every one of them on a single question: were they ready to abandon the idea that adding headcount is the only solution?
That mindset led to an unusual promise for an outsourcing company. If SupportNinja is doing its job right, a client may actually need fewer people over time.
The thinking is built into Momentum Labs, SupportNinja's optimization team of CRM, AI and process specialists. The team joins during discovery and stays with clients to keep finding ways to improve their CX, not just fix the fire that brought them in.
SupportNinja is deliberately tool-agnostic. A team that already knows its platform shouldn't be forced to switch; the job is to make that platform work better.
In one example, a well-known direct-to-consumer brand came to SupportNinja with 12 internal staff and asked for six outsourced agents. After the team untangled the complexity in the brand's tooling, a year later three SupportNinja agents were handling the full Black Friday and Cyber Monday volume.
For Craig, every process starts with strategy, and specifically with one question: how do you want your customer to feel? If a process doesn't support that, it's the wrong process.
He shared the story of a brand whose CX strategy was built around generous, easy returns, until a cost-cutting change to the returns process triggered a spike in tickets. The fix was simple: go back to the process that matched the strategy.
His second rule is to hunt for friction, and to remember that friction is almost always a process problem, very rarely a human one. The people who feel that friction most are frontline agents. Through SupportNinja's Ninja Forge program, any agent can flag a painful process for the team to investigate. One agent's suggestion cut a task from 15 to 20 minutes down to three.
Craig ran an AI company before SupportNinja, and his view is pragmatic. AI does many things incredibly well, but it isn't the end-all, be-all.
When a luxury goods client with a $10,000 average transaction wanted a chatbot on its website, his team pushed back. High-value customers want a human. Instead, they used AI to surface transaction history for agents, so those agents could make better, more personal recommendations.
The biggest difference Craig sees between AI deployments that deliver ROI and those that don't is whether there's a human in the loop. Someone has to curate the knowledge and judge whether the output is actually good customer experience. As he put it, an AI tool can draw a house plan, but it takes a skilled architect to know whether it's a good one.
A lifelong bass player who learned on jazz, Craig sees leadership as a constant feedback loop, like improvising with a band. He asks his team for anonymous 360 feedback and runs SupportNinja on a core value of "compassion and candor."
With CSAT, voice of the customer programs and AI sentiment analysis on transcripts, CX leaders have more feedback available than ever. The challenge is actually analyzing it, to understand how customers feel and not just what score they gave.
Hear Craig Crisler and Adrian Brady-Cesana in full on Episode #285 of The CXChronicles Podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music.
Want help finding the friction in your own customer operations? Book a 30-minute consultation with the CXChronicles team.