00:00
Ciaran
Hello and welcome to Customer Friendship Conversations, the show where we bring you the latest trends, tools and insights into delivering customer experience as it’s meant to be. I’m Ciaran Nolan and I lead relationship management for Dixa. Today I’m talking to Lauren Klariskov, Ecommerce and B2B manager at momkind. They’re an organisation that offers care for pregnancy, childbirth and all the time spent afterwards in motherhood. momkind doesn’t just sell parental products, they also foster an entire community with help ranging from articles to online courses. They even have their own momkind podcast. Lauren’s originally from California, but she’s lived in Copenhagen since 2017, which is where she joined us from today. Hi, Lauren. Welcome to customer friendship conversations. How are you doing today?
00:48
Lauren
I’m good, thanks for having me.
00:50
Ciaran
So Lauren, why don’t you give us an introduction to you, tell us a bit about you and what you do.
00:54
Lauren
Yes, of course. I’m Lauren. I’m the ecommerce and B2B. Manager at momkind. I’m originally from Southern California and I live in Copenhagen now. I started out working for a direct to consumer luxury golf brand based in Beverly Hills, then managed their e commerce business for some years and made my way over to Copenhagen with my husband, who’s Danish, worked in tech. Here for a couple years and then have now made my way back to another direct to consumer brand, momkind, which is a brand that makes products for new moms around pregnancy and postpartum and nursing. And I’ve been there for almost a year now and loving it.
01:46
Ciaran
And I know, Lauren from some conversations we’ve had. You’ve also been a professional swimmer. Tell us a bit about oh, yeah.
01:54
Lauren
Yeah. So I swam competitively my whole life. And I swam in college for the University of Southern California, USC in Los Angeles. Yeah, swimming was a super big part of my life from age 8 until 22 when I stopped. I think it’s probably the thing that has taught me the most in my life because you just learn so many valuable lessons. I think doing any sport, and specifically for me with swimming, it’s a team sport, but it’s also an individual sport in a lot of ways. So it’s really just you and you have to put in the work, make it happen, persevere you’re trying to improve your times by just tenths of a second and stuff, which can be really frustrating sometimes, but it was also tonnes of fun and yeah, I kind of lean on all those lessons I learned even today.
02:56
Ciaran
Absolutely. And I know a lot of people, I’ve met a lot of people who are professional or wear professional athletes and really do take that learning and experience into the workplace, which is really cool. Are you a swimmer in Copenhagen? In the canal?
03:15
Lauren
You actually can in the canals because they’re so clean here, you can actually swim in them. But I have a little – you know, growing up swimming in Southern California, I was always swimming in outdoor pools. So I think part of why I always love swimming training and stuff was I was out in the sunshine and it’s a little different experience here in an indoor pool. So I’ll jump in the canal in the summer and swim a little bit. But I’m not so much of a swimmer, sadly, anymore, or at least at this part of my life.
03:49
Ciaran
You’ll get back into it, I’m sure. So listen, why don’t you tell us more about momkind and the products that you guys are selling there?
04:00
Lauren
Yeah, of course. So the brand was founded in late 2019 by our founder Nanna. And she kind of started having the idea for momkind in 2016 when she had her first child. And it really came from having this idea of what she thought having a baby and motherhood would be like and what the reality was. And there was just such a big difference between those two things. And she was left feeling very alone, kind of in this new experience and struggling and feeling like, why is it not the way it seems to be on social media and Instagram and it’s super challenging and it’s not just all positive feelings all the time. You feel happy and sad and grateful and thankful all at the same time. And it’s also a really big thing that your body goes through as a woman. And she felt like no one really prepared her for that either.
05:15
Lauren
There also wasn’t really products that helped with postpartum recovery. Childbirth is a really crazy thing. Even though everyone does it’s still a crazy thing. And when you’re pregnant, all the attention is on you. But then it really starts after the baby comes. And then when the baby comes, all the attention is on the baby and the mom is kind of left with like, okay, I just have to pull myself together and take care of my baby, but my body is more or less in shambles and all this sort of stuff. And you’re going through so many emotions and trying to get used to this new life while caring for another tiny human being. So she started out making these postpartum care boxes for new moms after birth. So it was products like a wash bottle to use after you go to the bathroom because a lot of women, I think it’s like over 80% of vaginal births you tear during birth and so you can’t just go to the bathroom normally.
06:27
Lauren
So making a wash bottle to help clean yourself after you go to the bathroom, a cold hot pack to use to put in your pants because you’re in a lot of pain, different nipple cream and stuff because breastfeeding can be extremely painful. So kind of all of these different products that can help the mom with the postpartum care and then as well as one of our hero products are postpartum panties, which you’re bleeding a lot after you give birth for several days. And these mesh underwear they give you at the hospital are the most awful thing you’ve ever seen. And you just feel so inhuman. So ours are like black and comfy, and you feel a little more normal in them, and you can wash them and reuse them, and they fit these massive pads you have to use after you give birth. That’s how the company was founded, making these postpartum care products.
07:35
Lauren
And then it moved more into, OK, what products can we make for women leading up to the birth and kind of extend when we’re relevant to our customer base. So then came these belly support leggings, which help they have like, support panels around the belly and in the lower back and really thinking about what the mom was going through in that specific time and kind of the pain points and solving those. So a lot of maternity clothes, you can tell that someone made them that maybe isn’t familiar with the things that your body needs at that point. Making these belly support leggings, pregnancy, leggings and bike shorts. And then moved into making nursing bras and underwear to wear while pregnant that can help support your belly. And it’s kind of continued from there. So now we have line of products that are great when you’re pregnant, and then the postpartum care products, and then our nursing bras for the period after when you’re nursing and doing all that.
08:55
Lauren
We just launched a new product, our period panties. So that’s also cool getting into, okay, now after you’re done with this whole phase around having a baby, then you get your period again. Kind of creating more products for moms and women in general because it’s just been a pretty untapped market.
09:22
Ciaran
Yeah, Lauren really amazing, and I love how passionately you talk about the products and the impact they’re obviously having on individuals who are going through pregnancy, childbirth, and the period after that. It sounds to me like your product development is very much not that of like a multinational company, because you mentioned a lot of the products seem like they’re designed on the market by somebody who hasn’t experienced it. Maybe. Could you touch a little on how you and the team inform product development?
09:53
Lauren
Yeah, of course. So the brand actually started initially with a community that Nanna started. So she started a private Facebook group and just started sharing her thoughts, being a new mom and struggles and all that. And it really took off fast from there. And so a couple of months later, she launched the webshop. And then since then, that private Facebook group is now close to 20,000 members. And then we’ve also created the Mom Kind Lab, which is essentially something that our customers can sign up to join. It’s a newsletter and we really use our community to help. We invite them to help develop new products with you know, if we’re thinking about creating a new product, we’ll go to our Facebook group, we’ll post there. Hey, anyone interested in participating in a focus group? We’re going to make a new nursing bra for women with a very large cup size and they have different needs than a smaller size nursing bra.
11:10
Lauren
And so we’ll go to the Facebook group and email the members of the momkind lab and then philtre through, see who is kind of in this target audience and invite them in. We’ll give them products to test and do feedback sessions with them to know, okay, the fit was good here, or what can be improved and do these different iterations when we’re developing a new product. So that when we go to launch it. We actually know that it’s something that is first and foremost relevant to our community and secondly, that works and something that we can feel confident standing behind and saying, you need this because of these different features, et cetera. Yeah, I think that’s something that really sets us apart. Just the really strong sense of community that we have and making our customers feel like they’re in this with us. We’re not just pushing stuff to them.
12:15
Ciaran
And this actually kind of leads nicely onto the kind of culture within the company. And culture, as we know, leads to customer experience and the experience of your teams. I know at momkind you guys have a very unique approach. You know, you can say unique. The world has changed a lot since COVID but to flexible working. What does that look like?
12:39
Lauren
I think when Nanna founded momkind, she also was very specific on what type of culture she wanted to create and knowing how important company culture is in the success of any brand. So we work a 30 hours work week at momkind. That’s full time for everyone. We are in the office a lot because we also just like being in the office. But Fridays are always from home. And then we have some other colleagues who work remote, one in Lithuania, one who lives outside the city, so she works from home a bit more. I think part of that is of course, Nanna felt like you can get just as much out of someone working 30 hours versus 40 hours and at the same time allow them to have a more balanced life that’s going to make them more excited to come to work. For me, I used to work 40 plus hours easily and now cutting back to 30 hours, I can say that I get just as much done.
13:56
Lauren
And you just also have to be a lot more structured about what you need to do and how you’re going to do it because you have less time. And so it helps prioritise your tasks as well because you really have to be like, okay, what is the most important? I have 30 hours. And then a lot of our employees are also moms and want to be able to go pick up kids from daycare school without it being too late. I think having the 30 hours work week, it allows the team to really be successful in their professional life and then also in their personal life. And it’s been working so far, amazing.
14:47
Ciaran
And that leads us very nicely the culture of customer experience within the company. You have a team which is working in a very flexible manner. You have a really active community from speaking to you both in this conversation and also outside of this conversation, very passionate about the brand. What does customer experience and customer friendship look like in nomkind?
15:13
Lauren
I think for a lot of brands they are trying to minimise their communication with customers. But for us, we really want to maximise it. It’s super important to us that our customers continue to engage with us, express their opinions and ask questions and challenge us. The way that we communicate with our customers on social media is very much in this two way communication and that obviously translates to our customer service as well. I think when you’re talking to expecting moms or new moms too, there’s a lot of emotions involved in stuff and so we want to make sure that we give really thoughtful answers to our customers and give them the time and care that they deserve. So maybe we take a bit longer replying to customers, but for us it’s really worth it and it really makes a difference. So I think the customer friendship is very much like baked into the mom kind brand.
16:29
Ciaran
I actually don’t know if you know this about me, but I personally worked selling baby furniture for two years.
16:36
Lauren
I did not know that.
16:38
Ciaran
Yes. So I spent two years working for Ikea in their newborn and baby department when I was in school and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was such a lovely job. It was like 16 hours a week and I worked with some wonderful people, but it was such a nice team to work within because you were working with people who were experiencing and sometimes going into probably one of the most daunting things in their lives. And at that time I couldn’t relate. I was 17/18. No, I was slightly older actually. But it is an emotive time for a number of reasons and I even found it with the partners of the people who were having the children or the wider family. How do you balance that, this very unique time for individuals? How do you deliver and ensure that you’re kind of taking that right level of empathy to the people you’re speaking to?
17:38
Lauren
I think it helps that most of our employees, they’ve all been through it, so obviously having first hand experience, everyone’s journey is different to a certain extent, but you know what they’re feeling and what they’re going through and of course it makes it easier to have more empathy. And I think in the office a lot, we talk about that, this customer experience, we have this special relationship with our customers, we’re doing this for them. So even though someone might be writing us and we’re like, I don’t really know, sometimes it’s just someone needing to just wanting someone to listen or just feel heard. And I think we talk about that in the office too. That’s why we’re here. This is a community, we’re part of it as well. Sometimes writing customers back like, I hear you, I feel you, and that’s all they really need.
18:43
Lauren
Even if maybe we can’t completely solve whatever their problem is. And maybe they’re frustrated and doesn’t really have anything to do with us, but they’re in such an intense part of their life that I think we just constantly talk about it and understand that not everything is personal, and we just try to support them the best we can.
19:09
Ciaran
And we spoke a lot about community, and you have a very large community that’s Instagram, Facebook and other ways, your newsletter and everything else. How has the customer experience changed as your brand has changed? So I’m presuming the customer experience in 2019 is very different than today. What way has that changed? And how have you adapted to the curve going up and to the right?
19:35
Lauren
So I was a customer of momkind back in 2021 when I had my daughter. And when I got my order, there was this handwritten card inside and it was back in a time when momkind was shipping out all the orders from the office so they could do that. And even up until last year, Nanna, our founder’s phone number was still listed on the website and stuff. So we really tried to keep things as personal as possible. But of course, last November our company started growing so much we had to move everything to a warehouse and then ship orders from there. And then getting so many customer service questions. And we also have a podcast that our community is super engaged with. And there’s also always questions that come up from the podcast or feedback and all these kind of different reasons why people were getting in touch with us.
20:42
Lauren
It became super apparent that we needed to kind of structure our customer service a bit different. Also moving the products to Rosquila and Shipping. From the warehouse, we realised, okay, we need a customer service platform that can help us manage communication on all these different channels and organise it in a way where we know that questions about our podcast is going to go to our podcast producer and customer service. Questions are going to be routed to Camilla, who’s our head of CX, and we also communicate with influencers through our Instagram account. So also, like, routing those conversations, making sure that they’re going to Odetta, who handles all of our influencer, really like, we have many different types of things that people are reaching out to us about on all these different platforms. So, yeah, it was super important that we got a tool where we could.
21:55
Ciaran
Get organised for real, and that tool was Dixa. So, yes, how has Dixa helped with that?
22:03
Lauren
Dixa has helped with that tremendously. I mean, just being able to easily route conversations to the right person, whether they’re in marketing, customer service, et cetera, because we get a mixed bag of all these types of inquiries. And then also with our B two B customers, we have a growing B two B business, and there’s a lot of customer service that goes into that. We’ll get claims from our B two B customers too, and we can organise all that in Dixa as well and make sure that the B two B stuff comes to me also inbound inquiries, et cetera. Even though we’re a small team, we really needed to make sure that the right inquiries and conversations were going to the right person because their needs were vastly different.
23:02
Ciaran
And even when you say it, sometimes the smaller the team, the more focused you need to be. So totally get that. Now, shifting gears slightly, you mentioned earlier in the podcast you’re really growing the product range beyond just pregnancy, and that’s obviously super exciting. But looking to the future, how are you planning on maintaining such a high level and high bar of customer service? As I know you’re expanding your product range, you’re likely looking at new markets. What does that look like from your guys?
23:34
Lauren
As you mentioned, we’re continuing to develop new products and also iterate on existing products. So I think this next phase for us is really about getting more data driven and finding ways to use all of this data we get from talking to our customers, whether it be customer service or messages elsewhere, or even in person. We have events as well, like in person interactions with customers, finding good ways to work with all of this data that we’re collecting to make informed decisions about, okay, we know that this many customers are having an issue with this specific size of our nursing bra. Maybe we need to look into it and make some improvements or adjust our sizing chart, et cetera, and really paying a lot of attention when we launch a new product. What that feedback? That initial feedback is from customers and being able to act quickly on it.
24:47
Lauren
So there’s that piece. And then also with these new products, we have the responsibility to educate our customers about them. So, for example, with our new period panties, a lot of people don’t necessarily know how they’re supposed to use them and how many pairs they should buy and how long they should wear them and how they should wash them and all these sort of things. So we’re working on really building out our knowledge base for our customers so that they can find out all of these questions themselves. And of course, we can also assist them when they need help, our products. They do take some educating, especially because before you go through it, you don’t really know what to expect, so you don’t know why you need a wash bottle or these certain things after childbirth, et cetera. There’s both becoming more data driven and really utilising all of this really valuable information we’re getting from our customers and then structuring it in a way to help make informed decisions for the future and then investing a lot in making a really great knowledge base for our customers.
26:22
Lauren
And also within internally as well, because as we grow, we need to educate new colleagues and stuff about our products too, and how we handle customer service and all of these things to help maintain the same level of service we’ve always provided. And that personal touch with customers because we don’t want them to feel like they’re less important twists just because they’re growing.
26:56
Ciaran
Yeah, I know. We met recently at event in Copenhagen. You’re somebody, I’d imagine, and I’m guessing keeps your ear very close to innovation. What’s the thing that you’re most excited about right now when it comes to customer experience? Innovation?
27:14
Lauren
Well, I think that we have yet to see a really good chat bot, but of course that is changing quickly and with Chat GBT too. So I’m hoping that we get to a point where we can have really great chat bots that you can just ask questions to and get useful answers out of them. And I think that’s coming. I think everyone was a bit scarred by the first chat bot experience some years ago. So I think that’ll take a little bit of time for us to all overcome that initial trauma from trying to get things handled with those first iterations of chat bots, et cetera. But I do think that there’s a lot of potential and we’re seeing some real great stuff coming with ChatGPT and I think that it could be something that we can actually use even.
28:35
Ciaran
As a small team. I think that’s the important thing that we’re working on here at Dixa is we’re working on a Chat GPT type powered chat bot, which we’re super excited about, but the idea behind it is it doesn’t need much maintenance and setup and it kind of can be kicked off pretty quickly. So we’re super excited about things like that. But I think you’re right in saying that it’s scarred in the past and hopefully fixing that moving forward, which is really great. Well, listen, we finish every interview or podcast, I should say, with three quickfire questions, so super quick answers. The first thing that comes to your mind. The first one is what do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your customer experience? And B2B journey to not.
29:26
Lauren
Take everything so personally. I remember back when I first started my career at G Fore, which was the golf brand, everyone at the company had to start off doing customer service regardless of what your position was, which was like, such a great way to learn the products and the customer and everything. And I was just so sensitive anytime someone had a problem or was upset or whatever. And now I think that goes just in general, everyone is going through different things, so knowing that it’s maybe not about you, but just trying to have empathy and help them in any way.
30:14
Ciaran
You can, you, throughout this have talked a lot about the power of community customer experience and whatnot. How are you measuring the success of that at one kind?
30:24
Lauren
So right now we’re trying to become more data driven and use things like NPS scores, et cetera. But in the meantime, we really look closely at our customer reviews and also just the general feedback we get talking to our customers. Since we’re a small team, we can kind of feel when customers are generally happy or when they start to get frustrated with, I don’t know, maybe our response time, et cetera. Because we’re small enough, we can still kind of gauge that stuff just ourselves in the office. So, yeah, I think for us, we always want to respond to customers as quickly as we can, but also in a way that’s thoughtful and that provides them with the level of care that they deserve and they expect.
31:16
Ciaran
Nice. Love it. Final one. Given that you’re so good at exceptional customer experience and managing a very active community, what is your number one tip for other companies and organisations to get to as good as you are?
31:31
Lauren
I think just always keeping in mind that you’re really nothing without your customers. And we’re lucky where it comes really naturally for us with the products that we make. They’re so personal. But the reason why you exist as a business is because of your customers. So if you’re not meeting their expectations and they’re not happy, then that’s it. That’s the most important thing. So always trying to keep that in mind.
32:05
Ciaran
Lauren, thank you so much for joining. Really, really enjoyed that conversation. Amazing product. You guys are doing amazing work there and very excited to see where things continue to go at momkind. Yes.
32:19
Lauren
Thank you so much for having me. This was super fun.
32:23
Ciaran
Thanks for listening today’s episode of Customer Friendship Conversations. If you’ve enjoyed the show, then make sure you’re following us on your podcast platform of choice. It means that you’ll get notified each time we release a new episode so you won’t miss out on any of the other amazing customer friendship heroes we’ll be showcasing in the coming months. Of course, a rating review is a huge help to the show, so we always massively appreciate those as well. And if you’re interested in learning more about customer friendship, then head to Dixa.com to discover everything you want to know about customer experience as it’s meant to be. I’m Ciaran Nolan. And once again, thank you to Lauren for pacifying our curiosity and helping us crib together this fantastic episode.