00:10
Ciaran
Hello and welcome to Customer Friendship Conversation, the show where we bring you the latest trends, tools, and insights into delivering customer experiences. It’s meant to be. I’m Ciaran Nolan, and I lead relationship management at Dixa. Today we’re talking to Cristina Martinez, the senior director of customer experience at Whisker. Even if you’re not familiar with Whisker, chances are you’ve seen their amazing litter robot across social media. It’s the smart cat litter tray that cleans itself and really has pioneered the industry. But Whisker is more than just a viral hit. They’re a premium brand who pride themselves in always placing the customer in the center. I spoke to Cristina, who joined us from Jacksonville, Florida, about just how they manage it. So, Cristina, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re delighted to have you here, and I know our listeners will be very excited to learn more about your background, Whisker, and all the amazing work you’ve done before.
01:05
Ciaran
So thank you for taking the time.
01:07
Cristina
Thank you for having me and thank you for asking me to join you today.
01:10
Ciaran
Why don’t you tell me a bit about you and what you’re doing and a bit about your background.
01:17
Cristina
Sure. So currently I work for Whisker. We are a company the little robot I don’t know if you all have heard about that, but we are the founder of the Little Robot, the self-cleaning litter robot for the kitty litter, for those of you who don’t want to scoop out the stinky stuff that your cats leave behind.
So that is I run the customer experience department over there, which has been great. I’ve been there for almost one year now, which has been a phenomenal experience.
01:50
Cristina
I’ve really enjoyed working with the organization thus far. Previous to that, I worked for a financial institution. I worked for Citibank for several years, heading up their operations, their customer experience operations there, mostly their retail and credit operations, and that was for quite a large organization. Our particular group had about, at any given moment, anywhere from four to 500 individuals underneath my responsibility, which was quite aggressive. But Citibank is a very large organization, so as you can imagine, it was very fast paced, had a lot of fun doing that, very fast paced, dealing with credit cards, retail, banking, learned a ton there. And previous to that, I would say it’s always been operations in some form or fashion. I spent some time in the transportation business, if you can imagine that, which is a 24 x seven type of business and learned a ton. And then before that, I spent time in HR and recruiting. So I’ve had a pretty interesting and diverse background from school all the way to where I am today. So it’s been fun. I’ve enjoyed the journey.
03:12
Ciaran
And it sounds like, from what you’ve said in everything you’ve been involved in and everything you’ve worked with in the customer or the employee has always been in the center. Is that fair to say?
03:24
Cristina
The customer is always in the center, and the employees are definitely there as well. I think for me, it’s always been. I’m a people person. That’s just how I think. I’ve always been driven.
03:38
Ciaran
That is no surprise.
03:39
Cristina
I have always enjoyed working..
03:42
Cristina
I think for me, I’ve always just been driven towards how can I work with people? I think for me itself, it was just, I’m a customer, right? So I always know, what am I looking for as a customer, as a consumer, what am I expecting? As a consumer from the business? What am I expecting? And so I always just found myself in a place where I was like, what can I do? How can I enhance the customer experience? How can I build a journey that can make that experience or that piece of the journey more memorable for the customer when they leave for the day? And I found myself in that place every single time, no matter what it was. And I don’t know, it’s really funny. But I can’t really explain how I ended up there.
04:27
Cristina
But no matter what step I took, I always ended up in those kind of positions. And I never left them because I think I enjoyed them so much. It’s the one thing I always say, customer experience. You can’t ride the middle.
You either love it or you hate it. And I think I find myself on the side of loving it. No matter what the day brings you, it’s always different.
04:44
Ciaran
All of our listeners will likely have heard of Citibank. I know here in central London it’s hard to miss their office buildings. It’s a large international organization. What does it look like going from a large bank that’s been around hundreds of years to an organization like Whisker, which is truly innovative and at the cutting edge of technology?
05:05
Cristina
It’s very interesting for me. Everything’s built, everything’s there. Everything’s kind of streamlined. And so when you are doing things there, you’re doing things more along the lines of just enhancing the process. Right. You’re not kind of really breaking out into new innovative strategy so much, right. Whereas Whisker, such an innovative product, been around for 20 years, but still in such a growth mode, they haven’t even reached their top potential yet, right. When you look at their customer experience department, they’re still in their infancy stages. When I spoke to the individuals there, every person that I spoke to, from the first person that interviewed me, to the hiring manager, to the recruiters, to the CEO, every person had such a passion for the product. When you’re going from an organization that was really just in its infancy stages and then having such growth, you understood that there were going to be some bumps and bruises along the way. I knew that this was somewhere I wanted to be there, because it was going to be something that I could be proud of, hugely proud of at the end, just this journey along the way. Pet parents are some of the most loyal individuals that you will ever see in the customer support, customer care area and I want to just be part of that. And so making that transition from financial into Pet loving world was definitely an easy one to make, but has been quite challenging along the way. But we’re doing great.
06:41
Ciaran
So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about Whisker?
06:44
Cristina
Sure. So the product has a great story, right? So Brad is our founder and this story is fantastic. He started out back in 1999, he had inherited two cats and he came home one day, he had a neglected litter box. It was very stinky. It was a stinky litter box with two inherited cats. And he just looked at it one day and he’s an engineer by trade, I think I had mentioned this earlier and he was just like, how can I make this better? How can I make this easier? What can I do to avoid having to scoop out this stinky litter box? And as he started to think about it and being an engineer by trade, he started putting some things together and the litter box, the self-cleaning litter box was formed and after many trials and tribulations in 2000, that’s when the first product was developed and 20 years later, 300 plus employees, two different locations. We now have what is a very profitable product. We’ve had various iterations of the Little Robot. We are now on the Little Robot Four and we have a robot. We have a variety of different accessories that go with it and the evolution just continues and we’re super excited about where the company is headed. So it’s very exciting. We have very loyal customers and some of them have been there with us as every new iteration has come out. We most recently hit our 1 million little robot sale, which is really cool. It’s been a fantastic journey for us and we are feeling it definitely in the customer experience department because as you know, as sales continue to go, so do those contacts come into the customer experience team and so that is what we’re dealing with today. But great products. The products are really innovative in the sense that in some of these products it tells you when Little Robot is full, some of these are connected and it can tell you the health or it detects the weight. So it’s a nice invention for those who have them and people swear by them and we are here for them. So we’ll continue to proceed and innovate.
09:11
Ciaran
Your team has amazing Instagram presence and Instagram targeting and I often come across the advertisements and I’m like, what an amazing invention. And one thing in my opinion, which I think is really unique is absolutely everything happens in the USA. So from end to end it all happens in the US.
09:32
Cristina
Yes, we are rated in the USA. So we have our American manufacturing based out of Juneau, Wisconsin. We have our US-based customer experience team. So we are remote. We are all over the USA. I’m based in Jacksonville, Florida and then I have teams throughout the USA from Michigan to Texas to parts of the West Coast. So we are all throughout the USA, so we are able to truly assist our customers throughout different time zones. Our repairs are done in the US. So in both Michigan and in Wisconsin. So everything that we do is touched and handled and cared for and supported here in the United States. And so we are very proud of that. We stand by that and we continue to pursue all of those ventures here in the United States and I guess.
10:29
Ciaran
That helps you also secure and control a very high level of quality and.
10:34
Cristina
Experience with it being right here in the US. There’s a lot of eyes in our product and the quality and just ensuring that anything that goes out has been reviewed and touched by our engineers and our quality teams and just ensuring that the highest quality is possible. And if anything isn’t, if anything leaves and it doesn’t meet the quality that we expect, it is absolutely reviewed and brought back and tested to ensure what failed, what can we do to improve upon it? What didn’t make the grade? Because obviously we take quite a bit of pride in anything that we put out of our facilities here.
11:13
Ciaran
And you mentioned, I know from working very closely with you, Cristina, that you have a very large customer experience team there and they’re fully remote. Was that team always remote? And how have you approached having well over 100 people dotted around the country.
11:30
Cristina
I think prior to COVID, so before even I joined the team, they were a smaller team and they were not remote. When I joined the team almost a year ago, they were remote. It is a challenge, I won’t say that it is known challenge. I think any teams that are remote, we always face those challenges. Right. But I think the one great thing about it is technology. We have the ability, our tech team is great in the sense that they set us up with phenomenal resources to be able to stay in touch with our teams. We make sure that we are in constant contact with our teams in terms of whether it’s chats, whether it’s video calls to stay in touch with what’s going on. But I will say that one of the things that has made it a lot easier is since we have made this transition over to the Dixa product, we have a lot of visibility into what’s been going on with some of the productivity with our teams as well. And I think that’s been a really good upgrade for us as of late, since February 21, so that we can see what’s been going on in the productivity side.
12:39
Ciaran
A very important day has been marked.
12:41
Cristina
In my calendar several times over.
12:43
Ciaran
Yeah. One week after Valentine’s Day. We’ll always remember it.
12:47
Cristina
That’s right, we’ll always remember it. It’s been great. But I think it’s also been beneficial for our team as well, because they now can see just how effective they’re being. Remote is always a challenge. I think we’ve done a really good job of being able to capture what’s most important while we’re remote and how can we continue to improve. So we’re consistently improving each and every day on the things that are most important, what should we be focused on and striving to improve on those things.
13:16
Ciaran
Because you actually moved over to Dixa from a more legacy enterprise, ERP or CRM solution. What does that move to Dixa look like for Whisker?
13:27
Cristina
I think it’s been great for us. Look, there’s always some hiccups when you do these things, and I think you move past those. But for us, I think overall it’s been very positive. For us, it’s always about what can we do to make things easier for our specialist to assist the customer? Many of our customers call us on lunch breaks. They call us in between taking kids to where they need to go. Time is of the essence in the world that we live in today. So in order to be able to provide the most swift answers and provide efficiency to our reps, this product has now been able to do that for us. And in our legacy product, were a little bit clunky, were a little bit cumbersome, and we didn’t have the abilities that we’ve been able to provide them today. So it’s been a great improvement for us.
14:18
Cristina
And we’ve seen immediate benefits in the transition so far, and it’s only been a month in, so we’re super excited about what’s going to happen just over to some of the optimizations that we plan to make over the next several months. I think one of the biggest benefits that we have had with the transition to Dixa is that if we want to make a change, the change happens. Same day and we’re able to do it. And so the team is able to see that their feedback is taken. And it doesn’t take multiple weeks or a team of developers to have to. Put their feedback into play. They get the feedback and we put it into existence sometimes within hours. So they’re very excited about that.
15:00
Ciaran
And we love working with you, Cristina, so that’s fantastic to hear and it’s so great to hear of the immediate impact that the solution has been able to have for you. So, I guess thinking of Whisker overall in the organization you’ve joined, what would you say the approach to customer experience is within the organization?
15:18
Cristina
It really is customer first. It’s memorable customer experiences in a positive fashion. We want our customers. They really are the core of who we are. And sometimes we have not been able to fulfill that core promise to the customer. We have to my chagrin, right? We have not been able to do that every single time. And so that’s what we’re working towards. And I know that’s going to happen. That is definitely number one priority for myself and for the people that are on our team because we know what the customers mean to us. Whisker customers are like our family. They are pet owners, we know what pets mean to the individuals. The majority 99.9% of Whisker employees are pet owners, and some of them are multiple pet owners. I myself have three pets.
And so we all know that your pets are like your family and so whenever something is going on with your device or anything that’s going on with something that’s related to your pet, it’s almost like something happening with your child. And so you want that item to function properly. And so we take that very seriously. When we think of customer experience, we want that experience to be top notch. And so we are taking every step possible to ensure that we achieve that goal. And one of those steps, obviously, was ensuring that we had the proper resources and the proper tools. And I think now we have that taken one really big leap in that. And that’s with this new platform with Dixa.
17:14
Ciaran
And a question for you, an organization, I guess, where you’re producing a very technical robot, what does that customer feedback look like back into the organization?
17:25
Cristina
We love the feedback. One of the first things that we make sure to do is collect all this feedback. We have open communication with our engineers and we meet weekly to discuss all the feedback that we gather. So one of the things that we do is, as a customer experience team, is we gather that information. As a team, we collate that information. And then when we meet with the heads of engineering, we provide this information to them. One of the biggest things that we.
17:55
Cristina
Ensure that we try to get our teams to follow is our tagging system, right? So making sure that we’re tagging the cases accordingly, making sure that we’re putting the right information, using the right internal notes, making sure that we’re putting and utilizing the resources that we have so that we can collate and gather some of that information accurately. So that when we do go back and have that information prepared and speak and provide feedback to the engineering team, they can then go back. And that’s how we make some of our updates, right? So when the engineers go and they say, listen, we had out of, say 1000 conversations, 60% of them were related to X, Y and Z. They go back and make an update. Based off of that feedback. So that’s how we close the loop. We hear the customer, we pay attention to them and if we can make a change, we absolutely make it. Those engineers love getting the feedback and they know that customer experience is frontline and center in receiving it. So they listen when we provide it and that’s how we get it back.
18:53
Ciaran
And I guess as a leader within an organization like Whisker, you’re working heavily with it, you’re working with your executive team, your engineers. What way have you approached building those relationships? So your seats at the table is seen as a really valuable one. How have you approach that’s always a tricky one.
19:13
Cristina
I will say that the leaders at Whisker are really fantastic in that way. You can’t always say that at every organization. But I will say that the leaders at Whisker are pretty fabulous. When it comes to having that seat at the table, it’s very important to be quantifiable.
One of the things that I will tell you is that if you’re going to expect a seat at the table, then you probably need to have information. That people want to listen to, right? And so it’s important that when you come to the table that you come with quantifiable data that you come with. I like to say I almost refer to so I watch sports and so I like to refer to it as like the ESPN highlight role, right? And so they come with the highlights and then the details behind it. So a lot of times I like to present here’s what my highlights are and then if we need the details, we have it behind. And those highlights are usually very quick, spurts of here’s, 1000 pieces, here’s the percentages behind it. But things that are going to make immediate impact so that they understand what you’re speaking about and grabs their attention. That’s usually what allows you to seat at the table. The other thing is, are you trustworthy? Right? That’s another thing. Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Do you act on what you say. That you’re going to act on? And do you build good partnerships? Are you good collaborator? I think one of the things I’ve learned over many years of leadership, not always when I was younger, usually when I was a young leader, it was like my way or no way. And I’ve learned over many years that it’s just as important to build strong relationships and compromise. You don’t have to win every war. Or every battle, but it’s definitely great.
To build those strong relationships with people so that when you go to the table, you get buy in from other people. They’re willing to sit next to you, they were willing to sit beside you, they’re willing to work with you on. Things that maybe they would not have had. You battled them all the time thinking.
21:40
Ciaran
Of the industry you’re working with in particular, you are selling robots. How do you approach customer experience for the product that I would imagine has a lot of intricacies? How do you approach that? Because I presume that is very challenging.
21:56
Cristina
In ways at the end of the day, the customer experience is still the same, right? We’re still looking at making sure that the customer is taken care of. So whether it’s a technical product or it’s a fluffy one, the essence of what we’re trying to do is still the same. We’re still trying to ensure that the customer is happy, that the customer situation is resolved and that they walk away feeling as if we did the right thing for them. So where it gets challenging is because it’s somewhat technical, it can get a little difficult if the customer may. Not be technical and the customer, if we ask them to possibly have to fix, because we do, right, in a troubleshooting situation, we may ask them to can you take off the bonnet of the little robot? Can you look to see if the motor is on properly?
Right? Where there are some people in my own household that wouldn’t even think to do that. They wouldn’t disassemble a little robot. That’s not their wheelhouse, right? But then there are others that would take it apart, put it back together, no problem. And so as a specialist in our business, you really have to learn to gauge your audience, really understand is this.
23:25
Cristina
The type of individual who is going to be able to do that kind of troubleshooting and then be able to reassemble the unit properly and not have more issues because they reassembled it incorrectly. And so you have to be able to really gauge that and speak with your customer to really understand are they iffy about it, are they not? So that’s where the challenge comes in.
And so I think for us, it’s understand the customer, listen to the customer, really understand where they’re coming from, and let’s make sure that we resolve the situation one way or the other.
24:03
Ciaran
How have you been able to train your teams and keep your teams up to date and working at their best when working with a product that is technical and the answers might not always be obvious.
24:20
Cristina
Oh, wow, yeah, that’s been a challenge. That’s always a challenge. I will tell you that for us, identifying those gaps is definitely something that everybody learns at a different pace and not everybody with a technical piece such as a little robot, anything you can’t plan for at all. And so you can train to a very high level and say these are the most common things that could possibly go wrong. But then you get an anomaly here, an anomaly there. So you have to kind of float those things to the top as they come up. We realized the importance, especially as the group started getting larger and the products started getting more complicated as it develops. Right. We understood the importance of really having a dedicated trainer, and so one of the steps that we decided to take was making sure that we hired a dedicated trainer for our team. And so we’ve done that. We took those steps last year to ensure that we hired somebody that was this is their skill, this is what they do, it’s their career to train, and now that’s what this individual does. Right. Not only do they make sure that.
25:41
Cristina
Our brand new people joining us are very skilled and get the smart groundwork in so that they’re ready to take on our customers, but look for the gaps in refreshing our tenured employees and what new training they may need. So as things come out and we notice things, we share that communication with the rest of the teams and say, okay, here we’ve noticed that this is starting to come up, this is something you all should know. And we try to create jobs really quickly so that we can share that and distribute it amongst the teams. So it’s definitely a challenge. You just never know what you have to share, what you have to train. Jim and Bob over here may already know about that, but Sally, Mary and Sue may not know about that. And so there’s so much oversharing and not sharing and then making sure that you’re removing old information and then sharing the new information is always a quick balance that you have to make sure that you’re keeping up with because the last thing you want is to have inaccurate information floating around out there that people then are kind of sharing themselves.
26:55
Ciaran
I know Dixa knowledge is going to help you with that as well.
26:59
Cristina
Yeah. Which is super exciting. We’re in the midst of getting together with that and putting that together, so we’re excited about that. But for right now, we have our Dixa snippets that everybody uses to help our customers with some of our communication.
So that’s good too.
27:16
Ciaran
Amazing. Cristina and I love the idea of having a customer experience trainer within the organization. So I guess shifting gears a little, what’s next for customer experience at Whisker?
27:27
Cristina
We are definitely looking at just long term strategies, right? We look at the feedback from our customers and we’re saying, hey, it’s important that we pay attention to our customer feedback. And we’re looking at our operating hours. Do our operating hours meet the needs of our customers? So taking a look at that, how do we expand our operating hours? Looking at what are the needs of our employee base, right? What kind of refresher trainings do they need to make them more efficient for the customer base? Looking at Dixa, just overall at Dixa and making sure that we can optimize that to provide our employees a quicker response time based on some of the things that we can do there with some of the knowledge articles and implementing those that they can quickly refer to those things. But for us, I think long term.
28:24
Cristina
At this point, what we’re looking at as we branch out over into our international markets, our operating hours is a big deal. Making sure that we can service those customers, but definitely just looking at conforming our current practices and making sure that. We are getting the basics right. While we’re an old company, we’re a new team and we want to make sure that we are just honing those skills and making sure that our customers understand that we are here for them and that we hear them and that we want to address all of their needs as quickly as possible and just making sure that while the business is growing, that this team is building a strong foundation, and that we’re not losing sight of what makes us who we are, and that the customer is at the core of who we are. And just remembering that the journey is what’s most important for our customer from the time that they place that order on the website to the time that they get that little robot and they’re super excited and they’re opening up that box and they’re ready to unwrap it and get their little kitty inside. And so that’s what I think over our next six to twelve months with that focus is going to be.
29:44
Ciaran
What would you say, recent industry trend are you most interested in? There’s a lot happening industry around Chat GPT, AI, all these different, cool, interesting things. What are you most interested in there?
29:59
Cristina
I do like the AI. I think it’s very beneficial in a lot of ways, but for me it’s interesting because our product is so different. And so I’m just curious because I’ve read a lot of articles about AI and just how it can take the tone of some of the things that you do and it learns off of the interactions that you have already built in from how you interact with your customer. And I’m thinking I’d love to see that happen. But how does it work with such a technical product? Will it learn could it learn how to handle some of these more difficult conversations that we have with our customers? Would it actually be able to figure it out like our normal product specialists would?
And if it could, wow, that would be amazing. Because in those kind of situations when our team is asleep and our team is resting to start the next day, could that AI then provide a situation where our customer, who had a situation at 01:00 a.m. Doesn’t have to wait until 08:00 a.m. The next day when our specialist will then receive that email? They could get answer right then and there. So I’m very curious about that piece of it, that AI that takes the tone of your specialist and can resolve a situation, I’m thinking, but. Can it maybe for? I’m looking for a Blouse, looking for a new pair of jeans or A pair of hiking boots or what’s the best paddle Board that I’m looking To Purchase. But our Product is so Technical, so o’m very curious to see if that’s something that would even venture into the technical side of The Business.
31:38
Ciaran
I am too. Well, listen, we have some quick fire questions, and we need brief answers for these. So what we’ll do is we’ll go pretty quick.
31:46
Cristina
Okay.
31:47
Ciaran
So let’s see how we get Going with that. So, Cristina, what do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your customer experience journey?
31:57
Cristina
Oh, what do I know now? Oh, my god. That I would like it so much. I didn’t think I would like customer experience so much or that I would be this enthralled in customer experience. I honestly thought that my Customer Experience journey would just be something really quick that I did in college and not something that I would actually make a career out of.
32:21
Ciaran
I love that answer. How at Whisker do you measure the success of your customer friendships and customer experience?
32:30
Cristina
So I think it’s the way we interact and communicate with each other. I think that’s the best way we can tell.
32:38
Cristina
The more communication flow that we have, the more open we are with each other and the better that we collaborate. I think that’s how we can measure the success or the friendships and just the collaboration. I think when that starts to Shut Down, I Think that’s when you can Tell that everybody’s more in a siloed Situation, but the more we collaborate, I think that’s how you tell the level of success that everybody is having. I truly believe that people tend to move more into silos when the stressors are higher.
33:11
Ciaran
As an organization, you’re so good at getting your feedback and getting buy in across the business. What is your number one tip for other companies and organizations and people to get to be as good as you are?
33:27
Cristina
Well, I always think I can improve. I would say always recess right. Always look at what the top priorities are and always remain really agile, but be willing to give a lot in order to get even more back and I think that’s where some people may or may not be willing to sacrifice, you have to be willing to be, I think, somewhat of a servant in your leadership role in order to be a leader at the table and that sometimes takes a little bit of you taking a step back.
34:08
Ciaran
Well, Cristina, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today. I know that I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I thoroughly enjoy working with you and the team at Whisker. And the tips, the tricks, and everything you’ve talked us through today I know will be such an amazing help to our listeners and all that’s left to say is thank you so much. Keep doing what you’re doing and we’re so excited to see how the customer experience team at Whisker continues to evolve.
34:39
Cristina
Well, thank you so much. This has been tons of fun. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations and you guys at Dixa are fantastic to partner with and to work with. And just overall, the engagement with you all has been fantastic and so thank you for having me and it’s been a pleasure. This has been great.
35:04
Cristina
I actually enjoyed this very much.
35:07
Ciaran
Thanks for listening to 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, a 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 experience, 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 another massive thank you to my friend Cristina for really being the perfect guest. Until next time.