00:00:12	All right, guys, just going to give it a couple more minutes. I'm sure people are still getting used to our new time zone. That we're the new time change that we're doing the AMH. And just to give you guys a brief description with this going on is we are doing the profit challenges every other week. And every other week happens to land on the week that I have AMA.
00:00:35	So instead of moving the Amy's into the week where we have jam sessions and copy calls and fresh traffic webinars and tech Tuesdays, I thought it would be best to do it on the week alone. Just because I know for myself, when I have so many webinars to attend, I tend to not be as productive. So I figured giving us the one week break,
00:01:01	at least, at least with my call on this week, it would be beneficial to everybody. So I hope you guys find today's. Am I recording? Yes, I am recording. I hope you guys find today's AMA very beneficial. Not a lot of people are on the call, but that's okay. Patrick was on about a month ago. I want to say.
00:01:22	And I met Patrick at BGS live. When we connected over discussing customer support. There he is customer support and services that he can help with and give us insight on. So I don't know if any of you guys on the call took that personality test that he posted on my post for AMA earlier, but I sure did. So if you guys need a couple minutes to take the test or finish up the test,
00:01:49	I'm okay with it. Are you okay with it, Patrick? I think it might be interesting to our conversation. Yeah. Yeah, For sure. So give us a one or two, if you're doing it, if you could hear me, you know, that's also a good thing. I feel free to turn your camera on, get off of me and I'll give you guys a couple more minutes before we really get started window.
00:02:14	I know you're going to be watching this, so don't edit any of this out because it's all beneficial. And plus, if they're not on the call, it'll give them time to do the, that tests. And it was, it was actually pretty fine for me finding out my results was like I said, I was telling Patrick before you guys jumped on really weird that this thing,
00:02:38	and I only answered a few questions. That was, that was crazy to me. So let's See the link in the chat to that page. Cool. Cool. So I see Bianca's on here and James is on here. Amanda is on here and Kim, I know Amanda. Doesn't usually talk on these cause she's probably working she's in the UK. Kim.
00:03:01	I don't know if you can hear us or you want to say hi, James. It's probably hiding somewhere back there and that's why he's not talking. Hey Christie. I can hear you. Cool. Good. Glad you guys could hear me. I was like started, the crickets were on here. Awesome. Alrighty. So let's just give it a couple more minutes and see what's up.
00:03:27	I don't know where everybody's at today, man. It's a really beautiful day here in Reno, Nevada. It's been cold. Like I feel like we've had rolled bipolar weather lately. Like it was super nice in the seventies, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday, Friday, really? Really cold. And then the sun's out again today. So maybe that's happening with everybody everywhere else too.
00:03:59	Oh, right. T let's see. I'm happy to begin when you're ready. You don't need to have any more than he was already here. It's fine. Okay. Well then let's jump right on in. Go ahead, Patrick. I'm here for whatever you guys want to talk about, I'm going to make sure that you can also share in case there's anything you want to share,
00:04:28	but let's go, Okay, well let's, let's begin. And then I'll share my screen and we can, we can talk about what's going on. So I think the beginning of our, this presentation kind of in some ways can pick off where we left off on the last one. And I think in some respects, I have some things we can talk about.
00:04:56	I would rather make this more of a, if it's an ask me anything, it means anything is fair game. As far as questions, I think being able to interrupt me or ask somebody that just comes up or direct the course of this conversation is kind of the spirit of the AMA anyways. So I'm happy to talk about some things and share something,
00:05:13	but I have some things prepared and please interrupt or please suggest where we might go. And when it's more useful, I'm gonna share my screen and we'll can you give me a shoe screen showing capacity Krista? Oh shit. Oh, all participants. There you go. And you should be able to share now. Alright, great. All right. So I'm sharing a screen and you also see some pecan nuts on your screen.
00:05:46	Is that what you're looking at? Yeah. All right. Well, I just say this is a little bit background. I got started building this e-commerce website in 1996. So long time ago, been building e-commerce websites ever since and had a variety of experiences over the course of those decades. From the standpoint of organizing e-commerce sites, building e-commerce software platforms,
00:06:09	working inside e-commerce businesses and a variety of all the in-between stuff for hiring people and supporting things that not just about growing orders. It's also about, you know, fulfilling orders and handling the people who has questions and answering those questions. So this is kind of where it began for me over the years among one of the things I I took away was a real understanding of the,
00:06:32	sort of the highest standards of customer service. Because I worked with this company for about seven years. They're based in London. They literally serve the queen of England when she comes in multiple times to their shopping in London, and they have locations around the world. So the very highest standards of customer service. I also learned though, the challenges when they don't have the technical,
00:06:51	the technology with the tools in place to really follow through on what is a very high standard. So good expectations, good people, but the technology needs to sync up a level up to your, you know, to meet those expectations. I've also spent, gosh, I don't know, many years working in this business where they sell something that is very emotional.
00:07:15	And if you have a vehicle that you're trying to get delivered and ship across the country, if you're a customer is expecting that vehicle on a certain day, and it's not going to be several days later, that's a lot of intense emotion that comes up. This is a business that has an industry notorious for over promising and under delivering. So I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about how to help train the people who talk on the phone to the angry customers.
00:07:45	A lot of my work these days is helping optimize the Shopify business that uses gorgeous. If you're familiar with the customer service software, Klayvio Shopify being a common kind of ecosystem of tools. And the challenge here is how do we grow the next billion dollars in Shopify sales without hiring any more customer service staff and then nursing problem. I've been trying to figure that out for the last several months.
00:08:12	So these are the kinds of things that I'm working on is a little bit of background. It might help, you know, if you think about questions or ways to shape this conversation, and if something I've just said, you want to hear more about, I'd be happy to talk about it. We're a gorgeous partner. We help implement gorgeous systems. And so on the one hand,
00:08:30	that's sometimes where we start, but also ends up backing up to say, well, what's the hiring process look like, especially a matter of optimizing a software tool. It's like, where did you get these people to do this work? And even though the wrong people, maybe they're the right person in, in these should be in a different job. And so that's kind of where we led us to this conversation.
00:08:50	Christina is how to think about hiring for that customer service role. It's not just about the technology, you know, go back to the example of this is a brand that had absolutely nailed it in terms of people and standards, and yet didn't have the technology and then you have others who, who have technology. Like we're just, it's just not enough of an answer.
00:09:12	It's not just that's the solution. So that leads us to some of the things that we teach in our work. And we had this idea called the attuned CX or attuned customers' experience. And some of these key principles where we break the word attuned down into a couple of different key ideas and helping to train people into thinking about how they relate to the customer and getting into some specific concepts.
00:09:38	So we could come back to this. I'm not going to begin with this idea, but there is something that we might come back to because in some respects, there's the idea that we just hire friendly people, people who are friendly. I mean, I've heard that word so many times for business. I was like, yeah, I just really hire friendly people.
00:09:59	And then, and then those same business owners have, have had their, their mind melt. When we play back recordings of conversations, where those friendly people are dropping F bombs. So friendly, wasn't quite a good enough standard, or just the understanding of what you're looking for. You know, need some, some specificity needs, some intention I think about screening.
00:10:26	So that is kind of a introduction to what sets us up to today's conversation. And I want to jump back to what, where we left off also here. This was our last AMA. We talked about a Roseanne BARR skit on Saturday night live. And we went through each of these eight statements that who Roseanne was, it was basically playing the part of a snarky frustrated customer service agent on the phone with a customer called the middle tonight with a problem.
00:10:59	And we kind of broke down each of these eight statements. And that was kind of a fun process. Wasn't it? Christina? It was. And I can't tell you how many times I've been in that situation, on the receiving end, not me be the rude person that we call your customer support place. Cause I need help with something like something you've touched on,
00:11:20	on when you got a vehicle transported somewhere. Like I felt like I was the person on the phone and Roseanne BARR was on the other side and they were like, well, I don't know what to tell you where they're stuck on the hill. And it's like, yeah, well, I don't know what to tell my boss now because I don't know where his car is.
00:11:41	Yeah. So I think so we kind of went through each of these things and drew some observations or things about this and I might go back and reference one or two of them, but you know, I see, we just, I think have Leo joining us on this AMA and one of the things I think Leo said at the very end of our last one was he's thinking about hiring someone for this role.
00:12:02	And he's thinking about also the opportunity to outsource. So maybe, maybe he didn't want to go through the challenge of hiring someone who might end up like this. Maybe someone else could take care of that problem for him and then make it easier for him. Right. He's just getting started. Not quite sure how much help he needs. And so that's something that I actually want to talk about today too.
00:12:25	I see Leo's here. I don't know Leah, if you want to say anything more about that to just kind of reaffirm what you were most interested in from the last time, maybe how it can help make this most appropriate to where you are right now. I'd be glad to hear that. Now, if you want it, Leo you're muted, we can't hear you.
00:12:48	Yeah. From I'm such at the I'm at the beginning stages of customer service. Initially I wanted to hire somebody and then I've sat on, on at least probably four or five different conference type things where they've talked about customer service and now I'm leaning more towards having an agency doing. Yeah. But I'm learning the pros and the cons now. So I'm still learning.
00:13:18	So I don't, from an input standpoint, I'm just learning. So I don't know what I don't know, you know, with this whole thing, you know, I got standard operating procedures, but I'm just learning. So I'm just here to learn. Yeah. So I think that one of the things that we could do, if it's helpful or interesting to the people who are listening here is we could start to think about the comparisons as you consider outsourcing to the,
00:13:46	when hiring your yourself. And depending on where we go with this, I could take you down a process of what it looks like when we help someone hire for the customer service. And there's the can be a lot involved. I know maybe we each bring our history to us if we're business owners and we've got some experience hiring people, it was always a way that we do it.
00:14:07	And I could share with you some of the ways that we think about it. Some people might take that and say, gosh, that's a lot of work. And I don't know, I really want to do that when I could potentially just outsource it. And so that's, I think a useful thing that I, and I'm, I'm curious about that myself,
00:14:29	you know, I feel the pull and the push of that in the projects, in which I find myself. So I be curious before I went any farther, maybe if people want to add anything in the chat, if, if you feel like where you want to maybe just speak, I'd be curious to hear where the primary interest among those who are here right now.
00:14:49	Do you find yourself more interested in about outsourcing? Do you find yourself more than interested in thinking about hiring for your own customer service team? I'd be curious, anything in the chat, they would help me kind of shift or go one more direction and then another, Hi. So this is Kim. I'm sorry, I can't join with my video, but I did want to mention that.
00:15:12	So we have a small team, I have a staff of five and we have cross functions. And so the sales associates have to do customer service for the online customers. And so what I'm finding is that people really don't have common sense. And so, as you mentioned, you hire people that, you know, you perceive them to be friendly on the interview.
00:15:37	They seem to be articulate. They have some degree of experience, but I think there are some common sense issues that people just don't get even here in the store. So one sales associate, we recently hired really nice girl, really smart, but we, we had a customer in the store and she had her cell phone at, at the checkout counter.
00:16:00	And she was on the sales floor, handling the customer and she got a notification and she said to the customer, oh, excuse me, I have to go and answer that. And she went and answered her text message. And it was just mind blowing to me like that you did that. She didn't think that that was rude or that would make the customer feel like,
00:16:17	you know, they weren't really paying attention to her, especially it was a personal thing. It wasn't like the store phone was ringing. So I am with you all the way with really being careful. I think it starts with the hiring process, right? Because you can have the best software, the best, you know, initiatives, because we have an initiative where every month each of the sales associates will call 50 customers checking in.
00:16:39	How did it go? How was your order? Did you find the right fit? How was the fabric? Do you have any suggestions? Because a lot of times we use the suggestions. Well, at the end of the month, we have a meeting, we talk about the suggestions and the comments that we got. And some of it drives our,
00:16:54	you know, purchasing feedback in terms of styles and different colors that they want to see. So yeah, I'm rambling a little bit, but anyway, so there's, it's really important to think about the people that you hire because now I, what I've done is I've created a lot more work for the store manager because it's a lot of handholding and it's a lot of common sense things that we didn't assume,
00:17:17	but that you have to assume that people may or may not know. So, yeah. So that's my, just my little tidbit there. Yeah. And so it sounds like you also, because you have a retail store presence, it's not so much like you're going to outsource that to someone else altogether, although No, but we have the online. And so we do get a number of inquiries from the customers that are looking to purchase online,
00:17:38	or they have purchased online. So the sales associates in the stores kind of serve a dual functions cause they're, they're performing that function as well. It would be nice to have a team that's sort of dedicated to just that, but with the existing team that we have, I still feel like it's important to train people and to have them understand what it means to serve a customer.
00:17:57	And you know, how you do that in a way that aligns with our values as a company. And no one's been outright rude. I don't know that she thought what she was doing was rude and she's brand new. She's been here less than a month, but it was just to me, common sense that you don't do that, but you know,
00:18:12	common sense, same common, right. That's my grandmother used to say, Yeah, I appreciate that. And so that helps me kind of shape some of the things that I might say next. Is there anyone else who wanted to jump in with any observation or anything at all? This is Leo again, you know, coming from an e-commerce store perception.
00:18:42	No one of the things I grappled with and I'm very anal retentive, I guess says the word for it. I don't know if that's good or bad as good in my eyes because I think a lot, but people working from home, like I shop for my mind, like, should I get an office so I can watch over people or give them the golden handcuff of working from home and having this first office,
00:19:11	what can I trust? You know, how do I, what's the interview process find a person rather than showing that she has to work, you know, that, you know, that's gonna fit and works for me. I have a whole bunch of what if this, if this, if that related to the pros and cons of adding somebody, working from home,
00:19:34	having that luxury, you know, getting a cell phone bill paid by me, things of that nature to kind of tie it in to give him this virtual office versus just outsource the whole thing. And they've already done all of these things and we just got to train your staff about what I need. I feel like the control is there where I lose it,
00:19:57	having someone working for me on a 10 99 know. Okay. That's very helpful to talk about that too. I think the key word of that is where's the control and where are you losing it? Because what's underlying. That is a word that I hear a lot in, what I do is brand tone. And that word means like, are they able to convey the essence of what makes your company special?
00:20:26	It's kind of, I think Kim mentioned something along the lines of how does it align with her values? That's kind of the word I use is brand tone, but let's have you been using? And so where is that controlling? Why do you care about that? Control is because the perception of your brand sometimes comes across and the choice of words of your most entry-level employees.
00:20:47	And that, that can be painful. Sometimes they're not as conscious of anything that you spend so much time investing in trying to develop a story about your brand and then, you know, relatively junior employee, who's just not even conscious of what they're not doing or realizing what they're saying can kind of ruin that perception. So that's what I hear when you say control,
00:21:10	is that right? As you think about it? Oh, absolutely because I'm not only selling customer service, I'm selling a high level customer service. So the expectation is, you know, a friendly unrushed conversation, you know, about air purification and, and making it a seamless process for a person. You know, I mean, that's a nightmare to imagine someone telling one of my customers,
00:21:41	Hey, hold on for a second. You know, if some common sense thing where they just tell them to hold on a second, I got another call or just some level of professionalism that could be avoided, you know, with some level of common sense. And that's where the control comes in, where, you know, it looks almost like, I don't know,
00:22:06	how do you build into a script, build a script that is, has, you know, all those components of, you know, when to escalate a call, how to put a call on hold, you know, in a professional way, you know, these are the, some of the things I think about as I'm writing strips in my, in my S a P it's just like,
00:22:30	I look, I appreciate these cars. Cause I'm like, man, this is heavy. Lots do a lot to think about. Yeah, yeah, sure is. Well, I like we can come and talk about those things. Script's SOP is very much so is there anyone else you want to make observation or just to me, that'd be helpful to you today.
00:22:59	Okay. No. Then I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to jump to something right here and share my screen. I think this tax is a little bit small, but maybe you can see it. This is an interesting, if you want to just cut right to the chase, like all these problems could be solved for you, if you just outsourced it.
00:23:22	And here's, you know, the professional plan or the advanced plan, choose which option choose your price point, pull the trigger and customer service is solved. I don't know if anyone's seen pricing plans like this. This is for a popular e-commerce outsourced customer service agency. And when I look at this and I think I, I might be paying similar or more per hour.
00:23:55	If I was paying someone in a customer service role myself, I'm curious, does anyone here pay a customer service person more than $14 an hour? And you were in the chat or when I sort of, I mean, I mean, I have part-time work that we do. So yes. Is my answer. Anyone pay more than $14 an hour in the chat?
00:24:20	You want to give me a little feedback there? Yeah. So it's like at least one person's paying more than 14. If you're paying less than 14 and you are managing it all yourself, the hiring process, the screening, the training, and you see this kind of pricing plan as an option, it can be attractive to sync. I can just,
00:24:50	I can just outsource this and, you know, I think Leo says is willing to pay 20. So that probably is probably because Leo you're willing or you think there's a closing of the sale involved there. It's not just a matter of like, is this the wrong fit? I want to return my item. How do I get my return label? Maybe there's a little bit of a sales consultation process and it's worth $20 or more.
00:25:15	Is that right? Leo? You want to say any more the chat back or Yeah. I mean, you know, the role is, and here's something else. I also am analyzing this. Do I want customer service to be just customer service or do I want customer service to be sales and service? Because I need them to be able to not only service the customer,
00:25:40	but if they need something that we have a solution for, you know, I want them to be able to pivot into that conversation or that same person be able to call up an abandoned cart or call up a customer that hasn't purchased in a while and, you know, have a conversation about some of their needs or maybe they don't even have an Aircare plan.
00:26:06	So you want to see how long they talk to about the air care plan on their current machine. No, I joke with that, you know, should I keep shells and service separately? Should I make them one role? You know, so I would, I'm willing to offer them $20 an hour to, to really understand. And that way they really understand my business and are really able to convey that level of professionalism I'm Searchie before.
00:26:37	Yeah. So when you have that sales component there, it can be worth certainly more than 20 an hour and have the right person closing orders. I, I just spent the last couple of days in Arkansas at a business that has, I live in Austin, Texas, and my last couple of days are in Arkansas and the conversations there were a lot of the phone conversations do have a quoting aspect.
00:27:07	They sell a catalog of 700 products and some of those products are perceived as being custom sorta, but the word custom is like the customer's choosing from a variety of options. And so there's a, there can be a conversational aspect to it. And what's the dilemma in that business is they have someone who's been there. Oh my gosh. He started when he was 15 years old and now he's the general manager.
00:27:33	So pretty much knows everything he does know about this product, which is very common. You've seen it. It's probably on your desk, but you would never think or know about the complexities of what's going on in the manufacturing and the selling of this. It's like, it kind of blew my mind super like it's right in front of you. And yet you wouldn't even understand half of what's going on.
00:27:57	So how is that person going to hire a customer service person to replace? And what he finds is he's so successful at closing and booking orders that it's, it feels like it's impossible to pay someone $15, $25 an hour, $50 an hour to match the level of sales effectiveness that he's having. So yeah, this is a very real dilemma. I want to,
00:28:22	I want to step back a little bit from the sales problem, that it is raising the bar of who you're trying to hire. I want to back down a little bit down that bar to more customer service for right now, but that's definitely something that I appreciate the significance of it. And part of the challenge of outsourcing, I'm going to look at something else about outsourcing and,
00:28:40	and, and say one of the things that appeals to me about it, and it, it ties into whether you're doing customer service yourself or not. This is an example of a coaching form that an outsourced customer service agency uses when it looks at how people are performing in a customer service role, this is the form they take the agent through. There's a couple things about scoring and so forth.
00:29:09	I'm not going to get into that right now, but what's really important about this one is that this happens every single week. And when you do outsource it to someone who has a very clear service level, like they're staying that, you know, for whatever the price is, you're gonna pay per hour. They will every week have a one-on-one coaching session with your customer service agent,
00:29:33	presumably done by someone with more seniority, right? That consistency of feedback. And some of the process there can be very valuable and you should be doing this yourself if you're, if you're not outsourcing this. And a lot of times, I think one of the things that that can happen is you can think about, well, we have to have better sales.
00:29:55	I want to do it myself, or we want a Hexter. The brand tone is very on target. We want to do it internally. And those are good, good sort of hopefulness a good intention. But if you don't have sort of the discipline to follow through when actually monitoring what's happening and this digital example of what a process looks like, then I would say,
00:30:17	please, please reconsider. Please make time or spaciousness to have someone in your team. If it's not, you go through with each agent, who's answering questions on some frequency, they're doing it weekly. Maybe you do it every other week. I think every month is too long because too many issues have come and gone in terms of the phone calls and the issues do it while it's fresh.
00:30:40	And if you don't have the time to commit to that kind of fallacy, what you'd have someone in support of you to do that kind of follow through, then you need to plan for that as the cost of managing your own customer service. So Zen want to react to that or should like move on. I'm going to move on a little bit. Then this here,
00:31:10	you know, Leo spoke a moment ago about how does he, if someone's working from home, how do they, I think be accountable to the virtual office and have you just show up and know kind of what they're there for it. This is a tool called Hubstaff, it's the sort of thing that you could have, or that C an outsource agency would already have in place to monitor how much people are working from home,
00:31:32	how much they're active or inactive in a given day. This is certainly what outsourced agencies use to show accountability, particularly if say their agents are in the Philippines or somewhere feels far away, and you don't know, you know, don't feel as close to that. I don't find this as critical as what I just showed of that weekly check-in and reviewing. And then another thing that might happen.
00:31:57	And one of the things that we help people with is a quarterly audit where we come through and say, it's been a quarter let's look and listen to some phone calls, let's check and see what we're looking for and discover things you might've overlooked and have some sort of either more training to help them pick your cases or find a little broken process you might have.
00:32:17	So I think Leo, the bottom line is there can be some tools to observe people's behaviors at home. There's recording of calls. We really like a service called call rail for routing calls. And, and this is in some ways, a marketing tool for tracking your pay-per-click advertising spend, but they have really expanded this product to be customer service-y. Would they have piece called lead center where it's much more than call tracking,
00:32:43	it's really call routing and, and all of this stuff here that you can see how many calls are being missed. You, you can see what times of the day calls are being missed. You can set up sort of a common key metric that says, how many calls are we missing during the business hours that we promised to answer the phone? And that's what these kinds of analyzed tools help you take a look at.
00:33:10	So I think even if you are managing it internally, or you're spending someone else to manage it externally for you, there is a regularity kind of rhythm that you want to be bringing into your business. Whether it's checking up on individual people or checking up on some of the third-party metrics of how many calls are missed, how long did it take to respond?
00:33:33	If you're using gorgeous that's customer service tool, you know, how long did it take to get, I'm going to go pull up a chart here. This isn't a gorgeous system. And, and there's a tracking number here that says, okay, in January, the time to, to resolve a ticket was, was a six and a half hours. And in December it was four and a half.
00:34:01	Having those numbers where you're actually paying attention enough to know how long things are taking, that's a great process to have in place. And it would be the sort of thing you'd want and expect from an outsource agency. And if you're doing yourself really, you should be kind of managing it, having someone in your team, helping you manage this. This is a tool called air tables,
00:34:20	like a glorified spreadsheet. And it can be great for keeping track of some of those key metrics. If I look at some of these first response time, number of messages received per order, so forth, all the things that come down the line here, number of missed calls. Here we go. The percentage of miss calls during business hours, about 30 to 45% and numbers missing for December and January got to keep up on it.
00:34:49	So they're not, you know, they're, they're good in Sandra and they've forgotten about it since 2022. This is a pretty common, yeah, pretty common. But the intent is there, you know, they're wanting to keep that up. Should I pause here? Any feedback or questions about that? That's interesting because I'm looking forward to using gorgeous. As I built this customer service platform,
00:35:19	it's really good data to be able to measure simple things. You know, how many, how long it took a ticket to get processed, things of that nature. And it could be, you know, things within the numbers. Maybe I don't, you know, I don't know how, I don't know how you close the ticket, but maybe somebody new could open a ticket,
00:35:42	grab a ticket and forget to close it. I mean, obviously things to inflate number, but that's really good data, good KPI to be able to measure your customer service effectiveness. Yeah. I think again, the idea that there was a process for how you're thinking about it, you know, Kim made the observation about how some common sense seemed missing.
00:36:08	Sometimes maybe you just happened to stumble upon a situation where the customer was facing your sales person. And they went off to answer a text message and ignore the customer. Like, how did you discover that, that it just, you happened to see it, did the customer complain. Maybe that was just like good luck, or fortunately you were able to notice that.
00:36:26	And so how do you step back and think about what's the, what's the signals. If you don't observe every customer interaction, if you're not overhearing staff in the side room, talking on the phone all the time, what is your process in place to catch those kinds of signals? And how do you know when to step in and get some extra coaching or,
00:36:46	you know, the signal monitoring is kind of what we're talking about. When they look at this chart, I want to go and look at this here. This is a little bit smaller than I'd hope to put on my glasses gracious. Especially while you can read these words, this is kind of looking at a standard operating procedure. Do you see a spreadsheet here?
00:37:06	Can you read any of the words there, Christina? Is it too small to read? It's really smell. Even put it in a bigger screen. And it was still small. Yeah. So I bought that like bigger is a better, you made it smaller. It was, there you go. That's good. Okay. So the point about showing this is that it's a spreadsheet where we have like the demonstration of what a standard operating procedure would start to look like.
00:37:38	Views views is a way in gorgeous of thinking about what tickets you're seeing and you can set up tickets for some people to see some like social media, Facebook, and some people not to see that Facebook stuff, depending on who you have, how much specialization within your team, for example. And so they're also, they're going through here and they're saying,
00:37:57	okay, the first column is what are the views? And are they added to gorgeous or not? You can see that some of them are yellow, which means it's not applicable and haven't done it yet. Then they have the next column, the pink column reviewed by the customer success manager. Yes, no, no, no, no. A lot of these are no.
00:38:17	And so then they have the name of the view and then they have the, the filters and so on. This is just to say that they have basically a process where they're looking at optimizing and refining, what's set up within gorgeous. And this is just, again, another example of a process. Someone is paying attention to this and when you're outsourcing it,
00:38:38	that's what you're paying for. Right? You have someone who's thinking about process. Who's thinking about making refinements to it. And if you, as a business owner, if you don't have the space for this, it can be a good Beeson to potentially outsource it to another company. You know, in my case, we, sometimes we help coach business owners to do these kinds of things themselves,
00:39:04	or help train people on their team who might kind of grow into the customer service manager role that they don't quite know. They started off answering the phones. They're good. You trust them. They've been there a while. Now it's trying to give them a little more responsibility, help them grow and to be sort of a customer service manager kind of position,
00:39:22	even if there's just a few people, someone to pay attention to this stuff. And so that can be a real important part. And it's part of what needs to be done, whether you outsource it or not. So, okay. I want to jump back to this chart and I want to come back to here. I want to look at what we have right here.
00:39:49	Yeah. Sit here. Yeah. This is interesting question for you. I don't know if anyone's willing to type this in the chat, but what do you prefer to manage people? Processes or products and by products? I mean, things like whether the, the product is made of one kind of fabric or another, but the design of the things, a lot of times,
00:40:22	depending on who's who's here today, if you're a business owner and maybe had some involvement in the invention of your product or this curation of it, then you're like all about the products, then it would make sense that that would be what you'd prefer to manage. Maybe you just really like organizing the way things flow for businesses of ours that have like factories,
00:40:43	you know, efficiency of manufacturing or the efficiency of how, where does the fulfilled and making it faster or more orders per week and so forth. That's a process kind of thing. And then some people just want to go in and, and just take care of that, make sure that people are doing well. You know, I was, I was spent my week in Arkansas last week and,
00:41:04	and one of the owners she came through and she made sure that everyone was going to get fed for lunch. Did I want Mexican? Are we going to go to the dairy bar, a dairy barn? I think it's like a knock-off of dairy queen, but dairy barn in Arkansas, we got, you know, just want to make sure that I had the chocolate shake and everything I needed.
00:41:24	That's what she was caring about. Right. That was most important to her. Any feedback when people, I see Leo put in processes, anyone else want to chip in with what's what's your preferred products products. Hmm. Yeah. Don't see anyone typed in people yet. I guess I'm waiting for that. That's to manage people, James, he's willing to go.
00:41:51	Huh? All right, James, you're willing to manage people. Well, for James, we can continue down this path. I'm going to show that if, because managing people is kind of the hard part and thinking about that customer service role, anyone else going to venture one to manage people? Because if not, I mean, I get it. I get it though.
00:42:14	Nobody else. All right. Then I think the question of where you look for customer service helpers, if say nobody's here that interested in managing people, then I think we ended up going back to charge like this because they have processes in place to manage people. And maybe for someone else on your team who will be managing the people. And so you're not that person,
00:42:42	but you're still willing to have people management within your organization. So maybe that's, you know, that's what part of it. But if you're not going to go to this road and she was the professional plan, like they recommend, then you start asking yourself things like this. This is a company that we like called dynamite jobs. They are primarily remote.
00:43:04	So, you know, we're thinking about remote filtered by customer service and you end up writing job descriptions like this one customer service agent. If you can read that customer service agent or eventually a customer success manager, and you start going through a process of asking, how are we going to get this person to go and work for us and have the systems and processes in place to hire them?
00:43:33	I have a few things I could share about how we go through this process. If you're in the hiring frame of mind for the customer service role. Is that interesting to you here on this, on this call? Do we want to get deeper into that or is something else we've talked about? Do you want to go circle back and get more deeper into that?
00:43:52	Any feedback? Okay. I got one. Yes. We'll continue on with the hiring. So is Shelley. Okay. Well, people who couldn't make it, who were interested in the hiring process. So I know there'll be one. Okay. I'm going to go here and jump into an example of what a process starts to look like when we organize it within sort of a 1, 2, 3 steps.
00:44:21	How we collect applicants, how we think about screening them. Is that helpful to you, Shelly? You're going to go down that process. Maybe I'm going to go to that. Yes. Okay. So I'm jumping into an air table. We use these a lot, the kind of a glorified spreadsheet. We can do some special things for them across this right here.
00:44:40	This is part three. We have a three-part application process and you can see that we have some, some total of people. I won't, I won't expand this cause it'll show all their names and personal phone numbers and applicants that want to get into the, you know, this is a recording. So all I'll say is that in our part, one of our application process,
00:45:05	starting with sort of a job description like this on a page like this, we send them to an application form and let's see if we get, if I get these in the right order, the job application form can look like this is this text too small to read Christina, can you actually read it? I can read it. Okay. So when someone advertises on a page like dynamite jobs and they're sent to application form,
00:45:38	this is kind of where the tension starts to arise. There's a lot of jobs out there, particularly today in the last 18 months, a lot of remote jobs. And so it's almost like there are so many job openings that are remote. The tension is how do you make your job attractive enough to make the effort of applying to what makes your job special enough to hold their attention?
00:46:04	And the tension tension, the tension is how picky you can be about screening. You know, cause if Kim said earlier about how do you find people with common sense you want to screen, you have to screen. And it can't just be the friendly, like my friend likes talking about, he just hires friendly people and that's just not good enough. He found that out painfully.
00:46:31	So we want a multi-part application process. And the challenge is to not make it too involved to discourage people, but enough of a screening process to weed people out. And so what I'm going to show you is just an example. And it's not like the formula that you can follow. The example I'm going to show here was for last year and the job market is dynamic.
00:46:56	The economy shifting it's changing. I mean, there's a lot to say at this moment. So the tension of how much hoops to jump through for your applicants, how much the screen is, you know, it needs to be in real time. Like you need to take stock situation today in today's job market. So what I'm going to say is a little bit from last year.
00:47:16	Okay? So we have the key step in application part. Number one is, did they follow directions or did they not? We have a lot of questions we ask them. But the underlying question is, did they follow all directions? You'd be surprised how hard that is. Right? If you look at my account here of 28, applicants, 18 did not follow directions and 10 did follow directions.
00:47:45	That's totally normal. That's totally normal. So that's th that's the criteria. Let's look at the application form itself. How did you hear about us? These are some interesting sites to advertise. I just showed you that in my jobs, we like hire. My mom is a wonderful woman down there in Euston who runs that for the last many years, hire.
00:48:07	My mom has been interesting. If you have someone who might be say, it's not just women, but it's commonly women who are working from home with kids. So maybe they want to have a job that lasts until three in the afternoon. When their kids come home from school, things like that, it can be very attractive. You can have a very mature,
00:48:26	Hey, going back to Kim's comment, you would have a mature, you know, 39 year old woman, mother of two, who knows how to be like a human being and be attentive to people working remotely just six hours a day. And that's where my mom comes in. You work remotely also. Okay. So we're asking, do you have a workspace at home from which to work?
00:48:49	Don't take that for granted time zones, of course full-time or part-time we like to give people, Hey, if we find a worthy person, we could invent a part-time role for them. Even if we would prefer a full-time send us your resume to this. That is an important instruction. Not everyone follows that. Tell us about your computer skills. We asked them what they think as far as how comfortable they are.
00:49:19	It's always good when you're measuring people, don't just measure objectively through some tests, ask them what is their perception of their capacity. And so we like to do that because it helps people understand, give us a clue. Are they coachable? In other words, do they see themselves as already an expert in whatever you're asking? Are they willing to show some vulnerability of yesterday help in one area or another part of the challenge with hiring is people want to come off and make a good impression.
00:49:51	So they can say you have more ability than they actually do. And we want to ask them how comfortable they are, and then evaluate that later in future steps, we do actually ask them to complete a typing test. This is kind of funny. Some of the business owners just kind of laughed about that, but gosh, it's so nice to have a frame of reference.
00:50:13	You know, I've got someone on my team who types 92 words a minute without errors. Like it's just different for her. When she works through some tasks, it's just not at all the same perception of being intimidated by something that I might ask her to do. And I know she types 92 words a minute and I then choose to help her, you know,
00:50:32	offer some things that otherwise wouldn't other people. Okay. So they do that. Then they understand the job. We give them a job description and we actually asked them to go and tell us some of the details about the job description. So they actually have to read it. Some people do some people don't, it's part of the following directions question we're seeing are they even,
00:50:56	even paying attention because not as much at this moment, but it was the case. Last year, you may have this experience where people were trying to apply for jobs as a way of getting unemployment benefits to keep coming. They only want the job like they would rather to get in. Let's meet up today's situation, but it's, you know, it's a possible concern for people.
00:51:16	Are they willing to pay attention to this job? And there we go. So that's part one. Do you want to go to part two if they make it from here? Yeah. Let's look at what part two is. We went from account of part two. We had 28, 10 follow directions. If I go to part two 11 follow directions and part two,
00:51:45	it looks like this. All right. This is where we start to get some experiential interactions. When I put them in situations that we can start to evaluate, what's there. Like, what does it, what does it sound like on the phone? What are they, are they willing to do something as a, as a test, so to speak.
00:52:04	So we have them go out and pretend to be a prospect and we actually give them a number to call and they actually call the company. Okay. I pretend to be a customer. And then we asked them about it. We use that. We're recording that too. And so we can go out and find the recording. And here it's more like material for VM interviews that come later.
00:52:32	Then we have them role play. As if they are calling a perspective customer. We reverse the situation, role play as if you're pretending. And if you notice here, we say, I think leave a voicemail. So we give them a number. They can call, leave the voicemail at. And that's, that's what I mean. I can't as easily stage a pretend customer interaction,
00:52:54	but I can listen to a voicemail and boy, I can gain so much insight into a person when I hear them leave a message on the phone. I don't know if you ever do this, but have you ever called someone important? Maybe it was for a sale and you left a voicemail and then you played it back. It was like, oh,
00:53:11	I sound kind of, I sound kind of dumb. I didn't quite say that. Right. And you hit delete, and then you record the message. Again. It's almost like I was going to say almost like dating, you know, but I've been married for 25 years. It's hard to know, remember what it was like to call a girl,
00:53:28	but you know, you leave a message for the girl and you're trying to get sound both confident and relaxed. You know, like, like I'm not too, you know, too much, but I'm, I'm on it and pay attention. So that presence, I want to hear that presence in a voicemail. And this is actually a wonderful thing to do.
00:53:47	We actually ended up using a tool called freedom voice for like seven bucks a month. You can get a voicemail at 800 number and super cheap, like whatever that costs would be worth it to have someone pretend when your job on screening. Okay. So then step three, we role play, helping an upset customer, similar as helping a prospect. It's just this time,
00:54:13	this is the delivery of bad news. Want to be able to deliver bad news with some presence, you know, and this is a key question. If you think about managing people and training them, you know, and, and Kim said, common sense. She wants part of what you're wanting is can someone, oh, should I say this? Can your customer service agent say no?
00:54:44	Or like the equivalent of know to a customer? Because some people just have a hell of a time. It's, it's hard to give bad news. And you know, in our last AMA, some of the people on the call were saying how they're just happy to give a refund to anyone who calls and they want to give a refund right away. And of course they would take care of the customer.
00:55:05	And customers are always happy because, Hey, just give refunds as fast as they can, you know, no reason for the customer to be angry. Okay. I get that example. But if you've been like in a business, I've been a part of, sometimes you have bad news and it has to be like, essentially for the customers, like it's like a no,
00:55:25	and that is difficult. And customer service people hate those situations to be presented with that. Like, they can't make someone happy. It's not just about giving a refund. So sometimes it happens. Maybe your business never does, but certainly in the ones, I'm a part of it. It can be painful. So we want to hear the voicemail of someone giving the bad news.
00:55:49	It's, it's challenging. It pushes them to feel like, you know, they, they, aren't just solving a problem there. I think I've said it. Okay. Does anyone want to speak to that? Or how did has that as important getting bad news or I can keep going. He wouldn't have their own experience. Okay. All right. Let's go to the next step.
00:56:21	The third part of the process we want to now find a good fit with our existing team and work each to our strengths. So if someone has gotten this far in the process, we actually liked them. They've passed the door of the presence test in terms of the voicemail. And now it's a matter of maybe they're strong in certain areas, they have the typing skills,
00:56:48	they have the computer skills, they have the presence on the phone. They have the things we think we're looking for that could make them a qualified person. It just, they may not be in fact, the best for customer service. This is actually an important one because a lot of times people try and come to an organization through the customer service route as like an entry level way of getting into a company where they think they're being a transitioning into a new career.
00:57:15	And the cutting of customer service is kind of lower level. You could actually find people who may be better suited to other roles in your company. And so we'd like to think about this in that sense. And we want to think about, are they maybe just willing to get through that application process and put up a good face, but after eight hours a day,
00:57:37	they're not the kind of person that was talking on the phone. That could be also the case that good enough for one good voicemail. I'll they here trying to record it through three times, but after the end of the day have a whole day of it or a whole week of it, and they just can't handle that much phone time. So this is a personality kind of discussion.
00:57:54	We're asking for a few references, ask them to get quick personality test. There's no wrong answers. And there's lots of possible outcomes for this job just helps us. We want you to enhance our existing team and work alongside others. So that's kind of where we rephrase it. And we like to think about personality. It's a couple of different tests we've used over the years,
00:58:17	but one of the things that we're giving a lot of attention to right now is this idea of a polarity personality test polarity type indicator, and someone we've worked with together alongside with. And I just respect the waste, thinking about the personality of people. So I don't know if anyone wants to talk about personality coming up here at the top of the hour.
00:58:40	Do you want to go any farther and think about some of the personality observations about customer service? Is it helpful to people? Oh, I just want to say we can keep going and you don't really have a time limit today. So I find this is like my favorite part when I was waiting to hear was the personnel personality part. So I say,
00:59:00	go for it. But what does everybody else say? I've been a big fan of like Myers-Briggs and this for a long time. So that, that brings in another avenue right there because I, how to, you know, I know how to comprehend the disc or the Myers Briggs. I never thought about finding a way to connect those two, even though now it just came to me.
00:59:35	As soon as you brought it up, I'm like, holy crap. That's perfect. So, but if it's a simpler way to approach it, because some of those, you know, they have quite a few questions, so, you know, you can get to it quicker, I guess. You know, if a test is shorter, I don't know.
00:59:53	How do you feel about the length of the personality tests? Yeah, it can be, you know, it's the last thing that we do in the screen process. So we don't necessarily want to use it to disqualify someone as much as we already know. We like them at this point. And we like to think about it as are they really for the customer service role,
01:00:15	because maybe they're not. And so let's just talk about some of the details here. This one is based on the Myers-Briggs, but the guy who developed it actually he's quite the, the youngian personality expert. And he actually thinks there's some flaws and some corrections that he's made to it. So that's kind of what spurred him to go forward with his idea and build upon the Myers-Briggs and correct some things.
01:00:39	So a couple of things I'll just make a first introduction here is that he looks at people in terms of how they take in information and perceiving. All right. And then how you make decisions. And this is sort of a four part matrix here. So how do you take an information and how do you make decisions? There are some people who might see all at once sort of a big picture,
01:01:05	they kind of grasp it intuitively they just kind of get it. Whereas some people need precise, detailed, focused, very much in the day-to-day though. You know, concrete is verifiable. People have one, they're not just one or the other. There's a spectrum across here, but some people it's easier for them to take into information when it's sensory oriented.
01:01:29	And that's what this sort of, it gives it the color green sensation oriented, which is someone who kind of more grasps it intuitively okay. How we take it information. Secondly, how do we make decisions? So you can think about it from the customer service perspective, they're listening to the customer complaints, someone calls up or someone emails, and there's a problem.
01:01:53	Okay. How are they? What's the easiest and what I'm saying, the easiest, I mean, people have qualities or aptitudes that they are conscious of. And some things they are more in the subconscious. What they're conscious of feels easiest. It, it can do it without being exhausted. Some people it's more of an unconscious ability. It feels harder.
01:02:16	There's more kind of resistance. They can maybe get to it or do it, but they have to really work at it. And so part of we're talking about here is where's where are people is their proclivity. What's easiest for them to do their most conscious of. And that's kind of where that spectrum is. Some people are more or less easy and how to,
01:02:34	how to do these things. So in terms of making decisions, do they analyze information to find the cause and effect? Are they following it and trying to place the logical order of things you might call us analytic analytical kind of thinking, or is it more personal and more subjective, more of a value judgment, more of like the appreciation, empathetic kind of connection with a person.
01:02:59	You can imagine that when the agent is on the phone and trying to understand what someone's bringing to them, if we go back to this on here, he does the Roseanne BARR skit. This is the part that gets me. Like I got some magic wand. I've got nothing better to do to listen to him, bitch. This is a person who's not in the way you might want them to be in the red feeling,
01:03:26	personal appreciation, empathic, compacted, right? It's just not her orientation in the skit. The Senate live one, there's a good role for this kind of blue thinking style, but it does make for a smoother and warmer experience. When you have people who are more in this red feelings zone about how they make decisions, this is making sense to you.
01:03:50	Christina, do you have any, any feedback on this so far? No, I think that's totally spot on. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to jump in then to map this. Visually, if you look at this chart here, there's not enough time to go through all of its meaning, but what I will say is that on the bottom left corner,
01:04:13	there are people who are more of a helper orientation, more feeling, less head thinking. Not that there's also a sort of analytical quality might have in some degree, but the orientation is more in the helper zone. So when you map people's personality and you find that they are much more of an innovator or inventor up in the top, right, and they're applying for a customer service role,
01:04:40	then we start asking ourselves like, Hmm, is this a person who is capable of following the standard operating procedures that I've carefully written out? They might prefer to invent their own. They might be enlivened by thinking about all the things they could create and do differently or better than what you've already set up. It doesn't mean that they're not useful to your organization because you might need that to be clear about what you're hiring for.
01:05:10	We need to be clear, you know, where they're oriented, you know, so this bottom left quadrant, if they are not in this area, it makes it it's worth the conversation in the interview to explore more. So for example, we have a wonderful woman who's in one of the projects we're working on, who is more of the architect. She likes to see how a system comes together.
01:05:41	She loves the idea of gorgeous connecting to ship station with order and shipping delivery, things. She loves kind of connecting and seeing how those things should work. She loves the Shopify, notify me when it's back in stock app, like the inventory is out. Notify me when it's back in stock. She loves configuring how to reduce number of customer service inquiries.
01:06:06	Because now someone can go to the Shopify page, enter their email address and be notified when it comes back in stock in her mind. She's problem-solving and thinking about how to plug those pieces together, to reduce the reason to call the phone in the first place. Does that make sense? You may need that person on your team. It can be very valuable.
01:06:29	It just may be the case that when it comes to say no to a customer who needs to hear that, it's going to be really hard for her. It's not going to be something she's going to want to do. She might like delay it for a couple of days. She might find like five other things to do first. Is this making sense?
01:06:48	What I'm saying? Yeah. Okay. There's other thing is about this year without getting into much of this could be a whole discussion into itself, this chart and draw meaning from it. But one of the other things that we look for, I'm gonna go back to our screening process. When we look at the applicants, see what I can see here.
01:07:11	Let's go here. We see, I guess I can't quite show with all the details I was going to say that we have, we actually map how introverted or extroverted the customer service applicant is. And by that you familiar with the idea of introversion and extroversion. Sometimes people come when it comes to cliche, I'm extroverted. I love to be with people.
01:07:38	Another way of thinking about it as more, when you are around other people, do you find yourself exhausted or drained after a while? And then you need to go and recharge kind of to get your alone time or when you go around, other people does that Enlive in you, do you find yourself more energized? Yeah. I know someone who works at a restaurant and when she comes home,
01:08:04	she is completely exhausted. Whereas some people come home from a restaurant and like wired. Like they can't go to bed. It's two in the morning and they are just so jazzed up from being around the people in the restaurant. And so when we go back and talk about this, this is a thing we joked about in our last, in our last session,
01:08:24	DNA, Roseanne BARR in the Senate. Laughs. She says, you know, they hang up and leave you alone. And that's when you feel real good, this is a sign of someone with an introverted tendency. She wants to be kind of like, let me get back to my real work of doing whatever and like not talking to you, Mr.
01:08:48	Customer. So that's good to know. It's really good to know about the people you're hiring introversion or extroversion. And in this chart, there's too much detail to get into for time, but it does give us an indication where the extroversion is. I don't know, Christina, would you be willing to say anything about whether you scored more introverted or more extroverted on this?
01:09:14	Say anything about it or no, I'm extroverted for sure. Like, but I knew that already going in, like I love people. I like to be around them even when I'm I miss people after awhile, you know, so definitely extroverted for me. Yeah. Yeah. So that's part of that sort of screening and hiring processes to think about where people are most enlivened.
01:09:37	And it sounds like, you know, someone figured out that Christina is probably in a good role for what she's doing is to have that quality where she's happy to help you and not so much feeling burdened by the interruption, even if, you know, cause you know, you might personally feel some overwhelm at time. There's an inclination that you're your satisfaction in your enlivening comes from feeling someone's got their needs taken care of.
01:10:04	Oh for sure. And that's probably why I'm so good at my job. That's, that's a huge quality that makes your job feel easier to you. And so part of what the challenge can be w and we've come across these and these audits that we do, people can be in a, in a role where like, for example, this is organizing rule,
01:10:27	the very top left quadrant. We had a woman who was in a customer service role who just wanted to get things in their proper place. And she kept being distracted by all these pesky phone calls. She came off initially as friendly. So that was like a checkbox. Yeah, she's friendly. She's well-spoken but she really wants to get back to the organizing things.
01:10:55	She found out that she was wonderful at programming, a chat bot. And if you've ever come across a chat bot, they have the ability to do question and answer kind of pseudo intelligently. And if you're looking at one of the examples I have to have on my screen right now, if you go to this site house or more, there is a chat bot here,
01:11:17	and you can go through that process of going to play with it's like, but in any event, her orientation was to program in the most optimal questions and answers, which reduced the number of phone calls dramatically curability was to organize that into lots of logical groupings and concise answers and sort of train the artificial intelligence of the chat bot. However, she kept being pulled into phone call interactions with customers to the point that,
01:11:51	you know, like all of our last AMA is the customers are like, Hey, I'm going to give a refund, whoever calls right away. Well, in this example, the customer service agent became so frustrated that she decided to withhold a refund from the customer. She was going to make the customer pay because well, you know, the customer had been,
01:12:12	had been a bitch. And so she was gonna make him pay and not give the refund. Well, she was put, she was sort of triggered or brought to that level of so fresh frustration because the role she was in kept pulling her away from the work she really wanted to do perfectly good employee who lost her job because they didn't orient her to the right role.
01:12:35	So any feedback on what I'm saying, does this kind of help you think about the responsibility you need to sort of take on, if you do develop your own customer service team versus say outsourcing it, these are the things that we're interested in evaluating, because if you don't want to give that, that much consideration, you can go here and say, oh,
01:12:53	they've vetted and screened candidates. I'm just gonna, you know, pick one and charge by the hour and let them take care of that. These are the kind of the trade-offs that we have. We see as we think about this, this process, any feedback or thoughts about that? That's very interesting. I could see somebody not wanting to manage people,
01:13:17	wanting to go with a hourly rate, a customer service person, just cause they're like, you know what, I, ain't trying to deal with that. Go ahead. Let me hire somebody, let them do it for me. And I, that would be a good and a bad thing. That definitely there's a lot of good that could come out of that for sure.
01:13:35	Especially if the calls are being monitored and somebody is reviewing these calls for somebody else. But I do like how you pointed out a lot of things to look for when you're going to go hire your customer support person. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe you've already got the person hired and it needs some more training or orientation. Our sort of attuned method tries to think about helping you bring that quality up and the people you already have working for you.
01:14:04	And it could be something that kind of is helping you make it easier to get the results, want out of the team as compared to going in and just sort of relying on, say the outsource agency to do that coaching for you, where they are, the ones checking in and going back to that thing, I said at the beginning, that process where you,
01:14:26	every week, this is being done, this is a real great way to help bring over time, the level up of your team of your team. You know, for time, I don't know. I go go too much farther today, but I I'd be happy to stop or just, we can end it here. We could, you know, just kind of take some questions are the things you've heard me talk about.
01:14:46	What's what's helpful at this point. I think I'm have anybody has any questions with stuff that Patrick talked about, feel free to type them in or unmute yourself. We have some new people on the call that have never really been in an IME on an AMA. Feel free to unmute yourself, turn your camera on, give us any feedback of what you heard.
01:15:11	It looks like Leo typed in there. Thank you so much for sharing my personality type is great at managing processes. Thank you, super cool. All right. Well thank you for that Leo and thanks Kim, for the feedback to, Yeah. Yeah. I know that the people who weren't able to be on three of them for sure are really going to get a big,
01:15:34	big benefit out of watching this replay. I really appreciate you breaking this down, Patrick, for anybody looking to hire somebody you gave such good like things to look for. So I definitely appreciate it. Is there something that you offer Patrick where somebody could hire help? Have you, have you helped them hire somebody? Yes. I think it would probably would begin with essentially an audit of what the situation looks like today.
01:16:05	And we can kind of correlate what's going on with what you might need. And it was also the case. Some of the organizations are, are trying to balance a hybrid model where you've got a few core people, you know, maybe like, it'd be like Kim, they have a retail or presence in the store and they actually need some people there,
01:16:23	but maybe they need some more help online or during off hours. And so they have a combination of some outsourced and some internally, and we can kind of help you think about that process and how to optimize it if it's not as clear whether to go one way or the other. That's so cool. That's so cool. I never thought that there would be a possibility where there is a hybrid.
01:16:46	That's super cool. Well, I appreciate you very much for jumping on the second time, Patrick and giving us some really good points. Is it okay for people to reach out to you if they have any questions I'm in the Facebook group. So find me there. Yeah, you guys, Patrick is an e-comm insider. He's been with us since BGS live,
01:17:07	but definitely reach out to him. Send him message. He already said, give us the green light. So you're ready to have your inbox flooded. Yeah. All right. Well, I think the main thing about customer service that interests me about it is we've, we've found over the years that there can be a drag on your sales. There's like a drag in your business and you're not quite sure what it is.
01:17:27	And it's not just about positioning the button in the right place and the checkout. There's something else, you know, so much about retention and you know, things I like about what Tanner teaches is that retention and life cycle focus in the costumes over the long-term and that can be derailed, but all the good things you've put in place, it can be derailed when there's a bad customer service experience,
01:17:49	or even just a marginally annoying one that just drags everything down. So it's kind of in some ways, a, a hidden danger or a vulnerability in your business, if you're not quite aware of what's happening and how it can affect your results over the long-term. Yeah, that's a hundred percent true. A lot of people don't realize that their customer support has a lot to do with scaling of their business.
01:18:12	So I'm really happy. You were able to touch on that because you know, a lot of people don't know that and they don't realize that they think just optimization, optimization and running ads and traffic to your store. It's all great. But if you don't have the right people behind it to answer any questions that arise, then it's all worthless, right?
01:18:33	Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think let's take up some questions in the Facebook group and taking the examples of, Hey, this situation, how do I handle this? Or, Hey, this thing happened to me and now I'm thinking about going down this route or another, I'm happy to take those kind of questions in the Facebook group. Yeah, for sure.
01:18:48	That'd be great. Yeah. We actually get those from time to time that are like, what should I do? They said they got like, what are the things I hear a lot is I heard, I saw this person says they, they didn't get their package, but I saw it was delivered. How do I handle this? What do I do?
01:19:03	My instinct is F you, I know you got it. And I've heard a lot of people say that. They're going to say that, but I'm like, don't, you dare tell them that you will lose that customer for life. So I really do invite you guys to post those questions in the Facebook group for sure. And have Patrick help you respond?
01:19:23	Yeah. Okay. Well, very good. All right, guys, So much for joining us on this AMA, the next one is going to be March 21st. And since it's an honor of the women's month, women's appreciation month, I'm going to invite all women business owners to jump on that AMA if you're a guy and you want to be on there,
01:19:42	go ahead. I don't mind, but I prefer to have mainly women on the call. I just like to be with my women there and see how I could support you guys. So with that, I'll see you guys, March 21st at 12:00 PM Pacific time. I'll talk to you all later. Bye.