Customer experience determines whether your customers choose you or another company. At this year’s SaaStr Europa, Natalie Margolin, the VP of Customer Experience at Monday.com, shares strategies and lessons learned to elevate customer experience at scale.
Keep reading to learn more about Monday.com’s customer experience journey, the challenges and milestones you’ll face at scale, and how to deliver a world-class customer experience.
Monday.com’s Evolution Over Time
Monday.com is in over 200+ industries and countries, with 70% of customers not in the tech industry. From a CX perspective, this is super challenging. With 225,000 customers and a robust platform, Monday.com has been very busy over the last decade and is still evolving for many verticals. They got to a point where customers knew more about their platform and products than employees did.
So, here’s a history lesson on Monday.com’s CX journey.
Before Natalie joined the company, the customer experience team was the pride of the company, with 25,000 interactions per month, a 6-minute response time, and a 9.5+ customer delight score. Those results were amazing until scale happened.
Of course, it didn’t happen in a day, but it felt like it became an entirely new company with new challenges, and the customer experience started to go in the wrong direction.
- The volume of emails was increasing, and it was the only communication channel
- There was endless back and forth, with customers knowing more about the platform than Monday.com’s people
- Wait times got longer
- Customers weren’t satisfied
- Team members were overwhelmed with a backlog
The customer experience went from answering emails so fast to almost not answering them at all. Natalie joined Monday.com to bring customers back to the forefront and remedy some of these challenges, but she didn’t immediately start implementing changes.
Instead, she listened. Before suggesting changes, as a leader, you have to listen and get to know what everyone is experiencing, from the founders down to the customers. If you jump in and make those changes without this step, you might not have buy-in, and your plans could fail.
Listening is Key
Who did she listen to, and what did she learn?
Founders
The awesome founders at Monday.com said that nothing mattered more than the customer experience, and today’s situation must change. Emails as the only communication channel had to stop, and it was time to bring some live channels in to allow them to solve issues more effectively.
Builders
The builders jumped in, saying, “You have to do something. The amount of tickets and bugs we’re receiving from your team isn’t allowing us to be available to build new products and features.” They had a huge backlog of their own.
Team Members
Natalie met with many team members around the globe, and everyone shared a huge frustration that they were overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge they needed. They weren’t hired to troubleshoot problems and bugs, but that’s what they were doing.
Customers
Natalie read hundreds of customer surveys saying they were tired and frustrated with the endless back and forth through email. They even thought the Monday.com team got it wrong because they knew more about the product than the team members.
The main challenges Monday.com was facing at scale were:
- Evolving customer needs, limited channels, and a more diverse group of people from different industries and countries
- Detachments from customers and the company
- Key functionalities and functions were missing. The organization’s structure made sense at a lower scale but didn’t work anymore
- Frustrations from external and internal folks, thanks to an endless backlog and customers not feeling heard
- Sparse data infrastructure, which meant decisions weren’t based on trends, customer sentiment, or data
A different approach was needed. So, what did they do next?
Improvements, Not Changes
It was clear that a lot of changes needed to happen, and people don’t like change, so you want to frame the changes as improvements—improving the experience for customers and team members. They forced themselves to stop using the word change, which sounds simple but made a massive difference for the organization.
The mission was to build a service operation that could handle anything at scale and become an industry leader in providing an exceptional customer experience. As leaders, you don’t want to look for solutions to the problems of today or yesterday but to build an organization capable of handling any scale that comes.
The guiding principles for exceptional execution at Monday.com are fast, simple, localized, and empowered. If they aren’t doing those things, they aren’t doing it right.
Monday.com’s CX Journey Milestones
Monday.com picked four main milestones to level up the customer experience team and had many smaller ones along the way.
#1: Everybody Knows Everything
Monday.com is a robust, multi-product platform. Before, team members didn’t know what was happening. With Monday.com today, it doesn’t make sense to expect someone you hire to know every detail on the platform from day one.
The solution was to develop expertise by rearranging the organization. You want to make people experts in a specific area of the platform, and they could build their knowledge as they went.
With the help of smart routing and automation, customers had a much better experience. They built a mechanism that routes the right interaction to the right person with the right level of knowledge.
Technical support is another important piece. They had one organization, so the same team member might have a simple how-to followed by troubleshooting a complex bug. So, they needed to build a new team with relevant, expert technical experience. The impact was immediate.
#2: One Channel of Communication
Email was the only way customers could approach Monday.com, and they were looking for more ways to connect. Email wasn’t suitable for what they did and was a huge source of frustration.
The solution was live chats. It sounds easy, but it’s not. Suddenly, team members are tied to their desks so they can solve real-time problems. The moment Monday.com opened chats, they were flooded with them.
Live chats and email affected customer satisfaction almost immediately. The ability to resolve a customer issue on chat is 10x greater when the customer is real-time with a team member in the platform.
#3: Volume Increase with Scale
Chats didn’t solve for scale. It might have brought in even more interactions because it was easier to reach them. That’s why Monday.com decided to automate everything they could in everything they do. The generative chatbot was introduced.
The generative chatbot was a game-changer almost from day one. Changing from humans to generative from day one brought in 50% fewer chats while solving problems with the highest quality. This is where CX is investing most of its time today.
The bot improved the knowledge base because it was leaning on all the articles and content Monday had. Implementing a chatbot immediately reduced the wait time, and 90% of the time, it takes less than 90 seconds to connect with a customer. This is huge!
#4: Staying One Step Ahead
These solutions aren’t about solving today’s problems but thinking about the future. For the future, you need to be one step ahead of what customers are looking for, so this is what Monday.com decided to do. How?
Monday.com is adding AI to everything it does, in every aspect of team members, customers, data, enablement, etc. Monday.com is investing a lot in learning what’s out there and innovating to ensure its people can be their best with everything they need to achieve the mission.
If you have a good objective sentiment analysis, there won’t be a need for CSAT. You can understand what the customer is thinking and feeling at any given moment, which means you can be proactive about what you put in front of them.
You don’t need to wait for the survey that comes after it’s too late. The sentiment score runs in real-time online all the time.
They also automated quality assurance. If you have hundreds of team members worldwide, this is the only way to ensure that every interaction is above and beyond customer expectations.
With the right tools, you can audit 100% of interactions continuously, flagging the ones needing review. This is huge in the field of customer experience. AI searching can also look through every item of knowledge, no matter the platform, to provide answers to people immediately, both internally and externally.
Key Takeaways
Every step you take as a customer experience team needs to keep you well-connected to the customers. You should constantly imagine the next best thing while staying connected. Monday.com has achieved a lot within these four buckets, and they have a better way to make decisions today.
Key takeaways for customer experience leaders are:
- Always listen. Don’t jump right into solutions until you hear them from every angle.
- A vision is best shared, so you want buy-in from your team.
- Automation can make humans superhumans.
- An innovation a day keeps the doctor away. Always look for the next best thing while working on the current one.
Some ways you can deliver a world-class customer experience are:
- Build infrastructure to support any scale.
- Help your people bring value through AI and bots that give time back to humans.
- Make your employees happy.
