Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. Table Service is presented by Tavolo Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Nino Cavanencia is a passionate CX enthusiast and lifelong student of consumer behavior. With over 20 years of experience scaling CX and support functions at iconic customer centric organizations like Nordstrom and Zappos, Nino has a proven track record of delivering impactful results. Now, as the founder of Swift cx, he's leading the way in creating AI powered tools that equip support teams to deliver world class customer experiences at scale. Nino, welcome to the table.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Jordan.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. For our guests who may not be familiar with you, I'd love if you could just tell us a little bit about the work you do, the things you're passionate about, and then we'll, we'll dig in a little more.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: In terms of my background, I, I've been building and scaling support teams for over 20 years.
I started, you know, bottom, bottom rung of the ladder, if you will, customer service agent and really just kind of grew through the ranks from there. And you know, I, as you mentioned, I say, thankfully very, very early on my career getting exposed to two brands that I had the pleasure of working for, Nordstrom and Zappos. Nordstrom was actually before I went into customer service, I was actually just a sales associate in high school. The stuff that they instill at, you know, for every employee that comes in that company was just memorable. I'll never forget it. And then being part of Zappos support team when it was only five agents and I was, you know, one of, one of five on that team, really early days in San Francisco and you know, having those two experiences really at the foundation of my career, like colored everything else. So really from that point on, in varied levels of leadership, my sort of dream vision was how do we create amazing customer experiences, service experiences that scale with the company. And, and I think that's, that's something really important to highlight. The scaling piece is that I think a lot of companies struggle with that, Zappos included, you know, where it's just sometimes so expensive to provide these amazing service experiences. So I wanted to find a way to do it efficiently.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Before we dig into more of the conversation, I'd love to zero in a little bit on your time at Zappos, particularly being so early in the process. Would love to hear a little more about what that experience was like.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I Mean, it's funny. I probably will do it at some point, but I could almost do a whole episode on sort of the early Zappos stories because there's a lot of stuff that I think folks got exposed to via sort of the Tony Hsieh era and the book. But I was before all that, Nick Swinburn was actually the founder CEO of Zappos. And, you know, we were. It was. I think it was 30, 35 people in this building in San Francisco.
And a lot of people talk about this story, but it's hard to find the article out there. But one of the things that kind of skyrocketed Zappos, in terms of folks starting to talk about them, was this. I think it was like the San Francisco Chronicle or some kind of prominent publication wrote that a customer went into chat and I don't know, maybe they were drunk one night or something like that, but essentially they asked the chat agent to order a pizza. And there was. So this. This predated me, but there was essentially a mandate in support that you'll do anything for the customer. We're going to do everything for the customer. Customer first. And so that agent helped them to order a pizza. And then it was like a whole article. I think this, if I get the right. I think it's like 2000 or something like that. So it's an old article. And so when I got there, I actually sat next to the guy who. To handle that chat. And so we laughed about it. And I just. I was blown away that that was sort of like their ethos and how they were handling things, because I had, even though I was still new in my customer service career, I had come from before there, which I think is a stark contrast, an outsourcer kind of startup. And so they were just hammering us with volume, and it was like throw us in the deep end and, you know, trying to make margin off of all the agents. And then you go to Zappos and guys telling me, you know, you can take as long as you want. There's no such thing as handle time, whatever a customer needs, you know, et cetera, et cetera, you know, fully empowered. And so, yeah, I. It was. It was really cool to be able to be part of that and to see how they, you know, tried to scale that.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: That's awesome. Especially thinking about your. Your experience then obviously being at Nordstrom in your, your, you know, high school years. And just a classic story that I think you and I even even talked about recently with Nordstrom of a guy rolling Some tires in and saying, hey, I bought these here however many years ago and I was always told back, and of course Nordstrom didn't sell him the tires. But to go and look at that story and find out that that story is actually true. It's not just some lore that's been then built up. It's pretty, pretty incredible thing to have to have. I'm sure works for both of these companies and how much they've instilled. Yeah, in you.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: They, they talk about that specific story. In my training, I remember that story, but. And I wrote a LinkedIn post recently about my story at Nordstrom. They talked about that story and I was working in the stock, I was going to work in the stock room, which I thought, you know, I barely would even see the sun. And so I thought, like, you know, why do I need to know about all this stuff? But I, but I did, you know, and I remember them telling me that, you know, you could be walking around, you represent Nordstrom, right? And if a customer asks you a question, you need to represent us the right way. And. But yeah, that story that I told about that lady with a hole in the shoe, it's 100% true. I remember it vividly. I remember me, you know, as a sales associate. I know anybody who works at Nordstrom and sales, they'll know this. You know, you have your. Maybe it's different now, but back in the day you'd have your employee number and you could tap it into the register, check your sales. Especially as a salesperson, you're like, oh yeah, I'm killing it today. So I'm here at the cash register just checking my sales and she comes up and she's like, these shoes are defective. And I was like, oh yeah, let me. Happy to help you out with that. So grab the shoes. I'm looking, there's a worn out hole in the bottom.
And everything was spinning in my head about like what I wanted to say, but of course I'm not going to say that, which is like, are you sure you didn't just walk a lot maybe? And she said she bought them recently and then they just wore out so quick. But yeah, our manager. What I didn't add even more detail in that story was when I went to the floor manager, our buyer was right next to the floor manager and I gave the manager the shoes. And he goes and looks at the buyer and he's like chuckling, he's like, you know, she says she bought this recently and then the buyer's like, you Know, we carried those like two years ago.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Or something ridiculous. But yeah, with Nordstrom, there was no questions asked, give her a full refund.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: I thought that's pretty amazing.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: Yeah, pretty incredible to see companies doing this. And I know obviously in our, our age of not really personal touch in customer experience and customer support, I mean, one of the topics we'll talk about here today is AI and how that's being utilized in support and how some companies are using it in a way that is. We're just, we're not anywhere near a place where we need to replace the human touch from this completely. And so I think it's really good for all of us to go back to those stories and remember, even though we're in a different time, in a different way, delivering this in a whole different scenario, there's still ways we can do this as we serve our customers and help them with the products that they have purchased from us. Well, let's dig in a little more on the tech side. Talk with me a little bit about customer support in tech. So as we kind of move towards the story about Swift cx, that we'll talk about like, what has been your experience of support in tech in support, and what has led you in the direction you've gone in terms of the products you're building now?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that we've geeked out about support and tech.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: And I think there are a lot of us out there that, you know, we've got the sort of nerdy side to ourselves. We just, we love all the cool new tools and, you know, but obviously we're, you know, support leaders first. But just keeping your pulse on what's coming and what's going to help us do our job better, I think was a big sort of impetus for me trying to push on, launching something for myself that I believed in. And it was just a buildup over my career that, that I was someone that very much respected the traditions of support, where we came from and kind of what seems to be working. But at the same time, I would always question things and want to poke holes and figure out is there a better way to get to Z from A more efficiently.
And support is ripe with a lot of places to poke holes and do things better. When I look at tech over the years, I think it's not done as good a job as it could have, enabling us into that sort of future version of support, like really propelling us in the future. It's been really good at this sort of status quo. Idea of support, that we're reactive, we're the firefighters, we're the cost center, et cetera, complaints department.
And so I think it's been good about enabling us to exist where we are and constantly sort of trying to play catch up and be more forward thinking. And so I wanted to see a different version of what technology could do for us. Because throughout my career when I would question things and try to do things better and when I would see amazing outcomes and what I produce with my teams, it was never thanks to my tools. I would say pretty much never did I go, wow, it was that tool that got me there in Spy of the Tools I was able to get there. And it was usually manual effort ingenuity, working with great other people on the team, banding together, figuring out ideas, but it was elbow grease that would get us there. And so although I always say this, I don't think being a founder in the support tool space with domain expertise is a prerequisite for success.
I do think it's a prerequisite for being innovative. And I don't think enough of them sort of fully understand what we're going through in our operations enough to build that forward thinking version of what we need to enable us to get there. And so I thought after so much complaining, I better do something about it and stop complaining. And so that's where SwiftCX kind of was born. Is this answer to can technology help enable any company to deliver amazing service experiences effortlessly? And that's what we wanted to achieve.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Now, before we, before we kind of move into talking about Swift cx, let's talk about the overarching picture then as we think about what AI and customer support does, you and I have some conversations about what companies are missing when they're going out and they're looking at all these tools or me as support leader. The number of people who reach out to me on a daily basis and say, hey, I've got the AI tool that's going to solve all your support problems. Here you go, here's this. And I would say 99% of them, when I look at them, I can immediately tell it's, you know, cut and paste. From the last guy that I talked to, it's not anything special, there's not anything unique about it. It's not actually going to solve my problem. So what are companies missing when they're, when they're thinking about these tools and what can they do to better evaluate those types of tools?
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Specific on the buyer side, like what could, what can, okay, yeah, 100%. We're going to be working on a series of guides because these conversations that I'm having, I'm realizing that it's really going to help us. And I know it comes across self serving, but the way that I create content, you know, for this community, which as I'm a support leader first, founder second, but I do it with, I want to actually give them the right information because I see countless examples kind of to your point, where I've talked to folks that have been burned by some of these tools that they quickly adopt without being fully educated and sort of being sold something in the sales process that they then regretted when they went through implementation. And I think one of the things that's really ironic that I've seen is sort of, how would I say this? It's sort of thinking that AI at this stage is capable of doing more, it can do more than it actually is capable of doing. Right. Which is. And the reason I say it's ironic is because I think a lot of folks in the support space would agree we don't want our jobs taken overnight by AI, yet somehow our perception is that this thing can take our jobs overnight. And so I would almost sort of try to tell the community at large, let's take that like 50 steps down. And it should make you feel better. We're not gonna go anywhere tomorrow. But you know, I'll run demos sometimes and I think some of the, some of what customers think is possible is probably gonna be possible a year or two out, but you know, they'll go. And so when this happens, it'll just learn right away, right? Well, you're gonna hear that from other vendors, but it's not really the way that it works right now yet.
And it does learn and it will learn, but not in the sense of almost sort of Harry Potter, like magic of, you know, I click something and then it's just the next time I don't even have to click it right. And so we'll get there, but we should all thank our lucky stars we're not there yet. Because that type of speed learning by AI, no one would work or have a job. So I think it's kind of tempering expectations a bit on what AI can do right now.
And this is just a few things off the top of my head also. This idea of really trying to acknowledge generative AI for what it is and isn't, what it isn't is smart. It's not, it's. It has a perception of intelligence, but it 100%, at least in this current instance today, follows along with garbage in, garbage out. That, you know, if you. If you just give it a whole bunch of terrible prompts or feed it a whole bunch of, you know, random knowledge and then you want some very specific response back. That's where hallucinations come in. That's where, you know, missing the bullseye comes in. So a lot of that stuff that we were really thoughtful about and. And to actually deliver on a closer level of accuracy than you would see other companies sort of speak to in their marketing and their marketing content, that whenever I see something like, you know, we'll automate 93% of your customer service. Like, I mean, even saying it, I just start to laugh right When I read something like, you know, we will automate 91% of your support.
The missing fine print is if you have five macros that handle all tickets with zero editing required. And this is the most vanilla support ever in human history. Yes, I agree. 91% is achievable. So that that kind of disinformation engine that's being pumped around it makes it harder for the other companies that are actually trying to operate with integrity.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I would say with confidence. There have likely been good companies that might have a better product that have reached out to me, but they have not gotten time from me. Because if I'm wading through multiples of those in any given day, any given week, I'm likely to miss some good ones along the way. So kind of moving from there. Now, just to talk about SwiftCX, I'd love to hear a little bit about what y'all have built, what you're doing, and what the. The plans are for the future.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: So today we are squarely focused on three specific areas that I feel, at least as a starting point, all wrap into that overall vision of making it easier and more scalable to deliver amazing service experience for any company.
So first and foremost is helping our agents. I definitely have a soft spot for the front line, as I said, you know, that's where I started. So I wanted, you know, for the. For the employee in the company that is arguably doing one of the hardest jobs and is 100% the lowest paid. I just felt like, you know, they need a really good copilot like. Like tomorrow or yesterday, I should say. So we very, very thoughtfully tried to create a copilot that, you know, wasn't just some rapper over ChatGPT. Wasn't, you know, providing some kind of superficial solve. Like, it was thoughtful, intentional about making their Workflow end to end easier. And so we like to say that our copilot helps make every agent the best agent. And so we really tried to, to achieve that through how we approached it. And then to complement that is a bot. And our bot can, or you know, or an AI agent if you will, it can exist in a chat widget, it can be automated email and soon voice. I would almost say part of the reason also that we didn't start with a bot is admittedly never rolled out a bot in my entire support career because I didn't like how any of them performed. And it was just another sort of, it felt like another flavor of a phone menu. And and I just, I just thought this is just. It drives me crazy. I don't want to drive our customers crazy. So everything I did was about scaling support by just finding ways to reduce contacts by just improving the customer experience. So the hard, the hard way. And so I told my co founder that you know, when we created a bottom let's make sure this better be the most customer friendly customer first bot out there.
And so that was a big, big thing for us as we were building it and what that meant and it meant that we put a lot more time building it than sort of your next vendor. But for us that was, that intentionality was really important. And so for our bot we do certain things within that experience that I would say bridges the best of both worlds from sort of your flow building aspect that some of the incumbent bots have as well as the generative AI bots. So you kind of get this blend of both that really keeps the conversation on rails, but feels very much like a nice conversation. Like in many cases it feels like you're having a chat, very much a chat like with an agent, but it happens to be AI and also a big thing for us is that while I don't in any way pass any judgments on anyone using the term deflection, I really want us to start just being a fan of neuro linguistic programming and how important that is is to try to start reframing how we think about automation. And deflection is something that I think about like bugs on a windshield.
The last thing I want to think about is deflection for customers who keep our bills paid and the lights on.
So I don't want to deflect them, I want to automate amazing service for them. Sure. And so when we were thinking about again the experience for our bot, that's what we were thinking about. And then lastly, very close to my Heart is our Insights product. So that was a lot of what I had to do manually to try to scale amazing service operations is really constantly just digesting insights from everywhere I could within our operation and feeding that into marketing, products, sales, et cetera, to really try to do better for the customer. And so we've kept this piece in beta because we really, really, really want to do it. It's justice and it's not an easy thing to do. Right, sure. And so that compliments to me, that kind of trifecta of helping your agent, helping your customers and helping leadership through that kind of product suite.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Could you tell us just a little bit about these three products or any combination of these products, some of the successes your customers have had utilizing these?
[00:21:14] Speaker B: Yeah, let's see. So we're actually going to be releasing a few case studies soon. I remember one interview I was doing a big thing. Actually they mentioned it in a few of the interviews that I did. Surprising. And this wasn't even actually a use case that we were thinking about when we built Copilot, but we just sort of happened this way, onboarding new agents that using our Copilot, it was like record speed to onboard a new agent because they'd have access to all this information and it would be easy for them to sort through that information and leverage it with AI.
So that was really cool. Another one was sort of multilingual support that, you know, in an ideal world you have specialists across the globe supporting customers in their native tongue and that's an ideal scenario. Maybe you happen to be a global company and you're going through growing pains and you've got some US agents or maybe you got some agents in the Philippines or whatever it may be, and maybe they all don't speak the languages that you support.
And so we make it super easy to deliver easy service in any language as well.
But yeah, so that was some of the things that came up recently in the Copilot. The other thing on the chatbot side is just, I would say something that we've been really proud about is being able to go against incumbents in the space, especially companies that are melding together flow building and generative AI and have this kind of small but growing shop, SwiftCX win in those deals because customers are testing us against the incumbent and saying that we're just, we're providing an equal, if not better service with, you know, more affordable price. So that's something that's been a milestone for us that I've been really proud of.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. Well, Tell me a little bit about what's, what's next for your team. You've mentioned a few pieces around getting that last product out of beta and then also these case studies. What else is, is coming down the the line for Swift cx?
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Super good question. This year I would say is going to be a mix of things. So on the product side for sure leading into more admin value, I call it admin value, which could be your buyer, could be leadership, it could be QA or trainers or whatever. But really that admin that's coming in and helping run the operation, making their life as easy as possible, do right by their team. So we, I think we've done a tremendous amount for agents and for customers and so we've lagged a little bit behind on the admin side but now we're playing some, some heavy catch up this year. And then the other thing too is around sales and marketing. So you know, I think a lot of startups, they sort of do a little bit of a balance of building a little bit of product and selling, selling, selling and selling, building a little bit of products, selling and selling. We took an approach where we were just very heads down. You know, we would add a small cohort, iterate with them, get feedback, work super intimately with these customers, add another cohort, rinse, repeat, add another cohort, rinse, repeat. So where that left us was with a product that can go up against large incumbents and win that a lot of people don't know about because we didn't do sales and marketing. So now we have to play some catch up on the sales and marketing side, make sure that we're known and out there as a choice for support leaders. And so yeah, that's going to be a big thing this year as well.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Awesome. Great to hear. Well, as we start to wrap up this conversation, would love to get an opportunity. Any, any closing thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners?
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Don't be shy about how much power you have as the buyer and it took me a little bit of time in my career to learn this. Thankfully I learned it early on, but I wish I would have learned it sooner.
You'd be surprised what you can get from any company that you're in the sales process with.
Just ask.
And I say that up front because all the things that we do to be very buyer forward, buyer friendly, I know is harder for, for our competitors and our salespeople on that because they're following a certain process. Sorry we can't spin up a POC for you. Sorry, you know, you can't really have a trial. We could just show you this demo, but then you have to sign up for, you know, they've got all these policies that they have to go through. Whereas everything that we do at SwiftCX I try to imagine as what I wished I would have went through as the buyer experience for the past 20 years of my career. And so I'm making that the foundation of our sales process so there's no pushy, you know, sales flow we have to go through. What we show you in the demo is the same thing you're going to be using. Right. There's no cookie cutter, beautiful, you know, flow that we're orchestrating. Everything is just as you would experience it. So there's no surprises. One of the biggest things that I hated was, you know, going from the sales process to the implementation and going, wait, what? I thought we had this, I thought we had that and this and that. There's no surprises. And so I sort of challenge support leaders out there, demand for more and demand for better. And when you have a vendor like SwiftCX in that mix, you'll see that it sort of raises expectations for everybody else around you that you want a POC with us, something custom or whatever, we're flexible. Whatever you need for us to show you value, we're up for it. But yeah, I think the biggest thing is buyers just don't realize the power they have and hopefully they'll realize that more, especially with all these vendors coming up at them asking for their business.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, thanks for sharing all these thoughts with us. If folks wanted to connect with you or learn more about SwiftCX, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
[00:27:21] Speaker B: LinkedIn profile. You can grab time if you want. If you go to our website, you can check it out and also grab time. My calendar link is on there as well. So either way through my LinkedIn page or our website, we'll make sure to.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Include those links down below in the show notes so folks can get to you pretty easy. Nino, thanks so much for joining us here at the Table.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me, Jordan.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: You bet.
Thanks for listening to the Table Service podcast. You can learn more about today's guest in the show Notes below. Table Service is presented by Tavalo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
