How AI Enhances Customer Service: Insights from Jordan Brown

EP037_08-02-24_Jordan Brown

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Welcome to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. Today I’m thrilled to have Jordan, the founder of Omnie integrated services with us. And he’s going to talk a little bit about his business background and how he’s helping the e-commerce industry revolutionizing the customer support using AI [00:01:00] and automation. We’ll be also talking about some of the latest trend in customer support and advantage of outsourcing versus having an in house customer support team and how is their company’s unique approach can really help the e-commerce business or toy businesses, not only satisfy the customer, but also drive additional revenue. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Jordan. 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jason. Excited to chat through all things customer service. 

Jason Hsieh: Let’s start off with talking about why do you even start this company to begin with, what was your background? 

Jordan Brown: I’ve been in the customer service industry for over a decade. Managed large teams globally on five different continents, and I noticed that the outsourcing industry was not keeping up with technology. They were simply providing phone and email support, and these large call centers typically share agents or they’re shared agents that work on multiple [00:02:00] programs. So the experience was always poor. I think we’ve all had poor experiences with outsourced teams in the past. And so I saw an opportunity to run towards technology and provide an experience for customers and merchants that elevates the customer journey, reduces costs and drives revenue growth. This was a foreign concept to the large call centers that have been around for decades. So when we first started years ago, we were supporting every industry, healthcare, finance, hospitality. And we found that when you cast a really wide net, your solution can be missing important features that each industry may require. We focused on e-commerce. It seemed like a natural fit for us. These businesses often run very lean, used to outsourcing other aspects of the business, like logistics, marketing, website design. So why not customer support? And so our focus on [00:03:00] e-commerce helps us ensure that our management team, our tools and the entire program is perfect for e-commerce brands. 

Jason Hsieh: What year do you establish this business? 

Jordan Brown: 2020. So I’ve been in the industry a long time working with similar companies. But Omnie has been around for a little over four years. 

Jason Hsieh: Oh, so you started doing COVID. How was that? How was that? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah It actually was perfect because if you look at the number of Shopify stores opened during COVID, it was a massive increase and with people working at home, it’s tough to establish an office and hire team members when you’re stuck in your home. So we were a great fit for brand new businesses that were ramping up, looking for a low cost solution and then they can focus on growing the business. 

Jason Hsieh: What kind of a recent trend that you have been noticing, especially in the e-commerce space, using customer services to drive additional revenue?

Jordan Brown: E-commerce is evolving [00:04:00] rapidly and customer service historically has been considered an expense. Businesses think, ah it’s just a department that increases our expenses, but if it’s strategically implemented, customer service is a revenue driver. Some really exciting trends I’ve noticed is personalization at scale. So customers expect personalized experiences. So not just large banner pop ups on a store, but something that’s a little more tailored to them. By leveraging data and AI specifically e-commerce brands can tailor recommendations offers based on individual preferences. So think of how netflix recommends shows based on your viewing history. E-commerce brands can do the same with product recommendations leading to higher conversion rates and AOV when they’re that specific. And then customers want to interact with brands seamlessly across whatever channels they’re comfortable with. So social media, chat, email, phone, whatever that [00:05:00] might be. If a customer starts a conversation on Instagram and continues it through Email, the service should be seamless. Companies like Zappos do a really great job at this. And this kind of positive experience can really

Jason Hsieh: Zappos is actually one of my favorite company. You know why? Their previous CEO is also Taiwanese. He has the same last name as me, Tony Hsieh, same last name. Yeah. 

Jordan Brown: Yeah They’re known for fantastic customer service. 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, I was very sad when the CEO passed away. He was a really wonderful entrepreneur. 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Really great. And chatbots can also be used to drive revenue. If you have limited hours for live support, AI can provide instant support and handle common queries, freeing up agents for more complex issues. So chatbots can assist with order tracking product information and even style recommendations when they’re live on your site shopping. 

Jason Hsieh: This is something I was talking to some of my e-commerce entrepreneur friends. [00:06:00] Some of my friends actually use gorgias, which is a pretty well known customer support software. 

Jordan Brown: Great partner of ours, perfect for e-commerce brands.

Jason Hsieh: That’s actually my next question. What software are you currently using when you help other e-commerce business? What’s the customer support? Do you use gorgias? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. gorgias is our preferred partner for any Shopify brand. There’s a lot of competitors on the market, hundreds to choose from and a lot of those CRM platforms, they cast a really wide net. They support every industry pretty well. gorgias, they’re socialized e-commerce. So every tool, every feature that they release is perfect for Shopify customers. And their chat bots, their AI tools, fantastic. The best time to convert somebody that’s on your site is while they’re actively shopping. So if they have a one question and they’re close to purchasing and it’s midnight on a Saturday, Getting them a quick answer, whether it’s through AI or through a human, will help them convert while they’re actively [00:07:00] shopping versus using a contact form. You get back to them on Monday and hope that they come back to the site. That’s really important even just being quick on the responses can really drive revenue. And we track all of this through reporting. So you can see when a customer. 

Jason Hsieh: That’s actually a problem I have with Gorgias, some of their dashboard data is not accurate. Issue with their dashboard for the past couple of months.

Jordan Brown: Oh no, we’ve always had great experiences with the reporting, especially the revenue reporting where you can see when somebody chats with an agent and then goes on to make a purchase during that session recorded as a conversion. So you can really see ROI by having a great customer service program quickly.

Jason Hsieh: They wrote out a new dashboard for a couple months ago, and that new one, our team couldn’t get it to work. The number is old. It doesn’t work. We need to switch to the old view. Then it’s working. 

Jordan Brown: Happy to help you with it. We’ve always had great experiences with the reporting. 

Jason Hsieh: One of the question I have now, which is have this discussion. A lot of the people I work with, a lot of their [00:08:00] revenue is predominantly on Amazon. They do a little bit on Shopify, but not that much. So my question is how many ticket per month you think that the e-commerce entrepreneur need to have before they even consider to go to someone like you for like additional customer support. Because if they only have 10 ticket a month on Shopify, they can do it themselves or just someone out of VA. They don’t need a full time person or a company like yours to take over that process yet. Do you have a recommended, like a thread hole for e-commerce businesses to even consider to hire a company like yours?

Jordan Brown: We work with brands of all sizes. So some of our programs are part time agents. So half an agent a day, so four hours a day weekdays. To some of our partners with 50 60 70 full time agents, where we typically partner with a brand is when they’re scaling up and there’s a lot of people working on tickets on the side of their desk and then they’re deciding whether they want to bring that in house or outsource to experts, bring on technology and [00:09:00] focus on growth. So that point where you decide to work with a customer service agency it really depends on your time, right? I think once you have 20, 30 tickets a day, that’s enough for a part time agent of 20 hours a week. And that’s a question we get a lot is, Oh, I’m doing this myself. I spend, I can do this in three hours, four hours a day myself. You can, but you’re trying to run a business. Do you want to work in customer service or do you want to focus that time on marketing and product development?

Jason Hsieh: That’s a very valid point. And that’s actually a perfect segue to my next question. What are the key advantage of outsourcing the customer service compared to just maintaining it with an in house team? 

Jordan Brown: The first one is cost efficiency. Running an in house team can be expensive due to salaries, benefits, training, infrastructure costs. So outsourcing companies can save on these expenses. For instance, many businesses find that [00:10:00] outsourcing to specialized service providers like us, us can save them up to 60% and then they can allocate these resources, especially if they’re growing to other critical areas of the business. And then for us, a big one is scalability and flexibility. Like we talked right before we started the podcast here. E-commerce businesses, 99 percent of our partners notice seasonal spikes, which can be difficult to manage in house businesses, need to fluctuate so does the demand for customer service. Outsourcing allows companies to scale support up really quickly. So September, October, our partners are calling us and saying, we need to increase the team size 50%, a hundred percent. And then come mid January, February. We can scale back with just a couple of weeks notice.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, because a lot of the customer Q4 is a big season for most of the majority of the e-commerce businesses until like summer product. 

Jordan Brown: Exactly. Yeah. And then outsourcing, aside from cost efficiency [00:11:00] it’s also great when you have a partner like us who focuses on customer service, where we’re the experts, we understand the technology, the AI and the management of a team whereas the people that we work with are likely business owners or product experts, right? They don’t necessarily want to be in the weed of building AI. Like we talked about prior is multilingual support. So we can support any Global language through phone and through digital channels as well, which can be tough. 

Jason Hsieh: You also have Japanese, right? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah we can support any global language. So through digital channels, we most often use automatic translation tools. Translate. com. Off with Japanese.

Jason Hsieh: I actually prefer a Japanese speaker. Do you have a Japanese speaker on your team? 

Jordan Brown: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So for voice channel, we need native speakers because the AI I don’t feel is there yet for that. And we’re all about customer experience. We don’t want to sacrifice the experience to save a dollar on [00:12:00] AI tools if they’re not up to par. But for digital channels, yes, we can hire native speakers anywhere in the world. For a more cost efficient approach on digital channels, we do have great options translation tools that translate instantly both ways. 

Jason Hsieh: Can you give us some example on how you have done that before with other client of yours? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Imagine this, you’re browsing an online store and then suddenly live chat pops ups with a spot on suggestion for you. So it’s not just convenient, but it almost seems like somebody’s actively there personally providing you that recommendation. We don’t just stop at quick responses with customer service. We take it further with smart conversion campaigns through that live chat widget, which makes it different than a lot of the just general banner ads, 

Jason Hsieh: monitor like time on page or like other stats on the website to decide when to open that chat window and have a direct, more direct approach and just ask, oh, we can help and know that.[00:13:00] 

Jordan Brown: Exactly. So if you’ve landed on a site and you get the pop up that says I’m here, if you need something, this is the next. This is three levels above that. So we use data like where the visitor is from, what they’ve bought before their cart value to craft hyper personalized recommendation. So a few examples of this we work with a UK based shoe company. They sell internationally, so when a UK customer specifically adds shoes to their cart the chattel pop up and say it rains a hundred and seventy days a year in the UK Don’t forget the shoe protection kit. It’s a good one. And then there’s an add to cart button directly in the chat widget. So they can just add that. So that’s personalization. Another couple of campaigns we find really successful is when a customer is close to getting free shipping and they’re in their cart and we determine that they’re exiting based on just being below the free shipping threshold, chat pops up and says, [00:14:00] Hey, where are you going? Here’s free shipping and they’ll gravitate back to convert. Since we’re on the toy business podcast here, what we do with a toy brand of ours is they have bundles of toys. So when somebody adds a single toy to the cart, it’ll pop up and recommend a bundle where that animal is included and try and get them to increase that order value. So with a recent partner we onboarded we saw over 35, 000 in revenue in just the first month through really complex chat campaign. Those are just some examples. So over and above just time on page. 

Jason Hsieh: It’s super like, you say, hyper personalized and also you sync it with the customer data, but how do you know who is who when they’re just visiting and they are not logged in? For the email or you look at the IP. Okay. Okay. 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. IP. So knowing who they are, if they’re not logged in, you’re right. Won’t always be triggered because they’re not always logged in. Unless [00:15:00] they’re logging in to the checkout page and you have campaigns on the checkout page, we’ll know that.

Jason Hsieh: And maybe they can also tie that to the royalty program. It was like, Oh, you have 20 royalty points, you can use it for the next order just trying to push them over the edge to maybe increase the car value as well. 

Jordan Brown: Yeah, and you don’t always need to give away discounts in order to convert visitors. We use this on a partner of ours, they sell pacifiers. And when somebody goes to leave the page, a crying baby pops out and it says, relief is only a click away. We both have children and we don’t want to see a baby crying. And we noticed that customers gravitate towards the chat, ask a question and then purchase after. So you don’t always have to discount your products in order to have success.

Jason Hsieh: That’s a creative marketing there. I guess one thing I concerned with as a e-commerce business brand owner myself is when I outsource customer support, how can I still maintain the brand voice and also the quality of the brand standard with the outsource solution, because we all hear those [00:16:00] nightmares story when you outsource, then all the quality went to crap and it’s not at the same standard that the brand want to have when they outsource some of their part of their businesses. How do you ensure that the customer support that you assign to the brand can still maintain the brand voice and the same standard? 

Jordan Brown: That’s a crucial question. And what we hear quite often, especially with founders that are growing and they’re nervous to have somebody else manage their customers. That’s the lifeblood of their business. It’s really important to them. So we hear this often. So maintaining brand voice and quality standards is essential for our partners. Every time we’re onboarding, we do a deep dive into the brand. We understand their brand’s unique voice, their values, and that’s the foundation of delivering consistent high quality support. We do in depth workshops about their brand, personality, values, and tones. And that’s not just for the agent, it’s talking to customers. We also build this into the AI. So the AI tool talks like the brand as well, and can be very unique. It’s not just [00:17:00] template copy paste responses anymore that AI it can be on brand as well Yeah. And then we only all have dedicated agents. So not shared pool. We’re not working with a toy brand and a waste management company and a sock company. It’s really hard to maintain a unique brand tone when you’re working with so many brands. And then that’s where you get the really robotic copy paste type responses. And then the product knowledge is there. The client knows who is working with their customers. 

Jason Hsieh: Sometimes you need to do the contact switching and when you’re working with so many different companies.

Jordan Brown: And then we always make sure that the agent feels like an extension of the Our partner’s team. So brand immersion is key. We encourage our agents to use the client’s products or we purchase products from them wherever possible. And this is firsthand experience helps them better understand the customer’s perspective and deliver more authentic and [00:18:00] empathetic support. We go far beyond just answering calls and emails in a big office full of cubicles, which is hard to do what you think of in these large call centers we want to make sure that the interactions reflect the brand’s voice and meet the highest quality standards. 

Jason Hsieh: How is your company currently leveraging AI and automation, particularly using ChatGPT or other AI tool to enhance the customer service experience? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. Fascinating topic. I love this stuff. AI? Because a lot of businesses in the BPO industry are running from automation. We’re running towards it. So what we do is customers expecting quick, efficient responses. So AI can handle high volume of inquiries simultaneously. So customers are getting instant responses to common questions. And so like very easy request, where’s my order? Send me my tracking. That stuff is all really easy to handle by AI 24 seven and with chat GPT specifically AI [00:19:00] responses are more personalized than ever. Even if a customer has asked. Previously, about a specific topic, AI can tailor responses to reflect that interest. Providing more engaging and relevant experience versus your classic article recommendations or templates. 

Jason Hsieh: AI, are you using I know Gorgias is also launching their own AI right now. Are you using their AI or you have your own AI? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah it depends on the program, but we are Gorgias AI transformation partner. So we are actively working with them on their AI tool. So like I said they’re a great partner of ours for help desk solutions, AI solutions and they’re poised to make big leaps in AI for the foreseeable future.

Jason Hsieh: Majority of your services sounds is email support, chat support. Do you also do inbound phone support as well? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah we can support any contact channel except Morse code and smoke signals. So we do phone, email, chat, [00:20:00] WhatsApp, Google, my business, Amazon, Walmart, eBay. We can support any channel. Social media, all that kind of stuff. I’m too old for Tik Tok, but the kids love Tik Tok and we can support even the Tik Tok. 

Jason Hsieh: You can support while they are still here and they will probably be here for a few more months. 

Jordan Brown: And then, yeah, just one more thing on how we’re using AI is a lot of people think that AI needs to automate a response in full from beginning to end. That’s not necessarily the case. It’s a productivity tool in the end. It’s there to support agents. So let’s say for some of our more technical products, let’s say the customer needs help with some basic troubleshooting. AI could help with conversational troubleshooting. And then if all else fails, escalate that to an expert. That’s the way human agents focus on more complex issues. So when they get the ticket, the expert, they know that the basic troubleshooting has been done. They have everything they need in front of them to address the ticket and move on. 

Jason Hsieh: [00:21:00] What other thing that you do as a company that set you apart in the industry? Because as we know, there’s a lot of customer support company out there in the market. 

Jordan Brown: So there’s traditional hiring agencies that say, here’s a bunch of people, you don’t know them, you manage them, you train them, you deal with their turnover so you’re still pretty heavily Involved in the customer service department. And then there are tech companies, software solutions like gorgias, the Zen desk intercom drip, all those guys. But then you’re still responsible for building and maintaining and managing the platform. And you, maybe you don’t have bandwidth for that or interested in doing that at all. So what we do is we’re everything customer service under one roof. So we handle everything from implementation, training, management of the CRM, the AI tools, but then we also recruit agents and manage the agents we cover for any time off sick days. So our partners can be as hands on or as hands off as they like. We have some partners that want to chat monthly. We have [00:22:00] some partners that we haven’t talked to in a year. They just say, omnie, you do the customer service, leave me alone. I want to sell my products which is perfect. That’s what we want. We have a partner that e-commerce super busy during Q4. I had some questions for him. I couldn’t get ahold of them in November and December. And in January, I said, is everything okay? And he said, Oh, I was skiing in Switzerland. In the busiest time of year, and that’s it all fantastic. I love that during his busiest time of year, he’s enjoying the time off. So I guess we’re everything under one roof. So businesses can focus on growth in the end. 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to ask this question. If you don’t want to answer it, it’s okay. Biggest elephant in the room, how much is it going to cost? Because as a business owner, especially e-commerce, we’re running at very lean margin. Especially if you’re selling toys, we don’t have that much margin for our toys. So how do you charge when, let’s just say, if I’m going to you and say, Oh Jordan, I need some help with my customer support. I’d like to hire your team. What is all [00:23:00] the costs involved? 

Jordan Brown: It’s simply two costs. So there’s an hourly cost for the agent and that can be as low as nine dollars ten dollars an hour. But we can hire from any country in the world depending on your requirements So if you really want a posh british accent and you want to hire out of london where they have 50 weeks of vacation a year we can do that. That’s a lot more expensive than hiring from say canada, mexico, Philippines wherever that is. So the price varies by hour, but it can be under ten dollars an hour and regardless of where that agent sits, the managers of the agent are located in North America. So they’re on your time zone and you don’t have to worry about any issues with timing. And then we have a cost per automated ticket. So any ticket that could be automated in full, you there’s a cost there for and it’s as low as 60 cents a ticket. So you have just the hourly cost for the agent. If you’re interested in automation, totally optional. It’s as low as 60 cents a ticket, which is [00:24:00] about a sixth of the cost of having an agent handle. And we build and maintain all your support technology, all the AI. So it’s constantly improving over time. It’s as light as that. No hidden costs. Everything’s month to month. No onboarding costs, no setup costs. I’ve been in the BPO industry a long time, and there’s always, Oh, a permanent cost here, none of that here.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Cool. And a selfish question, because I run multiple businesses beside the e-commerce business, I also run a digital marketing agency. Does your company consider also do and provide outbound sales in the future? 

Jordan Brown: Yeah. We’ll hire for any role since we’re dedicated to a brand, what we do during the recruiting process is we take an agent profile from them. Most of the time it’s general customer service agent with experience in my industry, but we also get really unique requests for personal assistance. We had a request recently for someone [00:25:00] to help monitor the CEO’s fitness goals. Because we’re taking a job description we’re hiring just for that role not a shared Pool of agents, but yeah, we do have a few programs where we do, BDR types outbound sales, but yeah, but even data. Sorry. 

Jason Hsieh: How is the success rate was a BDR so far?

Jordan Brown: Like how many kind of meetings are booking? 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. 

Jordan Brown: We don’t have access necessarily to their metrics, but our customers are happy with their performance, but we’re not always taken behind the scenes of how much revenue they’re generating, but yeah we have some successful programs and they keep adding team members. So I assume it’s going well for them. We have also hired unique kind of project manager roles. Things like that as well. So we can really hire for any role. 

Jason Hsieh: Wrapping up today’s interview, thank you so much again for sharing your story and your expertise in the customer support field. My last question is like looking ahead, what do you see as the [00:26:00] future of the customer services and the customer support in the e-commerce industry going forward? 

Jordan Brown: I think the obvious one is the use of ai. We have been heavily automating support requests for years. It’s just the technology’s been super limited. We haven’t always loved it with the release of ChatGPT for the last year, the more personalized AI is what people are going to love moving forward. Traditionally chatbots, our reserve people think of chatbots as live chat, but we implement these tools across all channels, including channels that see a majority of requests, which is email for our customers. And so that’s really the key. If only 10 percent of your customers use live chat, Chat bots, if they’re just for chat, aren’t going to see a ton of success. And what we find is pre purchase questions come through chat most of the time. Post purchase comes through email. And a lot of those questions are, where is my [00:27:00] order? Give me my tracking. I want to return this item. Those are really easy to automate. An AI can handle these pretty well, but we can also develop really complex bot flows behind the scenes as well. But we also think that AI isn’t going to support a hundred percent of requests. There’s always going to be a need for human agents for really serious issues. But more importantly agents can now, instead of just trying to pump out as many tickets as possible, copy, paste, here’s your tracking, they can now focus on complex emotional and high stakes interactions, like focus on sales, converting site visitors, building genuine relationships, versus just trying to pump out as many frequently asked questions and responses as possible. So it’s, not that AI is going to take the jobs away, the agents are going to be able to focus on more revenue, generating more genuine relationships.

Jason Hsieh: I agree with [00:28:00] that. I feel like AI is not going to take job away, but it’s going to enhance each one’s output. So instead of one person working one job, one person can do output of two person in the past. So it’s either you adapt or you get eliminated. And that’s how I look at it. 

Jordan Brown: Or worry less about having to get customers off the phone like his when I visited call centers around the world Yes, it’s you have the you have three and a half minutes to get the customer off the phone Get them off the phone get them off the phone when you’re at four minutes your supervisor’s barking in your ear to end the call. That’s not the kind of experience that we want to provide here. Our goal is to keep customers happy. If the customer wants to talk for 20 minutes on the phone, talk to them about their dog, whatever they want to talk about, but then you don’t feel pressured to get them off the phone because you’re only yeah, you’re not pressured to get tracking information and FAQs out. So you can actually just provide great customer experience without the pressure [00:29:00] and that’s our culture here is a good customer experience over volume. 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, quality over quantity. That’s very important for sure. How can people find you if they want to talk to you and your team?

Jordan Brown: You can reach out to me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email jbrown@omniecsr.com and so check out our website where O M N I E is the name here. And I’m happy to chat with anybody that’s looking for feedback on their customer service strategy, their AI tools, happy to get on the phone and provide any feedback I can.

Jason Hsieh: Sounds good. I’ll make sure I put that in the show note. 

thank you again for the audience for tuning into this episode of Toy Business Unboxed. We hope you enjoy the conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you heard, please make sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform so you’ll never miss an episode.

We appreciate your support and love it if you can leave us an honest review and share the podcast with your friends or [00:30:00] colleague in the toy industry. For more resources, tip, and the latest update in the toy industry, please visit our website http://www.toy-launch.com and join the conversation and connect with us on social media using hashtag #ToyBusinessUnboxed. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes, so I can bring more wonderful guests like Jordan today to bring you the latest AI technology in different aspects of the toy businesses. But until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, and keep bringing joy through toys. This is Jason Hsieh, signing off from Toy Business Unboxed podcast. See you in the next episode.