How the 1st customer-facing employee @ Loom predicts the future of CX [1/2]

Susana was early at not 1 but 2 rocketships (Airbnb & Loom). At Loom, she built their customer experience (CX) team from scratch. These days, she advises founders on building CX functions.

This is the first of a two-part post with Susana de Sousa, author of signed ✍️, a newsletter focused on CX (opportunities, leader interviews, hiring tips and industry trends).

AI will eliminate CX. Said literally no one that has any practical experience working in CX, ever. That’s not to say it won’t evolve and raise the bar for customer experience, though. Just not in the ways most people think.

It doesn’t get more practical than Susana. She joined Loom as its first customer-facing employee when it had only a handful of people and huge ambitions.

I had a remote onboarding with one of Loom’s founders (Joe). It was the morning for me but 1am his local time. He said, "OK, here’s the spreadsheet with passwords and logins. I’ll see you in eight hours.” I loved that. I was so happy to dig in and figure things out myself.

Susana would go on to build Loom’s customer experience function from a scrappy startup to the household name that eventually sold to Atlassian for close to a billion dollars. These days, she uses the lessons learned at Loom and Airbnb to advise founders on how to set their CX teams up for success, keeping the customer at the centre of everything they do. We discuss:

1. When and why founders should make their first CX hire

2. Susana’s framework for CX teams

3. 10x CX employees, and her thoughts on future hiring

4. The cold email that got Susana hired at Airbnb

When and why founders should make their first CX hire

This is a question Susana gets often. It’s especially pertinent given how much is changing about how we work and build companies in recent times. A founder may be tempted to outsource this responsibility or even automate it. But that would be a miss:

When founders feel overwhelmed managing support, they miss key feedback. I’m a huge believer in founders' spending time with users. It's one of the key things I learnt at Airbnb, where Brian Chesky didn't just meet with users, he'd live with them and would turn their feedback into a product roadmap¹. I went on to see the same thing at Loom, where the founders were still dealing with support tickets even after I was hired. It’s so important. But if founders have their attention elsewhere, it can degrade the user’s experience. They should hire, and hire with care, so that users continue to get the time/ attention they deserve.

I like that she prioritises the customer's perspective rather than the founder's or team's. In the long term, capturing, measuring, and categorizing customer feedback can save teams considerable time, so it’s ultimately in their best interest anyway.

What impact does she think AI will have on this first hire?

AI will delay the first CX hire and impact how quickly a CX team needs to grow. But, the combination of humans and AI will be the winning one. CX as a function will certainly still be crucial, but AI will change how much a small team can get done.

As in most functions, AI will allow employees to scale themselves. It will reduce the tedious and manual work that must be done, which begs the question: where should they spend their newly discovered time?

Susana’s framework for CX teams

We discuss Susana's customer experience with British Airways (BA), as an example of how not to do CX.

I was flying to New York with a connecting flight from London. I was ready to leave for the airport and got a message saying my second flight was cancelled. I messaged support to ask about my options. A chatbot asked me to confirm my details and asked me what the issue was. After re-explaining the context back, I repeatedly got the response: “Looks like you want to cancel your flight? Please confirm”. Not only had it completely misunderstood the situation but it was ready to take action on it!

Susana communicating with BA’s chatbot.

Anyone who has travelled with BA is probably unsurprised. They provide a great example of how not to insert technology into the customer flow. OK, rant over.

Susana then gives a masterclass on what BA should have done instead:

They should have proactively figured out that I had a cancelled flight. Confirmed the context of the situation with an agent. Then, that agent should have found a solution. They could have kept me in the loop as the situation was resolved. I shouldn’t have to contact BA, clunkily confirm my details, and the situation etc. They should figure out the context, anticipate the problem, and tell me they’re finding a solution.

Here are the key steps she recommends for CX teams to support customers:

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1. Identify customer: Who is this person, and how important are they as a user?

2. Gather context: What’s their current situation? What do they need to do (if anything?)

3. Take action: Decide what to do and what needs to happen

4. Communicate: Contact the customer proactively before they need to reach out

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This framework allows you to understand where AI can be most effective. Helping the support agent understand the customer and context while helping them decide on the best course of action seems perfect for AI. Notice how much better this seems than simply putting a chatbot before a customer.

The key is to have AI enhance what’s happening on the backend while preserving and enhancing the human-facing communication.

Susana sees the future of CX as one where a support ticket doesn’t need to be triggered by a customer issue; the magic will be in AI anticipating an issue before it becomes one. If and when there are issues, using AI to enhance the customer experience by keeping customers up to date. It should serve as a co-pilot to the support agents who are responsible for the solution (by creating context, surfacing information, etc.).

Part 2 of this post below, where we discuss 10x CX employees, Susana’s thoughts on future CX hiring, and the cold email that got her into Airbnb

1. https://reid.medium.com/how-to-scale-a-magical-experience-4-lessons-from-airbnbs-brian-chesky-eca0a182f3e3