CXChronicles Podcast 182 with Fran Brzyski, Founder & CEO at Hark

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #182  we welcomed Fran Brzyski, Founder & CEO at Hark, based in New York City.

Hark is reimagining Customer Experience. In a world where video has become an integral part of communication, how do we allow for customers to easily send their requests to their favorite brands while delivering the "perfect ticket" to CX teams?

Hark does just that in a sophisticated way that opens up a new channel for customers to engage.

In this episode, Fran and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #182 Highlight Reel:**

1. The future of problem tickets & leveraging video to drive feedback & innovation
2. Why CX Leadership positions are incredibly difficult to serve & thrive in
3. Building Asynchronous feedback loops to drive trust & transparency 
4. Leveraging user-testing to understand key moments of your customer journey   
5. Creating a new lens for your internal teams to best understand your customer data   
 
Huge thanks to Fran for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the employee experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Fran Bryzski

Click here to learn more about Hark

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future business leaders to join our customer focused community!

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see all of our customer focused business leader video content + our past podcast episodes!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

CXCP #182 with Fran Brzyski, CEO @ Hark

Adrian (00:00:08) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited today, guys, we have Fran Brisky, founder and CEO at har joining the show. Uh, Fran, why don't you say hello to the CX nation? My friend 

Fran Bryzski (00:00:20) - CX Nation. Hello, uh, honored. Humble to be here. Uh, longtime listener reached out to Adrian on LinkedIn man. We've had what several conversations now, uh, always learn new things. When I talk to you, I'm always enthusiastic coming out. Like I feel like we've run through a wall after our conversations and, uh, I'm really pumped to be on the podcast and, and chat in public now. 

Adrian (00:00:38) - Sweet man. Well look, number one. I appreciate all that. Um, as Fran is building a super cool company and, um, you know, when Fran, as Fran just mentioned, um, first couple times we chat and number one immediately was drawn to what he's building with har number two. Um, I just immediately saw so many similarities of what Fran and his team are going through building hark and what me and my team are going through building CX Chronicles. So I think this is gonna be a really awesome episode today. And, um, Fran, Fran's gonna have some really cool ideas, I think for you to think about in terms of what he's going through, his team, building heart, but also just like the future of support, the future of customer success, the future of the way that we're all gonna be taking care of customers. So I want in today's show, I want our listeners kind of thinking about how you can fast forward some of the things that we're always talking about each week, a couple years from now and start thinking about how some of the things that we're gonna norm, we're gonna look back and we're gonna think are super normal in, in five years or 10 years, and we're gonna be why the hell didn't we always do this stuff, Fran, C's building some of the stuff that I think is gonna be in the front end of that. 

Adrian (00:01:35) - So Fran, why don't you start off man, set the stage before we even get into all the awesome stuff with har, um, give them listeners a sense for how you got into the space, man, how'd you start your customer focused business leader journey. And what were some of the stepping stones along the way, man, for you to, to get into the place that you're in today? Building hard? 

Fran Bryzski (00:01:50) - Totally. So I've been at startups in around 10 years. Uh, I came outta school and I worked for some of your bigger companies like JP Morgan striker. Um, I didn't love it. I didn't love being part of such a large bureaucracy. I, I, I love being able to iterate to change, to feel my impact on the company. So I, I took around into startups and primarily in a sales focused engine, uh, in biotech and medical device, you talk about customer experience. I ran an entire territory on my own, right? So it wasn't your normal SAS AE account manager, customer success. It was you that's it. And if you've got a million dollar quota and you lose a $200,000 account, you better go find ways to, to, to pick that back up and then, you know, gain even more revenue. So I got very in tune with not only selling to customers, but with servicing them and making sure they were very happy on both sides. 

Fran Bryzski (00:02:41) - Um, fast forward, moved into SaaS again, but in startups for a while, uh, head of sales at my last one, and always really focused on that customer journey from the acquisition side, but, but a lot post purchase, right? I mean the most successful companies out there that I deal with have customers that love 'em, you know, you get on the phone with somebody and they're like, oh, you gotta talk to XYZ company. Those people were the best. It's the best compliment you can get. So after the last startup dissolved, um, I knew that I, I had the itch to be a founder. I knew I had the network, I had the foundation and I was ready to take that leap. And I was obsessed with the customer journey post purchase. And I became very obsessed as a consumer asking why is it every single brand I reach out to is phone, email, phone, or chat? 

Fran Bryzski (00:03:27) - It's the same text stack everywhere. And although some chatbots sound more like humans than others and some are more self-service than others, it's the same flow. And at the end of the day, I just wanna be able to frontload my problem, move on with my day. Cause my time is precious, but also understand give the agents what they need so they can solve it out. Um, so I found myself continuously guessing, what do I need to front load in an email to show them and possibly get this right? And I'm hit back with these automated responses about, you know, we need X, Y, and Z. They're asking for the same stuff I gave them. They just want uniformity. So I became obsessed with this idea and simultaneously we've entered a time when three of the five top apps on the market really are Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. 

Fran Bryzski (00:04:10) - And what do they all have in common asynchronous video? You know, like, so, so it's like, right. People are communicating in a new way. The post purchase CX world, I don't wanna say is antiquated. There's a lot of innovation happening, but that innovation's not really hitting the consumer as much. A lot of it's on the back end, making things more streamlined. How can I bridge two sides of that and make an incredible experience for the consumer who wants to communicate differently, but also practicing up for the agent and make their life much, much easier. And that's how Hark was born. 

Adrian (00:04:42) - I love it, friend. I mean, number one, you already know that, um, uh, many of the, myself and many of the folks that listened to this show were probably some of the biggest fans of, uh, and believers. If you will, about the power of focusing on CX and ex simultaneously, right? Creating two tracks to build your business. One focus on customer side will focus on your employee experience, employee engage.

Adrian (00:05:01) - And just slamming the gas on those two tracks. Cuz if you, the companies that do that typically crush in, they typically get ahead. And there's typically all of to your point, man, they're building armies of promoters, not just on the customer ranks, but on their employee rank side too. Um, second big thing, man, is that I, I love that you're talking about you're right, right. We it's so funny. Like now that you say it like that, like some of the big, what are some of the biggest things that are attracting the most attention on planet earth, these platforms, right? TikTok, Facebook into all these different, um, what are they doing? Video short video, short form video. Uh, it's unfortunate, but humans, our attentions have definitely waged, right? We can't sure. It's not like you're you're you're uh, everyone's on the train reading war and piece these days, right? 

Adrian (00:05:43) - People are slamming through 32nd videos on their phone and jam it on the like button. Right? That's what it is. It's where we're at in 2022, whether you love it or you hate it, but you bring up a brilliant point frame, which is like that equals some type of validity around consumer expectations, consumer demand, preferred mediums. Like that's brilliant. Now that's super, super smart. Oftentimes let's call what it is. There's usually only a handful of companies that can stay ahead on how quickly they need to revert their success, their experience, their journey, their support for some of those new mediums. But I love that you guys are building in a space where you already know that that's gonna be where it's going and, and you're right. The video piece is huge and Fran I've Fran probably laughs guys, cuz every single time I talk with them now I've got like three new examples of where we should sell to our <laugh> because it's, it's true. 

Adrian (00:06:27) - Right? You've got huge companies that are, they've got excellent at managing their volume and their scale typically through the way that they use their issue resolution management system, where they're ticketing software, right? That's part of how they can keep up with all that stuff. The bottom line is most of the times customers leave those, those support, uh, situations unhappy. And it's because of what Fran's talking about. There's automated stuff. There's, it's hard to get someone on a telephone it's even harder to get someone when's the last time you guys saw a global brand, put a face on your computer screen. So you could talk through the issue instead of typing it out, right. Or, or being on a phone call for 47 minutes. Um, so there is a new world where like there's a huge opportunity for short form video back and forth. Adrian can drop his 32nd note to Fran. 

Adrian (00:07:07) - Frank can drop his 32nd response or better yet his resolution back to Adrian. Everybody's thrilled. Everybody's happy. And there's cost implications on that too. Fred. Right? So for the CX and the CS nerds listening, you can kind of think about what that means for your budget. If you're running in team at scale and you're out, you're the guy or gal that's charged for thinking about how you can cost effectively manage your success or your support or your experience. So I, I really, really love that man. Um, Fran, let's dive into the first pillar team, man. I want you to, I definitely wanna learn more about har and I wanna learn more about the business you're building, but you're in a cool position, man. You're, you're similar to me. You're seeing all these different companies and you're seeing how they're kind of formed. I'd love for you to take a couple minutes to talk about the first CX pillar, uh, of team and, and just, just, just give the listeners some ideas for how you guys have been building your team at heart. And what are some of the things that you're, you're noticing you're seeing with the clients that you're servicing today and the way that they built their, their, their success and experience and support teams. Yeah, of course. Uh, 

Fran Bryzski (00:08:00) - You would think it's pretty similar everywhere, but everyone does it differently. Right? Um, and a lot of that comes back to the leadership and how involved or not involved they are with CX could be a good or bad thing, them being involved. And what I mean by that is I talk to a lot of companies. I mean, every day I talk to five different companies and you seem to have leaders who want to throw bodies at problems. Their belief is that everybody wants to get to a human and what they should do is scale with a BPO up and down. So there's always humans available and I don't necessarily agree with that. And I see a lot of the younger generation also doesn't necessarily agree with that. If you really look into like there there's some companies I I've worked with who get really into ton of stories internally with data, which is a great, you have to be doing that. 

Fran Bryzski (00:08:48) - And if you look at the urgency of requests, live chat is wildly misused, right? It, it, it doesn't need to be live all the time. It's just what we've been programmed to do, cuz that's gonna be the fastest resolution to our result as a consumer. But man, that puts so much strain on the back end of these teams. So I, I, I know we're getting into the makeup and how built my team and this and that. But I, I wanna call out how hard the CX leader role is right now because many CX leaders, I know we're just fantastic customer support. People who were plucked and put into this role, whether they wanted to or not, cuz the company was scaling so fast and they're trying to be everywhere. The customer is, but every customer is different. It's so subjective. So you've got an older generation who loves to pick up the phone and call. Well you've better got really, really, um, high volume of people ready to take those calls or else you've got the wait on hold or you have now people are putting in like, oh, press one. And we'll call you back. Be calling back in the middle of my next meeting. And now you're interfering with my meeting. I have to call you back again and we're doing this, you know, this, this, this song and dance. It it's ridiculous. Um, live chat, you've gotta be ready. And although you can handle many live chats at once.

Fran Bryzski (00:10:02) - There's so many consumers who open live chat, then they're on another browser. I mean, we've got very little attention spans, as you mentioned. So you don't go back to the live chat. Now you're signed out. Now you're starting all over again. She's adding friction into the process where it's not needed. If it was truly urgent, they'd be sitting there watching the live chat until they got help. So I bring that up, that Some of the more forward looking brands that we work with, um, are looking at ways, "How can I provide a great customer experience, but deflect the urgency of it," where 90% of these are not urgent and build trusted transparency with our customers to show, "Hey, we got it, we're on it. We're working on it. Um, You don't have to call in through another channel and check back. We have your back on that." 

Fran Bryzski (00:10:42) - And that's where I think the, the industry is ripe for innovation of, of not only creating a better customer experience initially, but through the process, you and I talked about this a lot in the past, the customer full journey, them being able to check in and see that their tickets being worked on. The agent coming back and resolving it. And then following up again with them to let them know above and beyond, I think that's imperative. And as I see teams moving that way, using technology to make that happen versus throwing bodies at it, those companies are having better like margins. Um, their, their cogs are going down, uh, their, their, Their you know, customer acquisition costs are there, but their post purchase  those margins are better as well. And they're just gonna be better off in the long run. run. run  run run. run 

Adrian (00:11:24) - Yep. A hundred percent. You mentioned the cogs part. So cost, cost a good sold, right? And like, I think one of the big, the big things that you nailed is part of the journey, right? Is understanding all of the different segments that a, a given customer or sorry a given company has. Right. And all of us, everybody listens that wildly different companies, different industries to trans point different team sizes. Also, I would argue one extra part. I wanna add onto the top of what you just said there, Fran is different executive, um, appetites, so different leader, different executive leadership teams have different appetites around how they believe. You mentioned the throwing bodies part. Some, some, some executive teams they're gonna be thrilled to throw additional budget, right? If they're killing it, they're crushing it. They're seeing abundance of a certain type of customer coming through. 

Adrian (00:12:06) - Here you go here, throw 10 more people at the problem. Some executives have that technology process or that technology appetite, where it's like, Nope. Now we can finally avoid the thing that I've been telling you no to for the last two or three years, if you're the head of CX or the V CX, now we can finally buy that thing that you've been bugging me about. Right. And whether that's a leading tool or, or some type of process management, whatever it is. Right. Um, but, but, but, but the segments piece is huge guys because I don't care what size you're at right now of any business. But like, if you don't already have that boiled through where inside of your different, the different folks sitting inside of your customer portfolio, it's super easily, you got 10 company, 10 customers, or you got a thousand customers, you got a million customers. 

Adrian (00:12:45) - It's really, really easy to lay out what Fran's talking about, where you can start to understand the different mediums, meaning. So like when you said phone calls mentioned some of our older folks, they like to get on the phone. Some, our younger folks, they wanna do short term video or chat at most. Like they wanna be into the, and they're already used to Palm and hand all the damn time. And that's kind of the way that they communicate. Right. And then lastly, there's different. Um, there's different needs or use cases depending on severity of items. Right? So like, if it's like a, a quick little easy thing, maybe some people don't mind just like dropping in a, dropping in a ticket on, on the company site or leaving a quick one. Cause it's just like an answer that you don't care whether they get back to you now, or they get back to you like in a week from now, where's, there's other things where it's like, the house is on fire. 

Adrian (00:13:27) - I wanna talk to somebody who write this second, or I want somebody to acknowledge the fact that I've got a problem, right this second. But like, guys, it's really easy to go through your portfolio and take a, take a different look at it. If you haven't done so already. Cause a lot of the best CXRs and CSRs, they're already doing this type of thing, but like take a, take a minute to go through your customers and understand what the primary primary mediums are. Secondary mediums preferred mediums, right. Are they gonna be chat people? Are they phone people? Are they video people? Are they people that in person, right. Some fair. I was telling you before we started diving today, show some of our customers been, they still meet with people. They're literally still going and meeting with meeting with their customers and meeting with their clients face to face. 

Adrian (00:14:01) - So in person is another medium. Um, and then you start to, it starts to carve out this, this new lens around capacity, right? And when you start, when you hear Fran talking about just like cost of goods, sold team budgets, uh, the different teams or roles required on a team to think about it. That's an easy way to start to do a little bit of forward math around your capacity management, capacity planning, bandwidth planning, right. And then you can really kind of start to make some, some, some, some, some more, um, um, uh, calculated, uh, decisions around sort of how you need to think about building the team. So all awesome. Awesome thoughts here. Yeah. 

Fran Bryzski (00:14:33) - Quick on that. So, so I mean something you and I talk about all the time is CX. So you bring up a point here when, you know, the way we run our company, like we've got rules of the road. Bylaws is a, a term you could use for, I think it's a little harsh, but like, how do we engage with each other at har, right? Like how, how do you wanna be spoken to that? That's very personal. And if you can understand that at the employee level, um, your, your company's gonna be humming, right? Like your departments are gonna be working well together. Well, on the CX side, it's very similar. I mean, we look at like the consumers and assume that they need to have all options open at all times and like roll out the red carpet. But at the end of the day, most consumers who have some sort of loyalty to your brand, want to engage with you in the best way for you. 

Fran Bryzski (00:15:23) - Like most are just waiting for you to tell them, Hey, like, if it's something small like this that you just said, tell me the best channel to communicate with you. And I will do that gladly. If it's, if I'm putting a lot of strain on you through live chat. Cause that's just what I go to do. I'm happy to change my habits to make it easier on your team. And when you start to, I mean, contact us pages, we're doing a blog piece about this now where there's not enough direction for the consumer. You know, like we we're, we're in the self-serve motion. We wanna make that easy. But, but we actually add a lot of friction because our policies change all the time. We don't communicate them and it gets cluttered and it gets awkward for the consumer. So they just go to what they know. But if you can communicate with them and show them, Hey, here's the best way to engage with us. They'll reciprocate that. And when they do, and those channels are being used in the appropriate way, your CX department starts humming because now you only have to staff, so many people for live chat. You only have to staff so many people with the phone because the other asynchronous channels are taking a lot of that volume up, making things easier in your agents. 

Adrian (00:16:24) - Yep. A hundred percent agreement. It's so true. And the last thing that you made me think about with that too, is just like, be open to this. Guy's like you see, there's a lot of companies out there that only provide the one medium, right? Like we're making a decision, no telephone calls to this company. Okay, fine. That's fine. I get it. I totally understand. It's 20, 22 people wanna do different things. People wanna try to, to your point friend, they wanna drive customers into the different technology sets that they're building, that they think are going equal, their ability to manage, I guess, scale, manage volume. Maybe they think that that medium's the best medium, that they're gonna be able to provide the highest level support. Um, but be open to this guys, cuz I know for a fact like, well me personally, just for what it's worth, that drives me nuts. 

Adrian (00:17:03) - I hate it when there's not more than one jail. Yeah. Only because you're telling me that this is the only way that I can speak with you. Uh, as a brand, as a business, as a support unit, it just, it it's a bit of a turn off for me. But then again, I also understand that different businesses have different customer needs, different customer needs of different communication mediums that tend to work the best or that they already know work the best. Right? Some of these industries that are, have been around for a hundred years, they already know how they, how their customers wanna be talked to or they already know what types of expectations their customers have and they can kind of train. They can kinda try to build around that. So 

Fran Bryzski (00:17:34) - It's a risk man, because you, I'm sorry, it's such a important point that these smaller e-commerce companies who put a form up, which is fine. Cause like you said, that's all they can do right now. They're getting off the ground. We, we get it. But your nimbleness and, and your, your, your size is a strength for you, right. By not putting a lot of emphasis on CX and kind of just saying, we're gonna put up a form and people can reach out to us through there with so many large players in the game. You're inviting those customers to say, oh, okay, like your same product is on Amazon or Walmart. I'm just gonna go there and I'll spend an extra dollar or two, but I know I'm gonna be taken care of on the backend. Like people are paying a premium for the post purchase because their time is valuable. So there are some small companies we're working with who are getting ahead of this and offering some really great solutions so that they can be very personal with those people and wanna drive them back to the site and go above and beyond customer experience because they know how important that is to retention and LTV of their customers. So anyway, I just wanna sprinkle that in there as well. 

Adrian (00:18:35) - Oh, you're absolutely. You're absolutely right. And no, it leads perfectly into, into, into the next, the next question, which is, I'd love to kind of hear you talk about process Fran. So I think like in some of our first couple chats together, I remember you telling me like part of the, the, the evolution or the, the birth of, um, hark was like, you guys were paying attention to the way that the typical support and success process works at many companies today. So I'd love to kind, I'd love to kind of have you spend a few minutes sort talking about that second se pillar process. What are some of the ways that as you and the heart team have kind of grown and built out and expanded, um, your product, how have you guys kind of thought about managing that process and then how, what are some of the things that you've kind of learned in terms of the way that you've been seeing some of your customers build up the way that they manage their process or their living playbooks or their standard operating procedures sure. To really kinda help guide the support process. 

Fran Bryzski (00:19:24) - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh, we could talk about this the rest of the time. So initially was a simple but elegant idea in the fact that asynchronous video, let the person engage on their terms, get it off their plate, move on. Um, another part of our process is what I, I, I talked about trust and transparency. Uh, we sent an email as soon as you submit the hear, and we give you a link like the domino pizza tracker so that you can see your ticket being worked on. And we found customer experience leaders loving that because they have such a headache with.

Fran Bryzski (00:20:00) - The back end merging tickets because somebody reaches out through this channel, not channel, but the same thing. Uh, we're obviously doing a disservice to our customers. We're not being transparent enough. This is a great source for them that not only are they getting with heart as video, but they're getting that. Um, what surprised me a ton is, you know, from the consumer perspective, we talk about the asynchronous video because it just makes sense. Like people are tagging brands on Instagram. It just makes so much sense, but the power of video is what you can do with it. And what we found is that we don't wanna replace Zendesk. We don't wanna replace gladly or gorgeous. I mean, what they are doing on the back end is incredible. These huge systems, but we found is we can bring a lot of the features to life that CX leaders are, are not getting now. 

Fran Bryzski (00:20:47) - And what I mean by that is if you're, if you're an agent, you are best ticket that you can get is a form because it has everything in a uniform sense. You've probably got everything you need cuz you ask for it and you know how to respond on it. But a form for the consumer kind of sucks. It's not like, you know, it's antiquated, it's like the oldest way to print it. Absolutely. Um, during this conundrum. So, so, so our thought is with park, how can we take this video and bring uniformity on the back end of these help desk software. So we integrate via API. Uh, and there's a few things I I'll touch on now. And I'm sure you'll want dig into some cuz um, I know like you're a big on voice of the customer, things like that too. So with every hark you get, we call it the perfect ticket. 

Fran Bryzski (00:21:33) - We transcribe the video, right? We don't wanna have agents sitting there watching the whole time. That was a big thing. Uh, every CX was like, that's gonna take a lot of time and a lot of effort, they're gonna have to be typing things out. It's almost like they're on the phone doing the same thing. They're just watching a video. So we transcribe it, we collect name, email and phone number. What we don't do is collect order number or order details because that again puts onus on the customer. They have to copy and paste. What if they get it wrong? Everybody has the Shopify extension and they have to software or they can easily find that with a click of a button, just have three unique identifiers. And a big thing that we added later was sentiment. Because if you think about sentiment today, it's very two dimensional it's words on a page. 

Fran Bryzski (00:22:14) - And I, I use my mom for an example. She probably sends an email in all caps because she doesn't know what she's doing. And she doesn't mean to be like matter or anything. Right. She just communicates that way. And you could take that. Like for me, I get an email like that. I think it's urgent. The person's pissed off and someone's yelling at you, someone's yelling at you. Right? So you're, you're trying to iterate tone through words. And unless you pick up keywords, like I'm frustrated or this is taking too long. Okay. Like, you know that they're a little peeved, but what if you can inflect video tone now, uh, now the wording and also, you know, like what's going on. If it's a selfie, you can see it in their face as well. If it's them using their point of view, that's different too. 

Fran Bryzski (00:22:56) - So what we found is we're elevating these, these brands, customer experience, uh, voice of their customer programs to a place they've never been a lot of people right now. Again, CF leaders have a hard job. They are trying to do a voice of the customer program and bring in product, bring in engineering, bring in marketing, which is so important. But when you put up on a slide, like a slide deck, you know, Google slides and you put a few emails off about why somebody was upset, kind of falls on deaf ears. People are like, okay, like we got some bad emails. Let's move on with our day. But when you know, we have a dashboard for, for automating voice of the customer. So people can easily go in and look and find, okay, damage products for this. Um, and people who were negative in their sentiment, if you can easily put up four videos and now you have people inviting you into their homes, showing you where the product sits, how they use it, what it looks like, how the damage is, it's personal. 

Fran Bryzski (00:23:52) - I mean, you immediately become affected by that. And that's where the CX leaders come back to us and say, my product bleed asks if they could follow up with that customer directly. Well, now we're talking about the full customer journey. Now we're talking about getting followed up by an executive of the company. How great do I feel as a customer? So it's just amazing to see on the back end. It's not just the video coming in. It's what we do with the video and the data that we give you that can elevate so many aspects of your business and have you take off versus a very crowded space of e-commerce and retailers who are selling things online and job shipping into your door. So, uh, it's been pretty cool to see that evolution come to life based on our customer feedback. 

Adrian (00:24:30) - I, I completely completely agree with that. I think, um, it's funny, man, hearing you say it like that. It's, it's funny, you know, over the last two years with many of our clients at CEC, we do these customer listening tours for them where we basically.

Adrian (00:24:44) - We take as the, we take the expert role in trying to go through you give us X number of customers and we would literally give you back, um, a fully robust, super detailed, organized voice of customer report, right? The idea being like, we'll show you how you can build in advance some of the VOC report, or remember Fran, a voice of employee too VOE. So VOC reporting of customer side, voice, that's super easy to do to, to, to do the two. Um, but what's funny is like, you're right, man. I've literally presented in front of a variety of, of, of executive teams inside of the boardroom where you're showing, let's say like some of the biggest or the baddest detractors of the month and you're, and you're right. You just gave me a picture in my head of, up on the big screen, you might have whatever their survey feedback was or like the buzz line where you really thought you would make the people in the room kind of cringe with like, you know, your product's terrible because of X, Y, and Z or whatever, or you're right. 

Adrian (00:25:36) - I've done the exact same thing where you take screenshots, screenshots of, um, employee emails and you're right. There's, you know, people look at it and I've absolutely have countless memories of where specific executives across different parts of the business would say, well, what do they mean about the sales process sucks right there. What's that mean? So you might have your CRO get involved on that side. CTOs always, whenever there's any, any issue about bugs or product breakdown, CTOs, always putting their hand up saying, what, who is this? What type of, where are they coming from? Why are they saying this? What about this thing that we just fixed and spray, right? Etcetera CEOs are typically most about sales, right? Whenever you're seeing position around sales, revenue, growth, future opportunities that equal tomorrow's, uh, revenue streams. Um, they'll poke questions on that, but what's interesting, man is you're right, like inside of our listening tour is we would do some of these abridge versions where we take some of the best of the clips that we did in, in, in, in, inside these VSU reports. 

Adrian (00:26:24) - And what's super interesting about har man is you guys are doing that at scale, right? You're being, you're gonna have the ability as the business grows as the product grows, uh, as your platform grows, as the network grows. That's the other thing that me and you are always talking about Fran, right? We're, we're both founders of businesses trying to get, get, get these bonfires started so more and more and more people come around the fire and they understand what, how their worlds can be improved by the things that we're building. Right. And it's, I can easily imagine like a world where some of our, um, like your customer feedback digest or your employee feedback digest for the month, especially think of you're a bigger company and you just are able to scroll through a variety of the best, the brightest, the most impactful or the, or the, the most, um, interesting or the most funny too, man. 

Adrian (00:27:05) - Cause I'm thinking like There's another interesting part about having video. You get some characters that come through <laugh> for, for success and for support. It's another way of kind of making things a little bit more fun, where you get, you literally get a taste for the, the different personalities that your customers equal. And it it's, it's, it's a reminder on the, on the bad times, it's motivating cuz they wanna figure out you can fix stuff on the good one. So man, that's the other thing is like not nearly enough companies spend time doing the celebrations of the promoters of the month, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> the best feedback. So I think with har like you get into the world of, once you start to compounding all this video, um, that, that could theoretically be reshared repurposed reused. That's interesting, man. And I think that's a super interesting place. And I think a lot of, a lot of CX and CSRs are gonna be interested in how they can sort of leverage some of that for their, for their own future scale and, and their, and their own teams. Yeah. 

Fran Bryzski (00:27:47) - There's, there's two really, really important parts to that is one With video people ramble. Right? So we've, we've at Hark come in where someone's like taking tour through their house and showing you different stuff where something comes in damage, but they're like, look, have your product over here. And I love this one, but like, why is it? So you get people rambling and you pick up tidbits in there that you wouldn't normally. The second is that it's all organic, right? So it's not 30 days after the fact and you're reaching out with a survey or whatever, five days after the you're getting in the moment. And  you're allowing them to feel heard and voice their frustration or voice their pleasure, or just say, "Hey, like I'm just getting in touch. This is the easiest way for me." But when you capture that in the moment, it's more real, it's authentic. So I think that's a big leg up and you're right in the future. I mean the benchmarking surveys we can do and things like that studies we can do with all of this data. It's incredible. 

Adrian (00:28:43) - I, I completely agree. And again, it's just, it just gives so many different ideas for where the future of our space is gonna go. And what additional types of mediums are gonna come into play? Um, Fran, I'd love to, we've talked a lot about a lot about tools and we've talked a lot about, um, the hard tool, but like I'd love to kind of give you a blended question here as far as like, um, you mentioned gorgeous, you mentioned gladly, um, have there been any primary tools that you and the hard team have been using that, um, have really kinda helped allow, um, the ease of some of the growth and the ease of some of the development that you guys are doing with the team? Um, and or are there any tools that you're seeing your customers using that are kind of already repeating again and again, again, I'd love just for you to spend a minute of two talking about tools. 

Fran Bryzski (00:29:27) - Yeah. Um,

Fran Bryzski (00:29:29) - No, nothing, you know, on the, on the CX side right now, uh, we are doing, I mean, the only thing I'd say is we're doing a lot of user testing, so everything we do, we exhaust with our network and we exhaust the user testing to make sure we totally understand the impact that has on the customer journey. Uh, and that wasn't led by me. I know you and I talk a lot about, but my head of product is very, very big on that. Like, everything gets into detail about the customer journey and how we inflect that. So that that's been a big part of our building process. But I think in the industry, I'm seeing some really interesting stuff come out. Um, I, I, I've gotten very close with the fellows, uh, and gals@lang.ai. Uh, they do automated tagging and, and I think it's so important because when you can tag efficiently, when the tickets coming in, which again are always disjointed, they're not uniform. 

Fran Bryzski (00:30:20) - Uh, they just give you a leg up when you're reporting. And the more data you have at your fingertips, the better your company's gonna be. If you do something with that data and they give these companies who are smaller and they're trying to, uh, navigate, they, they give them a fighting chance. Um, I think flip is doing some really cool stuff on the phone, uh, formerly <inaudible> Brian and his team there. Um, just making things easier on the call centers. Honestly, what's interesting the technology, but the BPOs I've met have been unbelievable, like, you know, higher ratio also OS um, the way they go about helping you scale your CX team and the way that you go about thinking about that. Um, they make it a lot easier for the CX leaders and they provide really, really exceptional service. So, uh, those, those are probably the three top of mind that come up all the time with, with, with customers. 

Fran Bryzski (00:31:12) - And I, I think they're all gonna be winners in this space and they're looking toward the future, uh, of CX versus, you know, what we have now, which are, I hate to say, but like AI for chat bots that makes you sound more human. Um, I think is consumers, you've got a really, really smart consumer base and people see right through it. So, uh, I think the ones that are adapting and looking forward are getting a lot of traction, especially now post COVID people are investing a lot into the post purchase journey because they've gotten the customer acquisition side, the buying journey down. So well, they're looking at technology and tools to make that post purchase even better. 

Adrian (00:31:52) - Totally agree. A hundred percent agree. And, and I love that you call those out man, but, and we had Jose Jose was on the, from higher ratio was on the show. Um, a while back talking about the incredible things they're doing on the, and you're right, the BPO side is starting to take a different type of path where the technology or their ability to help companies, even just with, with the scaling of your team and your capacity management. There's some incredible things happening there. Um, Fran, I'd love to, I'd love to dive into the fourth and the final pillar feedback then. And I'm gonna ask you this a little bit different, cuz everything that we really talked about too is about feedback. But yeah, if there's like three main things and not to throw curve at, you'd be like, if there's like three major trends or if there's like three major focus points that you think, um, are going to become paramount in terms of the way the companies manage their feedback. Obviously both you can convert that both to your, your, your customer feedback and employee feedback. But like if there is like three main things that you're kind of hearing or talking about, or just seeing on a regular basis, when you're having your conversations with people about how they can improve their feedback, what will those three things be? Or, or what are like, what are the top three areas that you see is like just the biggest opportunity for how customer focused business leaders can really start to up their feedback game? 

Fran Bryzski (00:33:08) - Yeah, the top three. Um, I don't know if I'll get to all three, but I, the one thing that comes up a ton 

Adrian (00:33:14) - Is the top focus area. I didn't 

Fran Bryzski (00:33:16) - The top focus area. That's fine. That's fine 

Adrian (00:33:19) - Of you're. 

Fran Bryzski (00:33:21) - Yeah. I think a lot of people are so used to the reporting coming out of the help desk CRS are help desk softwares there's opportunity. You know, a lot of our companies like, like har like Lang and these others, you connect via API. So you get access to everything going on. And I think, well, I know actually, because I'm always asked for it, giving a new lens into that data is paramount because a lot of these brands in these companies don't have like a data science team, like bigger companies do like Kraft Heines or something. Like, I mean, they have a full data science team that are using snowflake and having all these systems talk to each other and that's why they know their customer base. Like they know exactly who's buying Philadelphia cream cheese in while. Right. Like they know that down to the mile. 

Adrian (00:34:08) - Yep. 

Fran Bryzski (00:34:09) - But the smaller brands don't have it. So I think what you'll you'll see is.

Fran Bryzski (00:34:15) - Companies not only do again, our process is our process in har has its niche that we're wedging in and we're gonna be something much broader and much bigger. But one of the biggest things for our companies doing the reporting and giving CX leaders a new way to communicate internally with data, but making it easy for them because they don't have time to do all this themselves. I mean, they're, they're putting out fires off the right they're hopping on this. They're they're like, what are the department scales up and down as much as CX does none, no other department they're constantly fluctuated. They're constantly training. They're constantly going through all these things they need help. So I think the more you can give them this data wrapped up in new way and saying, have you thought about it this way? You're, you're gonna make them more successful internally and, and, and externally with their customers. 

Adrian (00:35:00) - Yeah. I, I, I, I think you're absolutely right, man. And I, and again guys, Fran, I Fran probably has a laundry list for me at this point. Cause every time we chat, like there is so many different ways that you can use this. He mentioned the transcription, he meant mentioned sentiment analysis. He mentioned, um, the, almost like the managed service view or the managed product service view of, Hey, you're not ready to have a data scientist and Hey, you're not ready to have someone build advanced reporting or advanced analytics. No problem. We've got so like all of these thoughts, Fran, all of these different possibilities, all these ideas, they're right. They're, they're, they're spot on where like these are a lot of the challenges and these are a lot of the issues that modern CX and CS leaders face. These are a lot of the challenges and a lot of the opportunity sets for how you absolutely can get better. 

Adrian (00:35:45) - I don't care what type of business you are. And I don't care what type of industry space you're in. The reality is there's, we're never chatting about the other day. There's a ton of companies out there that are crushing it financially. So like they're crushing their sales goals and they're crushing their, their, their, the way that their financial performance views look. But they're not even doing some of the stuff yet. It makes you wonder like, wait a minute. Like if there's, if you, the minute you could start to apply different iterations or different versions of the types of things they've ran. And I sort of chatted through today to small and medium businesses to midmarket companies, to enterprise companies beyond it's, there's just no more debate here. Every company can stand to gain from, from some of these, for things that we're talking about today. So absolutely love it. Fran, before we wrap up, man. Um, yeah. Give, give the C nation, um, uh, a shoutout around where they can find more about you man or where they can find out more about har and then any, any, any other last items that you wanna kind of shout up. 

Fran Bryzski (00:36:35) - Yeah. Uh, you can find us send hark.com. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn. Uh, it's my name F Brisky. I'm sure. Uh, Adrian will, will tag me in the post about the podcast and you'll be able to find me that way. Absolutely. Um, I do a lot of discussions with CX leaders. Like we're doing one coming up about black Friday, uh, cyber Monday in the holidays and, and, and what are some best practices around scaling up and down. So I, I like to try to connect with a bunch of CX leaders and just talk about what's going on. Not, not har related just in general, because I think we can all benefit from that. Um, and, and the community is amazing in the CX world. Everyone's a plus to work with, which obviously, I guess you would, 

Adrian (00:37:12) - They're not afraid to talk Fran either. This is a, a group of professionals that, yeah, this is on a phone call or zoom chat and chat in the out. 

Fran Bryzski (00:37:19) - Yep. They, they, they want to help. So, um, so you can find me there. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Um, but, but just reach via and har. So you can go to our contact side and use har to contact us and let us know who you are and what's going on. And we receive it, um, on the back end and there help us software too. Uh, one thing I guess, to wrap up, is it like the humbling experience behind all this? I Figma is very top of mind because they just had a massive exit or, you know, they were required for a lot of money. And you talk about companies that are growing so rapidly and they're trying to provide best in class customer service. And I remember right before we launched hark, something happened with my Figma account and I, I was trying to put a new credit card in and I could not do it. 

Fran Bryzski (00:38:02) - I was getting an error that was a bug. And I went through nine emails back and forth sharing screenshots. They're coming back with this. So come back with that. Meanwhile, I'm trying to build a company and I gotta get going. Um, and I'm just thinking, I build a product for this. Like, let me just send you a hark. It'll be so much easier. You'll totally understand what's going on. And, and, and those situations are when it started to click. And then when we brought customers on and the customers are sending us slack message, slack messages about how to be more efficient on the back end. And the team loves when get HARs, because they're the best ticket. It's, it's humbling, man. And, and, uh, we've got a great team of my end, all people that I've worked with in the past, and we're just here to help, uh, you, you get us like what you see is what you get and, and we're growing pretty quick. So, so please reach out if you just more we're to hop on always conversations. And, um, it's been a pleasure with you 

Adrian (00:38:51) - Hundred. Thank you so much for joining the showman. I, I love what you guys are building and I can't wait to see what the future brings for you. And, uh, I'll look forward to keeping in touch moving forward, man. 

Fran Bryzski (00:38:59) - Yeah. Likewise brother. Thank you.