CXChronicles Podcast 198 with Alex Ross, Chief Operating Officer at Hire Horatio CX

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #198 we welcomed Alex Ross, Chief Operating Officer at Hire Horatio CX based in New York, NY and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Hire Horatio is a next-generation and tech-enabled customer support outsourcing firm aimed at providing a reliable and trusted handpicked team to allow businesses to “do what they do best and Hire Horatio for the rest.”

Horatio partners with high-growth and innovative companies to develop their customer support strategy and provides a dedicated handpicked team to execute.

They focus on the constant balance & refinement of daily improvements on their employee experiences (check out their new campus in Santo Domingo, DR) which reflects directly in the customer experiences that they provide their customers. 

In this episode, Alex and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback and shares tips & best practices that have worked across his own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #198 Highlight Reel:**

1. Leaving JP Morgan to kick-start & co-found Hire Horatio CX with friends
2. Employee experience needs to be the top priority while building your company
3. Building a modern tech company in the Dominican Republic, with ties to NYC 
4. Leveraging historical data to increase sales, mitigate churn & boost retention
5. Driving agent empowerment through investments in building living playbooks
 
Huge thanks to Alex for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer care space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Alex Ross

Click here to learn more about Hire Horatio CX

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused video content & short-reel CTAs to improve your CX/CS/RevOps performance today (politely go smash that subscribe button). 

Contact us anytime to learn more about CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com and ask us about how we can help your business & team make customer happiness a habit now!

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #198 with Alex Ross, COO @ Hire Horatio CX.mp4

Adrian (00:00:08) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm super excited today, guys, we have really, I think I was just saying to Alex, it's only our second time that we've had a repeat guest on, but we have Alex Ross, co-founder and c o o at Higher Hario cx, who's joining us on the show today. Alex, say hello to the CX Nation by Friend. 

Alex (00:00:27) - Hey, everybody, how's it going? And thanks for having me on. Really excited to be a part of this 

Adrian (00:00:32) - 100%. So, guys, Alex and I had an awesome chat the other day, getting ready for today's show. Um, friendly reminder for some of our, for, for some of our long time listeners, we actually had the pleasure of having, um, Alex's teammate Jose Herrera, the c e o of Higher. Her ratio was on the show a while back, episode 1 39 of CX c p and I. You know, guys, what Alex is gonna jump in today, the stuff that Alex and Jose and the team at Higher Ratio are doing is, number one, it's incredible. It's awesome. It, it's a whole different brand and flavor of the incredible things that are happening in the CX and the CS landscape. But number two, these guys have just simply built a super duper cool business. So when Alex reached out, I was like, dude, yes, you're coming on the show. And yes, I want to hear all the things that have happened since we had Jose on. So before we f jump into the pillars and all that fun stuff, Alex, let's focus on you, my friend. I wanna, I'd love to just kind of understand, I ask everybody the same question. How did you find your way into this part of the space? I knew your buddies with Jose, but give the, give the listeners a little bit, uh, of a sense of your background and some of the stuff you were doing before IRA ratio and let us know how you got into this whole world of being a customer focused business leader. 

Alex (00:01:32) - Yeah, definitely. I think it's, uh, kind of non-traditional segue from what I was doing before to, to this role. But, um, you know, my background, I grew up right outside of Chicago in, in Evanston. And, um, you know, after I finished college at University of Michigan, uh, I lived in Chicago for about a year, and then I ended up moving to New York City to go work for JP Morgan, um, in one of their banking roles, which was a great experience. I did that for about eight years, primarily focused on, uh, real estate acquisitions. And so, uh, during my time there, uh, I realized I wanted to go get my M B A and I went, uh, to Columbia and I actually met Jose on our first day in the morning at the first breakfast. Uh, we had sit next to each other, uh, there and got to talking. At the time he was also in banking as well. Um, we became, you know, close friends. We added, um, Jared, our other partner on as well too. We had, uh, some mutual friends and the three of us really, uh, you know, kind of went through business school together, taking similar classes, hanging out and talking about what business ideas we wanted to do. Um, we had a lot of really bad ones. 

Adrian (00:02:48) - <laugh>, uh, 

Alex (00:02:49) - At some time we wanted, 

Adrian (00:02:50) - Hey, that happens Alex. That happens to the best of us in the beginning, my friend. 

Alex (00:02:54) - Yeah, exactly. I think at some point in time we wanted to be, uh, coffee entrepreneurs. Um, then there was some idea of doing some small venture capital. Um, and ultimately, you know, one of the things that people ask me a lot about business school and they say, you know, how rewarding was it? Um, and I'd say from a, you know, a technical piece, I, I knew a lot from doing banking side, but I really had no experience into what being an entrepreneur was like. And after going to business school, I was really, really interested. And I think Jared and Jose would say the, the same thing. We just had to figure out what Yep. Um, and so we, we had a lot of ideas and ultimately Jose, uh, came one day and, you know, said, you know, this industry of customer experience and outsourcing is very big, uh, in his home country of the Dominican Republic. 

Alex (00:03:42) - And that matched really well with a lot of conversations we had been having with founders in business school who had a lot of trouble figuring out how do you do customer experience really well? Yeah. How do you optimize it and how do you make it not a call center? So yep, we explored the space, uh, and ultimately decided that this was something worth pursuing and taking a shot at. And when I went back to my boss at JP Morgan and tried to explain to him and several other people why I was leaving, um, they, they just simply couldn't wrap their head around how this world of customer experience had anything to do with what we were doing in banking. Um, and so they were a little bit confused. I think we had a lot of people that were confused, but ultimately, you know, we figured out that this is a phenomenal space that's been underserved. People haven't really figured out, you know, at the time how to focus on it, how to turn it from cost center to a revenue generated. And that's really how we got involved and started to say, let's take higher her ratio, um, and figure out how we can grow this and start adding value to the rest of the company. So that's how we originally got started. Um, and it was, you know, quite the story and we've scaled from there. 

Adrian (00:04:54) - I, I love that. I mean, number one, I think, I think of all of the different CX and CS people, Alex, that, that we've had the pleasure of having on the show. And of all the different folks.

Adrian (00:05:02) - I've personally had the pleasure of becoming friends with, just from, just from this space, from our industry, from the stuff that we're doing every single solitary day with our clients. I don't know that I've had, uh, anybody that's come on the show and said, yeah, I walked in and told my boss at JP Morgan Chase. I'm, I'm, I'm quitting. I'm leaving to go start a CX startup. You might, you and Jose are gonna be the first people on, on that, but I love it, man. And it, and it worked out for you guys, right? So you guys have done an incredible job. Even I was, Alex, what me and you were chatting about the other day, even since Jose and I last caught up, like you guys have done some incredible things. You've continued to build this business to your point of like finding this great spot, you've guys, you guys have crushed it. 

Adrian (00:05:35) - Go beyond that. I'll, I'll, you're being humble. You guys have crushed it. You found a bunch of huge businesses that you're helping to alleviate and take this extremely difficult task of building incredible customer experiences, incredible customer success experiences, all of the different things that go into support and let's call it what it is. All of our listeners right now, they can think of a million different things that go into really kind of doing that extremely well. Cause it is hard. It is one of the hardest parts of most businesses. However, I love that you're starting today show with when done properly. This is not a cost center. This CX is modern selling. It's where companies that are killing it and crushing it and dominating their spaces, uh, moving forward, especially in the crazy world that we got going on, man, these next couple years are gonna be really be really wild with our market and our economy globally. 

Adrian (00:06:16) - And, and here, here, here, here in the state side. But you guys have crushed it. So I'd love for you to just, why don't, why don't we drive, jump into the first pillar team, talk a little bit about the higher her issue team, and, and honestly, things have changed so much. Alex, like start from the beginning. Start, start as if our listeners have never heard about it before, because I'd love to kind of have you paint that picture for all the incredible things that you're doing in this incredible, uh, team of humans that you guys are putting together across the world to, to, to build higher her ratio. 

Alex (00:06:41) - Yeah. I think, you know, when we talk about the, the four Pillars, team to me is probably the one that stands out the most. You know, I, I know it sounds cliche and everybody wants to talk about their team, I think in CX and our type of business model, uh, it there is a little bit, it's unique to having, um, you know, our focus and how we focus on our team. So we provide, um, outsourced services for venture backed, all different types of companies that are growing really quickly, mainly in the CX space. Um, what makes us different from kind of the traditional models that you'll see of people providing outsourced laborer in the CX space is that we actually go and build entire CX departments. So we take you through everything from the technology to the playbooks, to the processes, to how you should scale, to how, what data you should be looking at and how you build tagging programs and all of these different things to help you build the best in class CX department that's really needed to turn it into a revenue generator. 

Alex (00:07:40) - Um, but for us, team was probably one of the first things that we focused on. Um, if you think about, you know, the, the outsourcing and the CX industry in general, um, typically you think of, you know, old antiquated companies, not great experiences Yep. Reading scripts. Yep. Uh, not data focus, low end technology. Um, and for us, one of the things you said is, you know, to offer a better experience for all of our clients. What do we need to do? We knew the package around the tools and the software and everything we needed to put together, but we really needed to think about team. Um, and our thesis was that if we can hire really, really top talented people, offer them an unparalleled experience, then we can also serve that to our clients. And so what you've seen is that in our offices in the Dominican Republic, if you walked in there, you wouldn't be sure if you were at Horatio or if you were at Google's headquarters. 

Alex (00:08:36) - Down <laugh>, uh, in the dr we have invested in everything for the employee experience. We have on staff therapists throughout the day. We serve three meals a day for free, for everybody that's there. We have a great phenomenal gym that I just got back from using Nice, um, last week. And, you know, it's all open floor plan, open space, and many other perks and parties. And the idea here is keep employees happy, keep them motivated, pair them with really interesting, fast growing companies Yep. And give them a new type of work. And that has been kind of our key to success. And it's really been centered around how can you build the best team, incentivize the best team, and put them in an environment that they can do their best work. And, and that's where we focused mainly in growing this business. 

Adrian (00:09:26) - I love it. I mean, number one, Alex, it's, uh, I, I feel like we're always talking about in this show, but for, for, for, for customer focused business leaders that are fighting this good fight day in and day out. You just said something that we just can't say enough of, which is, if you wanna build incredible world-class customer experience and customer success, you gotta start with the team brother. You gotta start with the people, the guys and the gals that are taking care of your customers, serving your customers, building your tools, utilizing your tools, writing or authoring the playbooks, right? Like thinking about what you could do with the feedback and how you could take action upon it. And so it's almost like people are constantly asking, how do you build this great cx and how do you build this awesome customer success.

Adrian (00:10:03) - You gotta start with the employee experience, man, I love that. You just, you're plopping that one right out there on the table for us to, to, to pick apart. Because if you're not, it's gonna be everything else downstream is gonna be really, really difficult. Um, the other thing too is just we've seen time and time again, especially with some of the, the clients that you're working with, oftentimes it's the guys and the gals on the front line that see different leading indicators. They see different opportunities, they see different possibilities for utilization, whether it's on the tech side, the process side, whatever you name it, product side, service side. So like having a team of people that's fully vested, fully engaged, fully supported, educated coach. That's how you're gonna start to unpack all those other variables, man. So I love that you're calling it out. Um, one last part, um, I joked, I, I was joking with Alex the other day, guys, I a hundred percent I'm coming to visit you guys and visit the Horatio campus the next time I'm down in the dr because it sounds like, um, I don't know, Alex, are there other companies, are there other, other, other types of industries that are taking advantage of what you and Jose and the team have really done an incredible job building your team down in the dr Is this a new trend? 

Adrian (00:11:00) - Is this, are you guys kind of front and center on is what ta talk a little bit about what's happening down, down in the DR with this type of new interesting work that you guys are building. 

Alex (00:11:08) - Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, down in the dr we are the, the first to pioneer this and really start to invest, um, you know, the time and the capital into the employee experience, especially in our industry, but also, you know, expanded from beyond there. I think other people have taken note of what we've been doing. We're very active on social media for attracting the right applicants that we need for our clients. Yep. Um, and so I think a lot of companies now are faced with the question of, you know, do we try to mirror what these guys are doing? Can we mirror what they're doing or do we suffer the consequences? Now for us, you know, when we talk about competition down in the dr you know, because of the types of clients that we're working with, generally us-based very high touch, fast-growing companies, um, we need a very high caliber level of, uh, agent to join Horatio. 

Alex (00:12:03) - Okay. Um, where other companies may not have that requirement. So I think in the, you know, if you talk about the at and ts or the Verizons of the world, yeah, they provide specific, you know, language requirements and language testing levels that they need. And, you know, they're generally not always the highest. Um, and for us, our clients are making the decision of, do I work with her ratio, have them scale, scale my team with them, um, and have them offer a better experience, or do I grow this in-house and, and handle it that way? Um, so not only do we need to, you know, show show them how to build these CX departments, but we need to have our teams be at a, just as good or a higher level than the teams that they would be hiring in-house. Yeah. And so for us, you know, we've segmented that market and saying we need the top talent. And the top talent really has come to us, which has been a, you know, a great indicator of the success that we've been having is looking at who we've been able to convince to come not just from the CX industry, but kind of from all over. We have people from the finance world, insurance, healthcare startup, um, all come into work in the CX side with us. Yeah. And that's been great. Um, you know, proof for the work that we've been doing and the experience that we offer. 

Adrian (00:13:16) - Yep. I love it. And guys, just when you get a chance, you take a ch take a look at the, uh, higher ratio.com website, you'll see some of the, some of the logos and some of the brands and some of the businesses that are, are trusting hario to really take over some of this front lines, the support. And, and not only that, you heard what Alex said, it's, it's, it's more than that. It's going behind the scenes, it's getting into the tech, it's getting into the tools, which by the way, perfect segue. Let's jump in a second. CX pillar of tools. So Alex, you mentioned, okay, team is critical. Team's number one team is super important. You guys, you've spent the last several years building this incredible army of, of humans that are, are, are really doing some incredible work on the CX and CS side. 

Adrian (00:13:52) - I'd love to hear you spent a couple minutes talking about the tools. So as the business grew, as the business scaled, as the team grew, and then frankly let's call it what it's, as you get more and more and more of these big customers coming on board, how did you guys continue to unpack the way that you managed, number one, your own tech stack, like the Horatio tech stack, and then how do you sort of interplay with all of your different clients technology? I'd love for you to spend a few minutes talking about all the different ways that you and the team are thinking about the tools side of our game. 

Alex (00:14:16) - Yeah, I think historically in the industry, what you saw is a lot of the times where, um, you know, the industry is called the business process outsourcing BPO industry, where you would see that a lot of the big companies would make clients shift over, use their specific task. Definitely stack. Yeah. Um, it was a huge barrier both in terms of getting up and running really quickly, which is a huge priority for our clients when they have backlogs or wanna reach out. And so one of the things that we've been is, you know, initially technology agnostic and really working with whatever our clients had. And then what we started to say is, that's great. Um, but how can we start to steer them to the best in class technologies that fit their particular business? And so, you know, sometimes I get asked Alex, what is the best technology, um, for this area or that, and a lot of times it's so dependent on the use case, what type of business you are, where you fall. 

Alex (00:15:13) - E-commerce is much different than FinTech, which is much different than healthtech. But one of the things that we started to realize was super important was to build out reporting. I think it was one of the probably most underserved areas of CX was real in depth reporting. Yeah. And I'm not talking about just, Hey, what was my volume last week and what were my, you know, first response and resolution times. So we took it on us to in-house build proprietary software that's gonna allow us to do things like run full tagging analysis so we can be able to look at, you know, exactly what types of interactions are driving CSAT scores and satisfaction scores up or down, how is that changing week over week? What are we looking for in terms of volume changes and how that's shifting from, from channel to channel. Our focus is b, figuring out, when you talked about feedback before, how can we give our clients the most feedback possible about what's going on in their CX department so that CX team can start to get a table at these executive meetings and around this executive table and say, here's what we're we're seeing on our side. 

Alex (00:16:21) - Here's what our customers are saying. You just released a new product or a new feature. Here's the feedback, here's the actual metrics around them. Yeah. And so for us, it was super important to build that internally. However, we also partner with a lot of the softwares because we think that there's stuff that we can build great internally, but there's also phenomenal companies that are spending day in and day out building solutions for percent problems. And we've been able to part with amazing, you know, chatbots like ADA and forethought have been huge for us. I know you had the forethought. Yeah, 

Adrian (00:16:55) - Absolutely. Yep. 

Alex (00:16:57) - And, you know, they've been phenomenal. And we can talk about that in ai, which has been a, you know, very interesting to watch, but also just seeing, you know, the CRMs develop and for a lot of, you know, e-commerce companies and working with companies like Gorgeous to be able to simplify how we're handling things and increase efficiency at the end of the day, you know, you gotta ask yourselves, what does this do for the end customer? Yeah. Am I serving them better? And is that, and secondly, looking at the efficiencies on your side and saying, how is that helping our business, um, service that customer, both from a cost and optimization standpoint. But I think a, you know, a good mix of in-house technology on the data side and then partnering with these best in class companies has been, you know, the key to our success. 

Adrian (00:17:44) - I love it. I mean, Alex, what you just laid out there, man, let's call it what it is, especially for many of these venture capital back companies that are, they're, they're, they're getting their bonfires started, for lack of a better term, right? Maybe they just got some product market fit, maybe they finally got some revenue. Maybe they're just started building out the key, connecting all those dots and doing what you just said. Taking a little bit of your in-house, your in-house tech and a and, and a lot of your, your your best in class or your, your, your SaaS partnership type of type of tech and marrying it and blending it and normalizing it and aggregating it, and then being able to just come up with basic reporting that anybody could take action on. That stuff's hard, let's call it what it is. I think for some of our listeners that are, have the luxury of being at a, a big mature, maybe an older, more, more established, more mature company, right? 

Adrian (00:18:27) - Where you've already got a full-blown data science team, you've got data ops, you've got sales ops, revenue ops, marketing ops. You've got literally, you got, you guys probably aren't even thinking about this. You've got 5 million of payroll helping to build that reporting for you. When you're in the beginning phases of building the company, building a niche space, finding your little groove, figuring out how the hell to put, put together actual revenue that's gonna matter and allow you to build your team and scale into the future, this stuff's super difficult, right? It's really, really hard. Naturally, you see this process of as different leaders come in, marketing's got their tools that, that they want to use, sales and revenue have their tools that they want to use. Cs cx, maybe ux, they've got their tools and, and some of the, some of the tech that they wanna use. 

Adrian (00:19:06) - What, what, what most of these growth companies struggle with Alex is connecting the dots. How do you begin to put all of this data together so that, number one, the, for lack of a better term, the organization's rowing the damn boat in the right direction. But then number two, so people understand what other folks in different teams, different departments, different focus areas, know what they're focused on, know what they're worried about, know what they're excited about, kind of have a bigger, more accurate, aggregated picture of what that voice of customer, that pulse of that customer is really truly showing. And so the stuff that you guys are doing with your team and your customers, that's why it's super, super valuable, brother. And that's why it's just like, this stuff is complex. It takes a long time and that not every business can kind of pick up and start sprinting with it. Alex. 

Alex (00:19:47) - Yeah. And you know, we think about companies kind of on the maturity scale from, you know, pre-launch to, you know, them doing, you know, hundreds of millions in, in, in revenue. I think they all probably consider themselves startups, but.

Alex (00:20:00) - Very different kind of on that curve and what their abilities are from a reporting standpoint and knowledge standpoint. I see one of the things that I see some of the best in class businesses that we work in, despite the size, despite the budget that they have, is this emphasis on connecting systems and aggregating data together to use that to make real insights. And to me, you know, I think if you go ahead and you look back at customer experience, you know, probably 10 years ago it was tough for somebody that was in that space at a company to get a seat at, you know, that table and big time give their, give their opinions on what they're seeing. Yeah. I think now they're one of the first people that are looked towards to answer questions. And I think a big reason of that is because the CX world has moved, you know, with other departments to a huge focus on data driven metrics. Hundred percent explain what's going on in the business. We see this with all of our clients that are on subscription brands and are super focused on retention. Right? I think in 2000, you know, 20 and 2021, when the market was great Yep. Everybody was focused on just growth, growth, growth, and hey, 

Adrian (00:21:08) - Yeah, all day long 

Alex (00:21:08) - Retentions your retention's there or not. We'll work on that later. And now that things have shifted, retention's huge. And when you think retention, the first thing we're going to is looking at cx, what are the interactions? How can we tag them in a way that we can figure out what's going on so that we can build these retention strategies. So we're helping clients build different retention programs that we're actually using at an agent level, um, that are help reduce, um, some of the churn that they're seeing. And again, it's all through data and this is stuff that's being reported not only up to the C-suite, um, but also to investors and telling them exactly what we're doing to help try to address some of the issues that they might be having with churn and retention issues. 

Adrian (00:21:50) - Yep. I, I I, I, I, I'm, I'm so happy that you bring this up cuz I think it's just, it's become super clear over the last five to 10 years that, uh, the same way that we, we, we so many businesses and so many executives and so many entrepreneurs and people that were building companies to try to find sales, find new customers, the, the whole nine yards. You know, we, we focused on pipelines for the longest time. We still do. The pipelines are a critical part of making sure that you're keeping fresh blood coming into your business. I e net new revenue and net new customers, right? Gotta have fresh blood coming, but customer journeys, right? And, and, and having an executive focus on sort of tipping the, tipping the pipeline on its side and looking at the, from the very beginning of a customer journey all the way to the very end of it where you're loyal and you're retaining them and you're bringing them back again and again and again, and you're spiking that LTV up and to the right. 

Adrian (00:22:33) - This is why I think I, I love that you're bringing this up, Alex. This is why you see the number of CXOs, CCOs chief evangelists, all of these customer, customer-focused roles, user-focused roles, i e revenue money. And I think that you're seeing, um, we're seeing a little bit of a difference in the executive, in most executive boardrooms around the appetite for some of the money that we traditionally would've spent on maybe marketing, like on marketing activities and marketing services and, and things that we always used to think would be like pouring gas into the top of the funnel just to get our conversions out at the bottom. Now we're, uh, the, the retention piece that you just called out Alex, it's critical. Like everybody in the world knows that things are gonna get, get a little bit dicey for the next couple years, right? Globally with our market, with our economy, we've seen every one of the biggest, smartest companies on planet Earth have tightened the belt. 

Adrian (00:23:18) - Some of them multi, multiple times. Unfortunately, let's make kind of makes, makes you really wonder how bad this is gonna get. But I think now more than ever having that voice and having some, some guy or gal in your business, whether it's a public company or whether you're a post series a business that thinks you're on your way to building a 20 million company, you gotta have somebody that owns that voice. You gotta have someone that is almost agnostic to what's happening on sales, what's happening on product, what's happening in ops, what's happening in finance. You are focused literally on the user and the customer. Right. So I I I love, I love that this is some of the work you're doing. Um, I, I'd love to jump into the third pillar process. You, you talked about playbooks, you talked about spending a lot of time working with your customers to not only think about the team and not only think about the tools, but process. 

Adrian (00:23:58) - I'd love to kind of hear you talk for a few minutes, Alex, about some of the things that you and the team at hire issue are doing around curating or authoring or building playbooks. And then I'd just love to hear kind of just your own 2 cents around some of the things that, like you've kind of been blown away by since leaving the banking world and entering this new customer experience, customer success world. Then maybe we, maybe you didn't see it in banking, but you're seeing it every single day at higher her ratio around the process. I'd love to hear you talk about process for a few minutes. 

Alex (00:24:24) - Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, we talked about team and that was, you know, I think one of the biggest driving things and then you talk about how you set your team up for success. I think very quickly we realized that working with these fast but young venture backed companies meant there were going to be a lot of moving pieces, a lot of things changing, not daily, but hourly. Sure. And it's a lot to keep up with. And so you think about, you know, how do you get an agent to be knowledgeable, to have resources? And I think in the CX world, one of the biggest topics that people are talking about is agent empowerment, right? Yeah. Yeah. How are we empowering them both with information and the ability to make decisions. Yep. That's ultimately how you get the best experiences.

Alex (00:25:10) - So for us, when we onboard a new, uh, client, the first thing that happens is we build out their playbook. A lot of the times the clients don't have 'em. Our playbooks outline everything from who you are as a business key people, what you guys are focused on, what your mission is, your goals, all the way to policy, procedures, macros, tagging, um, you know, video guides, everything that you need to be able to know to be able to service customers. Yep. And, you know, we build these base versions for our clients when we get started off, and then we actually continue working with them. And at somebody on our client's team is fully responsible for updating the playbook every time new information gets sent. So after a meeting or after a Slack conversation, or if we hear something from marketing, we're constantly updating these playbooks so that they have real time information that people can go to search and answer customers with the most accurate, um, information. 

Alex (00:26:08) - It's a huge, huge focus of ours. We use a number of different technologies to build them out. Um, but these are what's driving the accuracy of the information that we're providing, the speed in which we're providing it, and also building up agent confidence because going totally through and having these answers at your fingertips is one of the, you know, the easiest ways to enhance your customer experience. Yep. Too often do we talk with teams that, you know, before they start working with Horatio, and we've built all of this out. They say, you know, a lot of this was stuck in one person's head. It was in a slack conversation that you had to search through. Um, and it's not scalable. And I think when you talk about, you know, who are the right clients for us at Horatio, who do we work with best? You know, I mentioned venture backed companies, but it's really companies that are looking to scale. 

Alex (00:26:57) - Um, we set up processes, systems, um, and technology for companies today to serve them in six months or a year from there so that they can continue the goals that they want to do, but that they aren't going through all of this tech debt and headaches of not having the right policies and information. So for us, documentation of everything that's going on, um, is huge. It's, it's a core piece of how we work. And you see it in our slack conversations that we have with clients anytime they provide us with an update, right? The next thing we do is as a thread, we send the link to where this information has been added and outline it fully, and then we send it around to the rest of our team. It's a lot to keep up with, with these fast going, growing brands for us and for them. And so you need to have this process and this system to be able to do it efficiently. 

Adrian (00:27:48) - I I, I love it. And I, I, I promise you're talking to someone that, that thinks about this notion of playbooks or, uh, capturing living SOPs or, or whatever you wanna call it, right? Your living blueprint, well, on a daily basis. And the last comment that you made there about these growth companies more than anybody, because of the pitching and the pi, the constant pitching, pivoting, changing, changing, iterating, fixing, breaking, all that fun stuff. That means that those companies and the companies in those positions, more than almost anybody, have to have a playbook to refer to because of the volatility, the volatility's so high that if you don't have a place or a, a source of knowledge or the gospel for the lack of a better term, that everybody in the team kind of go and look at it and see what the, what the answer is for today, well then that's the first part. 

Adrian (00:28:33) - That's the first starting part. Yeah. The other big thing I love that you talked about, like the controlling and monitoring that you guys do, pools change every single day. Leadership ch changes minimally once a quarter or every couple quarters. Uh, customers change every single month, right? For sales teams actually doing its job. You got new customers, new needs, every single software month. Um, and then just ongoing like evolution and maturity of not just the CX side, but your product and your sales and the market, everything keeps changing and getting better as a business gross, especially if they're under the right type of leadership where they're constantly pushing for innovation, they're pushing for evolution, they're pushing for all this good stuff that's gonna keep differentiating your business, differentiating your team, and putting you in a position for success. I just think that it's amazing, Alex, how many clients that we work with at cxc that are doing between 10 and 20 million a year. 

Adrian (00:29:21) - And they, and same thing, same comment you just made, they don't have anything. It's like, wait, you got those two directors that you, you pay a lot of money to, they're the only people in the company that know everything that we're about to spend the next three to six months. Like defining and discovering and documenting and curating and, and, and Alex, I think we're, we're, we're sitting here joking right now, but like lot of companies out there, man, that's what it is. And it's crazy. It's such an easy practice to get into with capturing this information and destroying it somewhere.

Alex (00:29:48) - Yeah, I mean, it's so many companies and I think that one of the proof around this is, you know, CX touches pretty much every area of the business. Um, and so one of, you know, our proudest moments every time when we're building out these CX playbooks is that, um, you know, when we can see people not from the CX side in the playbook, trying to find answers to definitely whether it's new product that they launched and trying to find all the different features, um, or it's something else. You know, we have a lot of clients that use their CX playbook for onboarding new employees that aren't even working in the CX space. And they're saying, you know, the first thing you need to do is read the CX playbook, go through it, understand it, keep it open all the time, and that's gonna be your first day of training. 

Alex (00:30:33) - Yeah. Um, you know, and these are people that are in engineering, finance, and marketing roles, uh, but it's giving them the best sense of who the company is and you know, what the values are. And I think the, the second thing that we're seeing outside of the playbook, which I've, I've loved to see, and I think, you know, great founders and great CEOs are doing, is when they're talking about training people regardless of department, one of the first things that I've seen great founders, um, CEOs do, is actually have people work on tickets, um, customer interactions. And that's where you learn the voice of who's the customer, who's buying, what are the problems. Um, again, this is just CX starting to take a bigger role, uh, in these businesses. And, you know, the ones that have configured out and are focused on it and allocate budget to it Yeah. Are the ones we've seen really grow the fastest. 

Adrian (00:31:23) - I, I love that you bring, I remember vividly, I'm gonna share a quick story, Alex, um, one of the companies that I was, uh, a part of helping to build the CX and the CS roadmap for one fine stay in New York City. This is, you and I were in New York City, man the whole time together. It's funny, I always joke with Jose about that, but, uh, it was one of the biggest things we would do during our winter, our winter peak, right? When all of these people from all across the world would wanna come to Manhattan, they want to have their New York City Christmas, right? And so our portfolio in Manhattan and in the tri-state would, would, Bob would swell up every single listing that we had would get filled up for that, that Christmas peak. One of the things that we used to make our one fine state folks do is join in on the action of being on the front line, because it was such a massive peak that it didn't make any sense for us to do any of the crazy type of differentials with, you know, doubling up our support capacity or doubling it. 

Adrian (00:32:11) - It was, it was a specific niche product. We needed the people, the new one from state people to talk to hosts and talk to guests. It was what it was. But we would have our friends from sales, our friends from off some of our product friends sitting on those frontline calls, taking host calls, taking guest calls, right In the peak of Christmas, man. And I, I'll tell you number one, it was fun because you're spot on. You get all these different, you get different ideas, different points of feedback, you get different suggestions. Plus some of the people that were always kind of difficult with our CX under CS team, they would come outta there with a hell respect for us to be holy. This stuff is really, really hard. Now we see what you guys are talking about with the customer side or the product side. 

Adrian (00:32:46) - So anyway, I love that. I love that, that that's, that's, that's one of the things that you're still pulling them into. Um, Alison, I'd love to dive into the fourth and final CX pillar or feedback. And I know we hit on this a little bit. We talked about voc, we talked about some of the different ways that you guys are kind of helping people see insights or seeing you with actions. But let's zoom this one back into higher issue. Ma'am. I'd love for you to spend like a minute or two talking about some of the different ways that you guys are getting your customer and your account feedback today. And I'd love to figure out how you're getting some of, some of the employee and add Yex feedback from, from the massive army of, of, of higher her ratio folks that you guys have put together. I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about feedback. 

Alex (00:33:22) - Yeah, definitely. First I'll talk about the company and then I'll go into the employee side, which is a, a big focus of ours. Um, you know, for us, when we first started off and we were trying to convince these, you know, founders to, to let us handle their customer experience and outsource it to us, one of the biggest questions we got was, yeah, but you know, I've been doing tickets as a founder and you know, I get such great feedback and insights from everything that's going on. I'm, I'm scared to let that up. Sure. And originally we were like, you know, they're exactly right. There's so much gold in these tickets in this, um, you know, information the customers are sending. And so at first we were like, okay, we're just gonna go ahead and give you a summary of the feedback that our agents are hearing. 

Alex (00:34:05) - So, you know, we have weekly meetings with all of our clients. We'd pull together the agents and say, Hey, what are you seeing? What are the themes? What, what's going on? Um, and we'd send that to clients and that was good. Um, but it wasn't great. And so we started to say, okay, now we're working with bigger clients. They're getting tens of thousands of tickets per week. It's a little bit hard and subjective just to go and ask agents, Hey, what are you seeing? Sure. Although I do, that's a really important piece and we to say totally 

Adrian (00:34:32) - Agree. Yep. 

Alex (00:34:33) - Yeah. How can we build out, you know, systems and tagging analysis to actually provide insights into what is happening and what are we hearing? So a lot of the times when clients join her ratio, you know, we look at their, their tagging and their system and it's pretty basic. Yep. Um, you know, if it's an e-commerce company, they have refund, uh, return, uh, cancellation customer question, um, are kind of some of the basic tags and they're not really using that functionality. What we do is we pair them with our customer success team and we revamp their entire tagging profile. Nice to go so that we can dive deeper into, okay, so it was a refund, but, but what else? Why was it a refund? What refund? Sure. What product are we talking about? Yeah. Yeah. I think this matches back into what you were talking about before with building the systems to provide you with answers, right? 

Alex (00:35:23) - Yep. Companies don't care just generally how many refunds there wereand, why were there refunds of this particular product in this particular timeframe from this type of customer set. Right? Those are the answers that you need to be able to give. And again, if you in a CX role can provide that information to the C-suite, you are the most valuable person at the table to do that. Absolutely. So the systems that we've been building out from a proprietary basis do exactly that. They analyze the tagging systems and figuring out how we patent match those with the rest of the business in terms of sales. They also match that with customer satisfaction scores and figuring out what are driving those, what's not driving those. Yep. What new products we've been launching or features we've been launching of changing that. So that's really where the feedback is so key, but as you scale and as you get to a, you know, that ends of thousands tickets a week, right? 

Alex (00:36:19) - You do need a system and to quantitatively be able to pull that information or else you know, you're gonna get lost with everything that's going on. So I think that's from a client side, what we're doing, um, from an employee side, we have, um, a number of different ways that we're doing this. We have our, our quarterly survey where we collect an employee net promoter score every, each quarter, along with a series of about five or six other questions. Okay. We started, originally we, we had about 15 questions cuz we wanted to know everything <laugh>. We started to learn that, you know, sometimes too much can be a lot and you're not gonna get the response rates that you need. But we ask people about a couple main things. We ask them how they feel if they would recommend working at Horacio. We ask them how they feel about their manager, which is a huge predictor of how long people definitely are interested in staying. 

Alex (00:37:13) - We ask them how they feel about growth opportunities and options that they have, and we ask them about the fairness and how they're treated here. And then we open it up to just overall comments. We are tracking that and sending those reports and analysis to every manager at Horatio on a quarterly basis. And then they in turn come back with their action plan based on the results they're compared to their peers. They're compared to the different averages. But they all have to come back and figure out what they need to do to start to improve these scores. And that's how we get a great barometer of how people are feeling at a large scale. You know, we're at, you know, around 1300 people now. So again, walking around and asking people how they're feeling is, it's an Army brother. It's an army. Exactly. And it's tough, um, to, to get that feedback sometimes compared to when we were much smaller. 

Alex (00:38:02) - So this is a big thing that we do. The second thing that we do that, uh, you know, i I I hope more companies start to do is these focus groups. Nice. Um, we'll go client by client and have people that have no, you know, involvement in the business and not their manager, no decision making above them and hold these anonymous focus groups. And that's when we get the best information about what's going well, what's not going well, where do we need to focus, what have we changed that we thought was great, um, and what haven't we, you know, one of the things we did when we did our return to office, uh, was, you know, we saw some of our scores drop a little bit on the, uh, employee NPS scores. And we started to say like, why is that what's happening? Um, and we held a number of these focus groups and we started to realize that, you know, big portion of our employment base wanted to have a little bit more flexibility in terms of where they can work. 

Alex (00:38:58) - And so we rolled out our hybrid work program as a response to that and what did we see the next quarter? I mean, the scores increased dramatically. Yep. And then we looked at productivity of all of our agents, which is pretty easy to do in the CX space and working from home or being in the office, we saw really, really similar results across most people. And so that was just an example of taking feedback and putting it into action. Not just collecting metrics and reporting them to a team, but saying, what do you do about it? And, and that's huge for us. 

Adrian (00:39:30) - Yep. I love it. Alex, number one, thank you for sharing all that. That's super duper helpful. Tons of awesome nuggets of wisdom there at CTAs that every single solitary one of our listeners should be drawing from if you haven't already. But number two, it's like, there's something about, and we, we kind, it's funny, this is coming full so circle right now as we wrap up the episode. But like, we started this episode talking about like, almost, it's not a, it's not a nice to have, it's a need to have CX and Yex just connected at the hip, right? Like they've gotta be somebody in the organization or some team in the organization's. Gotta be.

Adrian (00:40:00) - Thinking about how the two things work together. Your last comment there and, and, and, and, and, and even what you talked about on the customer side and then going what you jumped right do with the team side. There's something about, you know, for, for employees that see companies or see leadership teams or see management teams that not only are they taking the time to think about what the customer wants, but they're literally taking even whether it's once a quarter, whether it's once a year, taking the time to see what the employees think. I think as I've gotten deeper into my whole CX and CS journey and myself and as we've worked with more and more customers in cxc, I just think it's baffling how many companies don't do this. And a lot of those companies that don't do this, by the way, it, it, it pains me to say this, but they're, they might be crushing it financially or they might have found a little market niche or they might have found a little sweet spot pocket area where they figured out where there was demand and they figured out how to supply it and they're freaking crushing it from a business perspective, right? 

Adrian (00:40:48) - Sales goals are always getting hit. EBIT is healthy companies operationally healthy, et cetera. We, there's a lot of 'em out there and it sucks because, like you wanna say that you have to have the CX and ex burning together for any of that stuff to work. Not always the case, but I just think that like in closing here, like we're about to enter a really interesting time, I think globally, not just in the workplace period, but just like in the world as being humans. And I think that it's kind of crazy and it might take us a minute to figure out how to compute this or show the exact r o i or do the exact projections, but like, it kind of just makes universal sense that people wanna work at companies where their employers care about them as humans, as contributors, as people that are literally carrying weight every damn day to make that business work. 

Adrian (00:41:28) - And then people wanna work at companies where that company's gonna go out of its way for its customer. It's just a more pl it's a more fun place to work. You typically build deeper, greater relationships with not only your customers but your coworkers. And let's call it what it is. I see this all time show, but most of us spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our, our wives, our husbands, our, our, our, our our sons, our daughters, our family, our moms and dads, et cetera. So like, I just think that this is something that's gonna continue to catch fire and I really do think that from a competitive advantage perspective, Alex, some of the best companies that are gonna emerge over the next five years, 10 years and beyond, they're gonna bake this stuff into their d n they're constantly gonna be investing in it. 

Adrian (00:42:03) - They're constantly gonna be employing or champion specific executives to really try to run this forward. And I think they're always gonna be looking for the incredible guys and gals that they want a knight to kind of bring into these Navy seal teams, for lack of a better term, to figure out how to do it better, faster, stronger, more cost effectively, et cetera. So like I love some of the stuff that that, that you guys are putting down. Um, Alex, before I let you go my friend, this has been an absolute pleasure, but people that are listening today, would that wanna, uh, number one get in touch with you or number two, get in touch with the team over her ratio? Where can they find you sir? Where can they find your awesome team over at her ratio? 

Alex (00:42:34) - Yeah, definitely. Uh, you can reach out to me, um, on LinkedIn under Alex Ross, uh, and then you can go to our website, hire hario.com, uh, and go ahead and reach out to us there. Uh, that's where we have started off with some of our earliest customers and still today. So, um, it's been phenomenal getting a lot of interesting brands that are fast grown and helping partner with them to build cx um, similar to what you guys are doing as well. But I really appreciate you having me on the show. It's been phenomenal talking through the four pillars and you know, it's a big piece for us and how we've built our business and been able to support the clients. So it's great to go through it and talk a little bit more in detail about it. 

Adrian (00:43:13) - I love it. Well, Alex, Senator, it's been our absolute pleasure. We're gonna be rooting for you and Jose and the entire team over higher ratio and I'm gonna look forward to to, to chatting with you again real soon in the near future, my friend. And I wanna get down to Dr. And see that that campus tour I'm taking you and Jose up on that offer for sure. 

Alex (00:43:26) - Oh yeah. 

Adrian (00:43:32) - Alex, thank joining Chronicles podcast, my friend. It's our pleasure 

Alex (00:43:35) - All.