Matt Riback on Whether AI Will Replace Customer Service: Why Human Connection Stays

Why every customer contact is a paid lead

Lisa (0:04) Hi Matt, thanks so much for joining today and chatting about your journey and about Audien and all the progress you’ve made. I love your story, so I want to share it with the world. So maybe you can introduce yourself and tell us how you got here and in this role.

Matt (0:18) Yeah, I would love to. Thank you so much. Big fan of Siena, for sure. I’m currently the VP of what we actually call the Audien Experience, and that’s pretty much every customer-facing touchpoint. Really, it includes our customer service team and also, recently, our entire direct sales team, which is a big part of the business as well.

It’s a bit unconventional how I found myself in this role. When I joined the company, I joined as VP of Strategy, just kind of in a general operational role. And with my background as a founder, and doing different things as a product manager and with AI, there was just a lot of synergy to come in and solve so many problems. One of the biggest areas of opportunity that we always talked about and focused on was CX, and it became, quickly, one of my greatest passions. I just ended up spending so much time there, and so eventually it was natural to make that the official title. And yeah, I love what I do.

Lisa (1:12) Awesome. I love it. I want to dive into something that you recently told me about: how you turned customer experience from a struggling call center into a profit center, and that customers who actually get to talk to the team are more likely to come back and stay and be loyal. So maybe you can walk us through that ethos.

Matt (1:30) Absolutely. I feel like at the conferences and everything, every time in CX there’s some panel on “Can CX be a profit center, and how do we make that happen?” That’s a huge part of our story here. When I first joined, and we were still figuring out what CX meant at Audien, there was very much the mentality, which I think especially for a lot of rapidly scaling direct-to-consumer companies, where the company’s growing so quickly: if we just had no CX at all, if we had no tickets, that would be a dream. It’s a necessary cost.

But what we quickly learned: all of the opportunity and all of the insight really lies in what our customers are saying. Voice of the customer. Through those interactions, we realized, “Wow, this isn’t just a cost to answer a question. Every single touchpoint is an opportunity to solve a customer problem and learn more about what the customers really want.” And essentially, if you flip it, every time a customer reaches out, oh my god, it’s like a paid lead.

What we talk about is earning the right to pursue additional value. So for every customer touchpoint, we actually have this framework called Learn, Confirm, Solve, Confirm, Earn. We want to make sure we truly learn about what’s going on with the customer. We truly solve the issue. We confirm, guarantee that it’s solved. And at that point, there’s usually an opportunity where the customer realizes, “Wow, this is such a big part of my life. To invest more is now kind of a no-brainer decision. I want to be a lifetime customer. I’m going to need what this company offers forever.” So whether that means buying a backup unit or investing as a subscriber, all of that becomes really natural when we do our job well.

And through that, the first time we started to see real revenue numbers, it was like, “Oh my god, what is even happening?” And crazy to say, it’s one of our biggest channels, one of the most predictable channels for revenue. It follows sales pretty logically.

Culture is destiny

Lisa (3:32) Most businesses, I feel like, just want to get rid of all the tickets and rid of the backlog. You just don’t see it this way. I really appreciate how you approach this. Also, something that stuck with me from our lunch in New York City was you saying that culture is destiny. I’m curious, what did you mean by that? And how does that show up in the team that you built? And why did you go with the fully in-house model?

Matt (3:57) Yeah, I’m smiling because I love that quote. It’s one of my favorites. The idea is you show me a team’s culture, and I can see their future. And I think that is so true. The very first thing I did when I came into Audien and joined CX is we realized it doesn’t matter what type of strategy we envision. You imagine the 11 out of 10 experience, take any framework where you dream the best possible experience: if we don’t have people who can, at a baseline, be a vehicle for that and truly represent the brand in the way we want to, it’s just never going to happen. And up until that point, we didn’t have a really robust understanding even of who we wanted our customer experience team to be and where they come from. BPO relationships were the majority of where we got our team.

This is a hill I’ll die on every single time. If you’re a serious brand where you truly aspire to be the best, and customer experience is a core part of your infrastructure (it may not be for every company, but for ours), you cannot have a successful BPO model. We’ve tried the best, and they couldn’t compare whatsoever to what happens when we hire people directly, internally, and we kind of remove the middleman in that relationship.

The effect it has is you now have somebody who is truly part of the team. Working in the call center is not known as the most glamorous job. Pay is notoriously pretty low. BPOs take a big chunk of that. And so when you could take someone and say, “You can now have a significantly higher wage,” and because we’re not going through the middleman, the cost that we would pay as a company would arguably stay flat or even decrease.

The first thing I tell every new person that we hire when they come on: we don’t care. Now that you’re in the door, it doesn’t matter where you previously worked, where you went to school, what level, where you live. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is that you’re able to deliver value. And now that you’re in the door, you are as precious as one of the founders in the door next door. And we look around, and at this point the entire leadership team we have in CX started out as an agent. So literally, to be able to say, “That person training you was in your shoes a year ago.” The opportunity is so real, and there’s just this feeling of genuine empowerment and appreciation and high standards. We will pay you a higher than average wage, we will give you opportunity that I think is hard to find elsewhere. But in return, we demand excellence. So there’s that kind of give and take, where it’s high bar, but high opportunity. And for us, that model has been game-changing. Could not do what we’ve done without having our own people.

Judging sales on what happens after the sale

Lisa (6:40) Yeah, and I feel like not everyone can pull that off. It is hard, but I am seeing this trend, actually: more and more companies and brands, they are moving to an in-house model when it comes to customer experience. Also, I know that now the sales team reports to you, right? And you also changed the KPIs from average order value and conversion to retention. Why did you make that call? Because I’m always curious how CX leaders are setting up these success metrics for their team.

Matt (7:09) This is one of the coolest things, that I was most proud of. Same exact model, actually: we had a BPO call center that was just kind of hardcore direct sales, answering the phone from various long-form, short-form, paid media, commercial, stuff like that. And they were good at what they did. There was such an apparent disconnect, given how much we’ve invested in the culture and brand voice and just customer experience that we have post-purchase, that the experience on the front end was a stark mismatch. You could tell those people on the phone weren’t really living and breathing Audien through their soul, and so the customer just, they’re not going to feel that. And they also don’t care, quite literally, what happens to the customer post-purchase, in terms of incentivization. They get paid if they close a sale, that’s it. They never have another thought aside from the next sale.

And so the opportunity and challenge was: can we take this team of hearing specialists that have done such amazing things post-purchase on the traditional CX side, and bring them pre-purchase into the direct sales side, and have the conversion and revenue performance numbers ultimately be the same or improve, ideally, and bring that brand value, so that the customer’s first point of contact is going to be the exact warm, loving welcome that we want them to have downstream?

We now evaluate our direct sales team not only on conversion rate, not only on AOV, not only on the traditional call center performance metrics, but we evaluate them on the downstream metrics. So it’s not only how much revenue are you bringing in, but what is the retention of those customers that come through the door. And if the retention is not high, then they will have their incentives adjusted accordingly. So if someone’s selling units like hotcakes, but they all end up refunding because maybe they’re not being sold in a genuine manner or what have you, that person will be identified, rooted out, and ultimately corrected. So seeing the full picture, and judging the front end on what happens on the back end, it seems like common sense, but for us, it’s just never something we looked at before.

We hold the team to a standard in terms of setting up onboarding. With hearing aids, there’s so many things that can become troublesome. Your left ear might have different hearing levels than your right. There’s vanity concerns, there’s fit concerns. Truly, everyone is different. Knowing that we can get someone into an onboarding appointment to preempt any of those concerns, and just set people up for success from day one, that’s something that the sales team is now focused on as much as revenue and the other metrics. That channel now has the lowest return rate out of all of our channels. It has the lowest churn rate for our subscription programs.

Why Audien runs email AI on Siena

Lisa (9:37) I love it. I like that everyone’s rowing in the same direction. I’m curious how AI fits into the equation. How are you using AI?

Matt (9:46) Yeah, we’re using it everywhere. Voice AI is a very significant part of our infrastructure. Email AI is an extremely significant part of our infrastructure. Of course, we use Siena for that. You know how crazy the innovation and speed of progress is in this industry. We’re now building internal apps and internal tools that in the past would have been unthinkable, that we’re whipping up literally in days, that have become game-changing. So we adopted really heavily.

Lisa (10:12) So why did you then choose Siena? I know you’ve tried a few tools before. What were you looking for? What made Siena the right solution?

Matt (10:23) A lot of what we care about is providing custom experiences and custom workflows. And that can be complex, given there’s different data sources. There’s all of these different types of customer flows. And it can be really tricky to bring all of that under one roof and manage it in a sustainable way. And so the Siena platform stood out from day one, because it’s very intuitive and accessible. We found that for taking really complex problems and being able to kind of view them and just understand, “Okay, what are we doing here? What’s the strategy? What’s our intent?” And evaluate progress as well. From a usability perspective, it was really good. But then, ultimately, what matters is you can deliver on what we want to do. You guys have a really strong technical team supporting.

Simple answers first, human moments after

Lisa (11:15) How are you deciding what AI owns and what stays with humans? I know you’ve been pushing Siena to solve more on its own. So maybe you can share a little bit about that.

Matt (11:26) The vision from the beginning was to have AI handle all of the low-hanging fruit, so that we can reserve the truly precious human moments for the human team, and keep that efficient and scalable. We have, officially, over 2 million customers at Audien. And so you could imagine answering simple questions like, “What’s the status of my order?” Or product questions? Or just a million kind of one-question, one-answer type questions. All of that is an easy example of what AI can handle.

What we found is that earning the customer’s trust by answering the simple things really fast, really accurately, and in a manner that’s friendly and digestible, earns trust to then tee up opportunities for deeper connection. We have the Audien Sound Check. It’s a video call with one of our hearing specialists, and that’s our unique answer to how to bridge the gap between traditional audiology and over-the-counter hearing success.

Lisa (12:23) So, education...

Matt (12:25) Through relationship building. When our human team does it with the customer, it’s magic. But in this day and age, it’s not necessarily typical for customers to expect, in a D2C company, to even hop on a video call. It’s not a super normal thing. And so with Siena, one of our most successful flows actually gets customers to book those appointments. We use AI to meet the customer, understand what’s going on with them, find out where they are, and then, if necessary, get them into those Audien Sound Checks, all without the human team lifting a finger. And so then all we have to do is come, show up, do our thing. And at our scale, that’s extremely efficient.

Lisa (13:07) That’s the perfect harmony: humans and AI working together. How is your demographic responding to AI? Because I feel like a lot of brands are afraid of letting AI talk to an older demographic. How do you make AI feel human enough to earn their trust?

Matt (13:23) Yeah, I think that’s the challenge. And that’s, again, why Siena has been great. One of the things I’m most particular about are the soft skills. So brand voice, language, even syntax, tone, the style of communication. I want it to feel very warm and authentic. Obviously professional and direct, but we care a lot about... We use this phrase: “Bring your heart into it.” If anything ever feels stale, or like there’s not emotion behind it, that’s not good enough, in my opinion. And so the challenge is: how can we deliver that in a continuous, predictable way using AI? It should just be an extension of our human team. That’s what we do, and Siena has been able to deliver it. If you have a good AI implementation, then there’s no risk, because just model your ideal form of communication. And if Siena can do that, then amazing.

What Audien builds and what it buys

Lisa (14:13) I’m curious: how do you decide what to build in-house versus buy? I think this is something that a lot of leaders are asking themselves.

Matt (14:21) For us, I think one question is: what is the longevity of the problem we’re trying to solve? Is this really something that’s here to stay? And how complex is it? And so for email and Siena, building our own version, I mean, forget about it. I would never consider it. Same for voice AI. I know a lot of people are experimenting with that, but given the complexity of all of our different workflows and data sources, it’s just a lot. That said, for anything that’s just a step less essential on a core operational perspective, maybe there’s an opportunity.

An example is we had a voice of the customer tool that ingested all of our different touchpoints. They had this amazing pitch. It was like, “All of your touchpoints in one place, harmonized, beautiful.” And it just did not work. We have a pretty talented in-house engineering team, and literally in a week, one of our engineers was able to build their own version of that voice of the customer tool that was more accurate. This individual is in charge of our entire data architecture, so he knows our Snowflake instance inside and out. He knows exactly not only the data sources, but what they mean to us and how to think about them.

And so to actually take all of these disparate data sources and build one place where we can ask a question like, “Show me every time a customer with this product had this customer experience moment, and what happened as a result.” Or, “Show me all of the customers that talked to our video team and have an LTV above this. What is happening in these interactions that drive such great outcomes?” Those are the things that we’re actually able to start to query and dig into, that we just built ourselves. And yeah, it’s really exciting.

Will AI replace customer service?

Lisa (16:11) When everything is AI, you said showing up as a person is where the value is. What does the CX team of the future look like to you?

Matt (16:18) When I think of AI, the question I always ask is: in a world where anything can be built at the snap of a finger, the value becomes not “Can I build it?” The value becomes curation and the uniquely human things that we can do. So it becomes taste. It’s like, we can do anything; what do we do? It’s style, it’s choices, it’s strategy. And so that’s where I think human value is concentrated. And for CX, it’s also the most rare commodity. So when everything can be solved through AI, there’s still a very profound human connection, of course, when humans can share a moment together and connect emotionally. That is something that I don’t think will ever be able to be replaced.

And so that, to me, is the future of CX. It’s: do everything as efficiently as possible, solve customer problems, meet them where they are, just be perfect in a sense. But then, if you have an opportunity to go deeper and connect people together and build relationships, and show that there’s something bigger than just the transaction going on, that’s something that is very hard to do. I think it will set companies apart in the future.

We obviously deal with an older demographic. Every new hire class, I talk about the reality that in America, people are lonely. We don’t have the family culture that exists around other parts of the world. And for some of the people we’re talking to, it’s sad to say, but this could be one of the most bright conversations they have all week. And to have someone who truly cares about them, truly is checking up on them, wants to know about them, I just feel grateful that we can do that for a living, and make those experiences happen at scale. And they can happen at scale because we have AI doing 90% of the heavy lifting.

Lisa (18:07) I love that. That is literally the definition of being in service. Great way to end the chat.

Matt (18:14) Nice and wholesome. Thank you.