Health & Nutrition
The Company That Wants More Tickets: How Audien Hearing Runs Customer Service in Healthcare
6
min read
Matt Riback is the VP of the Audien Experience at Audien Hearing, the over-the-counter hearing aid brand, where he runs every customer-facing touchpoint, from the customer service team to the brand’s entire direct sales team. Audien’s customers skew older, hearing is about as personal as health gets, and the brand counts more than two million of them. By the usual playbook, that is the last inbox a brand would automate.
Matt runs it on the opposite conviction.
“I believe you shouldn’t have to say anything, because it should just be an extension of our human team. If you have a good AI implementation, then there’s no risk. Just model your ideal form of communication, and if Siena can do that, amazing.”
— Matt
The confidence is earned, and it starts with what Matt decided customer experience is for.
The company that wants more tickets
Matt tells every new hire class at Audien Hearing the same thing: for some of the customers who reach out, this could be one of the brightest conversations of their week.
Hearing is an intimate, personal health need. Left and right ears can hear at different levels. There are fit concerns, vanity concerns, and the fact that over-the-counter hearing has only existed as a category for about six years. “With glasses, you find the right lens and you can see perfectly,” Matt says. “With hearing aids, truly, everyone is different.”
The company grew fast around all of that. What started as a direct-to-consumer brand on Shopify became an omnichannel business spanning dozens of channels, including Walmart nationwide, CVS, and Target, and the contact rate runs high.
Early on, the instinct was the one most scaling brands have: fewer tickets would be a dream. Matt flipped that. “Every time a customer reaches out, oh my god, it’s like a paid lead. We feel blessed,” he says. His team runs every touchpoint through a framework he admits rhymes without being pithy: Learn, Confirm, Solve, Confirm, Earn. Solve the problem completely, confirm it is solved, and the customer often decides on their own that investing more, a backup unit, a subscription, is a no-brainer. It turned CX at Audien into a revenue engine.
Matt rebuilt the team to match. Audien moved away from outsourced call centers and hires its specialists directly, and today every leader on the CX team started as an agent. “Culture is destiny,” he likes to say. Show me a team’s culture and I can see their future.
The math problem at two million customers
That model carries a demand inside it. Specialists can only earn the deeper moments if something handles the volume first, fast, accurately, and in Audien’s voice.
“The vision from the beginning was to have AI handle all of the low-hanging fruit, so that we could reserve the truly precious human moments for the human team.”
— Matt
At two million customers, the low-hanging fruit arrives by the million. What’s the status of my order. How does this product work. One question, one answer.
Audien is not shy about building. The team ships internal tools in days when a problem calls for it. Email AI never made that list. “Even with all of the advances of AI, I would never consider it,” Matt says. “It’s the little details that get you.”
What he wanted to buy was specific: custom experiences and custom workflows, across different data sources and customer flows, under one roof, manageable in a way that lasts. “The Siena platform stood out from day one, because it’s very intuitive and accessible,” he says. His team can take a complex problem, see the strategy behind it, and evaluate progress against it. “Ultimately, what matters is you can deliver on what we want to do, and you guys have a really strong technical team supporting.”
What Siena runs at Audien now
Siena works across Audien’s email support, and the scope follows Matt’s division of labor.
The simple things, answered fast. Order status, product questions, the one-question-one-answer volume that two million customers generate. Answered quickly, accurately, and in a way that feels friendly and digestible.
The voice. Matt is most particular about the soft skills: brand language, syntax, tone, the style of communication. The internal phrase is “bring your heart into it.” If a response feels stale or has no emotion behind it, it is not good enough. Siena carries that standard on every reply.
The warm handoff. One of Audien’s most successful flows meets the customer, understands what is going on with them, and, when it is the right fit, books them into an Audien Sound Check: a video call with one of Audien’s hearing specialists, the brand’s answer to bridging traditional audiology and over-the-counter hearing. “All without the human team lifting a finger,” Matt says. “All we have to do is come, show up, do our thing.”
What the simple answers buy
“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,” Matt says. That is the whole bet.
The numbers hold it up. Around 60 percent of Audien’s conversations are handled automatically, in the brand’s voice, at any hour. Customers get answered in the moment, and the conversations that need a person reach the human team warmed up instead of frustrated.
Siena handles | The specialists keep |
|---|---|
Order status and product questions, in seconds, at any hour | Audien Sound Check video calls |
Every reply in the brand’s voice, with heart | Fit, hearing levels, and the concerns no two customers share |
Qualifying customers and booking the appointment | The deeper connection the simple answers tee up |
The Sound Check flow shows what that trust unlocks. An onboarding appointment with a hearing specialist is Audien’s answer to everything that makes hearing personal, and Siena fills those calendars from the support side, qualifying the customer and booking the call before a specialist ever touches the thread. Customers start set up for success, and the specialists show up to do the part only they can do.
It is why Matt can say Audien has “AI doing 90 percent of the heavy lifting” and mean it as the thing that makes the human moments possible at scale.
The brightest conversation of the week
Which brings Matt back to the line he gives every new hire class. In America, he tells them, people are lonely. For some of Audien’s customers, a conversation with the brand can be one of the bright spots of the week. “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,” he says. “And those experiences can happen at scale because we have AI doing 90 percent of the heavy lifting.”
His view of where CX goes next follows from there. When anything can be built at the snap of a finger, value concentrates in taste, curation, and human connection, the things that set companies apart when the basics are solved everywhere. The companies that win will be close to perfect on the basics and go deeper where it counts. Audien runs that system today.
“When everything can be solved through AI, there’s still a very profound human connection that I don’t think will ever be able to be replaced.”
— Matt
Where Matt points Siena next
Matt keeps pushing Siena to solve more on its own, and the ambition has not moved since day one: solve everything that can be solved, meet customers where they are, and save the human team for the moments only humans can deliver.
Siena answers the simple things in seconds. The time it hands back goes to the conversations that can make someone’s week.
Read the full conversation with Matt
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