Rachel Carter comes across as a really nice person, but her mission is to help her peers in the CX leadership community treat customers with greater kindness.
As the former senior vice-president of customer experience with event management software provider Swoogo, Carter experienced first-hand the challenge of outgrowing a customer support ticketing system. She and her team spend nine months in vain looking for a platform that could offer more than a shared inbox or a smarter ticketing queue and make customers feel cared for instead.
“I started asking myself, what if kindness isn’t just about being nice, but is a smart business decision?” Carter told 360 Magazine. “How do you structure a company around care and intention? What does kindness in business actually mean, and how do we build a culture of service that demonstrates itself through revenue?”
Since leaving Swoogo, Carter has distilled her answers to those questions in a book, The Economy of Helpfulness: When Kindness Becomes Your Competitive Advantage, and productized it in a support startup, Hyphen, which launched earlier this year.
While being nice tends to make people avoid troublesome conversations or rocking the boat, Carter said kindness is about taking action that anticipates customers’ needs.
Hyphen approaches that in part through AI by offering an assistant named Penelope for service reps. However Carter said reading a ChatGPT response and hearing it through C-3PO’s voice in her head reminded her of how important it is to keep humans in the lead.
“If you look at Star Wars, you don’t have droids replacing people; you have droids helping people,” she points out. “I don’t want to provide mediocre fast service. I want to provide amazing fast service. So why replace the people who have the knowledge and the experience?”
Instead, Hyphen focuses on providing reps cross-functional context and integration-driven case context through AI summaries and the ability to ask Penelope direct questions. It also provides reporting to stakeholders both inside and beyond support functions with details such as feature adoption based on the length of the customer relationship.
For customers, meanwhile, Hyphen emphasizes multi-model options to share details about an issue. This can include texts, uploading files, audio notes and screen recordings. This avoids the usual text input fields that may not tell the full story.
Putting constrains and limitations on how customers share details has been one of Carter’s biggest pet peeves amid her more than 20 years in support.
“Why do we make it so difficult for them to tell us (about their issues) in the way that’s easiest for them and gives support people the most information at the same time?” she asks. Hyphen’s approach will be much easier than solutions that require a dedicated manager to oversee it, she added.
Hyphen is initially aiming at B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups, which Carter said often have small support teams but highly complex issues to solve as they seek to earn customer loyalty and grow their business.
If she’s successful, Carter will be empowering those like her, who she said are often given the directive to simply reduce ticket volume. She likens this to asking emergency service teams to reduce the volume of accidents that happen every day.
“Support teams don’t create the conditions for tickets to exist; they have to clean up after them,” she said. “If we want to reduce ticket volume, you need to let me get you the data that’s sitting in your tickets and make that actionable to the product team, to the sales team, to the account team, and the marketing team. They’re the ones who are going to reduce ticket volume, and we are here to get you that information.”