At A Glance

TJ Balo is the Head of Customer Relations and Marketing at Andrea Iyamah, a company known for creating a culture of abundance, adventure, and storytelling in elegant pieces that enhance your wardrobe. Andrea Iyamah offers high quality, beauty, and fashion in everything that they do, and that starts with having the right customer experience team. 

Who is TJ Balo

TJ Balo is the Head of Customer Relations and Marketing at Andrea Iyamah.

About Andrea Iyamah

Andrea Iyamah is not just a clothing brand; it’s a clothing experience. A luxury brand that offers high quality, beauty, and culture, all rolled into one. Designed with the fashion-forward in mind, Andrea Iyamah offers products to round out any wardrobe and any lifestyle needs. 

TJ’s Entrepreneurial Journey

Based out of Toronto, TJ has been in the industry for over a decade, but he didn’t enter into it through a standard path. Actually, his background isn’t in fashion, but in health, science, and communications. It wasn’t until after he completed college and started looking for an internship that he found the world of customer experience. And that was the end of the line. With the digital world of customer service just starting to come to fruition, TJ was able to not only enter on the ground floor, but also watch the industry continue to scale along the way. 

The CX factor

When it comes to customer experience, TJ loves the fact that you can connect with absolutely anyone. Whether it’s live chat or a phone call, it’s possible to reach out to people who are located across the world from where you are. And there’s never the same experience twice because you’re interacting with people that you may never meet in the real world, but you can still help them to have the experience they’re looking for with the brand. 

What does all of this look like at Andrea Iyamah? It looks like a mostly remote team, providing high quality service from locations around the world. That’s because about 80% of Andrea Iyamah’s customer service team is fully remote. And the remaining 20% are hybrid, with a few going into retail stores on occasion. But having a fully remote team isn’t always the easiest way to go. 

TJ’s biggest challenge in managing his customer service team? Trusting the team. Because when your team is fully remote it can be difficult to know just what they’re doing at all times. And when your business is using a great deal of AI in their processing, it can become all too easy for the team to blame all of the errors in their work on AI. But that’s not always the case.

The number one most important thing to TJ isn’t making sure there are no mistakes. He knows that everyone is human and that everyone makes mistakes. He also makes sure his team knows that negative feedback isn’t the end of the road. The important thing is for the little community of their customer experience team to be united and to help the customer get what they want. 

Finding the Best of the Best

When hiring new people for the customer service team, TJ and the team at Andrea Iyamah have developed a set of traits that they look for. Code-named, SERP, this set of traits ensures they hire only the best to represent their brand and to help their customers. 

Skills are the foundation of it all and must be top notch. But more than that, potential customer experience agents must be able to challenge themselves, think outside the box, and perform better than AI.

This continues into the education component, where thinking outside the box and being willing and able to learn on the job and seek new opportunities is crucial. 

Being ready and able to look for resources that will help to be a better member of the team and a better provider of excellent experiences to customers is trait number three. And the final one is all about personality.

Having a strong personality is actually a benefit when it comes to Andrea Iyamah’s team. And for TJ, meeting people who really seem to shine and who make a big impression during the interview is crucial. 

Making Customer Experience Work for the Customer

When customers are contacting a company they tend to have a specific method that they prefer. And at Andrea Iyamah, that preferred method is direct calls to agents. The customers at this level seem to enjoy the personalized experience of talking with a real person and even enjoy chatting with the agents outside of asking questions or having concerns resolved. 

What this means for the team, however, is that first response times are great, but call time overall tends to be a bit longer than necessary. Where TJ would prefer that call times range between 3-5 minutes, he admits that usually the times are closer to 8-10 minutes. Because, after all, the customers enjoy talking with the team. 

What’s in the future of customer experience?

What does the future look like at Andrea Iyamah? And especially in the customer experience sector? TJ believes it’s going to be all about AI. In fact, he’s looking to keep embracing even more opportunities with AI, to ensure the best possible experience for customers. 

So what’s the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal is creating a process where customers are able to reach out to get help and can get that help from start to finish without ever even knowing whether they’re interacting with a human or with AI. And that means a great deal of training to create an AI system that fits the brand and the human touch that customers are looking for. 

On top of advancing AI, TJ is looking at their loyalty program, Club Treasure, and how he can fine-tune it to provide the experience the customer deserves. The key, he says, is getting into the customers’ mind and then fulfilling those wants. 

Be the Leader Your Team Deserves

So what kind of leader does the customer service team deserve? One where the person at the top is willing to lead by example. While that might seem like ‘old hat’ advice, it’s something that TJ definitely takes to heart. Because how can you expect your team to do something if you’re not willing to do it yourself?

On top of that, being resourceful is instrumental to providing what the team needs and what the customers need. Looking for new opportunities or experiences or just seeking out new ways to help those who need it are great ways to showcase being resourceful.