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1. Know What Makes Your Customers Tick: Patrick believes that the best way for CX reps to prepare for their role and future career opportunities is by understanding the needs and tendencies of customers. "If you were this customer, how would you want this experience to go? Start there and build the best possible outcome to deliver that experience."
2. Stay Curious: Patrick maintains that to be a good leader, one must stay curious. Continually asking questions leads to solutions that better serve your team and customers alike.
3. Hire Reps Who Are Good with People: Patrick believes that the ability to talk with people and make them feel comfortable is necessary for working in CX.
4: Leverage AI to Make the Job Easier: Patrick sees AI as a valuable tool to handle backend admin tasks, freeing up agents to engage in more brand-additive conversations with customers.
5. Keep Your Team Up to Date: As a company scales, Patrick stresses the importance of making sure reps are current on all CX processes, information, and resources.
Meet Patrick Carney, Global Head of Customer Experience at Ooni!
Ooni designs, makes, and sells AMAZING pizza ovens. They’re so AMAZING that lowercase adjectives just don’t do them justice. Truly great pizza needs high heat; that’s why all of Ooni’s live fire pizza ovens get hot as hell (that’s 500 °C/950 °F) and cook incredible pizza in only 60 seconds. Before Ooni, if you wanted pizza that good, you had to go to a restaurant or spend thousands on a traditional pizza oven. Now, all you have to do is pick the Ooni oven that’s right for you.
Patrick credits his experience as a small business owner 15 years ago for instilling in him the importance of taking care of your customers. He remembers, “I had a photography studio, and my wife owned a dance studio. When you are a small business owner, customer experience is your lifeblood – you have to earn every sale, every customer.” Eventually, he landed the position of customer service manager at Chewy. There when the E-Commerce pet care company was undergoing rapid growth, he saw every challenge as an opportunity to level up the offerings that were being provided to customers. “It was really instructive. The company was going head-to-head with Amazon and actually winning, which was unheard of in that space. And the CX provided was the differentiator that set Chewy up for success,” he notes.
His next role was director of CX at an ocean cleanup company. There, his boss, who was also the CMO at Ooni recognized Patrick’s talent and brought him on for consulting work. “I ended up falling in love with the company,” he says. The belief system of the founders and their view on the positive impact business should have on the world made Patrick want to take a more permanent role at Ooni. In July 2021, he joined as Global Head of Customer Experience.
“If you think about any product you’ve ever bought or any vacation you’ve ever gone on, those memories are built on the backs of customer service and customer experience, whether you realize it or not. All those experiences were carefully curated,” Patrick points out. By using Ooni pizza ovens, the company’s goal is to bring people together, create memories, and ultimately share the spark and bring joy. “We want to instill the emotive aspect of cooking and the power a brand can have to be a positive light,” Patrick adds.
Headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, Ooni has a global team spread across the US, UK, Thailand, and Australia, which is supported by a BPO in the Philippines. Patrick strives to extend the collaborative culture felt in the office to his CX reps on the frontline, who mostly work remotely. “We have a follow-the-sun type of protocol where we have people working 24/7, but they’re just working their normal 8-4 shift in their location,” he says.
Top Challenges as a CX Leader
Patrick acknowledges that the day-to-day of customer service can feel mundane, a repetition of the same tasks and conversations. For this reason, keeping his reps engaged and motivated is a challenge. “Even though you might be handling this issue for the 80th time today, it might be the only interaction that customer has with us as a brand,” he says.
Making sure his team is on top of CX processes as the business scales is another main challenge. “I always use the metaphor of swimming upstream versus letting the current take,” he says of maintaining this balance. “A lot of times, your systems get in the way, and you’re fighting the current. Whereas it should be an accelerant that helps you do even better.”
For most, a CX position is the first stepping stone of their career journey. Knowing this, Patrick provides his reps with buildable skills that are transferable outside of customer service is a priority. Every department is connected to customer service in some way. “The best way to equip yourself for whatever comes down the road is to understand exactly what makes our customers tick. From a frontline position in customer service, you can take those learnings and extrapolate them over to our marketing functions or sales functions.” He credits Ooni’s supportive company culture for reps wanting to stay and pursue opportunities within the organization.
Leveraging AI: Recalling Data to Elevate CX
As a people-focused company, Ooni is exploring purposeful ways to leverage AI in its customer experience strategies. Patrick elaborates, “We want to leverage AI to free up our reps to have brand additive conversations they enjoy instead of doing all the minutia and back-office work in the backend from an admin perspective.” Inspired ideas come by looking to other leaders in E-Commerce and adapting them to align with the company’s goals and mission. To give an example, Patrick relays a situation where a customer mentions that a big life event is happening in 6 months. Rather than going back to find the reference, AI technology would recall and flag it. “That’s where AI has such an ability to assist, in giving information that can be helpful at the right times. It's not realistic to expect your team to have the full knowledge of every detail shared in previous interactions a customer may have had. Having AI surface pertinent info, at the right times is a massive level up.” he finishes.
The Future of CX: AI and Information Storytelling
While many in the E-Commerce space are focused on the personalization of AI to be more human-like (which is obviously a goal), Patrick believes more attention should be paid to AI’s ability to collect information and tell a story (and do so unbiased). He explains, “Having something that doesn't have that bias involved and can take our customer service reporting, our reviews platforms, interactions that potentially are happening with our sales team, and our retail partners and be able to normalize that data and tell that story in a really altruistic way, I think is a huge opportunity for AI.”
Patrick’s key advice for CX leaders is to never forget your experience of being a rep. “We all started in that frontline role. It can be so easy to get disconnected from what their pain points are,” he stresses. Leaders are working for their staff, not the other way around. And maintaining this outlook keeps leaders curious regarding the question, “How can we make this better for you” that extends to reps and customers alike. While many companies value CX as a cost center, this view sees CX as a way to leverage the community a brand has built. Once a customer buys a product, they want to come back and buy more. “Just stay curious, make sure you are grounded, and really hunt out Information that will lead to the best possible experience for your team and customers alike,” he adds.
Can’t Live Without Tool? Being a remote organization, it’s Slack. We live and breathe through communicating with one another. We have so many workflows that are built up for organizing questions that come in to ensure that we address this one while also addressing it to the total team to make sure that they're getting this information and it’s not being siloed.
Key Hiring Trait? If you’re going to be in customer service, we are ntrusting you to build positively represent Ooni.m with every interaction.. Step one: Are you good at conversing with people? That's ultimately what I'm trying to pull out in an interview. I want to get someone spinning yarn and telling me a story and connecting with me on a human level. And if they're capable of doing that, we can teach them all our processes, tactics, and how to deescalate a situation. But we can’t teach you to have a fun personality that is engaging. We are looking to see if you are someone who enjoys people. Do you like conversing with them? For instance, we very rarely hire people who have been in customer service previously. We're looking for the school teachers, waitresses, bartenders, and maybe someone who worked in a salon, an environment where you were where you are with someone one to one, building rapport as part of your job. And as part of your job, you must be able to carry on a conversation with them for a half an hour and not be socially awkward. If you come from that industry, there’s a pretty good chance you're going to be amazing in customer service if given the right tools.
Favorite Communication Channel for Customer Support? I’m a big social media guy. You get to jump the line - social SLAs are generally going to be quicker than email SLAs. But the number one avenue would be a help center or knowledge base, because it's the best service if I don't have to talk to anybody at all. I can just do a quick search, find my answer, and move on with my day.
Recent Book or Podcast? From a leadership perspective, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. The book was given to me by a former boss and helped with my evolution of leadership to learn about ‘why do teams fail?’ It’s never the reason people assume. It always comes down to a lack of accountability and a lack of communication. It speaks to how you think you can be doing well, but you're not seeing how the consequences and decisions can become a toxic aspect of it. Another book is “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott, which is about addressing people and holding them accountable. We always have this kind of mindset that I don't want to be mean and make someone feel a certain way. But if you're just sugarcoating and not addressing situations, negative outcomes arise eventually because you never gave them the opportunity to improve.
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