‍At a Glance

Ricky Gomez leads customer experience for a direct-to-consumer consumer electronics brand, where he oversees support, returns, and warranty across its website and online marketplaces.

Who is Ricky?

Meet Ricky Gomez, a CX lead in the consumer electronics space.

Ricky’s CX Journey

How did Ricky get into customer experience? Well, it all sort of happened by accident because Ricky didn’t really know what he wanted to do after high school. Living in San Diego, he knew he needed to do something, so he jumped into what was available: tourism. He worked as a tour guide, as a photographer, on boats, and even at the zoo. And each of those jobs felt … good.

As he continued working in the hospitality industry, Ricky realized that was where he wanted to stay, so he went back to school to learn more and grew into a leader in the space. But heading into the pandemic, things changed.

Ricky was working at a visitor center when the pandemic hit, and, of course, business declined significantly. Ricky decided to go another way and take a shot at customer service for e-commerce. That was it.

The mix of hospitality and technology was intriguing, and he dove in even deeper, starting with Knockaround and moving on to other brands in the fashion industry. At each stop, he improved the customer service process and kept building new skills of his own.

The Exciting Thing About Customer Experience

For Ricky, one of the most exciting things about customer experience right now is actually AI. But not a free-for-all use of it. Ricky believes that AI, used responsibly, can be a great tool for the customer service community. He believes it can help create a strong and cohesive website that is optimized around what customers need, so they can get everything done quickly.

On the other hand, he doesn’t believe that AI should replace a live customer service agent, at least not when a customer is really looking for a real person. For customers who just want a quick and easy answer, however, AI might be the way to go.

Building a Customer-Driven Process

Taking care of customers means making sure that everyone gets where they want to be quickly. It means having a tailored process for customers, and that means trying out submission forms, A/B testing to get the right layouts, and even testing response macros.

Keeping return processes as simple as possible, for example, is central to the customer experience, as is building tools that drive both efficiency and premier customer service. But that doesn’t mean it should all be automated. Instead, it should be smooth, simple, and customer-driven until the moment the customer needs a real agent.

When a customer really does need an agent, or there’s any kind of friction or pain point, getting to that agent should be instantaneous. As a one-person customer experience team, Ricky knows that keeping the process simple matters even more.

Top Challenges in Customer Service

For Ricky, the top challenge in customer service is identifying and articulating issues as they happen. After all, every challenge and every review tells a story, but looking at the data is just as important as looking at what’s right in front of you. Just because someone is loud about their problem doesn’t mean the problem is major or that it’s affecting many people, and the data will show that.

Staying on top of customer service also means tracking the right metrics, like customer satisfaction (CSAT). Ricky prides himself on responding within a few hours in most instances, and keeping track of these scores lets him know how he’s doing.

CX Success Factors

It’s not just the D2C website that keeps the business going. It also has marketplaces like Walmart, TikTok Shop, Amazon, and eBay. Managing each of these channels, plus the smaller ones, is important and it’s a challenge. After all, each platform has its own system and way of doing things. Feeding all of them into a single helpdesk takes a lot of effort as well.

There’s a great deal of manually checking platforms to make sure nothing slips through the cracks, which means even more work. Of the individual platforms, TikTok Shop is the most challenging. Ricky finds that selling computer equipment on TikTok is like selling it in a grocery store instead of an electronics store: it’s just not quite as simple. Making sure the potential customer knows what they’re buying can take more work.

Making It a Success

Beyond the day-to-day volume, Ricky focuses on the warranty process and making sure that it meets customer expectations and local requirements. Returns for this type of equipment are difficult, so it’s important to be proactive. It’s important to look at where a lot of the feedback is coming in and to make changes and tweaks along the way.

Still, Ricky acknowledges that the system is more reactive than proactive until all of the processes are in place to deliver consistent outcomes across the board. That’s where he sees AI’s best role today. Rather than putting it in front of customers, he’d use AI to extract data from different parts of the business and surface correlations that would otherwise be missed.

Managing the Process

What’s important about getting the job done, and where is there room to improve? For Ricky, the number one thing is consistency: making sure the brand, and the experience customers receive, stays consistent across every marketplace.

Even with each marketplace being so different in terms of communication and setup, it’s essential to offer something that the customer can count on. Making sure customers understand what’s going on from one channel to the next, and that they know what to do when they have a problem, is crucial every step of the way.

Tech Stack

Getting the right tools for the job is essential. While Ricky has worked with Zendesk for quite a while, he doesn’t believe it’s the best fit for smaller businesses. NetSuite can be the same. Both are quite pricey and require a bit of effort to set up properly.

Instead, he recommends tools like Gorgias, Re:amaze, and Zapier, which help get things moving without having to sit at a desk all day. He’s even been trying out AI services in this area, but behind the scenes rather than on the front line.

Why does that distinction matter? Ricky believes that when someone clicks on a chat bubble, they want to talk to a real person. If they click on it and there’s no one there, or there’s an AI agent there, it’s going to change their opinion and give them a negative experience.

The Future of CX

The future of the customer experience space is going to be big. In fact, Ricky believes that there will be a lot of innovation, including in how service is delivered. But the CX leadership role will change, so it’s less about managing people and more about managing each intricacy of the situation.

Even with his reservations about AI agents, he does believe that’s where a lot of things are going over the next 10 years. He sees AI handling a lot of situations, with the customer experience manager becoming the one who looks at the details and makes sure everything is accurate, appropriate, and nuanced.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

Ricky feels like he’s already had a chance to look behind the curtain at other businesses through networking events, and he definitely appreciates the view. He’s seen plenty of big businesses take everything and make it even more layered, nuanced, and intricate, and that is where he’d love to be.

Still, he recognizes that making it to that level, where customers can find anything and everything they need in an FAQ or a help guide and every detail is spelled out, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After all, it would be harder to get a real person on the phone if you needed them, and that human access is what he really values.

Setting Up for Success

For Ricky, meeting people is the most important thing when it comes to getting started and being a better leader. Networking, chatting with other teams, and getting comfortable with them is essential. It will help you find solutions, take different paths, and try out new features.

Meeting peers across his sector, and peers doing similar work in other industries, has certainly made a difference and been invaluable to his growth.