At a Glance

Riff raff is a specialty baby product company providing high quality baby products, including ‘cuddly pals’ for infants that are designed to help your baby learn to self-soothe and settle at bedtime. Not only that, they’re designed to become a comfort item that can help your little one transition to travel, car, daycare, and more.

Who is Jorja Lambert

Meet Jorja Lambert, Customer Experience Manager and Community Partnerships Manager at riff raff baby and riff raff pets.

About riff raff

Riff raff is a specialty company creating sleep comforters and sound toys that are designed to help little ones feel comforted and settled during sleep. It starts with their cuddly sleep companions that they can use to feel safe and secure no matter where they are and it extends to items like weighted teddies, hooded towels, and even bedtime books that can support a comfortable and happy nighttime routine from the very first night.

Jorja’s CX Journey

Jorja’s start in customer experience happened for the reasons you might expect, she loved helping others and solving problems. Before becoming a mother, she worked in management at a retail store, so she knew what it took to manage a team and to look out for people. But when she started at riff raff, she was only really getting her feet wet in the industry. Because she was working two and a half days in customer support while taking care of her new baby.

Today, Jorja works full-time and her job is handling day-to-day customer support as well as team leadership, involvement, escalations, reporting, and helping to create a personal experience for customers. Not only that but she also handles gifting, collaboration, and partnerships with the community and influencers.

And that experience really means something to her, because her favorite thing about the customer experience space is that just one thoughtful interaction can completely turn around someone’s day or build loyalty for years.

The human connection can truly make a difference and with customer expectations always changing and evolving there are always opportunities to grow and improve.

The CX Team at riff raff

When it comes to customer service riff raff definitely thinks of it as important but with a small company that means a small team as well. There are currently four people working together to make things happen and they’re all doing it remotely from the Philippines, Serbia, and Australia.

Being spread across the world helps riff raff to serve even more of their customer base, especially since their company is based out of Australia but expanding in the US and the UK. In the Philippines they’re able to better match the time zones to provide assistance and customer support.

But, of course, there are always challenges when it comes to customer service and for riff raff the trouble is balancing efficiency with empathy. Customers are generally parents and with the type of products that riff raff sells, they’re often dealing with parents whose babies aren’t sleeping well, which can be an emotional experience for them and lead to an emotional experience for the customer service team.

That means it’s extremely important to offer empathy and support to the parent during a difficult time in their parenting journey. Still, while Jorja believes that it’s extremely important to provide empathy to all of their customers, it's also important to make sure that ticket volume doesn’t continue to rise too high.

Growing the Team at riff raff

Hiring new people to the team of any business is important, but when it comes to riff raff their most important thing is empathy. They want to make sure that the company values are being upheld and that everyone they hire can support their customers. After all, skills can be trained, but genuine care for people is hard to teach.

Once they’re assured that the new hire has empathy, they look for things like strong written communication, adaptability, problem solving skills, and people who are aligned with the brand tone and values of riff raff.

CX Team Success Factors

What’s coming next at riff raff? Well, Jorja is always looking for ways to grow and improve the business and that means, scaling. It means making sure that the company is literally growing, but not in a way that sacrifices the personalized customer experience that they pride themselves on.

They’re always looking for ways to improve their self-service resources and to increase proactive communication so that they reduce friction without the customer even needing to reach out. That means making sure that the website is as user-friendly as possible and as informative as possible.

Revenue Generation/AI/topics of interest 

Taking care of the customer is the number one job of customer service, which means answering questions and responding to concerns. But if customers aren’t reaching out that actually means they’re doing a good job. It means that the website is providing quality information and that things are going right.

But Jorja admits that the people reaching out to the customer service team aren’t only doing it because they have an issue. Some of them are just reaching out for a conversation and that is actually a good thing as well.

Building the Brand with Customer Service

Is customer service important to building the brand? Absolutely. Because driving revenue absolutely comes from giving customers a great experience and offering what they need. Rather than focusing on the revenue, it’s about making sure the customer is getting an experience that they will remember and that will keep them coming back again and again.

It’s also about making sure that AI is being used properly. Because AI can be a great tool and Jorja is definitely looking for ways to use it within the company, but it’s not something that can ever replace true empathy. Jorja looks for ways that the customer experience can use the efficiency of AI with the empathy of human emotion and that way, it’s the best of both worlds.

It all leads into the best piece of advice she’s ever gotten, which was to always remember that there’s a real person behind every ticket. And that actually goes both ways. There’s a real person on the customer side, who’s having a problem or who just needs some connection. And there’s a real person on the customer experience side of it too. And that person also needs support and a management team that cares about them and gives them the tools they need to do their job well.