‍At a Glance

Solid Starts is a website and app that offers ‘everything you need to start solids with confidence.’ With a focus on helping parents navigate starting solids with their babies and the many questions that come with it, Solid Starts offers guided introduction of solids and common food allergens, articles, and tips for feeding from a team of pediatric feeding experts.

Who is Marisa Suarez?

Meet Marisa Suarez, Senior Director of Customer Experience & Community Engagement at Solid Starts.

About Solid Starts

Solid Starts aims to help parents feed their babies, providing education to families to increase their comfort level with starting solids. With a team of pediatric feeding experts, guided introduction of solids is provided while focusing on building baby’s skills to set a solid foundation for a positive relationship with food.

Marisa’s CX Journey

Marisa’s journey to Solid Starts started with more clinical customer support for those with questions about feeding their babies, rather than traditional customer service. This is because she is an occupational therapist with advanced practice in feeding, eating, and swallowing by training.  

Marisa has worked for over 17 years as an occupational therapist and feeding therapist, in a variety of settings including academic institutions such as Stanford Health Care. Over her career, she had been recognized for her strong verbal and written communication skills - tasked with roles such as a “communication consultant” in managing difficult patients and colleague interactions. 

She came to work with Solid Starts after giving birth to twins during the COVID pandemic, and wanting to find an opportunity to work from home. Her introduction to Solid Starts came when she started answering questions about feeding babies for people in the community who were followers of Solid Starts’ strong instagram presence.

Slowly, as she began to dive more into this niche, Marisa found herself taking on more and more responsibilities. Not only answering questions related to feeding, but answering other questions for customers as well and taking on a customer support role. 

Currently, Marisa is the manager of this continuously growing team, supporting efforts in handling all of the customer support needs of Solid Starts. Her background in healthcare means that she actually manages the team but also handles some of the more complicated clinical questions that are directed at her four-person team.

The CX Team at Solid Starts

The customer experience team is small, at Solid Starts, with a total of four people handling all of the questions. But Marisa has figured out the best way to make it work by giving each of those team members a specific area of ownership based on their strengths and areas of interest. One who is in charge of more technical problems, one who is in charge of partnerships and influencer management, and one that takes care of day-to-day needs within customer support. And, of course, in addition to strategizing systems & operations, Marisa herself handles questions related to feeding, nutrition, or allergies with support from other feeding experts on the team as needed. 

By segmenting out each area, Marisa demonstrates trust in each team member and cultivates a culture of taking initiative and providing & receiving constructive feedback amongst the team. It aims to ensure responsibility is carried by all to ensure nothing slips through the cracks, and allows questions to be easily sent to the person who is most likely to have an answer.

The team is also fully remote, with two team members on the West Coast and two team members on the East Coast. What that means is there are two vastly different time zones at play as well, which gives them even more opportunity to respond to customers who need help, when they need it.

Getting in Touch

Getting in touch with someone on the support team is actually quite simple, because Solid Starts has a contact form, an email, and direct messaging. They also actively respond to comments on their social channels and app store reviews and have a community on Reddit where they answer questions. Add in the live webinars where they offer question and answer periods and they’re really getting the message out there and helping their customers.

Keeping on Task

The truth of the matter is that keeping on task too much is actually the problem at Solid Starts. With a background in occupational therapy, Marisa focuses on solid work/life balance by making sure her team sets boundaries around their work to help prevent burnout. That means making sure that they engage in self-care, ask for help, and stick to their hours rather than putting in too much time.

For Marisa, it’s all about keeping her team doing their best not just for the customers, but for themselves as well. She prides herself on being a very strong advocate for her team, making sure they have everything they need to get the job done, while also ensuring they are making time for themselves and their families.

Hiring Someone New

The most important thing for new hires at Solid Starts is being able to understand and support families, from a variety of different cultures and backgrounds. It’s all about making sure that you can be present for them and help them in a time when they’re feeling vulnerable and nervous about starting a new stage with their babies..

That doesn’t mean that new hires have to be parents themselves. But it does mean having inherent empathy, intuition, and passion. And it also means making sure that those qualities can come across in the way that they speak but also in the way that they write, since customer service could be interacting with customers in different ways. 

It’s also important to ensure a new team member fits within the culture established for the team - one of support, self-care, and active responsibility.

CX Team Success Factors

What’s coming next? Well, for Solid Starts, just like anywhere else, AI is becoming a huge component of the process. Marisa is looking at ways that AI can be added in for a live chat feature through their app, which would help new parents with their questions and concerns. But she acknowledges that it can be difficult, especially in their particular space.

When they’re working with new parents, infants, and a topic like starting solid foods, it’s essential that they (and their AI bot) get it right. That means there’s a great deal of training involved to make sure the AI bot can provide the correct guidance and support, pulling only from content and resources created by Solid Starts, to keep the community as safe as possible.

Taking Care of Everyone

Taking care of customer support needs and requests, even when it’s a busy time, is essential, and Marisa makes sure that happens by making sure her team is ready. The team knows how to communicate, how to ask for help, and how to prioritize their work to ensure customers are getting the support they need.

For example, she makes sure everyone knows to prioritize email and those who have already made a purchase and are having difficulty with accessing it. There are also different considerations for training for private 1:1 messages versus public-facing messages, such as responding to comments and app store reviews - in a way that can support more people at once.. 

Tech stack

For most of their work, Solid Starts actually uses a tech platform that was built specifically for them by their developers. Named Athena, this system allows them to do most everything that they need all in one place.

Outside Athena, the team uses Gorgias for their CRM and also Sprout Social for things like direct messages and comments. But there are a number of platforms and systems that go into creating a quality tech stack and that’s where a few other systems jump in as well. Claude is their AI tool that has helped with reporting and project management with connectors to their various programs, and ManyChat is a great way to go about automating as a marketing tool. For communication amongst team members, Slack is their preferred tool.

Revenue Generation/AI/topics of interest 

Creating a solid connection to everyone within the team is crucial for Solid Starts. Marisa herself is on the director level, which means she has weekly team meetings with the other directors, but it’s not just about those weekly meetings. It’s also about making sure that she’s offering feedback to the other teams in real time.

Marisa doesn’t consider her job to be solely looking out for the customer support team and measuring response times or resolution. Rather, she believes that it’s her job to hone in on the actual experience of the customer, including the app and the product that they’re receiving. By doing that, and focusing on what the customer really wants and needs, Marisa and her customer support team are helping to reduce churn rate and increase subscriptions and retention.

What’s Coming Next?

The future is looking good for Solid Starts, and the team has several plans they’re looking to put into motion. The most important, is innovating. It’s all about making sure that they have the best of the best to offer their customers.

One way they’re considering doing that is by using AI and expert content to create a system that’s almost like having a feeding therapist ‘in your pocket.’ That way, the customer can have the assurance and support of a professional who can answer their questions when they need it.

On top of that, Marisa is looking at ways to reach out to broader markets and additional people in other countries. By using AI, she believes that this will be even more possible because it will allow them to translate and communicate into even more languages, expanding their potential reach.

Knowing the Team

What do future entrepreneurs need to know? Marisa believes the most important thing is talking to your team. She makes sure to talk about not just the job, but what their passions and interests are and then works on honing those strengths. That can help her delegate and also help those team members to really feel aligned with their work.

Also, find people who you believe are really there to support the team. They should be willing to take the initiative, be proactive, volunteer, and really own something so that you, as the leader, don’t have to control or micromanage everything.

It’s all about letting go and fostering other people’s strengths.