#523: Leaders in Customer Loyalty: Brand Stories | How SharkNinja Drives Customer Loyalty through Customer Engagement

On this episode of our Leaders in Customer Lulty Podcast, we're diving into a brand that has redefined what customer loyalty means in the modern home, Shark Ninja. Best known for iconic products across cleaning, cooking, and now even beauty, to keep that way for my daughters, Shark Ninja has built one of the most trusted portfolios in consumer products. We're not relying on a traditional point space program. That's very interesting. Instead, their success has been fueled by relentless product innovation and an obsessive focus on their customers. And a deep belief that trust and value are the true currencies of customer loyalty. Today we're joined by Jake Finch, he's the vice president of Global Customer Experience at Shark Ninja, Jake leads the brand's customer experience efforts, and he sits in a very unique intersection of customer experience, customer loyalty, and service, bringing the voice of customer directly into how Shark Ninja, designs products, supports customers, and most importantly, builds long-term relationships. In this conversation, we'll explore how Shark Ninja thinks about customer loyalty, and it's beyond transactions, how they listen, I mean actually truly listen to the customers, and how they respond into evolving expectations around value, service, and trust. Jake that was a lot in that introduction, but thank you very much for taking the time to join us today. How are you doing? I'm really good. You're so far. Doing well, thank you. First off, for those who may not be familiar, can you give us a short introduction to Shark Ninja? Sure, yeah, Shark Ninja is really the combination of two brands as one. You're probably more familiar with Shark vacuums and Ninja blenders, but that is ultimately what Shark Ninja is, and we're an innovation problem-solving consumer machine. Excellent. When you look at the great success of Shark Ninja, what side should you lead to some of the great success that you guys have seen? Honestly, it's really about taking it one consumer at a time, right? Our CEO often talks about building this business 15-star review at a time. Yep. That's what gets people to come back over and over and over again to buy the next great thing from Shark Ninja. We have, obviously, great products and great reputation, customer experience as well. You guys seem to be doing a great job. When you look at your role, it tells us a little bit more about your role, how you got into the role you are, how you got into marketing, how you got into global customer experience, and you do a day-to-day. Right now, I'm the VP of Global CX here at Shark Ninja, and really, how did I get into it? I think like many people that got into CX and customer service started off answering the phone many, many years ago, have actually been at Shark Ninja since 2007. So sort of just grown with the company, seeing this kind of level of growth. My role now isn't just contact centers. It's voice of the consumer. It's taking that information, that feedback of what we hear, that one relationship with a consumer and bringing it back into the problem-solving product machine. We actually have a pretty big role to play in what's coming next all the time. When you talk about voice of the customer, that's something that everyone talks about. Some brands do it very well, effectively, and truly believe in the power of the customer right and honor and action on it. Some are challenged to do it in an effective manner. How do you guys look at it? How do you do it effectively? What makes it kind of the basis of the foundation of all your customer loyalty and customer experience efforts? It sounds like. It really is the basis of it. It is taking that information of that conversation that the agent's having or the business is having with the consumer and understanding like, "Oh, you still have this pain point. You're still calling about, "Man, I really wish the hair in this vacuum would get off the brush roll." We're like, "You know, we hear about this a lot." When we go back until the engineer is like, "And there we go. You know what we got to solve for this. We'll get the no hair wrap brush roll going." But how do we actually do that? It's written on the walls. The interesting and unique power we have here in CX, with our voice, the consumer, is also the power to say, "No, when I look at new products, we're like, "Hey, we've got to fix this before you can launch it." I think that sort of empowerment from the top down is really a real big difference maker. That makes sense. You look at your role. You start off answering the phones. That made a pretty quick ascension of the chart, the org chart. What's the biggest challenge, or maybe the biggest opportunity you see in customer loyalty, customer experience at Shark Ninja? I think it's moving into the new paradigm of trust. That's the biggest opportunity. Moving away from the traditional metrics of customer service, your net promoter score, and moving towards a different measurement of, "Did you leave this call with a good call, with a great experience that we just had?" How do we start measuring that? That's really where I think the evolution is. Really harnessing that one-to-one relationship with personal zits in speed and confidence. Absolutely. When you look at your industry, a lot of disruption in your industry and you've done a lot of the disruption. People want better products. People, different kinds of cleaning and home products. How is that industry changing? How is it evolving? How are the customers changing their expectations? What are you seeing? I think the fundamental expectation is the same. That's great value. That's not just from the product, but also from the service side. What's interesting to me is the real shift of offering value throughout the entirety of the journey, not just at the point of purchase. So being there with the customer, the consumer, if something happens to go wrong or even when it goes right, I think that's the real shift that's happening is that CX is starting to become more and more part of the conversation further up the proverbial funnel of what makes brands different these days. Absolutely. Also, the big discussion around value right now as well. Value in the program, value in the customer to the program, value of the customer experience efforts internally to the C suite. It's one of the words that obviously has a number of different definitions. Are you seeing that as well? Yeah, no. Value is a big part of the start and end of the journey. We try to we strive. And I think we've been very successful at achieving value, right? Giving exceptional value from exceptional products to the consumer. It truly is the, I wouldn't say the non-secret sauce. Absolutely. No. And having a great product, I think, is foundational in driving value or driving customer loyalty. And I know you don't have a traditional point space loyalty program, but customer loyalty to your brand is very strong. How do you think about building customer loyalty through product innovation and addressing some of those needs and opportunities for the customer? Yeah. Loyalty for us is the value proposition, right? We don't win as a business now that we're at the size of consumers by one thing one time. So we need consumers that are excited and engaged with their products, but also where I think in the value chain for the consumer goes is where where myself and my team steps in is something might go wrong or bump in the night and it's there to pick them up at that level. So to me, that's really where we're at now is driving loyalty at relative scale, but still one to one. Yeah. So really to hammer that home is we create that loyalty by being there where we answer the phone really quickly, but we also want to represent and give consumers choices in every where they want to be to communicate with us to fix whatever problem they might have. Okay. You talked about it a little bit. The customer loyalty is very important to brands. They have different definitions in one of the best things about what I get to do is I get to talk to smart people like you about customer loyalty customer experience. When you look at customer loyalty, the products are very important, but holistically, what does customer loyalty mean to you and the sharp measure? Well customer loyalty is everything and that's why we've started going down measuring trust. So when consumers call us, we want to understand, do you trust this brand? Because I'm of the opinion, I think many are the same mindset that if you trust the brand and you trust having a conversation with them that they'll be there for you, you're going to come back because you have that trust. So we've started a process of trying to measure trust as a metric as consumers call us and how they leave that call, feeling that they had what we like to call the good call, which is we were there, gave you a confident solution and that now you want to go out and either re-engage with that product or go get anyone. And trust is an interesting idea concept. It was very hot a couple of years back, right? You want to trust them. I'm like, "Trusting your family." I'm like, "That's kind of a strange idea." Right? How do you trust them like you trust your family? But when you look at trust, it's much more in boge now than it has been in a couple of years. How do you trust it? Is it simple? Do you trust the product? Yes. Is it qualitative? Is it sentiment based? How do you get around defining trust? So we leverage a lot of different tools to do that. The number one tool is literally asking you, the consumer. Did you trust us? Did you trust before you called? How do you trust us after the call? But the other thing we now take advantage is you can't do CX without AI these days or at least have a conversation about it. Is leveraging AI to start looking for sentiment in conversations and how our agents are speaking and how good. consumers are reacting to those conversations. And what we're really finding is at the end of the day, the consumer just wants you to be there to fix their problem and that they're confident that you're gonna follow through on your work. So when you say, "Trust your family," we're not your family, we're a business. We want you to trust us because we execute on the thing we said we were gonna do. - When you look at your customers, do they usually start off with one product and then move into others. I know you have kind of a wide, they show one of the other different products. How does a customer engage with them? And when you look at connected ecosystem of different products, how does that impact or enhance the customer journey? - Yeah, that's a great question 'cause just this past year, we actually officially merged our two brands into one website. So previously, Shark and Ninja were quite separate. And not many consumers knew that and we're on a big effort to really make sure everyone's aware. So rather, funnily, we would find that consumers were very much in a state of buying a Shark product, buying an Ninja product and not even knowing they were buying it from the same company. And that's one of the strengths of our business is we move ourselves from, you know, you start with a blender and then we have an air fryer, right, and you follow that trust and that loyalty with us as we move from segment to segment. - Right. And one of the differences between Shark and Ninja, is they're kind of a different collection of products. - Yes. - So Shark is more of our cleaning side of the house. So the vacuum, the steam moms, and now recently into the Shark Beauty space, Ninja is definitely more of your indoor, outdoor cooking assistance with Skulls. So they do all the blending, air frying and cooking products. - Okay. - Excellent. Is there one product that you have maybe that they buy, they're gonna buy several products? Is there kind of a leading product? - I think if you, you know, the proverbial gateway to Shark and Ninja, I think if you get your hands on, I would say on the Ninja side, one of our air friars, you're never cooking the same way again. If you get in on the ground floor of one of our backings as well, I think you'll find exceptional cleaning performance at an exceptionally good price. And those are usually the gateway to the Shark and Ninja brand that fosters that loyalty across all the rest of our products because they're all in a similar vein of quality. - Okay. When you look at customer experience and some of the platforms you use to drive trust and then loyalty among your customers, how are you leveraging different platforms? You talked about kind of the measurement of trust. You know, what are you doing in that regard? - So we leverage, we're actually using it right now, zoom. So zoom is our provider that sort of, you know, connects the consumer to our agent. So one of the, we leverage them to, through their AI suite of tools as well as a few other partners to, you know, you always hear that this call may be monitored. Well, that's Zoom that is helping us do that. And that's, we work and partner with family behind the scenes to understand how a consumer is really reacting to a conversation with our frontline agents. And that's where we really try to maximize, what is that trust? And we have these programs in place where we call, we call, hear it, feel it, fix it. And that's what we really try to drive through to that frontline agent that you're speaking with. Did they hear what you're saying? Did they really fill in what your problem was like? And did they fix it? - Absolutely. And hearing and listening are two different things, right? So hearing, I was talking about its passivity here, a tree fall, right here, a noise, but listening is kind of a, has empathy, right? There's reciprocity. So listening, especially if you empower your customer servants, the line agents to take command and to make things right, will build that trust, but hearing versus listening can be two different things, correct? - Correct. And it's owning that moment, right? No one wants to repeat themselves like, "Hey, my name is Martin." Oh, what's your name? Like, you're instantly off to a wrong foot. And we also wanted to make sure that we empower our frontline agents to make the call in that moment, right? Maybe you might need an upgrade. Maybe you might need a discount, 'cause you are trying to cook dinner for your kids and the air fryer burnt out for a second. Who knows, right? Something went wrong. And you're just in a panic. He's like, "I gotta make dinner." It's six o'clock. What am I gonna do here? We want to, we make sure and pride ourselves that our agents are listening to that moment. They have empathy towards that moment. And then they provide you a solution in that moment that we can be proud of and earn your loyalty and your trust. - Have you ever had a call when you kind of listen and do some coaching around them, right? I'm sure that you do that. And Monday, listen to calls either, you know, you always hear about C-O-C-M-O's that go on and listen to some call agents or they listen to some recordings. Have you ever heard a call tape? And you're like, "What the heck was that heard?" And they're like, "What was the craziest thing you've ever heard?" Like they did something to the blender, they did something with a fryer. - Yeah, this ties it all back to, in fact, we have, 'cause we like to name things here. We called it here what we hear inside of our office that I'm here at in Needham. We have a mini call center in the back. And we, through our hiring process, we bring people through it so they can listen so that our engineers are hearing it. And in fact, sometimes when they're a consumer might call and get the engineer directly on the phone to solve your problem. You know, some of the craziest things, and in fact ties back to the voice of the consumer program is, you know, having a coffee machine and we told consumers you could froth milk in it. So people putting milk in places they shouldn't be putting. And then you scratch your hand and well, like, of course they did when we said, right? And taking that information from what you might consider, that's crazy. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. And then go off and we go off to the engineers and we make a fix. But if I could, maybe the craziest story we ever had that we solved was, and this is going back a few years, a lady had her engagement ring sucked up into our vacuum. And unfortunately, she returned that vacuum to us to be repaired and put back out there. So we had over 4,000 vacuums in our repair facility. And we had to go through all of them looking for this wedding ring. Oh, yeah. Probably one of the most insane stories, but we found it and returned it to her. You went through 4,000 vacuums and found it? And found it, yeah. That's crazy. Well, what did you tell us? It was a long day for that guy. Or 4,000 vacuums to find it. One person did that? Oh, no. There's a few people I'm making a joke. Or guy had a long day. But no, it was a less level of effort and care we try to put in for consumers like that. She was in the spirit of listen here, like truly listening to their complain and then really going out of our way to try to fix that. But is that kind of post-purchase support that you offer that many people don't, many brands don't do, right? Because there's a cost associated with that. And when you get so laser focused on cost, you lose kind of the spirit of the experience, the spirit of the customer. And that story right there is amazing. Great to hear. I'm sure that when you tell that the people, that there's kind of a virality around that. But I'm sure she's telling hundreds of people what you guys did for them, right? Or she made a big post-purchase in social media that they become so much more valuable to do those small things. Yeah, all those little small things add up. And I would also go, you mentioned cost center. I don't-- Sharkon and Ginger, we don't view the cost center as a cost center. If you would as-- I would argue as an opportunity center, right? We get to hear directly from the consumer about their problems and maybe go fix it in our next generation. And as well as drive loyalty and trust through all those conversations of fixing the problem. I genuinely believe that when you call customer service and no one really enjoys that, but you have that good experience, that good call, that great experience, you walk away from going, well, that was way better than expected. That was pretty easy, man. I'm going to buy from them again, and I'm going to continue to give them my hard earned dollars. And that's why we don't view it as a cost center. And we view it actually as a brand building center. Well, and that's interesting, because there's a big divide right now in our community. We meet with our brands, 120, 130 brands or members we meet on different topics. And right now, there's this CMO CFO divide, where the CFO is laser focused on cost. We talked about value, right? CFO has become-- in this time of economic uncertainty. Maybe we need to cut this, maybe we need to trim this, right? But when you do that, it can have some pretty dilute serious impacts on the program, right? And then to get back to where you were, you have to invest a lot more, you have to get refocused. So what may hit one-quarters numbers could have pretty steep and impacts longer term when you look at longitudinally, correct? I couldn't agree more. We don't view-- despite being a publicly traded company, we don't really manage it to the quarter. We manage it to-- we just want the best for the consumer. And the fact that that's a top-down and a bottom-up driven experience here really is a testament to Sharkninger's commitment to the consumer that it ultimately will cost what it costs to make sure that we do the best we can for the consumer in those experiences. Now, it always lands within like, well, what does that exactly mean? But we will do our absolute utmost to solve every consumer problem at very first time. That's awesome. Well, I think that's important, too, because we've all had the case studies in business school where when we become so scripted, when the call center becomes scripted, you have to answer here by a certain time, you have to get off the call. The problem invariably isn't fixed. So they're going to have to call back one, two, three, four times to a swage the issue you have, which creates consternation, a craze, just a whole list of-- they're not going to recommend. They're going to post something bad. We're getting that first call resolution. That's the metric everyone looks at. It's very important, but many brands have kind of way from that, correct? But I would say first call resolution is definitely an area that we focus on a lot. And in fact, even mentioned the word script. The only script we really have is, "Hi, my name is Jake Finch. How can I help you today?" Right? Beyond that, we leave it up to our, we empower our agents to have a real human conversation, not working you through a thing to get you out. One of the metrics that everyone loves to have, right? It, you know, beyond first call resolution is handle time. How long did you talk? We don't really, I care how long the conversation goes. Other than we want you to leave that call, "Satisfied with the outcome and confident in the resolution." So if the call takes 20 minutes, it takes 20 minutes. If it takes five minutes, it takes five minutes. I don't penalize any of our agents for having a call that went too long, but the outcome was fantastic for the consumer. There is no penalty for that. And that also ties back to the conversation about being a cost center. But, you know, the per real time is money. On that side of the fence, we have no qualm of spending the money to have a conversation with you. Do you go back to the kind of the calls you may hear? Do you have someone that's called in about every product they have, right? They're just complainers, right? They say, "Oh, it's Mark again. He's got a new ninja and he's just bitching about it. He wants to discount, right? He calls about every product he has. Do you have kind of a way to identify those people and do you have people like that?" We certainly do. I don't think a brand that gets to our size, you know, you get to around $7 billion in sales. There's not a few consumers that are looking for things. We are aggressive with our promo culture. And in fact, if you own more than one or two of our things, that's not a problem for us. If you're continuing to get a discount from us, guess what? You'll get one. We like consumers that buy more than once for us. Look, are there always going to be a bad actor out there, for sure. And our premises that we're not going to punish all the good consumers because there's a few bad actors out there. And obviously, there's tools in place to catch people trying to order 700 things on a 50% off coupon. But that being said, you know, if you want to try to get that many things from us, give us a call. We'll probably work out a deal. There you go. One of the big opportunities right now is engaging younger consumers, right? Gen Z, especially that's 14 to 28, 29 depending on how you look at it. You know, being able to identify what their needs are. Many brands are kind of with privacy concerns, right? And the fact that some groups may not want to be identified. It can be challenging to get them into a traditional program. But once you get them involved in a program, the brand, the experience, they become pretty city-fed advocates for the brand, right? Is that something you see as well? We see that as well. We don't really go down the big demographic area, but we do. We do try to meet every consumer where they are. So if you're on TikTok, guess what? We're on TikTok. If you're on Instagram, we'll be on Instagram. We support all those channels, not just from a sales side, but also a service side. So we look to meet you where you are, whether you're 15 or 55 or 85. In fact, some of the many of the, you know, we asked for about some of the callers. We do have a lot of elderly people trying to connect a connected robot to their app. And that can be extremely challenging for everybody, right? But that's the type of call we want to take as much as the, you know, 19 year olds who's like, why doesn't this app have these 10, 15 features on it that they're come used to? So really it is about a shark and an inch of like, it's the way we are as meet the consumer where they are and engage with you there. That's awesome. AI is a big topic right now. It's interesting when the last year the community, customer lozzy people customer, they weren't doing much last year, right? They're very concerned about regulations or concerned about who's going to own it at what day to share, what they do. Don't share it. It's definitely starting to take off with regard to kind of the segmentation, personalization. Even last year brands were hiring teams to manage the AI because they were concerned about having that target moment, right? Where the data is that. The robot gives everything away. Yeah, right. So they don't want that. But when you look at AI, you know, how are you using AI to enhance your customer experience, your customer loyalty efforts? Look, look, you nailed it, right? AI is it and CX right now everyone's looking at it as a huge opportunity to be that a chat bot and all this. But we leverage most of our AI efforts are actually leverage to try to get around enhancing the human to human moments. So how do we look for a call that might not be going well in the moment and surface that up immediately in real time for a manager to interject because the agent isn't doing right by the consumer. How do we leverage AI to like serve up like, hey, I'm AI, you might have never heard this call before, but I have. This guy needs a filter for their vacuum. So we'll help you out and cut to the chase and get that filter out, right? The other area that we do is we do have a team that looks at all of our chat conversations to make sure that we're always improving the outcome for the consumer that it's giving them the answers, right? So we look at AI conversations almost if not more than we look at our human to human conversations because each conversation, whether you're talking to an AI bot or you're talking to a real human, the quality of that conversation is so important to us to continue driving that loyalty. That makes sense. Absolutely. So when you look at customer experience, what's the next big thing when it comes to customer loyalty, customer experience that Shark Ninja is focused on? Is there something that comes to mind? Yeah, it's really about trying to be known just as much for all the services we provide as much as we are for our products. The Shark Ninja is the brand that is there for you on day one, day 10, day 180, day 400, right? And what we're really trying to go is build out our AI future that enhances those moments because I think that's the real future of all of contact centers and consumer experience is that these tools are here to help us connect better to each other, not replace those conversations. Absolutely. And when you look at all things that you've done for the program, plus when we look at customer experience, what are two or three things you're most proud of personally when you kind of look back? The things that are most proud of doing this for many years is the innovation that we've been able to put back into the system for our products. The second thing is we've been talking about a lot is how proud of them that we've moved on from being a cost center to being that innovation brand center just in the last year or so, as we've really taken a real step forward from traditional, experience contact center to a modern brand building experience. And that's what I'm really proud of is really the transition we've made over the last 12 to 14 months to really explore that opportunity and engage in a totally new and totally more personalized way with our consumers. Excellent. And last question, what can loyalty 360 do to help you and your new team in your customer loyalty journey? I think it's continued to partner with us and talk about what is happening out there in the marketplace, listening to other podcasts like this about other leaders are doing. I don't think we connect enough as a leadership group of like-minded individuals trying to do a better one-to-one with our consumers and how others are doing it because I think the learning opportunities for all of our shared experiences in this space is what's going to push all of us to be better. Well, Jake, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing how shark ninja is building customer loyalty through trust, value and truly listening to your customers. Your perspective on putting the voice of the customer and the customer first and at the center of product, service and customer experience really brought this conversation to life in a very unique way. Your passion resounded throughout the conversation. So thank you. You got it. I'm great to meet you, Mario. Also, I want to thank everyone else for taking the time to listen today. Make sure you join us back every Thursday for another edition of our leader in customer loyalty podcast, the brand stories edition. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on YouTube and across our social media channels listed below. Until then, have a wonderful day.