Developing a scalable customer feedback strategy with Squarespace's Rapha Fontes

So we evolved over the years and we cut up a Joseph KPI's, but we still see it. They still have visibility though, so they can talk to their team leads whenever there's something. And we also adjusted our survey to ask, if you are not satisfied, is it a product issue? Is that how the customer's work person top to you? Or is there something else we can do? So kind of filtering that out and surfacing that feedback. Welcome back to Conversations with Send Esk, where we explore new technology and trends in customer experience. Each episode we speak to industry innovators and experts to hear their thoughts, unpack industry trends, and discuss most important ideas around CX. I'm your host, Nicole Saunders. Today's conversation is with Haifa Fantas, Senior Vice President of Customer Operations at Squarespace. Haifa leads the company's Customer Operations Department, overseeing global teams that support millions of square space users. Initially based in Dublin, Ireland, he was responsible for setting up square spaces European headquarters and helped accelerate their international expansion. Before joining Squarespace, Haifa spent eight years at Google developing and managing different operations teams in Brazil, Argentina, Poland, and Ireland. A Brazil native, he has 25 plus years of experience in the tech world, working in a number of marketing and strategy positions in multinational companies, such as FCBI, BellSaus, and Real Media 24/7. Haifa is a mechanical engineer by trade with an MBA in marketing. Coming up in this episode, Haifa and I discuss how Squarespace prioritizes customer feedback and the systems that they've implemented to coleth, act on, and respond to what their customers share with them. Squarespace is such a wonderfully customer-centric company, and they've really done an amazing job with their voice of customer program. Stay tuned to learn all about it. Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the Zenus complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at zendesk.com. Haifa Fontas, welcome to Conversations with Zendesk. How are you doing today? I did great. Thank you Nicole for having me. Oh, I'm so glad that you're here. I'm really excited about this conversation. I'm a big fan of Squarespace. I've used it to build websites in the past, and I just think that what you all do is so cool. So one of the things that I really love about Squarespace is how customer-centric it is. And I would love to start our conversation today with you telling us a little bit about how Squarespace thinks about the customer experience and what it really means to be customer-centric or customer obsessed at Squarespace. Yeah, Squarespace is turning 20 years old. It's hard to believe about 20 years this year. And it all started when Anthony and his dorm when he founded the company for a couple of years when he started it. He was doing customer service himself. So he was taking emails. He was solving the issues for customer. So it was like the easiest feedback loop he had ever had because he was getting that feedback instantly, putting back into the process and fixing it as he went. So that helped from the get-go, build that empathy, understanding of how valuable that feedback was in the early days. And I think that set the tone on how the company evolved. Over time, it ended up being this one of our top values for the companies, be the customer, which is no different than putting ourselves into customer shoes and trying to create the experience that we want for ourselves for each and every one of our customers. So we offer the tools that we use ourselves. We try to use it as much as we can. And it's hard. It's hard to do it, especially as we scale. We have millions and millions of customers across the globe right now. Some of them are very savvy, some are developers, some of them are not as good with computers. They need more help. So it takes time and effort to remain and to continue with that philosophy across the company. And we've done a few things to try to keep it in over the years. One cool thing to be have as a Perkisqr space, every employee gets two free lifetime subscriptions to Squarespace so they can build their own websites and encourage to offer to family and friends and help it or just have their side hustle in there. We make sure that onboarding is weak over product. So people understand in details how it works and how our customers interact with our products. And many other products we can talk about, media programs we can talk about where one of them is called Tell Us More, which is like, if you're experiencing things as you're helping your dad or your brother and how to use Squarespace, you see something weird, how can we create a direct line with our product and the engineering team. So these are things that we use to try to remain us 'cause we're centric as we can. I think that that empathy and that understanding of the customer experience is so important. It's really cool that everybody gets that sort of free lifetime account, like you said, to really play around with the tools and understand what your customers are going through so that you can really effectively help them and design the tools and things that they need. One of the things that really struck me when we were talking ahead of the recording today is that you talked about how design is so central to Squarespace's culture. I think one of the phrase uses is design is not a luxury and I would love to unpack that because I think it makes sense that your website company, it's all about design and making design easy for people. That makes a ton of sense. But how is it really a big part of the culture and why is it so important? - Yeah, so again, going back 20 years ago when Anthony created the company and he tells us to worry that he basically was trying to solve a problem for himself. So he was always very design focused and oriented. Many of the websites at that time, a lot of it given the browser limitations didn't look as good. So he was trying to figure out a way to do it for himself. So he created the tool with that in mind from the get-go. And in the early days, it makes sense for photographers, for otters or for anyone that wanted to portfolio that it resonated more with them to build on Squarespace and that was the court audience for a couple of years. But as the company crew and as we expose ourselves to other companies, any entrepreneur, any company can benefit from that. There's a study that I've seen once study tells, I think it's like 75% of people, they judge your companies, trustworthiness based on their website. If you think about it as a consumer, when you land on a website, it doesn't look create or doesn't look that professional. You have second thoughts. Will you buy from them or not? It also happens very fast. I think it takes milliseconds for you to form an opinion on that website when you land. So it really, as if you want to stand out, if you want to build that trust, build that report with your customer, that's a key differentiator from a bakery to a photographer to an artist. So it's like we cover many sides of our customer base. And one cool thing about that permeating our culture and you talked about design is not a luxury. Like it came over time. It is definitely one of our values in there. We live and breathe with that on the day to day. So our offices are very beautiful. They are very well designed. Whenever we're putting a presentation together, we care about the fonts and how do we design the best slides. And even when we hire people, we attract people that are very creative in nature and our customer support team. Even in the entry level roles, we have some people who are artists or musicians or kind of creators and do that as side hustles. But they're just excited to be part of this press base because we have that value because it's so important to our customers. I absolutely love that. I'm a big fan of design myself. And it makes a ton of sense, right? You're going to land on a website. It doesn't look professional. And then there's me to interview your credit card information. You're like, "Uh, I don't know. I don't know what this is." And so really putting that design at the center is one of the ways that you put customers at the center because you're helping each and every one of them be taken more seriously, be trusted. You're helping their business to be better by focusing on that yourself. Design is a big part of what makes a business website effective, right? And I love that you're democratizing it. So even the small-of-this business now has the ability to have a very professional website. But it's not just about the look and feel, right? If I'm clicking around and there's things that aren't working or it's loading really slowly, that's also going to give me some concerns. So tell me a little bit about, or really what that makes me think of is that you must have a really robust process for understanding when the things are broken and getting that feedback from your customers. Tell me about how you collect all of this information about whether it's bugs or general feedback from your users because it sounds like that's a really, really important part of your business. Absolutely. And I mentioned how it all started with the easiest feedback look was Anthony taken emails directly from customers and he could fix it. There's no way to beat that. Not a scalable process, though, right? That's not scalable at all. But one unique thing we had at Squarespace is that we're 20 years old. But for the first 10 years, we remained relative as well. So as I mentioned, we were focused on artists, photographers, the company didn't grow as much was mostly US focused. And in the early days, we're primarily in one office. So it's very easy for a customer service person to walk into the engine years desk and say, hey, there's something I'm seeing here open and over. Can you help me fix that? So that's the something that happened naturally and to your point, it's getting that is not easy when we started expanding to different offices. In the last 10 years, as we started hitting the bigger customer base, we are expanding different offices, the product became more complex that we're now offering. As you mentioned, commerce is a big feature that we implemented over the years. So as we grow our product features, ads, and so on, it gets more complex. Like how do we figure that out? There's no silver bullet, but there are a few things we've done over the years that I think it helped a lot. So in Squarespace for customer operations, there were three teams that we started in the early days that helps shape what the process that we have today. What are the minutes called products? And that team is a bridge between the support team and engineers and products. So they are the ones who were collecting the bugs, the feature requests, they are understanding what the support teams are experiencing and translating that to the product team. So that's a big part of that. It's a good career path for our team. So it's usually you know the product in and out, but it's up in the customer. So that's the next step for them. So they can deal with more complex issues and interact with their engineers. And then they are also very uniquely positioned when they were launching something new. So understand that feature first and then talk to our knowledge base team. They're talk to our training team and get back so we get prepared when that feature is launched. So that is a team that we evolved over the years, but it's crucial for what we do. The second one is having quality assurance. So QA under customer operations is not something that every company does. And over time it moved in their engineering. But there was an awesome way for us to just to catch the bugs before we launched any product. So they were testing the products themselves. Many of them were working in customer support before they understood it better than anyone else. So that was a great feedback loop we've built with that. And a 13 which was unique and evolve over the years to is called casing sign. So there are many things and non-sciertic bugs or feature with us. But things that people are struggling with are some pain points that they are not in serrated articulated through bugs. So that team will read hundreds of interactions on a specific theme and put together a comprehensive back and say, "Hey, this is something that's going on right now and could be something complex as improving our usability to something very easy or simple." In our minds are the technical term for you say you're going to map your domains. That's the more technical term. But many people didn't know what mapping means. So it's like, in remake our knowledge base, say, connect your domain, which is something that most people would understand or know how to search for it at Google and find that answer and really get a better experience with us. So this is one of the already things we found and that team evolve over the years and it's being very helpful. This is such an important thing, right? Every business needs to collect insights from their customers and understand what's working well and what's not, what resources those customers need. And so I love hearing how organizations have solved this because I think it's a really challenging thing to have maybe an online community, have your support channels, have your account representatives, all of those people hearing from customers and collecting feedback and how do you amass that and move it into something that is actionable and then communicate back out to your customers with it. So it sounds like you all have done a really great job of pulling that together. What has been sort of the most challenging or difficult part of doing that? I think that one thing that is natural for any product and engineering team, the natural bias will be to build new things as opposed to spending time fixing what's out there, right? So there's always that tension. How do we figure out the best balance between those two things, especially if you're growing fast, if your company is developing. This is definitely a tension that there's no solution for that. There are ways in which we can address it and create framework surrounding it, but that's always there. So I think it's good to be cognizant of that challenge from the gap go. But the scaling part that we talked a little bit before is something that we've been trying to solve over time. So one thing that we've done over the years when collecting bugs is how do we automate that process? How to make it easier for the support team to go and say that there's a bug in how that bug connected to a product feature. So integration between Gira and Zendask is a big one. One click that can do that without having to go through a long process to do is so it can code it. We can account for that bug and the other part for the case in size team that we're talking about over time. It's not scalable to read interactions all the time. We still do it and a much smaller scale, but machine learning can be very helpful, surfacing themes that we should go and look deeper into that. The hardest problem to solve is as we grow, as we add complexity, as we add products, it can become a sea of bugs. If you have thousands of bugs in there, where do you start? So that's very easy to start ignoring that. So over the years, what we've worked a lot on is prioritization. How do we make sure we surface the right things? How do we make sure that people are focused into the most important impact for one? So there are a couple of ways that have been successful for one. For us, was one creating a framework just to quantify what's the severity? How important that bug is? How many customers are doing that? So really putting a focus on the most important things so we can make progress on the right things at the right time. So that's something that the team has been focused on. It's a constant process and we fix it, we improve it and so on. And the other program we've launched over the years is called customer stories. So sometimes you have so many bugs that if you take us that bad, they are connected to a broader issue with our customers. So how do we put together in a cohesive package that tells a story that like, "Huh, I get it. Why this small thing maybe just generated three interactions, but if you put them all together, they can tell a much bigger story." And then collecting things from, as you mentioned before, different sources. So what are customers saying in our forum? It's easier to do it through our Zandas interaction so we can come for that easier. But what is Twitter? How they are reacting to a new feature? Well, I should call it "Ax this days." But how is our forum reaction and put in this in one place? That has been very useful too and just saying, "Okay, there's always going to be a lot of things we can address." But what are the three stories that we can surface to the product teams that really can resonate? They can read it with the resources on that? So this is where some of the things that we've done is some of the challenges we are still to this day. It's like there's no civil bullet. We're still trying to work on them. Trying to build out your AI strategy for customer experience? Then be sure to tune in to the conversations with Zandas podcasts featuring interviews with Zandaske and Fortune 500 leaders about using AI4CX. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Yeah, I do think it's an endless and sort of all the ways of evolving workflow, I guess, that most organizations have to work with. Because there's multiple components, right? There's, as you mentioned, the technical component of like, how do we integrate things? How do we automate it so that we can do it at scale? How do we make it really fast and efficient? And then there's the process. All right, how do we then action on all of those? And then I love that you also mentioned the customer for stories. And how do we tell the bigger story of that? Because I think a lot of the time it's easy to look at, how do we pull in all these insetates and put quantifiable data on it? But the numbers don't necessarily tell the whole story and very much to your point, sort of that zeitgeist of, hey, there's a common theme across a whole bunch of different things here. So it is beautiful how you pulled all of that together and really wrapped it up in a cohesive package. It's definitely hard. It's an easy pitfall as you scale. It's like, is myself only the number of interactions that is going to tell the story. Like, well, what if it's just a few, but they are so back full that they can sell during a very important time of the year. The qualitative part is crucial to that too. So we're always trying to strike that balance. Yeah, you have to balance the qualitative and the quantitative sides of that. Have they been really any interesting lurgenings or takeaways or things that have really stood out in your mind as you've gone through this process where it either works really well or maybe something that you learned because it didn't. There's always things that we find out throughout the years. One thing that yes, we can always scale, we can always look at ways to automate, but going back to human nature is how do we figure out how to build the right relationships and the company's grow. So we have so many more employees than we had in the past. The product team used to be Anthony or CEO and a lot of engineers and there's a lot of product. They're focused in smaller parts of the product. So how do you constantly figure out the way to build that relationship and make sure the processes are done across the company? That's definitely something that is, again, it's an ongoing thing we need to keep an eye on. Well, I'm sure it's something that you have to adjust anytime you do have new technologies or things coming in. I'm really interested to see how AI plays into the space. I think about a lot of the things that can be done right now, or you can feed it information and have it give you a read out or a summary of everything. When you're looking at all of those different sources, I'm very hopeful that that's a technology that will help us all get a better, broader understanding of people that act on it more quickly and that kind of thing. And I think that's going to come sooner, like with generative AI, there's been so much buzz around support would be automated and the robot was going to talk to everybody is like, well, I don't think so. I think you will automate part of the questions, but I think anything like the internal things like you were talking about and the process that we were discussing before, can we have a process in which we go through thousands and hundreds of thousands of interactions really pinpoint the things that are important to address faster without kind of needing to go. To that manually, that's definitely something that we can start doing like very soon and it's very exciting for the evolution of the Russ as we have. Yeah. So what's next? What are you thinking about? We're talking a little bit about some new technologies and things. What is the next big thing that you're working on in terms of your customer experience? Generative AI is definitely going to be part of our journey for a while. We do have a chatbot that it's going to get better. It's going to get improved over the years where we invest in and what we just talked about is like, how do we empower our agents or advisors to have better information. So one example is when you are having an interaction that there's a long one, they talk to several people, can we have a summary given so it's easier for them, especially in live chat when they need to react faster and understand what's done in there. How many of us have been into an interaction and someone's to start over or you need to explain yourself again. So I think that's kind of enabling the advisors with that would be great. And I think from a customer feedback, one of you, as we talked about before, we're never done. It's like, there's always more to be done. We have new products coming in. We have new employees joining the company every day. So it's a constant learning and that's what makes it exciting. I think for many of us. us war and operations, war and support, know that there's that every year is different because even if you're doing the same job, it's a different flavor to it and there are new things that we need to figure out. Absolutely. So, a business owner came to you and obviously Scrooze Faced deals a lot of business owners and said, "What are some of the most important things for me to think about to make sure that I'm offering a great customer experience?" What would be some of your recommendations for them? I would say it depends on the stage that you're in, right? So I think stating the obvious and putting yourself in the customer's shoes is like it never hurts. Whenever I go through a support experience with any company as a consumer, I'm always with that lens saying, "Hey, would I like that experience for my customers?" So I think that trying to think with that lens is something that's a big one. If your small company really encouraging having the engineers that talk into customers, we acquired a company a few years ago called Acuity Scheduling and they were much smaller than we were, very customer-focused. They had a couple of things that they did that were great and it was kind of refreshing to see at an earlier stage and one of them as engineers had to take some emails once in a while and respond to customers directly. So that made them empathize with the issues and with no filter in between, which is great, hard to do it as a scale, but in the early days it's great. They had a Slack channel that every time a negative CSAT was submitted through the form, big thing, this Slack and engineers would see why your customer is not satisfied about. So they could react faster to that. So if you're small, I think those are things that can be very powerful. As we grew and scale with a team, like how do you replicate that experience? Sitting down and supporting a customer is a hard job. It's very hard to expect that any employee will do it from the get-go, but there are ways that you can replicate it in an easier way. So shadowing sessions is something we've done. So we make it available to anyone in the company. They want to sit down with one of our advisors and associates. They can see the tools they use or the live customer questions they get through live chat, which is a powerful thing to do. And the other thing is to this day, I think modeling the behavior from the top or anywhere in their organization, it's a big deal. Like Anthony and I get probably every day we get a pain from a customer that's not happy with their experience on LinkedIn. I think many of us have been there and seen that happen. And we have a process in place. When it happens, we work with the team and resolve it. But on one hand, it's great that it helps me understand what are some of the things that we can improve on. And so that gives me that flexibility and the opportunity to see that. But also, it sends a signal to everyone in the company that we care about each and every customer. And it's hard to do when we have millions of them. But I think just walking the talk, and that's one of the things I was talking about, Anthony started the company doing it himself. It talks about it to this day. Every time he talks to the team in all hands and he brings it up, it really creates a connection with the organization at large and shows that he's committed to it. So I think that's a big part of our journey to them. There's a couple of amazing things that you said of them there that I want to call out. The first being that you receive negative feedback from customers on a frequent basis, right? Because every business does. We can't pretend that any business is flawless and doesn't have its detractors. And I think what you really were pointing out there is that feedback is a gift. It's great. Sometimes it can sting a little to get some negative feedback, but it's also much more valuable to understand that and be able to know what those challenges are so that you can act on it. You can keep improving your offerings. And so that is such an important thing that I think you'll have to remember is that you will finish your getting some negative feedback. That's a good thing. And you should actually be really grateful to somebody telling you it and not just being frustrated and walking away. Yes, I agree. And over the years you learn how to interpret that in the early days or 14 got measured by their person who seems sad like what are customers talking about them. And many of them didn't find it fair because many times it would be a product issue. It would be an outage. Where is something out there control. So we evolved over the years and we kind of adjusted the KPIs, but we still see it. They still have visibility though. So they can talk to their team leads whenever there's something. And we also adjust that or a survey to ask if you are not satisfied. Is it a product issue? Is that how the customers or person talk to you? Where is there something else we can do? It's definitely something that again, it takes time and trial and error and we can look into it, but guess and brace in it and see. And many times it is, well, I think we've done all we could that person. It's probably not for them. Not everybody can build a website and be happy about it. That's why we have many wonderful developers that build site for others too. So sometimes they are not satisfied because it's probably they don't have the time. They don't have the energy to do that. So separating what is a product issue? What is a support issue or it's like it's just life. Not everybody will be a customer for us and that's fine. They will move on and they find another way that's something that we always try to think about. I think that is such a well grounded perspective. You're not necessarily for everybody, although I think Squarespace is a great tool for a whole lot of people, but being aware also that people sometimes conflate whether they're unhappy as something. I know something that I have seen in the past is sometimes an article or blog post will get down voted not because it's a bad article or post, but because people don't like maybe the feature that's getting talked about or the change that's getting made. And so it's important to tease that apart and really look at those things. To go back to your previous comment, the other thing I wanted to call out is you mentioned leading by example and how important it is to set a company culture by the leadership demonstrating that empathy and that awareness for the customer support. And I think it is so, so valuable and so important to make sure you've got good morale all the way down and make sure that you're really modeling for people what you want that responsiveness to your customers to be again, especially as you scale. It is so hard to maintain that close connection with your users when you're getting into the thousands or tens of thousands or millions of users. Yeah, it is very easy to get this sensitized when it's like when you look at dashboards, when you look at numbers, they're like, well, okay, that you need to go level deeper. You need to sometimes get into the queue and read some tickets myself to really get a few of what's going on. So it's not easy. And as you get busy, as you have different responsibilities and as a people manager, there's so many things pulling in different directions, but kind of forcing yourself to sometimes goes to Twitter and see that feedback. We're going to the forum and just being there and spending a few minutes that sometimes can be very powerful. So now I think one advice to your previous question about advice to other businesses, like even if you create a processes, try to experience yourself as much as you can, even if it's just a few minutes every week, that can be very powerful for sure. Absolutely. And on the flip side, I think it's also valuable to read some of the positive things too. It can be easy to get down a few read only then I get a feedback. That is a very good point. And that's the trade, I think as well for operations that we're talking about, to constantly improve in and moving on to the next thing is like, yes, it's easy to not celebrate or go back and read the amazing things that team do. Our team got so good over the years in all hands and highlighting all the positive things they're saying and recognizing the team members who went above and beyond. That's a really great part of the culture too. And it's like if you've done that well over the years, like people really feel proud of like making a connection and making an impact, it wouldn't be very interesting for a team member to go every day and support and respond to 30 emails or live chat. That's kind of boring, but if you frame in a different way, saying, you helped 30 entrepreneurs or customers to be a little bit more successful today, that can be a very empowering and powerful thing to do. And for the team at any level of the organization too, if you have your other jobs. Absolutely. I think that framing is so important. Well, it sounds like Spirit Spakus is doing awesome things with the company culture, with the way that you're listening to customers and the way that your leadership is really being a great example and setting that forward for your employees. Are there any other key things that you've learned or key takeaways you'd want to share with other business owners that are thinking about how to take in that feedback and how to create that empathetic experience? I think we covered most of it. The only other thing to say is that technology is an important piece here, right? And resources are usually limited. So I was talking a little bit about how Gira and Zendesk are connected. And over the years, how do we improve our help sites? So having a great help site is crucial for us. So we can offer a good self-help experience so we can spend more time one-on-one whenever it's really necessary. But doing that, like, there are amazing tools like Zendesk that offers all of that. Like, how do you customize this to your business? How do you get the engineering resources so you can build this in a way that makes sense for your own business? That's hard, right? But at many times, if the companies make decisions around how to put engineers for a product or for marketing and support, it's always something that you need to advocate for and making sure you have those resources. So that's another lens that might be useful to think about to you is like, what are the engineering resources? How can we get help from product? How can we actually build the support experience as it's one of our products that really adds value to the customers at the end of the day? It's something that we've been getting better over the years, but it's something that I'll recommend if you go to think about it too. That is a great call out having that excellent self-service support really frees your team up to focus on some of those more product feedback or customer empathy issues. That's right. Great. Well, this has been a great conversation. I wish we could talk further hour, but I think we'll have to leave it there for today. Thank you so much for joining me. I think it had a good call. It was a pleasure. Have a great day. See you. Squarespace has done such a great job of focusing on their customers and really empowering the users to be successful. Hava shared so many interesting things. ideas, how important great website design is to building trust, how being a responsive to customer feedback can really drive the business, and the people's intrigue values of that company. I hope that you learned something from that conversation. I know I did. Jeremy for our next episode, when I'll be speaking with Jeremy Kingsley from the Economist. We'll discuss AI regulation and the things that he's seeing across the AI space as it intersects with business. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with a friend or colleague or you could write us a review on Apple podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and for being a part of our community. You can always join the conversation at zendes.com/community or connect with other zendesk users through our user group meetups. Find one for you at usergroups.zendesk.com. Get information on zendesk products and services anytime at zendesk.com. Until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders for Zendesk, the Intelligent Heart of Customer Experience. Ready to explore how AI can help your business provide richer customer experiences? Zendesk enables you to instantly harness the power of AI to deliver scalable world-class customer experiences. In the era of intelligence, the X, Zendesk is here to help you find your way. Sign up for our free trial at zendes.com [Music]