Delivering World Class Customer Experiences at Scale with Monday.com's VP of CX

Please welcome to the stage Nathalie Margolin, VP of Customer Experience at monday.com. Super excited to be here and thank you for joining this session. Before deep dive into what I came to discuss here today, I will just introduce myself. I'm Nathalie Margolin, I'm the VP Customer Experience at monday.com. I'm a proud mom of two wonderful teenage girls. This is a session of its own, a workshop actually. Married to Nadav, love to practice Pilates, and I think it's a safe place to say that I'm also a Royal Family superfan. As of my career, I started at a very young age not knowing what my future will be in the biggest telecom company. I built myself there from ground up. This was the place where for the first time I was introduced to the world of customer experience and fell in love with this field. This is the place where I learned about hard work and how much to put the customer as a priority really brings value to the whole company. From there I moved to a tech company. I had the opportunity there to face the challenges of scale and global and working in the tech industry with a fast pace and the need to innovate around customer experience. And in the last 2.5 years, I'm very proud to be working in monday.com, which is a hypergrowth company where as a leader in this company, you have to be always one step ahead of everything that is happening. So why am I here? I'm here first as a customer. I'm sure like all of you, the importance of receiving an amazing customer experience is the reason we choose company— one company over the other. But also as a leader in this industry, I had that opportunity to see how this field is evolving, how it never ends, how it's changing, how you always need to invest and prioritize the customers in everything you do. You do. And in each company that I was, I made it as a target to myself to make sure that the company is staying focused, primarily focused on the customers. And I hope that today I will be able to share a few strategies and lessons learned that can help you elevate the customer experience in your own companies. The roadmap of the session today, I will speak just a bit about monday.com and on the product, but not from the product side, more to explain the context of the challenges leading a CX organization in a company like monday.com, speak about the CX journey that we went through, the challenges we faced with scale, the milestones and the achievements following that, the vision that we have looking forward, some key takeaways, and the challenges we have today. So as promised, monday.com, hypergrowth company year over year, 200+ industries, 200+ countries. 70% of our customers are not in the tech industry. I'm sharing this from a CX perspective. This is super challenging. This huge scale, this variety of customers coming from different countries, from different verticals. For CX organization, this is the challenge. With 225K customers and with a robust platform, Monday is very busy in the last 10 years and still is evolving the platform and getting to a point to have an end-to-end solutions for multiple verticals, multiple industries. And having users that can do on the platform whatever they want. They can customize the platform to their own needs. From CX, this is a challenge. We got to a point that our customers know about the platform and the products more than us. With verticals and products that are aimed to serve the dev, CRM, sales industries, This was new for us at Monday and for us in CX. So the journey, let's start. This I'm sharing from the history lesson I got from my people. This was before I joined the company, but the CX team was the pride of Monday for a very long time with answering 25K interactions per month. With only 6 minutes first response time, with 9+5 surveys that our customers are sharing their delight. This is and was amazing. Those results were the pride and joy of the entire company. But then scale happened. Although it didn't happen in one day, and it took time, it still felt like this. It felt like one day it's a completely new company that needs to face completely new challenges. And things started to go in the wrong direction. Increasing volume of emails with one channel of communication, endless back and forth with our customers that started to know more about the platform than our own people. The waiting time got longer. Customers started to share that they are not satisfied, and this is gentle. And our people, our team members, were overwhelmed, feeling like they are running in circles, and no matter what they're doing, they just don't see the end of it. Most of the focus was how to manage a backlog. It shifted from answering so fast to almost not answering at all. This is the time I joined, and this is where I was brought in for Monday to say customers are in the forefront of what we're doing. We have to make some changes. And the challenge that I faced was to rebuild a CX organization to be able to tackle any scale, any shape and form of scale. And I will share with you the milestones and the journey and how we did this. But if I need to put in a sentence what guided the solution, for me it was to infuse the talented people that I found with a new, completely new vision and mission. Even from when I started just interviewing and getting to know the company even before joining and through the onboarding, it was— started to seem very clear what needs to be done. But I decided to fight this instinct of just jumping into and making those changes that I thought were the right ones, and spent time listening, really listening. And again, I had a roadmap in my mind, but I'm thinking of 2.5 years ago, what was the smartest thing that I did was this, was to pause for a second and to listen, 'cause I revealed many things that have changed things that I planned. Who have I listened to and what have I learned from them? So first are the founders, our amazing founders in Monday.com. They told me that nothing matters than CX and that the situation that we have today must change and that the way we communicate with our customers in one channel, which was emails, which I found also shocking in 2022. We have to stop it. We have to bring some live channels back to allow us to solve issues in one-stop shop. Then in my first week, the builders have jumped on me and said, you have to do something. The amount of tickets The amount of bugs that we are receiving from your team is not allowing us to be available to build new products and new features. Your team doesn't know what to do with those customers. They're transferring and we have a huge backlog of our own with things that we believe needs to be answered in the frontline. Moving to our team members. I met many of our team members around the globe, and they all shared a huge frustration. Frustration that they are overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge that they need to be holding, and that they were also hired for a completely different job. They don't know to troubleshoot problems and bugs. They were hired to provide customer experience, more training and onboarding and using of the products. Then I moved to the customers. I read hundreds of surveys. I heard— I learned by heart almost hundreds of interactions. And it was also very clear from our customers that they are tired, that they are frustrated, that they are in an endless back and forth with our people on emails. They even, a lot of them have shared that they think we got it wrong, that we are asking too much of them, that we, they think we confused ourselves and they are the team members and not the customers. So this was the situation. And from there, I listed the main challenges that I found from all the ones that I spoke with. Our customers evolved. We have limited channels. Our customers are expert. They are very knowledgeable. They are more diverse. They are coming from different industries. They are coming from different countries. And they are coming, a lot of them. The challenge was the detachment. The department that I joined felt that what they are doing they are doing amazingly and there's no reason to change because it worked back then. There's no reason for it not to work now. They have struggled with the endless backlog and focused themselves on internal processes and forgot to listen to the customers. The organization was flat and was missing functionalities and functions. We had— we did— there was no leadership there. The organization as itself was structured in a way that again was very good to a much lower scale. The frustration that I heard from our team members, from our— from the founders, from the developers, and very important piece is the data. There's so much that can be done with the right infrastructure of data in the field of customer experience. And because there was a lack of it, the decisions that were made were not based, not on trends, not on customer sentiment, not on what the customers are saying. There was numbers in the air, there were KPIs, but it wasn't structured in any way that you can do something smart about it. So it was obvious that a different approach is needed. And by different approach, it means that we need to realize and recognize and remind ourselves that the reason we come to work is for our customers and for our team members. And with this in mind, we need to decide on what to do. And this is the change, the huge change in the mindset of the people and the team. Making decisions that are based on what our customers are looking for and prioritizing their expectation and their needs into what we do. This one is an important piece because it was clear that a lot of changes needs to happen and changes people don't like. And I will never succeed in this this beautiful vision I put in front of myself, if people will just encounter it as a change. But it was, I believed it's really not a change, it's only improvements. There's nothing that we will do in the sake of just trying to do something different, it was all in the sake of doing it better, to improve the experience both for our customers and our team members. So we forced ourselves to stop using the word "change." And every time it was said, somebody from my team have raised their hand and said, "It's not a change, it's an improvement." And today we're doing it without even noticing. It became who we are and what we are. We are not changing things, and we change many of the things. We're just improving them. It's huge. I know it sounds simple, but for a huge organization that we had, to play with changes would never work. So this amazing team that I joined and the change in mindset they were willing to do, and I'm thankful for them so much for being brave to do that. Brought us to write this mission together. And the mission was to build a service operation that can handle anything at scale. We are focused to position Monday as an industry leader in providing exceptional customer experience. It's not about improving the experience as it was, it's to create an exceptional one. To create a better customer experience at our current scale and ready for any future scale. This is huge. We didn't look for solutions for the problems of today and yesterday. We built an organization that is capable to fit any scale that will come, and it will come, and it's coming. To be ready for any movement, any fast forward that monday.com will do, and to be able to adjust to it in no time. This what guided the solutions that we found. And constantly to remember that we are here every day to empower our customers to achieve their business goals and utilize the platform for their own needs. In the CX, sometimes it feels like you're doing the same thing and you forget about it. But we are responsible to remind this to our people. It's their mission. It's why they are here. Same goes to our team member. We are so lucky to hire amazing people, and usually at the start of their career. We take it as a responsibility to help them find this talent that they might not know they have, and to empower them to accomplish and bring it so the customers will win from it and Monday.com will have great value. We had a lot of— we started to throw ideas, we started to think about what to do, and it's always starting to get complex. So we stopped at that moment and we said that we need to have guiding principles. Everything that we will do must carry fast, simple, localized, and empowerment. If not, we're not doing it, even if it seems like the right thing to do. So what did we do? I picked 4 milestones. There were many more, of course, and many things we tweaked along the way, but those are the biggest. Once. The first one was everybody knows everything. This was the organization. I saw the pictures. You want to take them? It will repeat itself. This is what we found. Remind you, as I shared at the beginning, a robust platform, multi-product, and a team member that doesn't know what the hell is going on anymore. And everybody did the same. Again, in a small scale, this kind of an organization makes sense. You hire, you onboard, and they just learn the platform. But in the place Monday is now and was already a few years ago, this doesn't make sense to expect from somebody you hire to know every detail on the platform, every single option on the product from day one. So the solution was to develop expertise and rearrange the organization. This is one way to look at our organization now. It's mainly from the customer flow and journey, but I want to focus on the human product expert support. This is what we made them be—expert, expert in a specific area of the platform, building their knowledge as they go. This was much better experience to our customers that with the help of smart routing and automation, and I promise I will talk about AI, great fan, we were able to build a mechanism that will route the right interaction to the right person with the right level of knowledge. And our people see a future. They see a growth path. They know if they will be great in what they are doing, they will be able to learn more as they go. Another important piece here is the technical support. We had again one organization, same team member that got an interaction on how to, very simple one, and a second after needed to troubleshoot a very complex bug on the system. So no more. We understood that we need to build a completely new team that will work side by side and hire talented people with a relevant expert on technical support. And immediately we saw the impact, especially the builders that are not talking to me anymore and not complaining. This team is capable to reduce a lot of workload from our builders, and they are now free to do what they really need to do, which is to continue growing the platform and the capabilities. Second one, one channel of communication. This was the only way customers could approach monday.com. Our customers were looking for many more ways to contact us, and we allowed them to reach us only on emails. The email channel is not suitable to what we do. It's not suitable, I think, to anything. It's a huge force of frustration. It's great to have an offline mode with our customers, but for our customers, it's a poor experience. So the solution was at this point to just add chats. It sounds easy. It's not. It's not. Our team members that were used to have coffee whenever they want or go to the bathroom as they need, suddenly they cannot do it. It's an online real-time. There's a real customer there. If I don't know to solve the issue, I'm in big problem now. The moment we opened the chats, by the way, we were flooded with chats. We did many things along the way to get over this, but just to show you the impact of it, we didn't switch from emails to chats. It was important for us to keep the decision to the customers. If they still want to reach us on emails, they found it exactly next to the chats. But we opened the chats, we open it in the platform, and our customers immediately started to adjust and choose the chats over emails. This as itself affected the satisfaction again almost immediately. The ability to really resolve a customer issue on chat is 10x bigger, which when you are with the customer on the same time in the platform. So our customer delight, our CSAT, started to rise from this. Bless you. The fact that we added chats didn't solve the scale that brought too many interactions coming. We just moved it. We actually now had even more. We had tons of interactions. Customers, as you saw, the base got bigger. We are now having chats. It's easier to reach us, and we need to do something about it. We needed to make sure that we are changing the way we work and we are not basing everything on humans. We need to make our people available to really bring an added value, and we decided to automate everything that we can, in everything we do. For here, what I chose to discuss is the chatbot. So we got to introduce ourselves to the world of email bot and chatbot. I'm not going to speak about the email bot. It's something we are investing in. We're doing it internally, and we are looking on ways to improve it. I'm going to speak about mainly the generative chatbot. This was a game changer almost at day one. We were planning to have a declarative chatbot, realizing that it's not going to help us in any way. We're going to shift from humans to a bot that needs a lot of investment from humans. But the generative one, at day one, brought 50% less of chats coming in, solving it with the highest quality. We are investing most of our time today in this, making sure that the quality is amazing, making sure that the bot has much more capabilities. And I will discuss about this harmonical relationship we're building with the humans. It allowed us— just bringing the bot in allowed us to improve our knowledge base. All the articles that were living there for years, we never knew if they are good or not. Because the bot is leaning on them, we are now capable of also working and writing content that is much more suitable to our customers, whether they will take the bot or not. So it's a win from this side as well. We have the chatbot with us. We invest in this. It immediately reduce the wait time, and we are proud to answer our customers in more than 90% of our time in less than 90 seconds on the chats that are reaching humans. This is huge. The amount of chats that our people are getting, although the chat is now taking 50% of its own, it's still the same amount. And why is that? It's because we went to this not in the sake of cost saving. We went to the chatbot in order to improve customer experience. So the moment we saw that the bot has this ability, we just started to spread the bot in many other places, making the CX humans more accessible. Nowadays, you don't need to look and search, how can I get to support? Nowadays, the bot is everywhere. So the amount of volume is still the same and the bot is taking 50%. This is a huge thing that allows us to really be there for our customers whenever, wherever they really need us. The fourth one, the last one. As I mentioned, it's not about solving the problems of today. It's thinking of the future. And in the future, we just need to be one step ahead of everything that our customers will look for, not just now. So this is what we decided to do now, is to add AI to everything we do in every aspect. Team members, customers, data, enablement, everywhere. We are investing a lot in learning what is out there, investing a lot in innovating and making sure that we are allowing our people to be at their best because they have everything they need in order to achieve this mission. There's a lot that we are doing with AI. I'm gonna touch the sentiment analysis 'cause I truly believe that this is the future of CSAT. There's no need for CSAT anymore if you have a very good objective sentiment analysis. It's endless what you can do with the power of understanding in every given moment what your customer is really thinking and feeling. You can put the customer in front, in the first to be answered. You can put this customer with a specific group of people that can retain him if he's a very— if the sentiment is bad. You can be proactive about it. You don't need to wait for the survey that will come at the end of the interaction. It will be too late by the time you will hear if your customer is satisfied or not. With the sentiment score that runs in real time online all the time, you can do what is right in the right moment. A second thing that I think is a game changer, and I will speak a bit more on things we implemented, but the automated quality assurance. Being in this industry for so long, this is one of the things that keeps me awake at night, not knowing that 100% of the interactions we have are in a good place. I have hundreds of team members and to be sure that in every single interaction they are doing above and beyond to meet our customers' expectation. It's something that you feel sometimes as a leader that is not in full control. And I have a team of quality assurance and you're putting your best people to audit those interactions, but still it's not 100%. It's still a small percent, again, taking you the best people that you have, taking them offline. They are not interacting with customers. They're just going through interactions and giving feedback to our people. With the right tools, you can get to 100% of the interactions being audited all the time, and only the ones that needs to be flagged will be flagged to team leads or whomever needs to take care of it. This is also huge game changer in the field of CX. Our people also are using— and by the way, we're using third company, like other companies. We're not doing it from Monday per se. Not every AI things that we're doing, we are looking to do it internally. This is something we're still playing with. A few we develop inside, a few we just buy. Outside, and the ROI is incredible. Our people today, going back to them being overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge, although they are now in different squads and they don't need to know everything at every given moment, still it's a lot. Still there are multiple use cases, multiple questions that they are interacting a day, and sometimes they don't know the answer. And they were looking for— we have a knowledge base, an internal one. We have Slack channels. But it's, again, with scale, it became almost impossible. We brought AI to this, and now they have one place in which they go. They ask the question. This AI tool is searching in every single item of knowledge that we have, doesn't matter which platform, and provides it to them. Immediately. We are again working on it being more proactive, suggesting the answer before they're even asking, and there's so much more that we're planning to do with that. Every step we took, it was important to make sure again that we're staying well connected to our customers. We can constantly imagine what is the best next thing, but we have to stay connected and this is what we do. We are also responsible in the company to share the voice of the customers, not only on the experience they have with us, but on the experience they have on the product, ideas that they have, problems that they see. We have again now a robust solution for data infrastructure that can combine everything that we hear from our customers. We analyze it. We act upon it. We transfer it to product, to the developers, to whomever needs to know and do something about it. And we see it as our responsibility. So we achieved a lot. But if I'm forced to put it in 4 buckets, We have a better, much better way to make decisions today. And we saw that the ones that we did made an impact, made a change. We are having, we have an infrastructure that can support any scale. Tomorrow Monday, we'll have more products, we will have more squads if needed. It's easy way to go. Our people really bring value today. The fact that the bot is taking all the how-to stupid things that we force them to do is now allowing them to really invest time in resolving customers' issues and take it one step ahead. Something that, by the way, we expected from them always, but they could not do it in the volume that they were facing. And we have very happy employees. Our employees now are finding themselves growth in the department. They are finding themselves matching the expectation that they had from the job begin with. And they see that they can really contribute. And looking forward, we want to be a market leaders. We have the courage to say it. We are brave to say it. And we feel like we're there, but we always look for more. We are innovative in the world of CX. We are not afraid to try things. And we want to become the market leaders for this industry. For this year, and we are halfway through to the year, we are looking to delivering exceptional customer experience. This is what we put in the front of our people. We are investing a lot in this harmonical relationship between humans and bots. Let's be honest, our team members were afraid, and sometimes they still are, that they will lose their job because the bot kicks in. For us, it's very important to share with them that vice versa. Maybe we won't need hundreds of people to hire in the future, and we won't. We have a clear ROI on this because of the chatbot. But with the people that we have now, we are looking to make them experts. We need them. We need them at their best. We need them to continue sharing what the bot can do more. They need to feel that they need to do it. They're not afraid to pass on the feedback on what the bot— why doesn't this interaction get to me if the bot could have answered? We need this from them. They know better than us. And we promise our customers that if they want a human, if the bot failed, the human will be there a second after. They don't need to beg for meeting a human. For us, it's Immediately, some— we trained the bot, by the way, to suggest it even in cases. And we are looking to have our people, expert, professional, having the ability to provide a personalized recommendation to our customers in, again, how to utilize their platform. And it's the challenge. It's the challenge of today. This this pass between the bot and the human, how our people are not ignoring the entire interaction that took place a second before, how they are not exhausting the customers now by asking the same thing that the bot did, how they just pick it up from there. So to summarize all of this as key takeaways that I have to share with you from my experience, Listen always. Translate the expectation into actions. Don't jump right into solutions until you heard it all from every angle. A vision is best shared. Again, it was clear to me almost in day one what the vision needs to be, but without having my amazing team working on that and feeling a part of it and fully engaged to this vision, I would never be here today speaking about the great success. Automation can make humans superhumans. Speaking about the bots, speaking about this holistic experience nowadays. Automation is not bad, is amazing. It's amazing first for our team members, and we made it sure that they know that. An innovation a day keeps the doctor away. This world is crazy, the world of customer experience. Customers are always surprising with their expectation, and it's changing and it's evolving. And if you keep on doing what you did yesterday, you will just lose. Always look for the next best thing while working on the current one.