Contextualizing the Decision to Onboard an AI CX Tool

My name is Adam Simone, and I'm a CPG founder. I largely have no idea what I'm doing, day to day. My previous life was in medical technology development, we sold big capital robotics to hospitals and surgeons. But I’ve made it this far, my brand Leaf Shave is nearly 6 years old.

I'm not attracted by best practices, flavor-of-the-month tactics, or shiny objects. There are few 'thought leaders' in this space that I follow to because I want to emulate them, though there are many people that I enjoy listening to when they speak. I've found a good handful of folks in this space that I'd consider friends, and I respect the work they do and the way they think.

I’m not a guru. I’m not an example of success. My story is still being written.

And yet, there’s a missing perspective that I’m happy to try and fill. Contextualized stories in DTC / CPG / e-commerce.

So, I'm happy to use myself. I will tell stories about my experience (largely in real-time) building businesses in the CPG space that leverage direct-to-consumer, amazon and wholesale channels. My work touches innovative product-development, manufacturing, quality, operations, customer experience, marketing, sales... every corner of a growing business. This will not be advice. My singular goal is to contextualize my experience in the hopes that someone finds it interesting, or helps them contextualize their own experience.

Here's my Surgeon's General Warning: Don't do exactly the things I'm doing. My context is going to be vastly different than the context surrounding your business. Event if it's tempting! Don't do it. Shoo. Don't even read it if that’s what you’re looking for.

Okay, let's get to work.

Something that takes a lot of mind-share is making bigger, strategic decisions for the organization. Flavor of the week is whether we want to onboard an AI customer service tool.

Here's the context

Along with my partner, I run a 5+ years old CPG business called Leaf Shave. At Leaf, we design and manufacture modern eco-friendly shaving tools, and pair them with a growing suite of consumable soft-goods that help people leave plastic behind safely, easily, and effectively.

Important information that will help contextualize this business:

• Leaf Shave is a bootstrapped business, we have never raised outside funding and my partner and I own 100% of the equity

• 2023 will be the 6th consecutive year of revenue growth & positive EBITDA

• At the time of writing this: 15 full time, US-based employees (including two founders)

• Things we manage in-house instead of outsource: warehousing & fulfillment, customer service, all marketing and sales functions including email, media buying and creative development, research & development, product engineering, quality, light manufacturing (soft-goods) and more. I’m sure I’m missing things.

• Things we outsource: heavy manufacturing & assembly (devices), backend finance / book-keeping, state tax filings

• Leaf Shave has three pillar products (devices: triple-blade razor, single-edge razor, and dermaplaning tool)

Additionally, we are on the cusp of launching our second brand, a "sister-brand" to Leaf Shave. This effort will challenge our own abilities and focus, as well as those of our small team. We hope to be able to find efficiencies running and growing both businesses. I will share heavily around the pre-launch, launch, and growth of this new business along with the more mature Leaf Shave business. In this way, I believe that the extra context of both launching a brand-new business and growing a 6 year old business will make this whole thing more interesting to more people.

But never forget: everything I'm doing is heavily contextualized by my own circumstances. Don't extrapolate to yours. Don't do it! It will be tempting.

Should we bring aboard an AI CX tool?

I'm generally a pretty anti-tool person. We spend our cash very conservatively. I'm constantly weary of SAAS claims, and constantly frustrated by the opacity of data and information that I feel should otherwise be available to make empirical and informed decisions. As a result of our discipline, we've avoided bloat in our tech-stack. We don't chase the shiny object (generally), and we're quick to abort when a test doesn't perform.

There are two reasons I'm considering onboarding an AI tool to support our customer experience efforts.

1. I heard about these tools only a few months ago on Twitter, it seemed like a logical extension of the rapidly evolving capabilities of chat GPT. I can’t consider adding a tool that I haven’t heard about.

2. We are on the cusp of launching a new brand that will increase the workload on our CX team (1 person) and I am conscious of the need to either bring aboard extra resources or provide tools to extend the capacity of our customer service function.

The tool we're considering is siena.cx.

What am I weary about?

Big, vague claims make me weary. Siena purports to "transform the way you operate and engage with customers." Transform is a big word, but it means little without context. So I don't know, I'm definitely not sold by their marketing. The proof will be in the pudding, and the pudding will be eaten if it increases our CX capacity without requiring headcount growth, without sacrificing support quality. Bonus points for increasing support quality.

I'm concerned about bringing a new tool on that will:

1. Cost money (thousands per month given ticket volume)

2. Cost human time (onboarding, understanding, integrating)

3. Require a leap of faith (this area is so brand new, and I have zero experience with tools like this)

If a tool like Siena can help my CX leader work on both Leaf Shave and New co. without requiring Leaf to hire additional people, then it will be worth the money. If I need to still hire an additional rep, then it will fail my hurdle of expanding our capacity. Instead, it will need to deliver on the (arguably) harder KPI: customer experience and satisfaction.

Could AI improve on key CX measurable metrics:

• First Response Time

• Resolution Time

• Customer Satisfaction Ratings

• Messages per Ticket

If I get a wash in economics, but an improvement across these metrics that's also a win. But because I want to reduce risk while we prove out the opportunity for New co. — I want to be able to launch without bringing a full time person onboard. Therefore, I'll be judging success based on our ability to extend the reach of our CX person across both brands. And I hope to improve those metrics at the same time.

Where am I with the decision now?

I assigned the exploration of this tool to my director of operations. Our CX function reports up through operations, with a dotted line into marketing. This is the organization structure we currently have mostly to ensure an even load of direct reports across the small senior leadership team. When the company is as small as we are, it's not uncommon to have unbalanced reporting structures, and this can cause unnecessary stress on an organization.

I want to keep my business’s organization structure as flat as possible, for as long as possible.

So, while I would normally desire CX to report up through the marketing leadership tree, I am comfortable with CX under operations for the time being.

It works for us.

My ops director has gone through multiple demos with the Siena team and we haven’t seen a reason to abort the evaluation process. We've prepared a business case and feel comfortable with making a bet despite the costs. It looks like it could cost us $1k to $3k per month depending on how much work we want to give it.

The only question left on the table is whether we want to launch New Co. with an AI tool in place, or if we want to begin integrating it right away with our established brand Leaf Shave to get some experience under our belt before extending it to the new company.

I haven't decided yet. But we’ll need to decide in the next couple of weeks. I’ll make sure to update ya’ll when we do.

Until next time

That's it! This is what I envision this newsletter to feel like. I'm going to give you a pretty unfiltered narrative about what's happening at my companies, and the type of context that I feel is relevant. I have no advice for you. I just have my story. Don't forget to subscribe to get these in your inbox, if you want to do such a thing.

— Adam