with Alex McBratney and Aarde Cosseboom

Don't have time to listen? Read the full transcription.

Alex McBratney (Host) 00:00

Hello, and welcome to Another Cloud Podcast, a podcast designed to bring you stories from the smartest minds in IT, operations and business and learn how they're using cloud technology to improve business and customer experience. All right, well, welcome to Another Cloud Podcast. We're excited to have Graham Wright from SumUp, he is the Head of Customer Experience over there, and is going to enlighten us with a wealth of information and knowledge about his experience with SumUp and just the whole customer experience. Aarde, of course, is joining us. Good to have you today. But ultimately, Graham, welcome to the show.

Graham Wright (Guest) 00:40

Thank you, Alex. It's good to be here.

Alex McBratney (Host) 00:43

And Aarde, so it's Friday, we're all geared up, we're ready to go for this podcast. And we're excited because the week is coming up. So we're going to keep this nice and loose. Talk about your experience and all that good stuff. But Aarde good to see you too, buddy.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 00:56

Yeah, nice to see you. Thanks so much, Graham, for joining on the podcast. For the people who don't know, because we're in podcast time and land. It's Friday afternoon. So after this, maybe one or two emails and then I'm going to go outside and have a beer. It's nice and warm outside. We're in Southern California here. Yeah, hopefully you guys have some afternoon plans? If not, you know, maybe some plans over the weekend.

Alex McBratney (Host) 01:21

Awesome. Yeah, we love Fridays. So Graham, let's get back into this. Let's talk about some of your journey to getting to Sumup and how that how your customer experience journey started and where he came from. Everyone's got a little unique story on how they get on how they got there.

Graham Wright (Guest) 01:38

Yeah, so I cut my teeth in the CX market research world. When I lived in San Diego, so I worked for a small market research company called strategic vision, and really caught the bug for doing research there. bounced around after being there for about seven to eight years to working at Lenovo for a hot minute. And then I saw this opportunity for a small startup called SumUp in Colorado so I applied, took the risk, and I've been here for about four and a half months now. And it's fantastic. We're one of Europe's fastest growing companies. And we're growing very rapidly in the US as well. We've had about 4x growth in the last year alone. And that's in the middle of a pandemic. And so, it's been great to come here and help them kind of understand the customer experience and understand why like why their merchants are making the decision to kind of SumUp rather than to swear.

Alex McBratney (Host) 02:46

Yeah, let's describe for those who don't know who some of is, and what do you guys do give like a quick little recap of who you are, you know, what you guys are doing in the market and how you're helping your clients.

Graham Wright (Guest) 02:56

So some of we're a we make card readers credit card readers for the small and micro merchant out there, our biggest competitor in the USA, that most people would realize that square. So when you go to a small business, and you can use your card reader or your card, your credit card, they're usually it's square and if not square, then it's usually SumUp in the US. And so that's just a little background about who we are, we basically are setting out to be the number one global payment processor out there. So that we can help small businesses out.

Alex McBratney (Host) 03:34

Awesome. And one of the interesting facts is that you guys are based in Berlin, correct. And Berlin. What I've learned over the last couple of years is definitely like the tech hub of Europe. You know, who would have thought that Berlin after all the history that it would be like this, this like silicon, silicon Germany area, right in Berlin? So how has it been, because you're one of the first guests that actually has a company that's headquartered in Europe. How does that transition from them expanding into North America? And just their view of customer experience? what that looks like, to the American view or your view or how things are playing out? What are some of the things that kind of stood out in that process?

Graham Wright (Guest) 04:12

Yeah, there's definitely some cultural differences there. Like in the US, we have a very here and now kind of mindset. But what's been great is, in Europe, we've been doing kind of the same thing. We want to be available for merchants, where they need us and when they need us. And so whether that's launching things like chat via Wechat, or via Facebook Messenger, we've built a really strong foundation in Europe. And a really, really kick butt team out there as well. And then bringing it over to the US we've had we've had some struggles we've had a lot of things that are just European products that we brought to the US market without really thinking about how the US is a little bit different of a market than Europe. And so we definitely had some struggles there. But in the time that I've been here at SumUp, we've, like I said, we've seen rapid growth, I've seen rapid change, and really a focus on bringing American products to the American market. And fixing small things, like, for example, one of our card readers said VAT on it, which made no sense to Americans, right, we did taxes, not in that. And so we quickly adjusted that and made sure that just updating our labels so that they were correct. And even other small things like changing are where the dollar sign is on a in the app. So in the US, we put dollar, and then the amount, and in Europe, it's the amount and then the euro. And so there's just been some small, small things that we've been working to change here. But really, our European team is fantastic. And it's been great for me, I work very closely with my European counterpart. He's got, you know, three years on me in this in this at this company, and just a wealth of knowledge that he brings. And he also kind of helps me understand how we can bridge the gap and like me thinking very American, and how that translates to our European developers and our European company as a whole.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 06:25

Now, do you have to work EU hours? Are you working very, very early? Do you have your own hours? And my follow up question also is, I know, it's still a pandemic, for the people who are watching this, that's probably post pandemic, but still a pandemic. Have you had the ability in the last, I think it's four months when you started to go out to HQ and meet everyone in person in Berlin?

Graham Wright (Guest) 06:49

Yes, so I've worked European hours once in the four months that I've been here, I've had only one meeting at early in the morning was about four in the morning, probably the worst day ever, having a full rating meeting, but no right now. So because we have a US operation, we work US hours, we're doing Mountain Daylight Time right now, I guess. So eight to five pm. And then, but for our customer support team, one of the things that we are working on is extending us hours to support. We're trying to go to 24/7 our support. But right now we've moved to extend to Eastern startup times. So if you're in New York, instead of having to wait until someone's available at like 10 o'clock your time, we've made people, the agents available at 8am. And we will be rolling out here in the next couple of weeks, another hour of change, so that we can have more hours for our merchants whenever they need us. So to answer your second question, I already know I haven't had a chance to go out to Europe, yet they are very lockdown compared to the US. 

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 08:43

Very nice. And we often talk about Alex and I talk about global deployments and helping people through some of the challenges that come with having customer experience and support centers that span across just more than North America. So EU and also Asia Pacific. One of the things that often comes up is compliance. We know that in Europe, there are different compliance regulations than the US some we do share some but there are some more in in EU and there's also some unique ones here in North America. But how do you guys work through some of those hard compliances? For example, you know, GDPR, or privacy related type things are anything having to do with the UK and Brexit and having to comply with them not being a part of the European Union. Does that come up a lot during your your conversations, or does that come a lot come up a lot when your customers are reaching out to you?

Graham Wright (Guest) 09:47

Yeah, so we're, I guess one of the good things is, we operate very independently of each other and so we are fully GDPR compliant even though we aren't obviously in Europe. It's very beneficial for, like California, for example, who has probably some of the strictest data laws in the US, I would say New York would probably be a second place for that. So it's been beneficial that way. But because we operate fairly independently of each other, where we don't have to worry too much about GDPR, occasionally what will happen is, there'll be someone who signs up in the US who is a European citizen. And really, that just announces, hey, okay, we have to close down your us account, and then we'll send you over to Europe and have you set up over there. And then we haven't had too much of an issue when it comes to people emailing our support line, because of the like, for example, in the UK, most email addresses end in.uk. And so we're able to filter those out and never even see those messages. But our compliance team here in the US is a really good job to make sure that we stay compliant. And as well as in Europe, making sure that we make meet all of the regulations that are there. And make sure that as a as a company as a whole that we can move forward. And one thing I love is that I don't have to focus on that. I have, we have a great compliance team here. And a great head of compliance, who's just recently started as well. And in January of this year, and so it's been great working with him, kind of saying, Hey, here's what we have, let me help you out. And like getting his feedback. So that our customer experience agents, our customer experience teams are 100% compliant, and everything that we do.

Alex McBratney (Host) 11:40

Yeah, compliance, compliance is big. It's a big one and every state being different, every country being different for sure. Let's go a little bit into the you know, that we talked a little bit before about the customer support versus customer experience, how do you separate those two or view those to like in your day to day and setting up your teams and, and working through that for SumUp?

Graham Wright (Guest) 12:02

Yeah, I think when you really think about customer support, versus customer experience, I think they both have the same end goal, right. And the end goal is that you are making your customer happy, right? It's just how you get their support, to me is a very reactive thing, you're waiting for someone to say, Hey, I have an issue, and then notify you of the issue that they have. And then you go and you react and you try and fix their issue for them. Whereas customer experience is really about being proactive, and knowing that issues arise, before your customer can tell you about it. And now a support world adds into the experience world, we do a lot of surveys to make sure that we're collecting feedback from merchants, our customers and, and asking them, you know, for feedback on how we can improve our products, what they love, what they hate. And then really going forward and acting on that. And then kind of closing that loop, creating a feedback loop for them, so that they know that we've heard them and that we're responding. And so in the US, we are very proactive in certain areas, like if you sign up for a summer account, you spend your $20 by cardreader. And you haven't started transacting yet, we get alerts that go off right away, yep, hey, go notify, like, call this person and find out why they are not transacting. We do a lot of support as well. So we are reactive when issues arise. We are there to fix them. But we try to be as proactive, we try to be one step ahead of the merchant.

Alex McBratney (Host) 13:39

Yeah, that's such a great point. And we actually were on the podcast earlier today, we've recorded another one. And he talked a lot about being able to look into that customer and have those triggers that come up for Hey, they haven't finished their training, or they're not using the platform. Because a lot of you know in this in this sense, it was like a SaaS platform for the healthcare companies. And they will know like, there's not a lot of ways you can track the metrics. But one way they could is like, well, how engaged they are, are they in the platform. And I think that brings up a really good point in that you need to have those triggers. So the customer experience, you're on top of it, you're proactive. You're not just waiting for the cancellation request, because nothing ever happened, right? And you're just reacting to Oh, like, I wonder why they canceled you know, or something like that. But it's interesting. Yeah.

Graham Wright (Guest) 14:25

And that's also like, I think that's a great point is like, it's not just about being proactive with the merchants that you are the customers that you have, but looking at potential churn customers, right, like, are you looking like, if I have those data that we're we've got? Are you looking like you're going to leave us or? Or are you just taking a hit like for us and the small business world, we get a lot of people who are seasonal businesses, so around Christmas, you'll see them fire back up, and then they do business for one or two months and then and then all of a sudden they're gone. And so we want to make sure that those people are aren't just forgetting about us, right, we want to make sure that they haven't churned out, we want to make sure that they're still active customers with us. And sometimes you find out that it's been a hard time for them, right? COVID been very difficult on the small business. And so we want to make sure we can do whatever we can to support. And make sure that, you know, throughout not even just the signup process and the touch points there, but also, once they are active and engaged, making sure that they stay active and engaged.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 15:32

Now talking a little bit more about your team that fields questions from your merchants, I think you're one of the first people on our podcast, that has a true b2b business model business to business, and your businesses that you're supporting, have transactions from their customers. So there'll be to see, often times, you'll see some sort of issue between the customer and the, in this case, the merchant, which is your customer, do you get the spillover does it does the customer ever reach out to you and say, Hey, I bought this, you know, some cakes and I never got it, but I want to ever happen, you know, whatever it is. So how do you how do you manage those conversations?

Graham Wright (Guest) 16:17

Yeah, we get a lot. We get a lot and there, there are two issues that people are our merchants customers contact us for one, they see the name SumUp on their account, and they have no clue who we are, right? Because it, they'll say SumUp. And then we'll say the business name. And so they have this summer, right? I don't remember SumUp. So we do get a lot of questions about, Hey, who the heck are you. And then the other thing is, we do deal a lot with just trying to help our merchants understand best business practices. And so one of the things our content team is in the middle of rolling out is how can like, we had this Help Center, we have this blog, where it's talking a lot about just some of its products. And one of the things that I wanted to see was how can we take that information and turn it into very small business friendly information? Like, how do I do taxes, the IRS summer, right? Or how do I? Like how do I decide how much to charge my merchant or my customer? And how do I issue a refund, to a customer. And so very rarely do as a customer called us asking for a refund. One thing that we always make sure to do is that we're we're a merchant first company. And so if they're if a merchants experiencing a chargeback, we'll fight for that merchant, right, if we can prove that it was a valid transaction, and that this person is just trying to get something for free services, goods, whatever, we fight for our merchants, and we always take the merchant first approach at SumUp. And so if you call us and you're a customer of a merchant, I can't do much for you, you got to take it up with him, I'm going to stay on with our merchants. So we really do focus on the B2B. And there's just I think, I would say maybe 5% spillover into our world from the B2C world.

Alex McBratney (Host) 18:14

You mentioned the resources, right for people to go to learn how to your taxes, or whatever questions they might have, which adds a ton of value for your merchants, right? It's like, how do you help them help their customers more with this value? Do you have any sort of, you know, resource library, self service type of how to or you know, library that your merchants can go to, to kind of off offload a lot of those voice calls that come in, or email tickets that come in things like that to kind of scale through the self-service?

Graham Wright (Guest) 18:46

Coming through and yeah, is not live yet but it's in development. So when I think of the US and what we need in the US, we need a lot of self service, I think it's something like 60% of people say that they would rather have some sort of self service option. We're in the process of developing a video series for just our products and how to use our products. But also, we're in the process of building a guide for small businesses. And there's information that's out there, you can go to small business center. You can go to the Small Business Administration, from the federal government, whatever you want, but we don't want our merchant staff to go and try and find the information, right, we want to be a source of information for them. And so that's why we really decided to invest those efforts, those resources internally to developing something that a guide for in best practices for our merchants, because a lot of people who come to sign up they come to SumUp generally because like this was a side hustle like this was just something they were doing on the side and they're trying to turn this into a business or like they're just getting started. In the business world, we do have a few customers who have been doing this are very established. But generally a lot of people are new. And so they need information and they need education. And if we can provide that in a Help Center, or in a, like a, like just small business guide, that takes off the workload off our customer support agents who don't have to do general information, requests and calls.

Alex McBratney (Host) 20:26

Yeah, it all it all takes time, right? It's like one building block at a time. And, you know, it's one of those things where you just, it's, it's a work in progress for so many things. How is it getting the like, just the buy in from the executives, or, you know, the group back in, back in Berlin? Like, has it been very accepted that, yes, we need to build these things out. And it's just a matter of road mapping? All these things you guys want to do?

Graham Wright (Guest) 20:50

Yeah, there is always an issue of like, what do you do first, when you are in such a growing company, right? How do we grow, and not just us specific, but for Europe, and Europe has its own complications, each country is a little bit different. And really, what was easy to do, it wasn't a hard task, because the need was there, right? We all knew the need was there. And the data showed that there was a need there. And so it really was once we could outline that there was a need, it went very quickly and getting approval. My boss here in the US, I mean, he's got a growth mindset. And he saw the need right away. And so really, once you once you establish the need, it's really just shuffle resources around and shuffle people's time. And in the US, we're a small team, we're not the world's largest team, and we do our best. And really, that means putting in some extra hours. And you know, if we have to, we have to hire new people, but we always go through it with a founders mentality, we try and do more with less and really go out. And if we see a need for something, just go into it is really what it's coming down to.

Alex McBratney (Host) 22:10

Absolutely.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 22:11

I'm going to switch gears a little bit here and talk a little bit about the pandemic and how the pandemic potentially changed your business model, maybe even change the way that you support your customers. I think my first question around this, I know you started in the pandemic. So you started probably December, end of year 2020. But your team was either already remote or thinking about working from home. So talk us through was there a lot of complexity in bringing your agents to work from home? Or they already there? Did you already have the cloud technology in place? Talk us through what that transition was like and then also talk us through a little bit about how you started during a pandemic, you know, you didn't go into the office first day, you probably worked from home for the first you know, couple days or months or till now.

Graham Wright (Guest) 23:03

Yeah. I'll start with my experience first, and then we'll jump into the to the experience of the of going remote. So when I started it was started December. So we had some issues getting my laptop to me because we it's kind of interesting, we use Apple products here because we're startup and whatever. And I love Apple products. And so I was living in North Carolina at the time, and they because it was December 1. We just didn't have a lot of lead time and Apple had just released a brand new MacBook Air and MacBook and Christmas orders were out the wazoo and everyone want on. Yeah, so it was I was about a weekend to onboarding and I still hadn't had my computer yet. And I just said okay, I'm going to Best Buy I will submit the receipt just cancel the apple order. It's not going to get here anytime soon. just cancel it. So we cancel that I went to Best Buy and picked up a MacBook Air. It's been rose gold, aka money that the six foot tall dude has a pink Mac Book Air. But yeah, so what's been interesting is SumUp because we do a lot of work in Europe, we were already accustomed to doing a lot of like, zoom meetings already. And I would say even during this pandemic, probably the best onboarding experience I've ever had at an organization. The training was top notch, got you up to speed really quickly. And you know, the small snafu the laptop but that wasn't on them that was on Apple not being able to fulfill orders quick enough so that the onboarding experience was good. And I met my team virtually and I I we just got into it right away. So my team when I came on was already remote. So I didn't have too much of a headache there. But they hadn't been remote for very long, they've been remote for maybe one or two months. And our big issue was that our agents didn't have laptops, we had them using desktop computers like that a Mac Mini, or, I believe. And so when I came on, what was happening is agents were taking their MacBook mini home with them, and usually two monitors on top of that. And so I was like, Okay, let's start rolling out laptops for them. So we started giving agents laptops, because agents would come in maybe once or twice a week. And so they would be coming in Mac Book, many, two screens. Like whenever they came into the office, and whenever they went home, they had to bring their MacBook Mini, and their two screens. And so now they all have a MacBook Air. It's so like, seamless. And we keep the Mac minis at the office. And so just because sometimes it's easier to leave your laptop at home. And sometimes it's easier to just be working on the Mac Mini. So that's been pretty good. We one of the things that we did here is we already have the cloud software in place, but we created a dashboard that tracked which agents were available online. And they're at what like their state was, were they in like, not ready. Were they ready? Were they working cases whatever. And we made that shareable across the entire organization. We wanted to make sure that any agent who was working remotely knew who was available, and knew if it was okay if they took a break kind of thing. And so once we implemented that things got a lot smoother. We weren't having as many like drops in, in just agents availability, call like handled times went down. And then also like average speed of answer went down significantly, because people could see there was a very transparent, you could see where people were at and what they were doing. I think that made a big impact and our support team just happier employees as well, just like they weren't as stressed.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 27:16

Yeah, I love the story of having to get a rose hold of computer we just did a podcast, and our last guest was telling us about I think it was like the beginning of March endemic they just sent all the IT people to Best Buy and just grab every head USB headset or Bluetooth headset you can find. And of course, they got all the like, you know, Halo, you know, ps3 legs are what's working, working from home with all these really cool, cool headsets. They slightly different call that I was on yesterday, I had asked them the same question. And they said that they because they onboard about 100 different employees. And they kind of cycled through employees pretty rapidly 100 different ones, every single month. He said starting back in March, he felt really sketchy because he went, he rented a van, filled it full of computers drove it across state line, and he called it the computer drops where you would literally go to like a school or like a parking lot of like a safe way. And all the people who work in that region would come to that, you know, come to the parking lot. And he would just be passing out computers to employees, and then getting back in the car and go to the next. Yes, super creepy. So but you know, the challenges that we had to go through to get to this work from home environment is definitely, definitely crazy. It's awesome to hear that you guys have the cloud ecosystems in place. Yeah. And it made it a lot easier because there's some people who still have really complex VPNs and desktop as a service. And you know, things aren't working because people don't have Wi Fi at home that that's good enough to take phone calls. So it's good to hear that you guys had that.

Graham Wright (Guest) 29:05

Yeah, that's one thing. It's one thing that's always interesting to me, right, like so we use we use five nine for our call center software. They've been pretty good to us. And what's been nice is here where we're at everyone has pretty high speed internet. But when I was out in North Carolina, I mean, I'd people in very rural areas, and you can like they couldn't do anything right? Even with like an Ethernet adapter plug in Ethernet, it was so painfully slow that we had to modify what they were doing right. We went from them being able to take calls and things to being able to just only work cases because the cases could we could take your time letting a case screen load. Whereas here we're very fortunate. So we got gigabit basically everywhere. But I think it's one of the things that companies who remain like work from home or remain remote need to invest in right give your give your employees a little stipend to have better internet services, especially if you're going to require them to be on zoom calls, or work from their houses. And that's just I mean, that's my own personal gripe against companies sometimes is that they're not always willing to invest back in their employees, right, which it shows when it in their customer experience to write like a good employee experience, it makes a good customer experience in the end of the day. So if you have happy employees, you usually have happy or customers because they're just willing to go the extra mile for your customers. And so here we try our best to make sure every agent has what they need. at home. We invested in some nicer headsets here for them noise cancelling USB see of that sucker and let it run. Just so that when they were at home, they didn't have the distractions, because when I came over, there were some everyone had a little bit different of a headset, it was kind of that like, just we'll get whatever we can the cheapest option from Amazon or wherever. And then some people had headsets that they had for like, five years, and they were falling apart. And so really, when we invested in those headsets, I knew that we were going to need a large amount over the next couple of months, because we were hiring so many people. So I think I did like an order of like 50, I was just like just order 50 I'll start distributing them to the people we have now. And we'll have them on hand for when people come available. And the first thing every agent said was, wow, these are really noise games, like I can't hear anything anymore. Outside of like, what's in their head. So it was really great. So we made sure we invested back in our employees so that they were willing to stick with us through the hard times. And, you know, make sure our merchants could hear and understand them well.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 31:50

Yeah, one of our very first podcast was from someone who used to be an agent and the supervisor and he said, there's really three creature comforts, physical creature comforts, and that's the computer itself, which thankfully, got the rose gold one so good to go there. A nice chair, because you know, most of the time, we're sitting in these chairs, doing these calls, as called contact center reps for eight hours a day, nine hours a day. And then a good headset. So it's really those three things, if you can nail those, if you get like the best of the best of those three things, people are going to be happier, less churn, they're going to be, you know, the employee experience is going to be, it's going to be much higher. So I'll toss over to you…

Alex McBratney (Host) 32:32

I was going to talk a little bit about the Tech stack, right? And just really, like, where do you see it going? Right? We know, like, what five nine and the other cloud providers can provide as far as like services in the context center. But with AI and predictive engagement, and, you know, these upper levels of feature sets that you see coming down the pipe for a lot of these carriers, like what do you see? You're just I guess that at SumUp, like, the vision that five years down the road, like, where do you see that evolving for you guys using technology?

Graham Wright (Guest) 33:03

Yeah, I'm, we always and I think it's been my own personal approach to talk with, with my counterparts in Europe. And our approach has always been to create the best experience for our merchants, right. And that generally means right now, a blend of both human and technology. So right now, we are setting up chat bots to help with our merchant engagement. Just because when we get we don't always have an agent available and, and to helps just stagger that those chats just a little bit longer. And when you blend the technologies together, you get a really good result. I don't know how AI will look in five years. I mean, the world has changed so much in the last five years. And just to think another five years from now. It'll be even more advanced, hopefully. But I think you'll always need a human element to it. And so you need to be able to have people who are emotionally intelligent, who are empathetic and who can, who can who are tech savvy enough that they know what the heck's going on the backend so that they it's a seamless experience for people and really, it's about creating invisible experiences. So when with our chat bots, we don't want you to feel like it you're talking to a chat bot we want it to feel as seamless as possible. And we really do a hybrid approach of tech meets meet human and so as we get as we get more advanced, I think we'll have maybe less human on the basics but really more human on the on the specializations where the where the tech just can't reach yet. So it's always an interesting and interesting because you don't want to go on robots. I mean, robots are great and all but they don't feel any...

Alex McBratney (Host) 34:57

The right Rise of the Machines, right?

Graham Wright (Guest) 35:00

We don't want rise of the machine. No.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 35:04

Especially in the payment processing world, you don't want them controlling all of our money.

Graham Wright (Guest) 35:10

Yeah, payment processing world, it's very interesting, right? Like, you have things like the rise of new currencies, you've got things like Bitcoin, you've got things like peer to peer payments, which is always it's a struggle for small struggle for us, right? The rise of peer to peer, and not just in like, hey, already, I mean, they send you 20 bucks, but like, right, hey, already, you now have your own small business, and you can use Venmo business and you do peer to business, right? Like, it's, it's an ever evolving challenge that we have. And so, for us, right, like, we try and automate as much of the experience as possible, right? We don't want a human deciding whether or not you're going to get paid out. But when the tech fails, we want to make sure that a human can come in and after a payment does go through. And so it's it's been an interesting, interesting battle. And then interesting to see how, as tech evolves, do we need the card readers anymore? Do we can like, tap the phone, become a finger, can we become can we help peer to peer happen within the business community?

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 36:21

Yeah, and if you think about it, you are the, you know, life blood of the of the Small Business merchant, if it goes down for a day, think about all the transactions that could be lost either to another, you know, just PayPal me or just whatever you like, all these other ability to collect payments. So it's got to be, you know, from a support standpoint, it's got to be hard to think about automation and self service. But then also make sure that you're not doing it too much so that you're alienating your customers and your customers are like, forget it, I'm just going to use a competitor, do some sort of other payment processing system.

Graham Wright (Guest) 36:58

Yeah, I think with what we do with what Square does, PayPal, whatever partner, you want to think about, like the know your customer, KYC, KY, the stuff that we're doing is, you know, it's very, it's very interesting, right? Because you have to get information on people. And you have to make risk decisions. And sometimes those decisions are not as smooth as we want them to be. And sometimes we have errors in our systems. And like, I mean, for example, last week, we had a system outage. And it had nothing to do with our technology at all, it had something to do with our choir. And so when we were, we were down for almost two days, where merchants were able to take transactions, which was great, like they were still able to, to run service, they just weren't able to get paid out. And it was that the API and the system weren't communicating and sending files to each other. So we had almost a million dollars worth of payouts that needed to happen that got stuck for two days. And so I mean, we went all in everyone on the US team, everyone on the Europe team trying to figure this out to make sure that our merchants get paid because like you said, We are their lifeblood, right if, if we have to hold funds, for whatever reason, it hurts their business. And so one of the things that we're actively working to develop here in the US is, is next day like t plus one payout rather than T two, three, which is what we're at right now. So if we can get to the point where you can instant cash out, that can be huge for the small and micro merchant who needs those funds to run their business?

Alex McBratney (Host) 38:45

Yeah.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 38:47

Yeah, or the other way around, maybe they don't need the funds, and they'd rather keep it in there and your and maybe get a little interest on it, you know, like not just pay me in 30 days.

Graham Wright (Guest) 38:59

You surprised how many small businesses don't want to be paid in 30 days, we offer we offer small payment, or we offer to like 30 day or within like a week. So if you want to go to a weekly payout, and as companies grow, those options become a little bit more enticing for them. Because what it cleans up their finances rather than getting deposits every day, and then having to reconcile those deposits. And makes it a little bit more seamless for them. And so, as we've seen, companies grow and we bring on larger organizations, we see that those organizations unlike the small and micro merchant, they're okay with like a week or a 30 day payout timelines. But the micro merchant and the Small Business who's just getting started, immediacy is huge for them, especially in the US are very, we need things here and like we need things as quickly as possible. Just as Americans that's become our mindset and culture.

Alex McBratney (Host) 40:01

We've been spoiled, right?

Graham Wright (Guest) 40:02

And we're in that aspect, that's one of the big cultural differences between the US and Europe with our payment provider, like our payment, or our merchant like payout timelines are. It's not that they don't want to be paid out as quickly. It's just that the expected like expecting to be paid out, like, within 30 seconds kind of idea is different for them. But it works out on we're developing things here that help the US market and will help the US market grow.

 

Alex McBratney (Host) 40:38

We've all been on Amazon to death, right? Where we expect things so quick and any made if you live in a major city like we do, you know, both of us, you know, Denver or Southern California, she's like, even more, you know, more of a microscope on service and expediency.

Graham Wright (Guest) 40:56

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you and I had a great a good talk on, you know, Amazon? And what will be the next kind of competitors for them? Will it be someone like instant cart? Or will it be someone like Walmart? And Yep, I don't know. I mean, it's not about the development of the like I told you, Alex, Amazon didn't develop an eCommerce site that was anything above and beyond anything anyone else can do. Right, what they did is they develop a supply chain and logistics network that is unrivaled. I mean, like FedEx is not as good as a logistics service, in my opinion. Amazon is an amazing supply chain and amazing logistics, and are able to get things to people so rapidly. And I think one of your guests on the podcast was saying, you know, we're not Amazon, like, they were saying, we're not Amazon, we're not going to get you today delivery. Right. And it's true, right, like, businesses and people need to be almost reminded that, you know, Amazon is truly unique in that it has, right a great supply chain, a great logistical network, and we leverage it at SumUp, you can order some products on Amazon and get it two to five or two day shipping if you're a Prime member. Whereas if you order the rest, it's going to take maybe three days because it has to go through just a different warehouse, and then through the federal ups USPS system. So Amazon's a, an always an interesting one, when it comes to thinking about their support and thinking about what they've done and how they've changed the way we think in in America. And in the world, actually.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 42:40

Yeah, absolutely crazy. I order something on Amazon and sometimes they'll get an email like, oh, we're so sorry, we told you was going to be delivered in two days, but it's actually going to be delivered in a week. Is that okay? And I'm like, yeah, that's fine, whatever. They said, but they set the bar high, and then I get like, disappointed, and then it shows up literally the next day. Like, I'm just like, what the what is, like, it's the craziness of, and I watch it all day, because I work from home. Now I see the Amazon truck literally stopped by our home at least two or three times, and they get packages delivered probably every hour, which is absolutely insane. And my dog goes crazy every time. She's probably like what's going on with all these cars? But um, yeah, the expectation is so high now. And it's we're in this, this world where everything is instant, like, it's like, deliveries, instant payment is instant. Communication is instant, like you almost expect, like, I don't want to wait on hold. I'm just going to go to your Facebook Messenger or Twitter or WhatsApp or whatever, I'll get a response way faster that way. And, you know, while I'm doing that, I'm also going to text my friends on WhatsApp. I'm also going to, like, you know, do my banking and pay my mortgage loan off like, everyone's multitasking and doing 10 things all at once and expecting something. And then immediate fashion, which is definitely new.

Graham Wright (Guest) 44:08

Yeah, it's definitely a new thing, right? And I don't know, there's so much you could, it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? I don't know if I'd say it's a good thing. But it's not necessarily a bad thing that we don't have kind of impulse control anymore. But, you know, it poses it poses challenges for us in like the customer experience world, right? Like, our goal as customer experience professionals is always to one meet the contract that we have in place, right like, for if you are a merchant with some of our contractors that you'll use us and we'll make sure you get paid minus the fields that will make sure you get paid, right. And when we don't meet that contract, that's when we have issues and so when we're when we meet the contract, we're just we're satisfying the demand, right? And you'll see it and a lot of companies do these like zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend us, and they always focus and like 10 is very satisfied. And they always focus on satisfaction, because they always are just focusing on meeting the contract that is in place. But what one thing I learned in my profession, right is that when you only satisfy a customer, you're not creating loyalty. You create loyalty by creating an emotional response to your product or services or to your company. And so when I was at that startup in San Diego, one thing that we did is we had a custom scale that measured using words that people understood, right. So on the low end was I hate it, and on the high end was I love it. And this concept was foreign for a lot of people. And the way I always explained it was like, Alex, you said you have three kids? I'm assuming you're married? Yep. Okay. Valentine's Day, did you tell your wife I'm very satisfied with you.

Alex McBratney (Host) 46:00

Typically it's I love you.

Graham Wright (Guest) 46:02

Typically, it's I love you, right? I hope on Valentine's Day, the one day of the year, you say I love you, right?

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 46:09

Now, Alex, you gotta try. I'm satisfied with the sort of relationship next Valentine's Day

Alex McBratney (Host) 46:15

next time around, I let Graham know. Thanks for that.

Graham Wright (Guest) 46:17

Yeah, let me know, we'll do this, we'll do this weekly, we'll have a partner. But so when you use the language that the consumer understands, right, that is emotional, and that they understand, you get better feedback. And so what we were measuring is, instead of measuring, how satisfied were you with this, we started measuring the experience, and we wanted to know what your emotional response was to it, right? And so at SumUp, we were starting to do that, as well as how can we start measuring the emotional response via surveys and vs scales. And some people, like an engineer just looks at and says, Oh, I'm just going to use the 125. Whatever scale? Yeah, I don't care. The one to five, doesn't care about the words. But you get people who use it and look at them, like, look at the points on there and say, Oh, I love it, right. And then I get people who call me up and say, Well, hey, I don't you know, I don't I don't love it. Like it's not a seven for me or whatever, right? And then I say, Okay, well then don't mark that down. Like, because we've been so conditioned. Yeah, right, you've been so conditioned to market 10 salesperson says, Oh, you got to give me a tenant, it's tied to my bonus, whatever, right? So you know, there's always this emphasis on the highest score, and what we don't, I don't want you to give me the highest score, if that's not how you truly feel, I want you to give me the score that is best reflective of the experience that you have, even if that means saying it was unsatisfactory, or that you hated it, right? Because if you tell me that, that means I have something I can fix. Whereas if you just tell me Oh, as a 10, or whatever is a seven, what does the seven mean on an NPS scale? Right? Like, there's not even a label there wasn't mean, right? And seven really good for you culturally, if I was in Japan, seven would be fantastic, right? I can. So really, we want to measure emotional response to things. And we want to measure it. We want to measure that experience on an emotional level. Not to be manipulative, but so that we can register satisfy the contract. But try and go a little bit above and beyond, right, how can we fix things so that you, you move up that scale. And we see that people who have a stronger emotional response in the positive short build up and are more likely to be loyal to us then people who mark a 10 on a net promoter score who just said that they're very satisfied. And so it's just because it's a different it's a mindset shift. It's going from satisfactory, just meeting the contract to kind of going above and beyond the contract without having to give away the whole company, right, like, so. It's, it's an interesting, an interesting battle that always is occurring.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 48:59

Have a quick story. For Alex, I promise it'll be quick, but because we're wrapping up here, but um, when I was a little kid, I went on a cruise ship with my parents and this back when cruises actually existed. And for people who don't know the cruise experience, it's all you can eat. For adults, it's all you can drink but as a kid, you remember the fun experiences throughout the day, but the most important thing is dinner because you get dressed up you put a little like, note suit jacket on and like you get all fancy and you go to dinner with family and usually they're just like 10 people at a table and the waiter comes over anyways. I remember being on this cruise because every time the waiter came over and interacted with us, he would say something's like very excellent choice. very excellent choice. Oh, that is a very excellent desert. He said the word excellent, literally 40 times within a one hour period. And we would go back to the cabin and everyday would be like did was it weird that he said the word excellent a bunch. We'd be like, yeah, that's weird. That's weird. Come to the end of the trip, which is seven day cruise. He comes over and he, you know, takes her order and everything and we have our dinner. And then he comes over at the end and says, Hey, everyone, I just wanted to thank you all for the wonderful week. It was very excellent to serve you guys. And you may be wondering why I said the word Excellent. So many times. And I did that on purpose, because I want to get an excellent score on my ranking on my scorecard, because it ties into my bonus, and maybe I'll be able to stay as a waiter. So there's definitely some gamification around there. But your story brought that one up to into my mind. And, yeah, this the whole the whole phrase of being excellent. Like, I don't know if I would call it excellent. I, you know, the meals, I would say I loved the meals. I don't know if excellence the right word or you know, was a satisfied with service. Sure. But yeah, I love your example of using. Do you love it? Do you not love it? tying emotion to it?

Graham Wright (Guest) 51:08

Yeah, I think also like, right, like, I think the excellence is, it's what's interesting, right? When you are constantly being conditioned to hear it so that when you see it, you're like, Oh, right, like my mind thinks excellent. Service could have been crap, right. But because he keeps using that it's conditioning you and using persuasion, slight manipulation there. And that's what we you know, that's one thing I hate, I don't want that, right. I don't want to see people manipulated. Like that. And I think it's kind of a horrible thing when companies do that, but at the same time, right. We can learn, we can learn from these experiences. And so we see that here at SumUp right we see, we get negative feedback, and we try and act on that negative feedback, we try and understand the root cause of why that that is happening. And moving towards you using emotional language has been very helpful in doing that. And so we don't try and communicate it in a in a persuasive way. But we do try and you know, say, hey, these are things that we fixed that we hope you will write, like, because these were big issues that that we had, and we hope you love our fixes, so that you stay with us so you don't churn so that, you know, we can keep helping you out and your business out. And so it's always an interesting thing as I think there's a fine line between persuasion and manipulation.

Alex McBratney (Host) 52:33

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I wish we had more time to discuss as well to just absolutely do this again, because I like the subject of it, of just meeting those SLAs are what the expectation is versus the emotional aspect to it. Because that's like you said, it's going to build brand loyalty. It's going to build a word of mouth, it's going to do all those things actually drive the business forward. Where if a waiter or someone just looking for 10 of satisfactory, it doesn't give you any it doesn't arm you with any data to really go out and how to fix the business and improve the business. Yes, no, it's absolutely an important subject. And we should talk about that a little bit more in the podcast to Aarde and bring some people back like you, Graham and just have a roundtable on. Let's talk about this, like, you know, manipulation in the CSAT and NPS and all this all these metrics and how do you know like, they're actually accurate. But Graham, I have to say, Man, it was we pushed the limit here. I loved it. We had a great time chatting it up with you. And honestly, we just got into a whole, we just opened Pandora's box when at the like last five minutes. But it was a it was fun having you on and I'm glad you can.

Graham Wright (Guest) 53:40

Yeah, it was great to be here. And honestly, if you ever want to have me back on, I'm more than happy to do it again.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 53:46

Absolutely. I think we're going to have to do a follow up. And Alex, I think I love that idea of maybe a roundtable with two or three people in similar roles. And we could talk about a specific topic like surveys and customer experience. But Graham, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Alex pleasure as always, and we'll see you on the next podcast.

Alex McBratney (Host) 54:06

Sounds good. Well, that wraps up the show for today. Thanks for joining. And don't forget to join us next week as we bring another guest in to talk about the trends around cloud contact center and customer experience. Also, you can find us at adleradvisors.com, LinkedIn, or your favorite podcast platform. We'll see you next week on Another Cloud Podcast.