X
How we help
Why Gladly
Drive Revenue
Enhance Efficiency
Decrease Costs
What makes us unique
Customer at the center
Best of AI and people
Customer service AI
All in a lifelong conversation
Compare Gladly
Zendesk
Salesforce
Genesys
Gorgias
Kustomer
Freshdesk
See How Gladly Works
Request a Demo
Products
Product Overview
Customers at the Center
People Match®
Payments
Personalized Self-service
IVR
Support Hero Experience
Customer Profile
Conversation Timeline
Answers
Task Management
All Channels Built-in
Voice
Email
SMS
Live Chat
Social Media
Insights
Liveboards
Insight Builder
QA Insights
Real-time CSAT Feedback
A-Z Directory
Custom Integrations
Featured Integrations
Shopify
Medallia Agent Connect
Klaviyo
Most Popular
Agyle Time
Big Commerce
Magento
Featured Customers
Deckers
Tory Burch
Breeze
Ulta
All Customer Success Stories
Radically Personal Podcast
Episodes
Learn
Blog
Podcast
Reports and Guides
Events and Webinars
Grow
Learning
Community
Help Docs
Mentorship
Connect
Gladly Connect Live
AI-powered customer service without compromises
Perfectly balance efficiency and the human touch
Radically Personal and BARK
Unleashing AI to Scale Customer Service Happiness
Customer Experience
CX Hero Resources
The Final Rose: Win Customer Hearts
Top Brands' Secrets to Customer Love in the Age of AI
Share
Featuring Tom Montgomery
Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer at Chubbies
Learn from the leader of Chubbies, a brand that’s not only known for their bright colored, retro-style shorts, but more importantly, for their close-knit community of advocates and loyal fans.
Tom Montgomery
Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer, Chubbies
Joseph: I am so excited to welcome Tom, one of the co-founders and the CMO of Chubbies on today. We have been threatening to do this for many months. I’m excited to chat with you and tell us the Chubbies story. Welcome.
Tom: The saga. Yes, thank you ...
Tom: The saga. Yes, thank you for having me. I’m extremely excited. I appreciate all the flexibility as we worked through scheduling. It never works out the way you think it will.
Joseph: Well, I’ll tell you, we have another podcast we recorded with Kate from Crate and Barrel. It’s COVID, so in that podcast, we’ve got a dog that’s joining in. Who knows? We’re going to have all kinds of crazy things that might happen today. Let’s start with the Chubbies story. I remember when you were getting the company started because we had met back then. How’d you meet your co-founders? What was the idea? How’d you get started?
Tom: There are four founders of the business. We met at Stanford as undergraduates, so just kind of college buddies and then stayed in touch after graduation. I went to work in Venture Capital just as we met and then co-founders worked in all varieties of different places. Start-ups, one worked in corporate retail at the Gap, one worked in a more hardcore finance growth equity, private equity, banking sort of track. We all stayed in touch and all had- we were all friends, but we also had similar fashion sense. You can probably guess what that was.
Joseph: It was the beach.
Tom: We were living in San Francisco and I think the idea came about this on a weekend trip up to Napa. Anytime you’re getting out of the city, you’re wearing clothes built for the sun, and for us, that was some variation of proper men’s shorts which were like three to seven-inch inseam, well above the knee, give the legs room to breathe. The funny thing is it was very natural to us and I think somebody else pointed it out that we were all hanging out and also had relatively short shorts for the time.
We realized it and we were talking about how did we find these products? Everyone had a similar story in that it was similarly difficult to find these products. For me, I would go through thrift stores and I even got gifted a pair of proper length shorts for my birthday one year from a friend in college. She’s awesome, and I still hang on to those shorts to this day. Somebody else would have it passed down through a long family lineage of short shorts. They were always from the ’70s and ’80s and they weren’t anywhere to be found at least in the States in any men’s fashion brands. None of us actually bought them from a real clothing brand. It was just really hard.
That started the idea of what if we sold this? Because we clearly love it and when we’re wearing it, we sometimes get commentary from our friends or their friends or whatever.
Joseph: Where’d you get those shorts? There’s an opportunity here. [laughs]
Tom: Exactly. I played soccer growing up, and for me, I didn’t like having any fabric around my knees because then you couldn’t run as- in the youthful time, you couldn’t run as fast or kick as hard. Then that just stuck with me through my whole life. That was the product.
Joseph: You guys just had overnight success by the way. You launched. It worked, right? It was easy. [laughs]
Tom: Exactly, yes. That’s how things go. That’s why everyone starts businesses.
Joseph: Everything is just up into the right. You guys were super creative actually. You guys did some really creative things to launch the company.
Tom: I’d say one of the hallmarks of the things we did when we were young were the things that we would probably never consider doing now, maybe that’s to our detriment. A funny example is in the early days, in 2012, Facebook advertising was just getting going, and we were early advertisers on the platform, learning about how this whole system worked. One of our goals was like build the following on Facebook. We saw we had a really active community. We saw customers just giving us tons of feedback and we wanted to channel this into a place that we could more formally communicate with everyone in a really fun way. The Facebook following was the big thing.
We realized when we’re advertising, if we’re putting our advertising hats on thing, we could pay a dollar to pick up a like on Facebook or a new follower on Facebook. This was at a time where we weren’t really pushing a ton of money around. We didn’t have a lot of resources. We were like, “We don’t have enough money for that to be meaningful.” We needed to find another solution. We also knew because at this time we were shipping out a lot of koozies along with our shorts and along with our product our shipments, just to be a nice value-added thing that for somebody to find the surprise in their package. We knew the cost of a koozie and the cost of a koozie was under 20 cents.
We knew the cost of a koozie. We knew that an envelope was extremely inexpensive. We knew the cost of a stamp was around 40 cents. We figured for all in at around 50 cents, you could put together a package that you could send out to somebody. We had the harebrained idea that for anybody new who becomes a fan of the brand, it’s cheaper for us to just send them a koozie than it is to pay for this on Facebook.
We kicked off a campaign with that as the back. What we saw was exactly what we thought would happen happened. People responded extremely positively to free product. We grew about 50,000 new followers in a matter of a few weeks. This was when we were only at-
Joseph: If I followed you, I’d get a koozie? Was that the deal?
Tom: It was a little bit more complex than that because we wanted to build in some virality. It was basically-
Joseph: I had to get someone else to get a koozie if you– [laughs]
Tom: It’s a koozie amplification strategy that now they’re teaching at the Stanford GSB. You had to be a fan of us already and then share the page. That was it. Anybody who was a fan could get a koozie.
Joseph: How many?
Tom: We ended up needing to send out 30,000 koozies. Up until this point, we’d sent out 100 pairs of shorts on a good day, this is 2012. The short shorts market was still catching on.
Joseph: That’s so great.
Tom: We had to figure out how the heck are we going to send out 30,000 koozies? Step one is let’s just try and ship one. When we get to the post office, we realize they have a very interesting way of determining package sizing. It’s this plastic flimsy- almost looks like a piece of paper, but it’s plastic with a little hole in it. If your envelope fits through that, you can pay for it with one stamp. We were a millimeter to where if you compressed it slightly, it would get through, or you gave it any sort of force, but the people at the post office- and at this point, we were still just shipping through the post office. We were doing all of our own fulfillment.
Joseph: It was in your basement or something or whatever.
Tom: We had a basement with a packing operation, and the team would go from working the day job to packing up boxes downstairs, and then somebody would take it over to the post office. Realized you couldn’t pay for it with one stamp, so all of a sudden, our economics are all out of whack. Not only that, you had to figure out how are you going to send out the volume of 30,000 koozies?
Immediately, I started working on vacuum sealing technology, how tightly could I tape the packages, the envelopes, and we ended up finding the solution to the envelope problem, and then we brought in about 10 people off of Craigslist to just come in and seal, stamp, label envelopes. We found somebody who fortunately was able to process 30,000 envelope shipments. We didn’t get it done quickly, but within I’d say 45 days, we had all 30,000 koozies sent out.
Actually, we retained, I think, around 30% to 40% of the staff that we brought on to help us run our warehouse and run our fulfillment facility. It was really great. It was one of those things where, if you look back on it, you never would have said, “Oh, yes. Let’s do that,” but it turned out to be really, really positive for the business in a lot of ways.
Joseph: Obviously, this idea of community, it’s just like a core to the brand. You started early days just on Facebook, et cetera, but you shared a story about a customer that whose shorts were stolen.
Tom: Yes. [chuckles]
Joseph: I’d love you to share with them here. The power of community, everyone thinks about community and getting people. It’s on Facebook. No, it’s about who that individual one person is that then goes and tells these amazing stories about Chubbies to everybody else. What happened with that?
Tom: We had a customer write in and I think he was at the lockers in the gym and he left his shorts out and he came back and they were gone, and we figured really what the problem there was. The implication was that they were stolen by maybe a bully in the gym, and then for us, the natural action is, as any friend would do, we got them karate lessons so that next time, they could stand guard to make sure no one touches their shorts.
I think that was a hallmark in all seriousness. If you think about community, we really think about community and our customers as the. 5th co-founder of the business. We could not have gotten anywhere without them. They were a source of content for us in the early days, in terms of social media. Even now, when you look at our social media, it’s pretty much all user-generated content.
They’re our best content producers. We had people writing product descriptions for us from the moment that they got them. Before we had any review system in place, we would get these sagas written from our customers that were just their experience with the product, and it was such a fun time and so interesting to see, and we instantly translated a lot of what they gave us into content that we just shared back out. Realistically, the business is built with, by, and for the community.
Joseph: You guys even- from what I understand, many of the models they’re your customer. Is that right?
Tom: Exactly. We hire and staff most of our models out of our customer base and every year, we run a man model contest where we basically search for more models from our customer base and just basically activate as many people as we can to let us know who they are. Let us know what drives them. For us, it’s always been about personality and just finding people who convey the brand.
For us, the brand has always been about inclusiveness, body positivity, diversity. We wanted to make sure that we were clear with that. We genuinely sourced everyone and everything from the community, and not only are they something that we’re trying to serve and work towards, but they’re fundamentally a founding piece of the brand.
Joseph: I love that idea of the community is the fifth co-founder. I never heard that expression before, but it’s super powerful because it’s taking customers and turning them into your champions.
Joseph: How do you think about customer service as part of that community building and what’s the role of service for the company?
Tom: One of the big cultural tenants of Chubbies is we value the customer, then the company, then the self, and that’s kind of the order in which we think about service. We want to make sure we’re servicing the customer, then we serve the company, then we serve ourselves, and it’s one of the things that we have on posters and whatever, but it’s also I think more critical, it’s the way that the team lives and the way that we live and breathe and operate day-to-day.
For us, the customer is the pinnacle. As founders, we always wanted to embody servant leadership, and I’d say we’re doing our best, but the idea there is always assessing the needs of your team and your employees and making sure that you’re working your hardest to meet those needs and whether that’s giving them a hand on whatever tactical or gritty tasks they’re working on, no matter how small it is, where your employees need help is where we should be as leaders.
Similarly, our employees convey that and embody that one as it pertains to our customers, and customer service is the frontline of that where, one, customers come to us with genuine problems and the most burning needs that they have, or to solve some sort of issue, some sort of product defects, shipping issues, things like that, where we have to resolve that very quickly and do so with them at the forefront, and the company as the secondary layer.
A good example of this is in 2020, we got hit with just all sorts of wild shipping delays because the e-commerce world blew up and the carriers just weren’t ready. There were a lot of problems with getting staff on and we totally commiserated. It was like, “Okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to process this?” Because on the one hand, you’ve got a way to conservatively message and you can try to be on the more conservative side of things, let customers know that the delays are going to take a lot longer, be as upfront as you possibly can, and try to make sure that you’re not setting customer expectations incorrectly.
Then on the other side of that, you have to try to set them so that they’re a little bit less conservative, and that might retain more revenue because people might be more likely to buy if they think the shipping timelines are shorter, but then you might start missing customer expectations, and for us, and our customer service team leads this, it’s always been an easy decision, we want to make sure that we’re conservative with our estimations, we want to make sure that we are upfront about that. A lot of times people might just assume what our shipping timelines are, so we need to get in front of them before they even place the order so that they know.
It’s kind of the front lines, and it’s where we interact and it’s where we get feedback. The customer service team also has so much important data for our product team, for our marketing team. It’s where the rubber hits the road on the customer company itself for us.
Joseph: Okay, one of the things that we’ve talked about is one-to-one conversations like that intimate, one-to-one customer conversation, the one-to-many when you’re managing service. How do you think about that? You talked a little bit about it in the shipping example, which is, you want to get ahead of it. There are certain things you want to get ahead of people all the time, but how do you think about the differences between that from a service standpoint?
Tom: It’s a really interesting question and one that- we’re on the journey where we don’t have like a firm route, we’re in experimentation mode as it comes to this, but it’s one that we’re really thoughtful of. There are a few vectors that it’s really interesting to think about when you think about the differences between a one-to-one conversation, just a straight-up normal customer service interaction, or a retail store interaction or whatever, and how either that interaction or a similar interaction can be one-to-many.
One of the ways that karate story embodies is like, one of the ways a one-to-one interaction can become one-to-many is when it’s either sufficiently positive or sufficiently negative or sufficiently interesting as to become a story that people want to tell. It’s one of the things that we’ve tried to embody in the way we approach customer service and customer experience, in general, is give people such positive experiences and such interestingly positive experiences that they become stories and they become conversations.
That’s one way to go to scale your CX efforts from one-to-one to one-to-many. The second one that is somewhat related is as you have these one-to-one interactions, you start to learn so much about what the problems are that you’re experiencing, or your customers are experiencing. You can translate that quickly into things like FAQs, videos, even the way you build the brand fundamentally, those interactions can go from a one-to-one interaction to then affecting the many, either in this very tactical format of an FAQ or, for us, we’ll take that and instantly integrate it into product development and that’s a way to affect the many.
We’re constantly looking for ways to scale these customer experiences, and for us, the customer service team is at the center of it. We have a meeting series called the Voice of the Customer, where customer service leads it and they just let us know all of the things that we could be scaling out, the feedback that they’re getting straight from customers. That’s really, really powerful, and it’s figuring out how to turn the customer service organization from what might be thought of as a cost center into an engine, and for us, that’s really, really important and very related to this idea of like, how does a one-to-one then become scaled in this like one-to-many scenario?
Joseph: Yes, a lot of people think of one-to-many as like, how do I communicate with one customer? Many people think that one-to-many is like, “Okay, now I’m just communicating to many,” but the way you think about it is how do we take this one-to-one conversation that’s happening and how do we have it impact the many, across everything the company does, like, “Hey, let’s change the product. We got a suggestion on something that we hadn’t thought about, let’s go execute on that,” it’s a mindset that is, “Hey, what happens here,” in a conversation with a customer can then impact every other customer, which is great. That’s how you scale, that’s how you take that voice of the customer and make it impact the business.
Tom: Yes. That’s from the customer experience perspective because once you start thinking about it as how are you communicating with many people, that starts to be on fringe marketing, and there’s pieces of that where customer experience can serve as marketing really well. Instagram comment feeds and things like that are really cool ways to work customer service doubles as a marketing moment there, but realistically, there’s so many ways to scale the efforts of your team, and we’re looking for all of those, like how can we best just scale the efforts, and for us, again, that’s the engine, understanding our customers is the engine.
Joseph: Yes. Talking about change, your brand, Chubbies, I’m guessing, you’re a younger lifestyle-oriented brand, right? Meaning your customers are younger than other brands. The way that your demographic of your core customers communicates is obviously very different than others, and I was wondering if you could chat a little bit about how that changed, I know together we launched SMS, for example, as a channel and it seems to have- well, it seems to have done very well. [laughs]
Tom: Don’t be modest.
Joseph: It was almost like a third of the volume- 30% of our channel
Tom: It’s been wild.
Joseph: How do you think about that? Were you surprised by that?
Tom: I was very surprised.
Joseph: Really?
Tom: Well, in hindsight, I can justify it and we were marching towards it and we knew that it was important because, for us, it solves a real customer problem. I think for me, what I realized after the fact, as I’m reflecting, as we so often do on things that are successful, now we have all the reasons why.
Joseph: You know that hindsight is 2020.
Tom: Exactly. It solves the customer problem and I think what we missed was just how significant that problem is, and that problem is that if you want live communication, there’s not a great experience outside of SMS because your chat experience is live, but you’re tied to a website. Your voice experience is live, but because it’s such an arduous channel for our team to handle, it means that you can’t serve as many customers, so you’re either waiting in the line, you have to sign up for a callback that takes six hours to get back, and email is inherently this latent lag channel because there’s so much structure to the conversation.
SMS solves this really interesting customer problem that is just like, “I want fast feedback but I don’t want to be stuck on your site, I don’t want to be stuck on the phone with you,” and for us, it was just under estimating how significant that problem was, but we saw SMS obviously– I’m totally in the generation that SMS is the main form of communication.
Joseph: I’m older than you, but it is the main way I communicate with everyone in my life.
Tom: Right. Again, that’s because it solves this problem of- if you were to call everyone that you wanted to talk to, at the same frequency with which you’re texting, those conversations end up taking 30 minutes to an hour, and you’re taking up every evening you have in perpetuity to communicate in a way. It really does solve a big problem and I just think the younger generation is very fast to adapt to that.
We’ve seen that with SMS, and now like I said, it’s up to a third and I see that continuing to grow. I think there’s still definitely use cases where other channels make a ton of sense, but I think that we’re a little over a year into it, and we only launched in the back half of last year, and it’s already up to a third. I got to imagine it’s going to up, but it’ll be interesting to see what the next one is and how y’all are thinking about it because there’s so many experiences out there where you can relate to customers, what are your thoughts on that next frontier?
Joseph: My product team is going to kill me if I say this, but I’ll share it. One of the things we’ve been thinking about and I know you’re thinking about this, which is how do you digitize the retail experience going forward? I think that COVID obviously has really fundamentally changed the way we as consumers purchase, do commerce, et cetera. One of the things where we think that’s going to be quite interesting is video.
When I was in your office, you have merchandise all over the place, right? We think a lot about customer experience teams, becoming more of the frontline pre-sales, not just post-sales, we think about revenue generation. We actually think about video as a way to extend the conversation when people are asking questions about part of that, let me show it to you. You might not be able to touch and feel it, but I can and I can at least get it to be that connection that- I think in work we’ve all– The last year, video has been it, and we think that’s an interesting channel that really hasn’t taken off.
Part of it is- I think historically people have thought, “Oh, for video, you’re going to do a video of the support person,” and it’s actually not the point, the point is actually how do I use video to let people experience my product in a way that they couldn’t do– You don’t even have to see the support hero. I don’t like calling people agents, I like support hero. It’s not about them, it’s not about having a face to face, you can do that, but I actually think that that’s actually going to be quite interesting going forward and you’re starting to see people adopt that as another channel.
Tom: I think there’s an interesting insight in how you’re building a product roadmap, there’s an element of solving the problem of e-commerce. One of the problems of e-commerce had always been for us, theoretically, when you think about the big differences between retail and online, we’d always been thought of fit and how does it look on you and all that stuff, but there’s another piece of that. That’s what’s the relationship with the person and how do you interact with that person? I think there’s something really interesting around, is that the true problem that you needed to solve to bring that experience online versus things like fit or things like that?
Joseph: My perspective on it is I do think that if you can make service about people, if you think about- in real life, in the real world experiences, yes, the person helps you and maybe helps you with fit, but usually, it’s because the person was just helpful, there’s just a qualitative side of it. If we could figure out how to deliver that in mass digitally, that’s our whole mission, that’s the idea of radically personal service. It’s why we call the podcast that. I just think that when you make it about people and great service is about someone having a great relationship, I think that just is really powerful.
I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this. Every other service platform out there, they’re centered around a case or a ticket. I don’t know if I told you, I was actually curious why we use cases and tickets, do you know where it comes from?
Tom: No.
Joseph: The case, the metaphor of a case comes from a legal case file. It got adopted by hospitals as this patient case record, case file, and then eventually someone built some software for the insurance industry called case management. Everyone was using cases for- and I don’t know about you, but I don’t look to attorneys for relationship advice. That’s just not the place I go. This idea that of making it personal, that was the thing. It’s great to hear what you think about that. Now, on that topic, one of the questions I always ask everybody, the name of the podcast is Radically Personal, what’s something radically personal about you that most people don’t know?
Tom: It would be tough for most people to know this because this is recent news. My wife and I are expecting our first child.
Joseph: Oh, that’s awesome.
Tom: We got a little baby boy coming at the end of June. I hope that I know enough to know that I don’t know anything about what’s coming, but I’m taking classes, I’m reading books. I’m convincing myself more and more and more that I just don’t know enough. We could not be more excited. End of June, June 24th, so that’s-
Joseph: That’s a pretty good one.
Tom: Yes, I can’t imagine, big moment.
Joseph: Does the company know? [crosstalk]
Tom: Company knows.
Joseph: Oh, they do. Okay.
Tom: This isn’t the reveal, but it’s a big one. We couldn’t be more excited. End of June, a summer baby, so we’re looking forward to it.
Joseph: That’s great. That’s awesome. Good luck. I think I mentioned to you earlier, being a parent is just one of these things that you can only understand when you experience it. You’ll be a great dad. I’m sure of that. I’m sure your little baby boy is going to have the coolest darn clothes out there. I can’t wait. I’m imagining what the baby picture is going to come out like.
Tom: We hope so. We got young fashion that I got to focus on. I’m learning, we’ve been reading. I’m a total fantasy geek, so I’ve been reading The Hobbit in utero, which has been great. Doing all the voices of Gandalf and the dwarfs. It’ll at least be a unique young kid wearing shorts, quoting Gandalf.
Joseph: One question I want to ask you, as a fellow entrepreneur, what’s the lesson that you’ve learned as an entrepreneur that you wish someone had taught you? You’re seven, eight years into this journey, is there something you say, “Hey, I wish someone had told me this”?
Tom: Yes. I think it’s probably a different take. I wish I would have been able to learn it when they told me it.
Joseph: You didn’t listen. Is that what you’re saying? [laughs]
Tom: You just can’t relate with certain things. One of the things for me is for any entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur, just be ready for it to be hard. Be ready for it to be difficult. Be ready for it to take time. For us, this is our 10th year of business and every year presents new and unique challenges.
Joseph: Like a pandemic you mean?
Tom: Like a pandemic and countless others. Be ready for failure, be ready for all of those things, be ready for self-doubt, but also be ready for it to be worth it. For me, that’s one of the things that again, you can only live it to really understand what that means because you can hear that and you can pay lip service to it. Honestly, it’s only when you look back that you’re like, “Wow.” It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work.
The second one I had is just setting yourself up to have a great relationship with your customer from day one. I think that we were very fortunate to have that. I think whether it is you ensuring that you have a really good data stack, the right CX partner, an active community, just really to make sure that you’re working to have a thorough understanding of your customer and the ability to communicate with them authentically because, again, it’s the fifth co-founder or depending on how many co-founders you have, it’s the basis of what you’re going to build. I think it’s vitally important to really start working on that from day one.
Then the last piece is related to something we’ve already talked about, but just really aligning on your values. Again, it’s one that you hear and you see and it’s in the books, but again, it’s something that you realize the value of it as you’re living it, and I wish there are ways to kind of help people internalize it, but cannot emphasize enough to really make sure you have codified values, and that they’re intrinsic to the way that your company lives their day-to-day and it’s certainly always going to be aspirational. It’s how your company kind of aspires, but it’s something that can be natural, and something that can come to life in just day-to-day actions that aren’t forced. I think that those three are the ones that stand out to me, in terms of advice.
Joseph: In that last one, just to comment a little bit on one of the things that you mentioned, is that you’re actually launching a foundation this year, which is related to your values. What’s the impetus there and what’s that going to be about?
Tom: From day one, the business has been about really building that Friday at 5 PM feeling, and when we thought more about that, as we started to grow and build, it really came down to balance and finding balance. I think one of the interesting things that we’ve learned is that there are many, many, many people who have barriers to finding that balance, or who lack the support network or the support structure to find that balance, and it became a cause that we just became very interested in, particularly like focusing on mental health, a lot of mental health issues are on the rise, nearly a fifth of the US population suffers from mental- lives with mental health issues.
It’s just something that continues to grow, and for us, we couldn’t think of a more genuine way that to participate and kind of embody the principle of doing good as you’re doing well, to make sure that when we can, we can start starting to figure out a way to systematically donate to causes that are important to us. We’re going to be launching with four partners and depending on when this comes out, we’re going to be launching in the middle of May this year, and it’s going to be awesome. It’s called Foundation 43, so-called because they’re 43 muscles in your face, which you use to kind of show or sometimes hide emotion, the way you’re feeling the way you’re thinking, and that’s really embodied kind of this pursuit of mental health, and that mental health isn’t always about smiling or happiness, but it’s about being able to rely on a support network, being able to express yourself.
For us, it’s been really awesome, really positive, it’s been a ton of incredible work from the team, totally. The team has all the credit here, but we could not be more proud of our partners and our organization from just being able to do this, and systematically, as people participate with our company, they can be confident they’re participating, and, hopefully making the world a better place.
Joseph: That’s awesome. That’s great. I just want to close- we mentioned earlier about that, when we met in your- I think it was like 7:30 in the night, I remember it was raining outside, I remember that. It was just like–
Tom: It was you and me and the entire office was empty. It was you and me. [chuckles]
Joseph: You said something to me, we had a whole conversation about some product features you wanted, et cetera, and you said- I don’t know if you remember, and I’m going to paraphrase here, but you’re like, “Look, I want someone who’s going to be a partner and I want someone who’s going to be with us,” and I never forgot that conversation, obviously and it’s something that I care about and I just want to say, you have also been a great partner and I want to say thank you, to you and the whole team for that. I just thank you for sharing your story today and thanks for the partnership and look forward to many more years together and I look forward to that Friday at 5 PM where we can actually enjoy in person again, hopefully, someday soon. Thank you very, very much, Tom, I really appreciate it.
Tom: Right back at you,I really do appreciate our partnership and it’s been something where- one of our prep questions, to go behind the veil a little bit, was what companies do we look to as good models of customer experience, and Gladly is one of them, which is really impressive, and as a customer experience- as a company focused on that, you really do deliver on the goods and we’ve appreciated it routinely, and in the world of SAS and things like that, it’s not the norm. You and the team.
Joseph: Thank you for being such a great partner to Gladly and friend, and for sharing the same passion for great service that we do. I can speak for everyone on the team when I say we are so proud to be your partner in helping Chubbies deliver exceptional experiences for your customers.
I’m Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of Gladly.
If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe on Apple or Spotify, or visit us at radicallypersonal.com. We’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening. This is Radically Personal.
Read the full transcript
WAYS TO LISTEN
With a proven track record of building companies that don’t settle for the status quo, Gladly CEO and co-founder Joseph Ansanelli is reinventing customer service to put people back at the heart of it. Joseph is also a Partner at Greylock, focused on investing in enterprise applications.
Listen to the previous episode
Listen to the next episode
Hear how Ulta Beauty weathers retail closures through the pandemic, continues to remain customer-focused during an accelerated shift to digital, and more.
Learn from Crate & Barrel executive on turning a contact center into a revenue center, innovating customer service, and how COVID-19 accelerated their digital transformation.
Hear from Andie founder on how their customer service Fit Experts help customers feel like they’re shopping for swimwear with a friend.
Thank you for subscribing to the Gladly blog.