Ebrahim Hyder – VP Consumer Support at Michael Kors

Ebrahim talks about how to establish standards for operational excellence, how to create loyalty, and how to improve first-call resolution.

Nick Glimsdahl  0:03 

Welcome to the Press 1 for Nick podcast. My name is Nick Glimsdahl. And my guest this week is Abraham hider. He is the VP of consumer support at Michael Kors. Welcome to the Press 1 for Nick podcast.

Ebrahim Hyder  0:15 

Hey, Nick, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to join.

Nick Glimsdahl  0:19 

Yeah, absolutely. I’m excited to have you join to it. And one thing that I asked every single guest is, what’s one thing that people might not know about you?

Ebrahim Hyder  0:32 

Um, you know, my life is basically an open book. But I think for those people that don’t really know me, or don’t follow me on Instagram, or one of the social media channels is I’ve always had a great love for music, specifically dance music, right? So something that listeners may not know about me is that I’m a DJ. So I have my my decks and speakers set up in the basement, you know, I’m always listening to new music, and trying to curate tracks for a new set. Because every couple of months, you know, when things get a bit crazy at work, and I need a break or a distraction, I find myself putting together either a 60 or 90 minute dance music set, I put the I create the set, I finalize it, I I publish it on Soundcloud and I have my own YouTube channel. So if anybody’s interested they can go and find me on Soundcloud or YouTube. It’s it’s I warn you it’s not commercial pop or hip hop or rap. It’s more dance. Good energy good for a workout or run or jog. So yeah, that’s something that I think your listeners may be surprised to hear.

Nick Glimsdahl  1:49 

Yeah, that’s actually very unique. What is for the people that actually do want to learn more about this dance music? How do they find you? what’s the what’s the name on Soundcloud or

Ebrahim Hyder  1:59 

any? Well, it’s actually on SoundCloud. It’s DJ that latest DJ and then it’s the EB str I’ll repeat that. So it’s Delta Julia Echo, Bravo, Sierra, Tango, Echo, Romeo, d j hipster. Both on Soundcloud and on YouTube.

Nick Glimsdahl  2:19 

That’s very cool. I had to at least throw that out there. Because you you said anybody that needs to find me can find me here. I was like, Wait a second. Somebody, there’s gonna be a few people that are gonna be like, Wait, is that what is that name?

Ebrahim Hyder  2:30 

Well, you know, I didn’t want to be self promoting too much. I’m glad you prompted that question, even though I had written down to mention it as, let’s wait. Hopefully Nick mentioned that.

Nick Glimsdahl  2:42 

Well, then, so for the five people who don’t know about Michael Kors, can you tell me a little bit about who you guys are? And maybe a little bit about your role?

Ebrahim Hyder  2:53 

Sure. So Michael Kors, and I’m talking about Michael Kors, the man not the brand, right. He’s a world renowned award winning designer of luxury accessories and ready to wear clothing. And his namesake company was established in 1981. People might not realize it’s been that long. And as an organization or brand we produce a range including accessory footwear, watches, jewelry, men’s and women’s ready to wear even eyewear and fragrance products. And, you know, my role with within michael kors is I’m the Vice President of customer service for North America. My role itself is actually bifurcated between supporting our b2c online channel via the call center. And we support the US and Canada in English and French. I also manage a fairly large team that provides customer service to our wholesale customers, kinda like our b2b channel, our wholesale and our brick and mortar company own stores. So the extent of my role is to support those two significant channels.

Nick Glimsdahl  4:01 

Interesting. One of the conversations that we had before we got started or throughout 2020, is you talked about the importance of operational excellence. So tell me more about why and how you establish those standards.

Ebrahim Hyder  4:18 

So, Michael Kors is a brick and mortar stores right are well known for delivering really great customer service experiences. And that just didn’t happen overnight. You know, they, our retail team in our learning development teams, spent many years refining the service, culture and service perience. So my goal when I started the call center back in 2014, was to remain true to that brand experience. And we and we consider ourselves and you’ll see this as a tagline in all our new hire presentations and our onboarding, we really consider our steep tension of the retail store experience. Right and, and, and The goal was for me to bring that retail store into the call center. We were able to achieve this by creating an immersive environment where our outsourced call center agents feel like they’re part of the brand. We said, Okay, how do we do this? Right? The first thing we wanted to make sure is how do we create a look in the call center that replicates the stores. And if you’ve been into our stores, you know, it’s bright, it’s got great lighting, it’s got showroom, it’s got mannequins, etc. So we replicated that, in our call centers, we have showroom, we have products on display, we have several TVs constantly playing our most recent runway shows, lots of vinyl branding and decals on the wall with some of Michael’s favorite quotes. So that took care of the look aspect of the call center, right, we also wanted to replicate the sound of the stores in the call center. So what we did was we went to great extent, to find a professional voice talent to use to record all our IVR messages, you know, the voice talent had to audition, but several other talented artists. And we gave them a script, and they had to read the script. And they said, Hey, can you say this maybe a little faster, a little slower, a little sexier, maybe more, maybe more uptown. So we wanted to see the diversity in the voice talent. So we will make sure we get the correct voice talent, she had to have a very specific sound cadence in way of saying things. And then also as it relates to creating the sound in the call center, all our hold music is actually from the same playlist that pumps into our stores. So you know, the customer had to be in the store. And they just need to call us in the call center. And they go and hope there’s a very good possibility that they’ll hear the same sound. Right? What we’ve also done is inter we actually have speakers in the ceilings, that streams the same playlist as the stores. So we have in it’s very unusual for call centers to have background music. But we do have that. So we have audio coming through this through the through speakers. And we have that similar playlist for customers calling us on hold. And then finally, you know, to create this immersive environment and replicate the store experience. We focused on the people, right, we needed to recruit the right talent, and put them through extensive product knowledge and brand training, in addition to systems and processes. And then we retain the top talent by offering them Europe, a few items of clothing a year. Generally, these are hourly paid employees, so they might not have the financial wherewithal to buy some of our products. We also give them an online discount, and lots of incentives and recognition through various programs we have. So that was our goal, to create this in store experience in the call center and make sure that once we hire the team members, we keep them

Nick Glimsdahl  8:09 

I love all the attention to detail, just the small things you do from the music from the call center the IVR. Today in store like that’s that’s small things, but I’ll make a big difference because it’s it’s creating the same experience across the brand.

Ebrahim Hyder  8:29 

Right, so this one, the and I’m going to talk about pre COVID now because you know COVID disrupted a lot of our operations, but pre COVID. And since we started in 2014, I was fortunate enough, recruit and hire a Michael Kors, retail store manager, a former store manager to work in our call center as a brand ambassador. So she had her own office, she was responsible for ensuring the showroom is stocked with the current flow sets, making sure that the mannequins have current product. And also ensuring that our style what we call our agent style consultants, that our style consultants, you know, are properly trained on new products and the brand is etc. And she was integral in participating in our calibration sessions because we wanted to hear if our star style consultants are saying the right thing and using the brand voice appropriately. So if any brands out there who’s listening to this podcast, never thought about this. hiring someone from the brand embedding them in the call center as a ambassador for the brand is a good way to make sure that the call center is representing the products and the customers appropriately.

Nick Glimsdahl  9:45 

It’s really cool. I’ve seen organizations kind of forced their their brick and mortar people since COVID. back into the call center so because they didn’t have a role yet in there. location, but I’ve never seen it as somebody who was there and saying, Hey, I see an opportunity to grow the brand and grow the experience to provide a better situation for the customer.

Ebrahim Hyder  10:11 

Right. And this, this individual also had great experience in the product search. So she would use the proper technical terms when describing, you know, the drop of a handbag handle or the amount of zipper pockets of the different fabrics. And that knowledge just got absorbed into the call center by the rest of the team.

Nick Glimsdahl  10:32 

So with operational excellence, I get that, do you also focus on customer experience?

Ebrahim Hyder  10:39 

Oh, yeah, of course, you know, for us, it’s all about the customer experience. You know, not many of today’s tech savvy, consumers really want to contact the call center, you know, or speak to a human when they can self serve or find the information online. Or by themselves, I’m certainly one of those type of, of customers, right. However, when they do call, we want to make sure that the contact is memorable, and on par with the great service they can get in our stores. You know, we also try to remove any obstacles or customer efforts throughout the customer journey. We’ve been fortunate to leverage some technology to help us with this. And about not too long ago, I did some research, you know, as to what our customers really want. And it turns out, they want things to be fast, we should make it easy for them. And we should add some type of you to the, to their lives, when they contact us. So you know, we’ve captured all of that. And I feel like we’ve done a good job in meeting those customer experience expectations.

Nick Glimsdahl  11:53 

It sounds like it does. With with Michael Kors being a luxury brand. How do you go about creating customer loyalty?

Ebrahim Hyder  12:03 

Um, well, and then, you know, it helps if you if you work for a living breathing American, right. Right. So so we depend a lot on on Michael and his his brand recognition. And actually, during during COVID, he had a pretty strong to media presence. You know, inviting people into his home and giving tips on you know, how to dress, resume, etc. So we depend a lot on on Michael to build customer loyalty. But but in the call center, we focus on clienteling, right, which is different than selling, we want to ensure that we always build relationship with our customers. For example, in the stores, our store associates can always pick up the phone and call their cousin, invite them back to the store for a special promotion, or, you know, even just to call them and say hey, happy birthday. In the call center, we don’t have that ability, right. So we do everything we can to make the contact memorable. You know, we try to keep the conversation very casual, as if you speaking to a close friend. We asked lifestyle questions because we don’t want to just offer something because it’s the most, you know, the product of the week, for example, why don’t we show that we tailor the product based on the customer’s needs. And we always provide product recommendations. In addition to that microcodes has a great loyalty program. So we always ask the customer if they are part of our loyalty program. If not, we know we give them a summary of the benefits. It’s a free program. And if anything, you know, they can get free shipping for signing up, etc. So we always try to that’s the value add part of the conversation. And then sometimes, you know, customers will call us for a specific product or a specific need. And we don’t we don’t necessarily know the answer, then we’ll do you know, warm transfer to a store that’s closest to the customer will call the retail store and say hey, you know, I’ve got Nick on the line, you know, he’s looking for something for his wife or his Mom, can you prying try and possibly help him. So we do a warm transfer, we tried to keep the customer in the brand ecosystem. And I think it will help build a good relationship between the call center and the stores as well.

Nick Glimsdahl  14:23 

Although things that you mentioned, as a consumer at the end of the day, like you said, you talked about fast and easy and effortless. I also want to feel known and valued as a consumer and having that warm transfer instead of just saying hey, here’s the here’s a local michael kors location in Columbus. You know, feel free to call them between eight and five or whatever the business hours are. That doesn’t make me feel known or valued, but that warm transfer and maybe with context saying hey, let me tell this the store location what the situation is. Make that introduction. And now they have information where they know that you’re calling and the information behind it. So that’s just again, the small things that you’re doing is, is providing a huge difference.

Ebrahim Hyder  15:13 

Right then, and for me as well, right, and my call center team noses, we constantly want to not only build and maintain the relationship with the customer, but we want the stores to know that we’ve got the back as well, right, we want the stores to know, we’ll just we’ll never seen the customer their way if it’s just a complaint. Because we’ll try and resolve it ourselves. At the same time, if we have an opportunity to send possible business a way or a customer that might be a lifelong, you know, future customer will certainly hand it over to them and let them you know, carry the torch from us.

Nick Glimsdahl  15:49 

So we talked a decent amount about operational excellence. But how do you take these standards of operational excellence and run them parallel to business outcomes?

Ebrahim Hyder  16:01 

Yeah, you know, yes, that’s a good question. You know, I would say our reason for being in the call center is to not only service our customers and make them happy, but, you know, be a contributing business operation, right? So absolutely, we want to drive and generate sales. But at the same time, you know, we want to keep our costs down as well, but obviously not to the detriment of this. There’s two ways of looking at this, right, from a sales perspective, we work very hard to generate incremental sales, and ensure that we are a self funded profitable calls into operation. So everything we do is to is to drive sales, but in a way that builds relationship, right, that come back to the term client telling, we don’t hard sell. And we spent a lot of time identifying opportunities to increase our conversion rates in the call center. And we’re doing this all without hurting our cset scores. The other the other side of this is, you know, you’re driving sales, but also keeping our costs down. You know, we’ve developed some, some technology will help keep our costs down. You may have heard of the term wizo. Yep. For those listeners that don’t know, Wiz Mo, is, is the bane of my existence, to be honest with you. It’s, it’s an abbreviation for a Where is my order. So we have a lot of, of wizo calls that come into our call center, you know, and depending on if we’re running a promotion or not, it could be anything from 20 to 45% of our calls. And that’s really, you know, unproductive calls that I have highly skilled style consultants answering. So we figured out a way to allow us to self serve and get the answers they need, without necessarily speaking to an agent. And if they do want to speak to a style consultant, then they can observe, but we’ve implemented IVR automation, where customers can speak the order number into the system. And if there’s if it recognizes the order number, it says, Hey, congratulations, Nick, your order is on its way. And it actually mentioned the items in your order. And it asks you if you want the tracking number as well. So, you know, over peaks, we’ve had great success with the applicant, we probably had close to about 1000 call the self service platform. From a cost perspective, it probably saved us about you know, three to four ft. Just through this self self automated process, right. So that’s one way of keeping our costs down. We’ve also late last year implement some CTI capability, computer telephony integration where if a customer is calling me recognizing recognize the phone number, we serve up a screen pop for the style consultant that has the customer’s name, their email address, phone number and the most recent item they purchased. Previously, the to go through a series of questions to get all that info now we serve it up. Not is that saved us about precisely about 100 cisely about about 123 times that’s pretty substantial. But there’s been other parts which we never really thought about right when we canvassed our style consultants some of the things that came back with what about this feature as I said, you know, it’s helping get the job done because when the screen pop doesn’t populate, you know for a fact that this is a new customer who may not have purchased before. So you tailor your pitch and your script accordingly. Right another another sell consultancy, this is a great for customers who forgot or misplaced the order number because our order number starts two to three letters. And several numbers. So it’s not something that you know, just rolls off the tongue easily. And you probably if you don’t know it, it’s hard to remember. So that’s a great way for us to, you know, make sure that I’ll plan to to not only serve as the customer meets the business meet needs by driving incremental sales and keeping our costs down.

Nick Glimsdahl  20:22 

I think it’s so important to, to drive sales keep costs down. But also, the other two things that are just as important is, how am I providing that experience? The the, where’s my order, the wizo? Also, what because you’re trying to find a better experience for your customers, then they’re just trying to get their stuff solved. But on the other side of that phone, or that interaction is that employee who doesn’t enjoy the waste most? The oh my gosh, I just kept to figure this out. And they’d rather be the skilled style consultant and help them understand what they’re really trying to go through and help them design the right fit or product that’s for them, instead of saying, oh, here’s your order. Let me let me let me let me figure that out. So

Ebrahim Hyder  21:10 

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I remember when, when whenever I do my my regular call center visits, right, one of the main things that I tell my team that travels with me is we have to spend time on the phones. Right? So between me and my senior sales manager, we get on the phone to maybe have a competition, we actually sit right in between all the staff consultants. And we say, Okay, you know what, I’ve got to walk my talk here, I’m always talking about sales and how you clientele so I get on the phones, and I do my thing. But it’s frustrating when every school is like, Hey, I’m calling to track my order, right? So as a star consultant, energized by the opportunity, either to sell a product, or to put together an outfit and accessorize it or talk about some of the new materials or the new designs, not so much when it’s a small call, to be honest, this right? It helps actually with the morale of the other agents as well. So

Nick Glimsdahl  22:08 

yeah, good point. Yeah. And it might have an indirect consequence of retention, because they don’t want to deal with those mundane tasks.

Ebrahim Hyder  22:18 

Exactly. Yes, you’re right.

Nick Glimsdahl  22:20 

So you talked about a little bit around how you have this, this cost center, what everybody calls a cost center. But you may have been able to not just you’ve been able to find with the drive efficiencies inside the call center, and having a BSL funded profit center. And you did that within the first 12 months of starting up the contact center. Can you can you explain a little bit about that? Because I’m sure there’s a ton of yours that are all listening on how to figure out this?

Ebrahim Hyder  22:49 

Yes. So it was a combination of having a great outsource partner that we worked with, you know, when we started our call center operation, we were 100% onshore. Right. And we were unsure in in the downtown district of a major US. So so as you can imagine, yes, big box, not cheap. And through a great partnership, we were able to shift our contacts to a nation. That that allowed us to save money, but actually still keep much more stuff. Then Then if we had to remain in on us mainland, right. So we moved a lot of volume nearshore. And we chose a nearshore location versus a a offshore location. Because we were very protective of our brand, right? Our brand has its own personality and its own style. And, and we wanted to make sure that we choose a geographic location where the style consultants are familiar with the brand. They familiar with us geography with us, customs dialect vernacular. This just makes it an easier conversation when our style consultants interact customers, because there’s an inherent familiarity of what the customer is experiencing right? When we started, we were also 24 seven. And we looked at the amount of calls that are coming in off the one in between 1am and 8am. Eastern, and it was such a nominal amount but yet we had to staff not only style consultants but also leadership. So we reduced our hours. Then at the same time we equipped our style consultants with the skills to generate the sales. We have a really comprehensive michael kors training program that they go through that that helps them to drive sales, and they reinforce those critical elements of the sale by Including that in our call monitoring and QA photo when we do calibrations or when the quality assurance team listens to calls, they make sure that the staff consultants when the under sales call, they are following the recommended procedure. We monitor sales conversion religiously every day. That’s one of our key metrics on our scorecard. And it’s interesting, though, because when we’re not making our sales and our conversion rate, and then we read to what could be driving that, but but also, you know, we may have made, we may have been achieving our conversion rate, but missing our sales go. And when we look deeper into that, you know, the first thing that we that we might notice is that our team is doing what they’re supposed to do on the phones. But you know, we happen to be running a promotion, which decreases our average order value. So they selling the selling, but they’re selling it at a lower value. So, you know, for any leader, I think they need to be very attuned to what’s happening in the operation. But also, you know, take some bold steps and and make some decisions to, you know, maybe shift to the front or cheaper location or reduce your hours. Because, you know, I don’t see a lot of people laying in bed at 3am in the morning shopping for expensive handbags, even if they do so with with the hope that they conclude that action online and not call us, right?

Nick Glimsdahl  26:27 

Yeah, yeah, I definitely don’t sit in bed and try to purchase a handbag at 3am. That’s not not something I’m interested in. So maybe another time. But you mentioned one of the metrics that you measure is conversion. But one of the big metrics of measuring a contact center success is the first call resolution. So how do you and Michael Kors measure first contact resolution and what’s your success rate?

Ebrahim Hyder  26:55 

So we’ve been measuring FCR, since we want to drive it. So So generally surveys optical surveys I, I like but it has to to not be something that’s going to be so consuming for the caller to complete that they just don’t want to do it. Right. So so we have a six question survey, five questions about the satisfaction with the interaction with the style consultants are purely about the style consultant. And the sixth question is FCR. So yeah, you know, we do measure FCR. And when customers voluntarily participate in the survey, you know, over the years, we’ve been able to to increase our FCR to an average of just over 90%, nine, zero. But here’s the interesting thing, right? We actually have to phone into action types, we we measure FCR. We have our sales and say sales in one line. And then we have a warranty or post sale type support line. You know, under the warranty line when customers are calling us they dissatisfied because the product didn’t meet the expectation. So generally, customers are not very happy on the warranty line. But we can to make them happy, right? So the FCR on the warranty line hovers on the the mid to high 2% mark. But on the sales line, it’s in the low 90s. So when you get the blended average is about 90 right. For us increasing first, contact resolution was a big initiative. I mean, besides the financial impact of having less unproductive calls, we also increase cset. Right. And we were able to do this, we had a 12 month long project focused on increasing FCR. We started the big fiscal year and we ended at the end of our fiscal year. And we did this by employing a strategy management methodology called the four Disciplines of Execution, also known as for dx for delta x ray. It’s a Franklin Covey methodology that leaders and businesses use to build roadmaps to achieve their critical goals. And for for the listeners that are listening in Nick is nodding his head. Do you know about 40x? Nick,

Nick Glimsdahl  29:17 

I am very aware of 40x Yeah, it’s interesting that you’re taking that and putting it into FCR though.

Ebrahim Hyder  29:24 

Oh, yeah, I’ve applied it to FCR I’m applied to reducing handle time I’ve applied it to increase in QA calibration scores. And and we will run one one of these initiatives a year for a fiscal year so we have ample time. And if you Okay, do you mind if I briefly tell your listeners the phase Disciplines of Execution? Go ahead, okay, so it’s fairly simplistic and easy to follow. It consists of four things. The first one is called focus on the wig. The wi g Which is just an abbreviation for the wildly important goal, find that one single that you want to focus on, and make that your strategy for the year. So you need to define that goal, right, just focus on the one thing, because what you don’t want to do is get caught in what is called the world when all the other things that are happening around you on a daily basis that can distract you. So define your wig, right? discipline to is act on the leaders to whatever the outcome is you’re trying to achieve, what are the two or three lead measures or metrics that you can measure that if you improve will result in you achieving your goal, right. So this is under lead measure, discipline, three is the fun part, which is, you know, keep a compelling scoreboard. So have a scoreboard, have your team come up with a scoreboard, you know, in bold, post your wig on there, and then you have a chart for your your lead measures. But it’s a great way to keep track of your progress over the over the over the weeks and months. And the final one is create a cadence of accountability. I love this one. This is really just a weekly touch base with all the team members on the project, where everybody takes two to three minutes to talk about one commitment we’re actually going to take in the coming week. And if they’ve achieved their commitment they’ve set for the for the current week. And it really, you know, bottles it down to just everybody taking one ad that they can commit to and completing it and driving and driving and driving. And and this is the approach we took to increasing FCR I think for the 12 month period, the collective team did 147 individual tasks or actions, which got us to our FCR, which we’ve been maintaining for a couple of years. Now. I know that’s a long winded way of saying it. But the gist of it is, you know, if you haven’t heard about it, explore four Disciplines of Execution. It’s a great, great tool.

Nick Glimsdahl  32:07 

The reason why, why I love it, for one, because it worked. But for two, that everybody had their own marching orders, you had this, this wig this, you know, the wildly important goal, and everybody had their marching orders every week. And it’s saying, Are you on track or off track? And my guess is if somebody was off track, you’re saying, Okay, how can I help you get back on track?

Ebrahim Hyder  32:31 

Right. But in fact, there’s a term for that, Nick, if you remember, I think me as let’s call it the the league or the the project sponsor, my role was to smooth the path. Right, I think that’s the term they use, you know, I need to make it possible for my team members to achieve their goals by removing any obstacles in their way.

Nick Glimsdahl  32:55 

And a lot of those obstacles are just like you said, the whirlwind, the super busy things that are around us that are really not that important. So if we can stay focused on that goal, I love the importance of keeping each other accountable and then helping them rate that on on track or off track. And that creates momentum when you have these small wins that it creates those memorandums for success. So, congrats to you. That’s really, really awesome. The

Ebrahim Hyder  33:26 

Thank you.

Nick Glimsdahl  33:27 

Two questions I

asked everybody at the end of every podcast is, first one is what book or person has influenced you the most in the past year. And then the second one is, if you could leave a note to all the customer service professionals and hit it’s gonna hit everybody’s desk Monday at 8am. What would it say?

Ebrahim Hyder  33:46 

Okay, wow, okay, let me think about the soap. So, you know, the pandemic, I’m an avid reader, I love reading. But with with, with two kids running around and, you know, a DJ gig in my basement, I don’t find a lot of time to read. So what I’ve actually done is I had a I had a lengthy commute to and from work. So I would actually do a lot of audiobooks, right, I would probably go through like, you know, four audiobooks a month. But during COVID, I, I was at home and I had time to read and I was actually reading a book, and it’s called pushing boulders pushing boulders by an author called Ethel Williams at h Ll fo Williams. I’ll tell you a little bit about this book. You know, it tells the really extraordinary story of a cape town born man, Cape Town, South Africa. He was born in a police station during the middle of the apartheid era. And then he struggles to overcome immense political and social odds to become the first one of the first people to ever graduate with a master’s degree from five of the world’s top universities, including Harvard MIT and Oxford, right at the height of his successful international business career. At the age of 40, he he forgoes all his wealth and status, to use education and sells actually Lamborghinis, Rose all these fans pursue a mission to use education to enable and inspire others to thrive, right, so, so pushing boulders is a story about how you can pursue your dreams. It shows that with a little bit of self belief and resilience, you can push aside the boulders that block your path to success. A little disclaimer here, though, is that I’m the author. So when it’s actually know him, he was a year ahead of me in high school. We used to play baseball together. I remember when he graduated, a year ahead of in high school he went to he was the one of the first you know, people of color to attend a all white university graduate with his master’s and the book details some of the challenges that he faced as a person of color coming into the business also highly recommended pushing boulders by athlete, I think it’s actually on Amazon as a Kindle reading. I think it could be like, I think it could be free, actually, I don’t know. But push them highly recommended. You know, your second question, if I could leave a note to all customer service professionals, what would I say, you know, there’s so much that I can think of, but I think I will distill it down to this, you know, our roles as cx leaders are really thankless boats, right? It’s not like we are getting lots of emails every day and texts and social media posting, thanking us for for seeing issues and preventing them before they even happened. Right. So you know, we work tirelessly behind the scenes to prevent these issues, from ever seeing the light of day. So I’d like to take this opportunity to give a huge thank you shout out to everybody, we’re in customer service, right? I appreciate all that you do. Thank you for all that you’ve done in elevating the service experience. You know, unfortunately, our jobs are never done. So we must keep pushing that boulder and continuously trying to improve the customer experience in whatever way possible.

Nick Glimsdahl  37:21 

That is some great advice. What is the best way for people, for my listeners to connect with you?

Ebrahim Hyder  37:29 

Oh, socially, through through LinkedIn, through LinkedIn, that would be the best way and you know, I then I’m sure there’s some people out there like me, but I do not like to see that little red badge.on my iPhone that says I’ve got an unanswered message. So rest assured, if you’re if your listeners are gonna hit me up through LinkedIn or whatever, media platform, I make it my duty to respond very quickly. So feel free and I’m glad to connect and and brainstorm will share ideas.

Nick Glimsdahl  38:02 

Yeah, he is all about the service from from connecting with people answering his messages, DJ, Eb, all the way through. He is a customer service, professional and personal legend. So connect with this guy. I really appreciate your time. It’s been really fun to learn more about what you guys are doing, from the metrics to the success that you’re having at michael kors. So thank you so much again, and wish you the most success.

Ebrahim Hyder  38:34 

Oh, and thank you, Nick for having me. I feel very honored. And again, if any of your listeners want to connect, we’ll be happy to chat. Thanks. Thank you.

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The Press 1 For Nick podcast is both educational and engaging, and each episode offers listeners a dynamic blend of insightful stories, best practices, and invaluable lessons.

Nick’s guests – each with a unique wealth of knowledge – include leaders from a variety of backgrounds and industries. Some of his guests include:

• Customer service & customer experience leaders
• A hostage negotiator
• Award-winning authors
• Home Depot’s Senior Director of Customer Care
• Former VP of Disney’s Magic Kingdom
• Lyft’s Head of Partner and Customer Engagement
• Deputy Chief Veteran Experience Officer from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs

On every episode Nick asks his guest two questions:

1. What book or person has influenced you the most in the past year?
2. If you could leave a note to all the Customer Service and CX professionals, what would it say?

You can find all the podcast guests’ answers under their episodes below.

If all you want is the guests’ book recommendations, you can go here.

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