HELLO FUTURE: Customer Service of the Future (PART 2)

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Somebody who has inspired me. Really, my whole life has
been Steve Jobs. I just think he is one of
the great American thinkers, inventors, leaders, just a fascinating, fascinating
figure and a great American you know. I think when
we think of people like Thomas Edison and in the past,
I remember learning about all of these great inventors and
then to be living through what I believe to be
the fifth Industrial Revolution. I used to say the second,
and then some nerds fact checked me and said it's
the fifth. So now I say the fifth. I'm like,
put Steve Jobs up on that list. Hello, Future, it's
me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The planet is Earth, the year is twenty twenty six,
and today I really want to continue a conversation that
I had a couple of months ago with a guest
who worked for Steve Jobs. And I'm not talking about
six Degrees of Separation with Kevin Bacon or whatever that
game is. This guy literally worked for Steve Jobs, Okay,
And when you work for someone like Steve Jobs, the
lessons that you learn probably you think about for the
rest of your career. It's like Mark Twain says, when
I was a kid, my father knew nothing, but the
older I got, It's crazy how much he learned. You
know what I'm trying to say. So. Scott Hazard is
the co founder and CEO of Symmetry Call, which is
the first mobile virtual phone system in your pocket, and
it really is revolutionized customer service and the way that
companies engage with customer service. And you've ever had a
bad customer service experience with talking to AI or hitting
five eight million times until you can get to a
human to lobby your complaint. Scott's the guy who created
the company or co founded it, Symmetric Call, to help
bypass that problem. And he got to start with a crazy,
awesome career. And you should listen to our other episodes
about it. But one of his bosses was Steve Jobs,
and we extracted a little bit of the information Scott
in our in our previous episode. I remember you know
how you were designing the I call it like the
glass cube in Manhattan of the the Apple store. I
know he would call you and he would go into
the store late at night to get the customer service experience.
It's a really great episode. One of my favorites. That
we've recorded for Hello Future, but we didn't get to
cover enough. And now I want to talk about the
Genius Bar because that was something he was so passionate
about that really inspired you all these years later on
your journey of using technology for customer service and experience
and human to human contact. But the Apple Genius Bar
in its original state, the Genius Bar really had an
impact on your life.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
It did.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
And you know, it was a funny thing because the
store started before I started working in the stores, as
we talked about, before I was in product design. The
store started in about you know, the concepts were in
the late nineties. I mean, it really was born out
of Steve's frustration of selling through best fries and channels,
and what he'd found was the channel partners really didn't
care what you bought as a consumer, whether it was
a Dell or whether it was one of the Windows machines,
or whether it was a Mac. And the Mac market share,
of course before the stores was like under a percent.
I remember that kind of exists, So it wasn't something
that people were even going into a store thinking to buy.
And so what Steve had figured out, of course was
like just like symmetrical. He was the SMB or sort
of the individual solution versus sort of the evil empire
at the time Microsoft going after the big companies, right,
And so he really had realized he needed that direct
consumer interaction. He couldn't count on a Best Buy employee
or a Fries employee to tell our story, right, and
he needed that interaction. And then most importantly, he needed
the customer service follow up, and that needed to be
a person. There needed to be a way when you
had a problem with your computer, which we all know
is the center of everything in the early two thousands,
like a smartphone is now, you wanted a person.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
You didn't want to call a helpline.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
You wanted a genius. You wanted a nerd.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Genius exactly You're exactly right.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
And Apple had spent like years harvesting those nerds and
building them into customer service experts, taking like rounding in
the EQ that some of them didn't have, and putting
them in a customer facing role. And for me it
was a groundbreaker, Like I was a Mac user before
I worked there, and that was the difference for me
because if I had a paper to turn in, right
something as a deliverable. I didn't have time to wait
until customer service hours happened. I knew an Apple store
could help me and I could get back up and
running that day, and at the time, they'd even give
you a loaner.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
And so that really the seed.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
The seed with me that this is a major communication
to customers that in this crowded, commoditized PC market at
the time, this is a differentiator and we're really doubling
down on the human connection and humans as customer service leaders,
rather than going down the path we've seen society go
toward automation and robots, which we both agreed sucks.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
And I remember it must have been it must have
been like fifteen twenty years ago, you know, when the
Apple stores first started popping up. I remember my mom
and I going to one and we recognize someone who
was employed there, and it was like you were meeting
a mini Steve Jobs. I mean, there was such a
matter of pride of an Apple store Genius Bar employee.
If you worked at a genius bar, you were a genius,
you know what I mean. And so few companies not
only think that way or create that culture, but maintain it.
And I want to because I remember my one of
my first jobs was a cold Stone creamery. I remember
to get that job. They called it an audition because
you had to sing when you got a tip, and
no one wants to hear me sing. But how the
hell they ever hired me is beyond But it was
all about how do you give someone joy when they're
when they're going to get ice cream? But I've remember
if you worked at cold Stone, that was I mean,
people are listening to this probably like what a loser,
But at the time it was really cool.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
You're right, it was a cold brand.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
I was a brand.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
It was a call brand where people would seek it out.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yeah. And then when I worked at Subway, I was
a sandwich artist. I'm like, I'm an artist making hogies,
Like really, but they tried. I didn't last long at Somebody.
By the way, no knock on cold Stone or some
but no one's paying me to say any of that.
I actually still patron them both. I don't want to
get in trouble with anyone. But but what I'm trying
to get at is like this idea that I wasn't
smart enough to work at Apple, but I still but
companies that needed you know, labor marketed jobs in different ways.
So what did you learn from Steve Jobs specifically, and
what can we all learn in our lives from Steve
Jobs about the creation of the Genius Bar and the
lessons that it tells us.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, I know, it's a really good question, and sort
of I think a lot about this every day as
we build our product, and then I also reflect on
it in conversations like this, And one of the things
that always comes to mind is this idea that people
are individuals, and I think a lot of companies actually
design a product assuming everybody is sort of the same.
And one of the things the Genius Bar really highlighted
was people would come with like a myriad of issues.
Pretty soon you'd start to see most of them bucketed
into the usual kind of five or six things that
what people would come in for. But people absorb technology
and adapt technology very personally and at their own pace.
And we've seen this with self driving cars. We've seen
this with all the technology rollouts that we think should
happen quickly but actually take a long time. And one
of the things that Steve was really in tune with
was the fact that you can't control that and so
you have to create this environment or in your products
and literally in the environments of the stores where everybody
can kind of navigate their own journey and everyone can
solve their own problem on the timeframe they're comfortable solving them,
because technology can actually be a really uncomfortable thing. And
one of the things, again it's symmetrical we focused on
is technology for people to connect. And I think it's
like an easy thing to say and a really hard
thing to do. And that again comes out of my
time at Apple, which was nobody wanted these devices because
they wanted a device they needed to solve a problem
that's really been lost in our society today. And I
think that there was an era you're hitting on, even
with some of the jobs you had, where companies really
saw themselves as connoisseurs of something and custom delivery vehicles,
and I think that's shifted on us over the last
ten to fifteen years with technology, and people have raced
into this shoe will fit everybody. They either are in
my brand or not, and that's not my consent, and
we disagree with that.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
And what's crazy is even with AI and like Generative AI,
it does feel almost like you're drinking from a fire
hose of content. But people people know it's fake, know
who's actually talking and who's not. And so it's almost
as if history is just repeating itself. But you know,
I remember prior to an experience like the Genius Bart
and this is you know, I'm really dating myself. But
as a kid, you would get those instruction manuals with
a device, and you would have to save them, and
you put them in a ziplock bag and you'd keep
them in a drawer, and then if something broke, you
would like be digging through that drawer in the ziplock bag.
And you started to see these companies pop up of
Nerds or whatever, you know, geek Squad or whatever. Steve
jabs Again, I'm not trying to knock the guy at all.
I mean, I just sung his praises. But he wasn't
necessarily known for being the world's most personable person, and
yet he was maniacally obsessed with actually keeping the human
experience in the point of sale journey, that includes after
the point of sale when you're in a crunch. Because
he was really one of the first, or Apple really
was one of the first to understand that if you're
asking people to buy a new computer, which is already
like a huge trust issue, and they're breaking up with
not even a product or like loyalty to a product,
but to routine understanding the way that their brain is
learning technology and to make a whole new move where
the buttons are different, the folders look different, at the
fonts are different. That person who's selling you it better
be someone who you trust, who's smart and yeah, who
does have EQ which I love that you that you
throughout in your answer that's ahead of his time. Where
do you think that comes from?

Speaker 3 (10:44):
So one of the things that made Steve really unique
was his left brain right brain capabilities. Right, And there's
no secret that he like did a trip to India
and like immersed himself in you know, meditation, and like
he had a lot of human connection on his mind
and all the time. Like even in some of the
biographies and stories of you know, his earlier time, like
before I was alive and he's working at Atari or whatever,
you hear a lot of these stories of genuine connections,
Like the Atari employees all really enjoyed him. And then
there's funny anecdotes about sort of their team dynamics, right,
And so I always saw him actually as a relationship
focus person because he really is that way. I think
what gets lost in the story sometimes is that he
was an immensely frustrated guy.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
And he was frustrated because same same Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
I mean I share that too, and it's why I
fit into the culture of the company. It was a
it was a place of productive frustration, where things always
took longer than you wanted because we wanted it yesterday.
And the attention to detail was so critical that balancing
all of the elements to get to market, and we
talked about this with some of the last episode was
the challenge a lot of times, right, And so he
knew this better than anybody. You know, design, quality, speed,
you have to kind of pick two of those three,
and he wanted three of those three, right. And so
he lived in sort of frustration a lot because for him,
he would already imagine and see how.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
We're so relatable.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
Sort of bringing people along was often like frustrating for him.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Productive frustration. I just had to meet the future moment
productive frustration. First of all, I think anyone can relate
to that. That's really the definition of human experience. Right,
and especially in the business world, if you're an entrepreneur,
if you're Steve Jobs and you're you know, thinking of
just how something the size of an index card is
going to change the world with the iPhone or computing
and everything, and he was probably even thinking beyond that.
He was probably already thinking of artificial intelligence and you
know everything that it does for commerce and all these
different things. Yeah, you see the future, but you got
to push people there. And yeah, I would imagine that
tension of being frustrated. But then I take it at
like me growing up in Delco perspective, or my mom
growing up, you know, living in Delco perspective outside of Philly,
greatest city on Earth, history of civilization, Philadelphia. God bless
that experience of being productively frustrated when you show up.
You know my mom, I love my mom, right, huge
MoMA's boy. Her hearing aids are connected to her phone,
and she is productively frustrated if that bluetooth messes up.
That is the most important thing for her to be
a human. And so that ability, like with this technology,
especially as we become more and more reliant on it,
if you don't have the ability to go somewhere to
talk to another human and you are relying on the
technology for a health reason. Steve, there's a lot of
pressure on Steve Jobs back then if he's guiding us
all to be candidly, I'm gonna use the addictive word
to the technology or to be reliant. But really it's
trust the technology. Because this technology has now become a hospital,
a bank, you know, an office like it's a lot
of productive frustration. So I love that. I'm gonna plagiarize
that from you. All right, well, I'll give you credit.
Scott Hazard, the co founder and CEO of Symmetrical for
customer service productively frustrated by the way, Wait, you were
telling me before we came on that people can can
go on your website and complain about I love this.
If you want to be productively frustrated, go onto what's
the website where you can vent? I love a good
vent session as my production.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
We're gonna actually share them on our website if customers
want us to, and they'll get permission. But we have
an email alias actually customer service stories at Symmetrical dot com.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Customer Service Stories at symmetricall dot com. But I'm sure
it's on your website too, if you can go on
the website and just get it. Yeah, so what do
you do when you email them?

Speaker 3 (14:56):
We are collecting incredible stories. I was telling you beforehand,
I feel like a therapist. My mom was a therapist,
so I know, kind of classically trained. I always say
eighteen year therapy degree. And it's coming in super handy
as we built this business, because everybody has this sort
of like tip of tongue's story and it's like traumatizing
to people. As we were talking about, people feel disenfranchised.
They feel like this is the one part of life
where not only is technology not helping, but it's literally
taking us in the wrong direction. And that's unproductive frustration.
So we're trying and by the way, you need productive
frustration to build things. Otherwise it's hard to build new things.
Building things is hard. Tearing them apart is easy. I
think you know that from the work that you've done.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
So it's really bad.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
I don't know I've done the work, but I'm trying
to do the work. But keep going.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
You're doing the work, my friend, But really down to
you know, getting people to even recognize right now, they're
dealing with this like as I went around and have
introduced the company to business owners and talked to friends
and investors and everybody on the planet. This is sort
of because coming funny to me because people forget they're
suffering on this thing so prevalent and it's so day to.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
Day they don't even know they're suffering.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Then and then when you bring up the topic, let
the games begin, right, all of a sudden, their mind
pulls all of these like traumas forward, and then you
end up in this like, hey, don't.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Worry, we have a product. It actually solved this for you.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
And it's so affordable that there's nobody on the planet
at fifteen dollars a month they can tell you they
can't fit this in their P and L. And so
we really built this thing so that there's nowhere to hide,
Like people will know you do not Kevin care about
customer service if they're not using Symmetric Hall. Anybody can
pay one hundred and eighty bucks a year a year
to care about and invest in their customers.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
We believe that's say you.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
Should sell it to the DMV in Washington, DC. That's
all I'm going to say.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
But you've got to Remember there's people like we talked
about who don't want to improve their customer service. I'm
not going to say the DMV is one of them.
We know every customer counts. They know these customers, they
see them in the community, and that is why they
mostly got.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
Into the businesses there.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
And they want to help people, they want to deliver services,
and somehow along the journey they were never given the
tools to do this.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Four trips to the DMV to renew a license, that's
all I'm gonna say. Four trips to the DMV to
renew a license.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
And you're in DC. How scary is that horrible?

Speaker 1 (17:26):
I mean, don't even get your story. That's my old life, Scott.
I've I've left my political journalism career. It's on hiatus. Okay,
I'm in the future. Okay, thanks for showing up to
meet the future, Scott. Comeback on because you've got this
awesome story about Google Glass. Remember that when the guy
jumped out of the plane. It's like that thing on
Netflix where the guy was, you know, going up the
skyscraper which I watched, and then the other thing where
the guy from the Red Bull jumped out of the
thing from space Anyway, he's got this great story on
Google Class that I want to talk to him about.
Scott Hazard the co founder and CEO of Symmetrical, first mobile,
first virtual phone system of your protety. Thanks for showing
up eat the future, Scott.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
Thanks, Vin, appreciate it.