Rick Denton (00:12)
Welcome back, CX Passport Travelers. Today, I am talking with Melissa Bardsley, a guest introduced to us by former CX Passport guest, Lisa Guzman. Melissa has spent her entire career in customer support across banking, manufacturing, and SaaS. That range gives her this strong perspective on how differently support organizations operate depending on the environment. From regulated process-driven organizations

to SaaS teams that rely on troubleshooting and adaptability and agility. She leads post sales functions like order management and frontline support where customers are directly interacting with the company and forming their impressions of the company in real time. Along the way, she's developed views on hiring, leadership development and what it takes to build teams that deliver a consistent customer experience. Melissa, welcome to CX Passport.

Melissa Bardsley (01:08)
Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.

Rick Denton (01:11)
It

is my pleasure indeed. have always said the best guests are those that are introduced by alums of CX Passport and you fit that category today is going to be awesome. I mentioned you working across all of those industries earlier. When you compare those environments, what really changes in how customer support operates and how do you balance regulation with what the customer actually needs?

Melissa Bardsley (01:34)
Yeah, I think there's definitely some similarities. The biggest differences lie in kind of two components. One is your customer expectations. So what does your customer expect from the experience? Do they need more handholding? Do they need more education? And I find that a little bit more in SAS. Or are they just looking for a quick answer and a quick response? ⁓

Rick Denton (01:56)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (02:01)
That can be a little bit more prevalent when you're talking about what I consider more transactional customer support. So you bought a pair of jeans and you just need to return them. And so it's a more transactional experience. So some of it, number one, sits in what are the customer expectations. The other piece is what do you deliver and how do you hire and train your team to deliver what's expected? Again, a transactional experience where you're following maybe a blueprint for how you deliver support.

Rick Denton (02:11)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (02:31)
much different than you don't know what you're going to get when you answer the phone and what that customer is going to need from you. You need to be able to think on the fly and pivot quickly to deliver what they need.

Rick Denton (02:44)
want to come back to that hiring part of it because that is, that's a really good point that there's the, it's not just the structure, it's who you bring into that structure. Talk to me a little bit about the structure. So the people that you are bringing in come into these different environments. What are those environments need to look like to equip those people to be able to deliver that consistent customer experience that we talked about in the introduction?

Melissa Bardsley (03:07)
Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, it depends on the maturity of your business model. So when you think of more transactional, I always like to talk about like big retailers, because I think people can relate to that. Again, you purchase a pair of jeans online and they're not the right fit. You don't like the style. You need to return them.

Rick Denton (03:21)
Right.

Melissa Bardsley (03:27)
Again, there's kind of a blueprint for that. There's a playbook for that of what you can do. And when you call in, it's a pretty easy transaction of someone telling you in black and white, very easy terms, this is what you need to do next. And so it's a little bit easier from the support standpoint where you can get someone up and running pretty quickly. You can train them pretty quickly. They can easily follow the processes and procedures you have in place. When you talk about SaaS,

Rick Denton (03:41)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (03:57)
especially in a startup environment, which so many of them are, you need to number one hire people that are really uncomfortable operating in the gres.

You may not even have a playbook yet. You might not have processes established yet. And even if you do, it's virtually impossible to document or help people get trained on every single scenario that they're going to encounter. So they need to be curious and be willing to ask questions and know that every time they pick up the phone or read an email, maybe a situation they haven't encountered before, they need to be really uncomfortable, like comfortable with the uncomfortable, I guess I would say.

Rick Denton (04:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. well, let's talk about it. So these are different, they can be the same person, but you're talking about different skill sets. If you're hiring and looking to identify those skill sets, how do you approach building a team when you're talking about this very tactical process driven approach and the other is exactly as you're describing the being comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Melissa Bardsley (04:41)
Thank you.

Sure, some of it is what they've done in their background. obviously experience, if the only experience they have is very transactional, they may have a more difficult time kind of transitioning to a less clear role or a more.

Rick Denton (05:14)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (05:16)
a known position. I think you look for someone that feels comfortable with like a technical aptitude. So, you know, are they someone that's curious about the technology that they use and willing to kind of dig in and get their hands dirty? I had a leader in the past who told me one of the questions they like to ask in interviews was tell me something new that you've learned recently. And it doesn't matter can be in your professional life can be in your personal life. But you learn a lot about people in terms of

Rick Denton (05:39)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (05:46)
how did they learn it? Did they ask questions? What technology did they use to learn it? Are they willing to get their hands dirty? And do they talk a little bit about failure along the way, the mistakes that they made in their learning and how they sort of accomplished that. ⁓ a candidate one time who told me they built a chicken coop all on their own and that was the thing. Right, they had built a chicken coop and it was all about

Rick Denton (05:56)
Mm-hmm.

No?

Melissa Bardsley (06:09)
Yeah, they had gone on YouTube and they had watched videos and they've gotten their hands dirty, all these different things. And so you absolutely learn a lot about how someone learns, their learning agility, ⁓ their process again for like successes and failures, how they try something out. And so it's a great way also to get someone talking about their process for that and how curious they are, how creative they are. You learn a lot.

Rick Denton (06:20)
Uh-huh.

Yeah, I'm laughing about the chicken coop. think if I'm sitting here, when you ask that question, my brain went to, okay, how would I answer that? And I feel like the answer almost 90 % of the time now being both a long time homeowner and also the owner of a 2001 Chevy Silverado. My answer is going to be something. And I learned how to repair something in one of those two categories that I didn't know how to do before, because I guarantee that something is breaking in one of those two. think the last one was repairing a dishwasher heater core.

All right. I learned how to do that. So I can, I can talk about that and I can certainly talk about the failures that were involved in that. I, you mentioned the failures part of it. And I think that's something that a lot of businesses are very uncomfortable in. Great that we can talk about the hiring of it, that we can talk about somebody coming in and what did you experience somewhere else? But at the places you've been, how have you helped support employees when they have those falling short moments and restore them to

Melissa Bardsley (07:05)
Yes, exactly.

Where?

Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (07:35)
well not falling short, and then also how do you discern, okay, this actually isn't meeting the mark and something needs to change?

Melissa Bardsley (07:42)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's twofold, right? So I think the first part is, how do you build confidence when someone's made mistakes or had failures? I was recently talking to a newer leader. They'd only been in their role about a year in a support function. And they had made two what they considered incorrect hiring decisions. Two people who weren't a great fit, didn't work out, both of them wound up leaving and they were...

⁓ really paralyzed by fear, like I'm gonna make the wrong decision again. And I said, I think you learn a lot more sometimes in your hiring decisions by the ones that were incorrect than the ones that were correct. You remember the person who wasn't the good fit. And so you sort of add to your bank of what does success look like in the role that you're looking to fill and how do you...

Rick Denton (08:14)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (08:32)
hire a little bit more closely to someone who's a match for that. So I think that's one component of it is really talking about, know, okay, so you made a mistake and that feels painful and, you know, it's a disruption to your team and you've spent a lot of time, but what did you learn from it? How do you apply that to the next time you have an interview? The second piece is really about feedback. ⁓ And I think it's so incredibly important. We all talk about it a lot, but it's really important to realize

Rick Denton (08:38)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (09:02)
that the goal is never to walk into a difficult conversation and say, I can't wait to have this hard conversation today. Just, yeah, it's just not gonna happen. And it's not how anybody views it. Nobody wakes up in the morning. But I think really when you understand that it's your job as a leader in whatever capacity to have those difficult conversations and you understand the need for it and that it's more important to walk through it than to avoid it because timeliness matters so much. ⁓

Rick Denton (09:31)
⁓ yeah,

Melissa Bardsley (09:33)
And so you

Rick Denton (09:33)
yeah.

Melissa Bardsley (09:34)
embrace the need to have it rather than saying, I'm going to be excited or really happy about it. It's still difficult to have those. I think the second piece of it is someone recently said to me, you can say what you mean without being mean. And it was so obvious, but also really impactful to me that you don't have to hurt someone's feelings by being direct and giving people the feedback they need to hear

Rick Denton (09:47)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, and the book that was out, what is it? Maybe it's a decade now at this point, Radical Candor. And there were a lot of folks that embraced that concept but decided, no, I'm still gonna be an a-hole and that's Radical Candor and that's what the book is on. No, it's not. And so you're right, you can be direct but still have kindness involved in that. Well, it's one of the things that I was excited to talk to you about is the fact that you've had all this variety of roles in that customer, customer focus areas.

Melissa Bardsley (10:04)
Mm-hmm.

Wait.

Absolutely.

Rick Denton (10:27)
order management, frontline support, these different areas. What have you learned about keeping the customer experience consistent? Because we talked about that in the intro, across all those different teams and functions.

Melissa Bardsley (10:40)
Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to communication and conversation. Words matter and so many companies, so many teams have those mission statements or their...

core values and so it'll be something like we want to deliver a world class, a world class experience. We want to go above and beyond for our customers. Where they kind of get it wrong is that we don't tell our teams what we mean by that. So you may have a team of 20 people. If I interviewed them or did a quick poll and said, what does world class mean to you? What does above and beyond mean to you? I'd get 20 different answers. And so the key for me is to really go to the core of your business and

Rick Denton (11:15)
Hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (11:22)
Understand what does that mean for you as an organization and then how do you communicate that out to your group? That's where it all starts. That's the foundational piece that leads to how do you hire and who do you hire? How do you train people? What metrics do you put in place? What do you hold them accountable to and it becomes your language that you weave into everything you do every single day and you have your team speaking the same language and so you become ⁓ a team that reinforce

Rick Denton (11:34)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (11:52)
the message all the time through all of your activities.

Rick Denton (11:55)
Mm-hmm.

I like that we're talking about that because so many times you've got companies that, yeah, okay, customers are the center of everything we do. It's the poster on the wall, it's the tag lines. People will have a little badge that says it. And then the customer experience still sucks. And whatever definition that means, right? So you've talked about kind of how companies can do it right, how they can do it wrong. But tactically, what does a company need to do nuts and bolts to get out of the poster and into reality?

Melissa Bardsley (12:06)
the

you

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, good question. think sometimes it starts at the top, but then it needs to, again, be woven through all the layers of your organization. So the trouble is that a lot of times your different teams are overseen by different leaders. And we want to allow people autonomy to be themselves. We don't want people becoming robots. ⁓ AI has its place, but people have their place too. And I think we want to preserve that individuals bring their personalities

Rick Denton (12:55)
Amen.

Melissa Bardsley (12:59)
and their style ⁓ to the team. And there's value in diversity, of course. ⁓ But you want to be speaking the common language. And so I think it starts again with how do you define what your culture, what your mission is, what those words like world class are above and beyond. And then I think it is the reinforcement. So it's talking about those things with a frequency. It's making sure that they're front and center. It's making sure that those are the behaviors you hold your team accountable.

So we spoke, think, a little bit about metrics or touched on how they impact these teams. And you can have a lot of metrics for a team, especially if your team is anything like a call center. You can pick from 500 different metrics. If you choose to do that, you will probably have a team that's very, very confused if they have 100 metrics that they're held accountable to. But what you can do is use those definitions and how you want to deliver

service as sort of your North Star.

Rick Denton (14:02)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (14:02)
And that becomes the guidepost that you are doing all of your work in that direction. so then when you come up with goals or metrics from your team, when you pick your KPIs, you're able to pick things that align with that mission, that culture, those core words of what you want to deliver. that becomes, you know, that definition becomes your guidepost again, your North Star. And everything else is reinforcement of that. It's the same language. It's the same words and not just

Rick Denton (14:29)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (14:32)
mindful of what KPIs or metrics move you in that direction, but what KPIs and metrics take you further away. Meaning, if you have that as a metric for your team, does it deliver the behaviors that you're really wanting to see and that you're encouraging? And sometimes it can do both things.

Rick Denton (14:59)
Oh, Melissa, I want to get back into metrics because I think there's a lot that gets sort of glossed over when we talk about metrics. And I think there's some things that we can we can pull out of some of the wisdom you've already shared. And I want to go a little deeper. But first, I want to take a little break here. A little change of pace. Join me here in the first class lounge.

Melissa Bardsley (15:05)
Mmm.

Rick Denton (15:18)
We'll move quickly here and hopefully have some fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Melissa Bardsley (15:24)
Yeah, I think probably Paris is my top location. I'm a bit of a romantic and probably grew up dreaming of going to Paris and

Rick Denton (15:27)
you

Melissa Bardsley (15:35)
I've been really lucky to be there a couple of different times now. My husband's company ⁓ was headquartered just outside of Paris. And so I get to visit a couple of times. And I really just love everything about it. I love Europe in general. But ⁓ the people watching, the food, the architecture, the flowers, just all of it, I think is really amazing.

Rick Denton (15:43)
Nice.

Okay, let me ask you a very specific off topic question here. Well, it's related to what you just said. This morning, I was listening to a podcast, two guys on a plane, fun podcast. Everybody go listen to that if you're at all interested in the aviation industry. It's two flight attendants. They were talking about one of the tips that they had been told about travel in Paris was never eat at a place that had flowers out front. Is that something? me more about that. I couldn't ask them the question.

Melissa Bardsley (16:18)
Mmm.

I don't know,

I haven't heard that one and I'm a little bit cautious of like too many do's and don'ts. think, you know, look for the popular suggestions, check things out, but I'm more passed by something that looks interesting and stop. Sometimes when we travel, especially those kinds of trips, we pack too much in and you don't have enough time to just sort of sit and be in whatever environment you're in. And I love to make sure I fit that time in as well.

Rick Denton (16:25)
Okay.

Yeah.

We're just gonna sit on that for a second. Everybody, when you travel, sit and be and absorb that culture. I'm guilty, I'm guilty, absolutely, and need that wisdom that you just shared there. What is a dream travel occasion you've not been to yet?

Melissa Bardsley (17:02)
Singapore is high up there. I would really love to get to Asia, but Singapore I think is really interesting. And I'm hoping, I think the next one up for me is south of France and northern Italy. So I'm hoping to do some of that. I think that will be next year.

Rick Denton (17:04)
Okay.

great places, great places indeed. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Melissa Bardsley (17:24)
I love pizza, especially pepperoni pizza. I could eat it ⁓ all night and day, but I'm a bit of a foodie. And so I really like all different kinds of food. I'm much more adventurous as an adult than I ever was as a child. And so, yeah, I really enjoy ⁓ all different kinds, especially if it's like a salty sweet kind of combination. So Asian food, love all of that. Yeah.

Rick Denton (17:39)
You

Okay, very nice, very nice

indeed. Well, you set me up well. What is something you were forced to eat growing up, but you hated as a kid?

Melissa Bardsley (17:57)
Two things, my family has a story that my mom made all of us on 105 sit at a table and eat stewed tomatoes. And we like weren't, you it was one of those like you're not allowed to get up until you finish.

None of us like those, that always, that memory always comes to mind. But I would say probably the much more common that people like that I don't, is I don't really care for any kind of lunch. And so, you know, those going to a friend's house on someone and I was like, mm, mm, mm, no, no, can't be that. Nope. Even as a middle. So yeah.

Rick Denton (18:27)
Boy, that makes the elementary school lunches a little trickier, but I'm sure you navigated them. Hey, that's not so bad, not so bad at all. Time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item, not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without?

Melissa Bardsley (18:29)
Right. I was like peanut butter and jelly every day, which was fine. Yes. Yep.

Hmm.

I take hair brushes and I have multiple. Some people take like multiple pairs of shoes. I like the blowout and so I have multiple hair brushes that go with me and take up a lot of room in my suitcase.

Rick Denton (19:06)
Oh, Melissa, you have no idea how much I love that answer. Not because, well, anybody can look at my hair and know that I don't need a hairbrush. My hair is running away from me. It's the uniqueness of the answer. Yours is going to be somewhere around episode 250, 260. I don't think anybody said hairbrushes. I love it. I love what I get to learn about folks. Can we go back to the metric conversation? I may spend a little more time in the metric space than I actually anticipated.

Melissa Bardsley (19:19)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (19:32)
We've seen metrics used to help people grow, help people get better. We've also seen them used as weapons. How do you create a culture, an organization? How have you seen it work well that metrics are actually used to support the business and support the person without being used as this just weapon?

Melissa Bardsley (19:39)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm, interesting. And I love that question because I think it's really true. I think there's two ways you can use metrics. I think number one, it's the guideposts or the numbers you hold your team accountable to every day or every month. we can talk about those. I think the second piece is how you use them in a coaching capacity. And so really like specific example of that is

I'm not a particular lover of like average handle time. ⁓ think that under the wrong circumstances, encourages sometimes your support team to cut calls short, meaning

Rick Denton (20:28)
Amen. Hallelujah. Preach.

Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (20:42)
If you're driving for an average talk time or average handle time of five minutes, your team becomes clock watchers. So they're at four minutes and 45 seconds, and now they're cutting your customer off. They don't really care if the situation's taken care of. They just want to wrap up that call so that they can meet their metric and move on to the next guest.

Rick Denton (20:57)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (21:03)
I understand why it's used. It just in my mind doesn't drive the behaviors, which the behavior for me is to have a customer that's satisfied, that gets what they need from the call or the interaction. And they don't need to call again necessarily. And so I use that more in a coaching.

capacity. What I mean by that is I still measure it in the background and I know what the average is for my team. So maybe the average for my team is the five minutes that I mentioned earlier, but when I'm in my one-on-one sessions with an employee who more bumps up to like seven and a half or eight minutes and I've listened to their calls, I think you know number one context matters and so are they running longer than average because they need more training, they're

Rick Denton (21:43)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (21:53)
struggling with the information, are they maybe doing too much like chit chat, and so I think that you can use it as do I need to help them more or do I need to help them be more aware of this. And so I use it as a coaching opportunity to look for the ways that I can improve and get that handle time down, but it's not a punishment for someone who's really doing their best, hopefully, to try to take care of the customer.

Rick Denton (21:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there's a...

almost don't want to say this word, but I am. There's almost a laziness that can be introduced with metrics. And that is the number is what it is. And therefore I'm going to think of this person in a negative way or coach them out of the company or whatever that looks like. Whereas what you're describing is a concerted effort by a leader, a coach to actually invest the time to understand what that number means.

Melissa Bardsley (22:34)
Mmm.

Absolutely.

Rick Denton (22:48)
and going beyond what the number means is that anti-laziness component that it sounds like you're describing is the best way to, or a great way to handle this. Well, let's talk about that. Cause you've actually, because you've had the different roles throughout the path, you stepped into some situations that are great. You've also stepped into places where things weren't working the way they should. When you walk into that situation, what is that first thing that you're looking for to understand what's really going on?

Melissa Bardsley (22:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think a good part is to always start with the data.

But to your point, that only tells part of the story. And so I think you have to understand what the drivers are. You have to look at the context behind it to really understand why is it high? I'm a gut feeling person a bit of the time, but I think in the beginning, you really have to look at all of the different components. And to your point, I don't know if it's laziness. I think a lot of our leaders are truly overworked at some level.

Rick Denton (23:48)
That's kind, you're right.

Melissa Bardsley (23:48)
And I would also say,

you know, to be fair and listen, maybe some of it is laziness. Some of it is not necessarily knowing how to be a strong leader, like how to do the coaching component in that conversation. It also leads, and we talked about this earlier in our conversation, to some difficult conversations and a lot of people try to avoid those. And so they'll just look at the information and become a bit of a micromanager around that data point when they don't really understand what's needed to

Rick Denton (24:08)
Yeah.

Melissa Bardsley (24:18)
improve the circumstance. I think again, when you're new, it starts with data. I also think that people get confused and think you have to make big changes to see improvement. I really love to go into a new job and look for the low-hanging fruit.

Rick Denton (24:34)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (24:34)
You can be a superstar really quickly by identifying some of the things that are really obvious to you and just didn't stand out to the person that was in your role before you. It's just a new set of eyes. That fresh set of eyes is incredibly powerful.

Rick Denton (24:49)
Okay, I definitely want to ask you about that because you're right. And it's so tempting to, I've got to make a big splash. I have to acknowledge though, I appreciate the way that you coached me there, that I needed to have a little more empathy and understanding. Look, it's not just laziness. Sometimes these people have way too much work on their plate. So they're actually not lazy, they're efficiency experts. And even I needed to be course-corrected there. Thank you for our coaching session. I want to close out with what you said there about the small wins.

Sometimes those small wins or that low hanging fruit are there because their tradition, their culture, they're sacred to the way the company operates. When you're new, that can be a tricky thing to call out. How do you navigate, look, this is broken. I know it's broken. It's very clearly that it's broken. And I know that this is something special, meaningful, important, and hard to change for that company. How do you navigate that tension?

Melissa Bardsley (25:47)
Yeah.

A of it, we've spent so much of our conversation today talking about communication and I think that's the cornerstone of so much of this. Number one, you have to lead with some curiosity. So you have to ask questions, you have to understand why are they hanging on to something from the past? Are you able to change it? You might be able to and you might just not be able to at this moment in time as much as you may know that improvement could come from making a change. But I think the second point is really acknowledging that any change

Rick Denton (25:54)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Bardsley (26:17)
is hard. So it's important for you to acknowledge that with your teams as individuals, all people have different responses to change. And then I think communicating what does the future of this look like and paint the picture and what is their role in that future of the team and what does it look like moving forward. Not just making change for the sake of change, but

Rick Denton (26:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Melissa Bardsley (26:42)
really to get to a place where it's better. But I think as excited as we can be, because we can see that future state so clearly, we need to acknowledge that getting from here to there can be a really scary process. And you've got to walk through each individual on your team at a pace that's comfortable for them.

Rick Denton (27:00)
for those that are watching the video know that I just sprained my neck, nodding so hard at what you just said there. is that setting that placement for them in the future, the way you said that of, and it helps alleviate that fear because so often, especially in companies with seeing employees as disposable, there's that fear of the, this change means I won't have a job or I have no role. have no responsibility and setting that vision of

Melissa Bardsley (27:12)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (27:27)
Yeah, this is what's changing and here's your place in that future and what that looks like. Melissa, this has been enjoyable. I think folks may want to get to know a little bit more about you and your approach to the customer and business in general. What's the best way for folks to get to know more about you?

Melissa Bardsley (27:40)
Yeah, the best way is probably to follow me on LinkedIn. I am pretty active on there and love to talk a lot more about customer experience and leadership specifically.

Rick Denton (27:44)
Night.

Awesome. Well, that as always will be put there in the show notes. Yeah, Melissa, was, there was that running theme that you even called out that was through this of communication. And I appreciate that. And I think that's something that someone who has had the different type of industry exposure can really see that that is a thread that is universal, regardless of where you are and what the role is. This was an absolute treat for me today. Melissa, thank you for being on CX Passport.

Melissa Bardsley (28:17)
Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.