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Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
If you work in customer support, if you lead a support team, or if you are looking to better the customer experience for your company, then this podcast is for you!
Happy to Help is a podcast about all things customer support brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. Join us, on the second Tuesday of every month as Buzzsprout's Head of Podcaster Success, Priscilla Brooke dives into the world of customer support to make remarkable support the standard, not the exception!
Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
How Intentional Gifting Creates Loyal Customers with Sarah Betts
Sarah Betts, the Director of Support and Operations at Vizit, joins us to talk about one of the most joyful parts of customer experience: intentional gift giving. We dig into why humans naturally connect through gifts, how the smallest gesture can make someone feel seen, and what it looks like to build a gifting strategy that is personal, thoughtful, and realistic for your team.
Sarah shares wonderful stories from her time in the corporate gifting world, including an unforgettable moment involving an Avengers superfan CEO and a beautifully targeted gift that immediately won his attention. She walks us through what makes a gift feel genuine instead of gimmicky, when branded items can strengthen a relationship, and why timing matters just as much as the gift itself. We explore simple ways to create delightful moments even when your budget is small, from handwritten notes to quick video messages that let your sincerity shine through.
Learn how to measure the impact of gifting, what mistakes to avoid, and which tools can help you scale your efforts once you have the basics in place.
Sarah mentions some of her favorite gifting platforms, like Loop and Tie, Brilliant, Tremendous, and Sendoso. And of course, we look at Chewy, which continues to show the entire industry what beautifully executed customer delight can look like.
Where to find Sarah:
Later in the episode, Jordan and I take a moment to reflect on our second full year of Happy to Help. We look back on the incredible guests who joined us in 2025 and the big themes we explored together. It has been such a meaningful year of conversations, learning, and celebrating the craft of customer support. If you have ideas for topics or guests you want us to feature next season, tap the Text the Show link in the show notes and send them our way. We would love to hear from you.
We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com.
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today we're exploring the wonderful world of gift giving. We're discussing why gift giving is a great way to connect with your clients and customers and how to build a gift giving strategy that is fun, scalable, and impactful. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. So, joining us today is Sarah Betts. Sarah is currently the Director of Support and Operations for Vizit, where she helps build systems and connect data, empathy, and experience. Throughout her career, she has built and led high-performing global teams and scaled support departments across remote locations. Sarah believes in building cultures of trust, clarity, and continuous improvement. Thank you for joining us today, Sarah.
Sarah:I am so thrilled to be here with you, Priscilla. Thank you.
Priscilla:I love meeting another Sarah that is fun. I feel like there's so many people in the support world that are named Sarah who are great. Oh, you, yes, Sarah Camoniti, Sarah Hatter. There's so many good Sarahs.
Jordan:I think we've had all the Sarahs on the spot. Oh, there's more.
Sarah:There's more Sarahs, and they're all fantastic. I've met so many great Sarahs.
Priscilla:We should launch a podcast that is just interviewing Sarahs. There you go. Wouldn't that be kind of cool? Maybe that would be my podcast idea. You should interview other Sarahs. A tour of Sarahs. A tour of Sarah. That's amazing.
Jordan:I love that idea so much.
Priscilla:That's so good. So we've already kind of started on a positive note here, but we always like to kick our episodes off by shouting out someone in the support world who has made your day recently. So, Sarah, do you have someone who has made your day recently?
Sarah:A person who consistently makes my day is Mercer Smith. She is an endless cheerleader and always turns things around to make it sound like I'm her cheerleader somehow. Yeah. But yeah, she recently gave me a really sweet compliment, backed me up on something. So I appreciate her.
Priscilla:I love it. It's like the small things that you don't really think are gonna have a big impact, just like giving someone a compliment. Yeah. It's something I feel like I heard recently someone saying that they really want to be a better fan of things. Oh, and they want to talk about the things that they love more. And so it's like when I see someone who's wearing a cute outfit, I'm never gonna let the compliment not be spoken. Absolutely. Because you never know what kind of impact a small compliment can have on someone. And so I love that. You know, Mercer made your day by giving you a compliment and being in your corner. And I think that's a totally worthwhile way to start this podcast. I love it. Absolutely. So, Sarah, you have an interesting background. You've been in the support world for over a decade, but you have worked in some different environments. And one of those is a corporate gifting company. Yeah. And that's something that I'm not very familiar with. And that's so that's what we're going to talk about today is gift giving and how that can impact customers and clients. But before we kind of get into that, can you share a little bit more about your background in customer support and how this industry kind of inspires you?
Sarah:Yeah. I actually got into customer support quite accidentally. Like I wasn't looking for it. I was going through a divorce, needed a job, and a friend of mine was like, hey, you know how to do all this stuff. Would you come work for me and help like build documentation and answer customer questions? And I was like, you'll pay me for stuff I already know? Yes. And through that job, like I started getting frustrated with the systems that we had or the lack of systems and building things, and landed my first tech support role and from there got into operations and support. But support is still my love. I love building the systems. Yeah. But support feels like a never-ending quest.
Priscilla:Yes.
Sarah:Because you constantly have something new that pops up that you have to go, where did that come from? Yes. And it's just like this regular rabbit hole of sleuthing, of finding the clues and figuring out what happened, and then be like, Eureka, I got it. And then yeah, documenting it for the next person. Yeah.
Jordan:We hear that so much from anyone who's on this podcast. There's something about like the sleuthing and puzzling and figuring things out that just really motivates people and it like lights a fire.
Sarah:Yeah, I heard somebody say that support people are like, you know, that meme that used to be like, what would you leave in the circle, in the pentagram circle to like summon somebody if they were a demonstration? Yes. That support people are just an endless line of being able to summon people by just dropping a little puzzle in front of them and they'll just follow it forever.
Priscilla:I guess. That's exactly it. Yeah. Well, and I like what you said about like something new pops up, and you're like, how has this not come up before? And now it's all of a sudden coming up. I think about that sometimes when I think back in the early years of being at Buzz Sprout, and I'm like, those were the questions we were getting all the time. And now we don't get those questions. We get this whole new set of questions all the time. And so we'll solve that and then we'll figure the next ones that come in. And I do think there's something really fun about that continuous puzzle and getting new things to figure out every day. And then the dopamine hit when you do get it is really nice.
Sarah:That's it. It's the dopamine hit if it's always something new. It's not like an office job where you file the same reports over and over and over again. You do not know what you're going to find when you walk into the queue in the morning.
Priscilla:It's so true. I always tell new hires that there's a balance of like repetition because you are in a queue. So that will feel repetitive, but every question is going to be different. And so it's all going to feel different every day at the same time. So it's this balance of repetition and continuous exploring. Yes. When this episode drops, we're going to be right in the middle of December, right in the middle of gift giving season. And I feel like it's, you know, just such a great time for us to discuss building a gift giving strategy in a corporate sense with customers and clients. And, you know, you think about when I think about gift giving, I think about birthdays, I think about holidays. Beyond that, though, there's, you know, gift giving on these like grander schemes. Like you think about the Statue of Liberty was a gift. Yes. That is like one of the bigger gifts in the world in history. Never given a gift that size myself. Just not. No, and we're not recommending that in this episode. But it's funny because you look at how powerful gift giving can be on just a small scale from a friend to a friend, and then how powerful it can be on this huge scale, country to country, and that it is a strategy that is used to build a relationship and to strengthen a relationship. And so then you look at it in a corporate sense where it's a company giving a gift to clients or to prospective clients or to employees and a way to build and strengthen relationships there. So I want to talk about that psychology around gift giving a little bit. What do you think is it about gift giving that allows it to be such a powerful part of the relationship building between customers and that customer experience situation?
Sarah:As humans, as beings, we are wired to share. Human society can't survive if we don't share because one individual can't meet all of your needs. I firmly rely on Costco and Trader Joe's and, you know, places like that. But before that, you know, I might have excess grain and you might have excess milk, and I can just eat a lot of grain. That's boring. But if I can have some of your milk and give you some of my grain, now we have a symbiotic relationship and we can help each other survive. So that's like the core psychological thing that we have always given gifts and the people who survived were good at sharing. We still make those connections that way. And it is kind of that we're gonna survive together. And in business, it is like that. If I don't have my customers, my company's not gonna make it. Like I might be able to fake some reports for a while, but ultimately my investors are gonna be like, that's enough. Right. This isn't adding up. Exactly. Those numbers need to be somewhere within range. So right now it's really noisy. I'm sure you both opened up your inboxes this morning and just sort of ignored most of what's in there. There's so many filters that help you automatically ignore most of the emails. I get dozens of cold calls. Thankfully, shout out to Pixel and Google Fi for having built-in tools to just ignore a lot of them. But stuff still gets through. And it is really, really hard as a business to break through that noise. Yeah. And people want to be seen. We don't have the strong communities that we used to have. We don't have the strong groups, like we've got our friend groups, but it's not as broad. And so if I notice that you have a dog, like you just adopted a dog, and I send you a little winter coat for your dog, you're gonna feel really seen. And like I cared. And I think that is the thing about gift giving that it makes us go, oh, you don't see me as a contract, you see me as a person.
Priscilla:Yeah. I think that's so cool. So do you have any success stories from when you were in that corporate giving world where you saw that relationship be strengthened because of a gift giving strategy that went really well?
Sarah:One of my favorite stories was this pretty new BDR was trying to land a call with a CEO and they knew their solution would work. It wasn't just like, oh, we just need to get enough numbers. She was like, I saw him post about it on LinkedIn, I saw that he was looking for this, I couldn't get through. And she had our research team do some research and found out that he was an absolute Avengers nerd. This guy was obsessed. So she ordered a four-panel hand-painted fan art watercolor of the Avengers and had it shipped to his office. And he opened that, was like, holy, and picked up the phone and called her right away. Because it wasn't just another BDR trying to reach out to him. It was somebody who took the time to say, I see you as a human.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:I see the geek in you.
Priscilla:Yeah. And here you go. That's so cool. What kind of an impact that can have on you when you're like, man, this person, they don't know me personally. I don't see them every day. They're not in my personal life. And they knew enough about me to send me something that was hyper-personalized. Thinking about it from their side can feel you're like, man, that must feel so good to be seen in that way. And that can like inspire us on this side to want to do it more. I think it's really cool. So, you know, gift giving is very powerful, but it can also be very time-consuming. And if someone is at a company and they're trying to figure out how to get a gift-giving strategy in place, it can feel overwhelming. I would guess there's ways that it can feel more promotional than really connection. And so, Sarah, when you're considering selecting a gift, how do you select a gift in a way that it feels genuine and not like a promotional tool? You know what I mean? Like gimmicky. How do you avoid that? Oh, and I saw that.
Sarah:Yeah. You know, I saw people that were just like, here's our $50,000 budget. We're just going to, you know, I hate the term, but spray and pray. I've just hit everybody with a gift card. Yep. And gift cards are one of those things that can be done very poorly. I mean, everybody has an offer for an Amazon gift card. Right. Which is, it's nice, I guess, to have an Amazon gift card, but it doesn't feel like somebody paid attention. That said, I have given gift cards that felt like I was paying attention. We had somebody who had a mishap in support, and this is one of my cool strategies for using gifting, is we screwed up somebody's account. We made a mistake. And so I had my team send out a big gift card to the head of the shop. It was an auto shop. And it was just a nice note of like, I'm really sorry we messed up. That was totally our fault. Go get coffee for your whole crew. Love that. That's so cool. And he was like, that was the nicest apology I've ever had. Like I felt like you cared.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:You have to be very strategic. Because it's so noisy, you can't be sending out that gift card through an email as your first outreach because it will probably get spammed and then you will never get through again. Once you get spammed, that's it. It's game over. So definitely once you have a warm lead, somebody's engaged, that's when to start thinking about gifting. But I like to go farther into the funnel with gifting, not early in the funnel, but later. So if you've got a contract renewal coming up, go find out your champions, learn something about them, and send them a nice gift. Or if it's coming up on an anniversary, even if you have a multi-year contract, or you know, maybe you've just finished onboarding, just like we would give a gift to a friend of like, oh my gosh, you totally killed that. And, you know, I just sent you flowers or whatever. Send flowers. If you find out somebody had a life change event, send a gift.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:It's not hard if you can step back and think of people as people.
Priscilla:Yeah, that's the key. Thinking about people as people. You just said send flowers. It made me think of something we've done in the past at BuzzSprout. So Buzz Sprout is an online service. We have many customers. We're not having these client relationships like you would see with like an ongoing client service type of a thing. And so we have all these customers, so many that we talked to once and never hear from again, but that use the product. And once years ago, we had someone who was going to come to a conference. And she wrote into our support team and said, I'm coming to this conference. I'm so excited. I'll see you guys. I'm excited to meet you. And then a couple of days later, she wrote in that she had had a life change. Someone in her family had passed away and she wasn't going to be there. So she told us about this experience that she had. And we were very consolatory and understood that she wasn't going to be able to be there. But then a few weeks later, she wrote back and she said, You know, I've decided I'm going to come. Things are hard right now, but I want to be there and I don't want to miss this. And we got the opportunity to figure out some details about her and send her flowers. So she had flowers in her room when she got to this conference. And it was really cool to be able to do something like that. Not because we can do this for every single customer for Buzz Sprout, but we can do this for one customer that we know of that's going through a hard time that we're going to have this ability to impact in that way.
Sarah:You know who really nails this, like at scale and does it beautifully? And you know who I'm going to say is Chewy. They have nailed this. And it's because they know their customer, they have dialed it in. They know exactly who their customer is. Yep. They know exactly what moments are decision moments or, you know, times that are hard. So I get a birthday card for my dogs and my cat every year on their birthdays. I had an experience where we had to change my cat's food and they were like, just donate it. And so, you know, took the food in. Amazing. But if you cancel a recurring order, they will often send flowers and sometimes a hand-painted photo of your pet. What? And that is so meaningful. Yeah. Oh, so meaningful. It doesn't work for every business, but because Chewy knows their customer very, very well, they have a very good know your customer team. Yeah. They're on it.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:They know exactly what to do. And some would argue, well, that's easy because it's pets and we're all attached to our pets. But I am willing to bet that every business knows something that their customers are attached to.
Priscilla:Yeah. And that comes back to the personalization side of things and how a personalized gift is going to be so much more impactful, have such a better outcome than something that is not personalized. But personalizing it is hard and that does take a little more time. It takes a little bit more effort on your end as the customer's support or success person who's doing this. So, what are some of your favorite ways to personalize a gift that might be a little more scalable, if you know what I mean?
Sarah:Yeah, some things are easy. Like we had a customer who had an annual conference that they did every year. And because we were all remote and everything, they sent like movie supplies because they were going to be watching a series of videos. And so they sent, like, you know, the popcorn ready to pop and the hot cocoa mix and the little blanket. You know, it was themed for that. Yeah. Other things that I've seen are sending a video with the gift. Like it doesn't have to be the gift itself that is personalized. It can be the note.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:Or the way, the way you convey the gift. I really like the ability to choose. So a lot of gift-giving platforms will allow you to create or select from a group of gifts that fit a certain theme. And then you send a link and you say you choose what you want. And the choice then is powerful. It's not like, okay, but I have 500 water bottles and I really don't need another one. Right. But it may be that you're like, well, heck, that blanket. Yeah, because my dog stole mine and I kind of need a blanket. Exactly. Yeah. Speaking of in this house, our dogs steal all the blankets. It doesn't have to be specifically the gift that is personalized, as was what I'm saying. It's it's the approach, it's how you do it, it's the choices that you give, those kinds of things.
Priscilla:Yeah. And a lot of companies will send swag. We do that a lot with BuzzSprout, is we'll send podcasters swag with our logo on it. What are your opinions on branded gifting versus unbranded, more personalized things that are not containing your logo anywhere?
Sarah:I think branded gifts are very powerful. Really? Done the right way. Yeah. So if you have somebody who's say written in and just been like, oh my gosh, I am so in love with your app, it just made everything easier. I switched over for this other platform, whatever, send them branded gifts because they're an advocate right now and they will they're fans that will magnify that feeling. If they write in and they say, You suck, I am so tired of this feature. You're just really pissing me off. Sending them a branded gift will magnify that feeling.
Priscilla:Maybe don't send them a bunch of stickers at that point.
Sarah:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless you want to see your stickers on a light pole with unsavory things written over them. Yeah, or like a bathroom stall.
Priscilla:Yeah. So you kind of touched on this a little bit, but another big aspect of gifting and doing it well is timing. Yes. And so how can a company identify what those right times are? Are there any that stick out to you as the best times to give gifts? I know we're in the middle of the holiday season, so I would guess that that's a pretty common time.
Sarah:What do you holidays are fun, but not necessarily the best time to leverage. Okay. Now, I will say that it depends on your industry. If you're someplace where, like, say you are targeting medical offices, that's a whole nother thing of rules and whatnot. But maybe sending a basket at Christmas is not the best time because they probably have 40. Oh, good. Yeah. If you know when that office was founded, if you know they recently got an award, if you know they recently had a change, like if they just got a new receptionist, that is the time. Yeah. Make it about them.
Priscilla:Well, and it comes back to what you've already been saying, which is the personalization. It's not personal to send a gift at Christmas or during the holidays because that's gonna be when everyone sends it. It's gonna get lost in the noise. Yeah, it's gonna get lost in the noise, but it is personal if you find out when they were founded. I think that's such a good tip. So smart.
Sarah:And a lot of those things used to take so much time. Yeah. But now with the tools like AI and a lot of the gifting tools connect to your CRM. So if you have a group of people that is going out and finding information, or if you're on a call and somebody says something and you're like, oh, now I know this tidbit, if you can go record that somewhere, you can reference it later.
Priscilla:Yeah. One thing that we have in Buzz Sprout is we have milestones that we celebrate with our podcasters. Yeah. So when you've released your 10th episode, or when you've hit 10,000 downloads, or when you get another subscriber, those kind of things, or years when you've been podcasting for a certain number of years. And so, like milestones are a huge thing for gifting. Milestones are super huge.
Sarah:Yeah. Also, if you have a tool that requires onboarding, specifically SaaS, things like that. Yeah. I primarily work now in Enterprise SaaS, obviously. So we have very large contracts and some of these things, it it's a bit of a slog to get everybody set up and configured and moved over from their prior tool or whatever. So when they complete onboarding, it's a great time to give a gift because renewal decisions are made by the customer during. Onboarding. Yeah. So if you've had any roughness to sort of smooth over, that's a great time to hit them with the hey, I heard you're going on vacation to, you know, Maine. Here's a jacket for you to wear. Some lobsters. Some lobsters. A jacket with a lobster on it.
Priscilla:I don't know. Exactly. I was thinking like plush lobsters, not like real lobsters. That would be a very different kind of gift.
Sarah:That would be adorable too.
Priscilla:I'm sure that there are some people that are listening to this that are thinking, I would love to give my customers gifts. In an ideal world, I would love to put some effort and some time and budget behind that. But the reality is I don't have the time and I don't have the budget. So what are some creative, maybe low-cost ways that you can show appreciation for your customers on a larger scale that maybe isn't going to be sending some plush lobsters, but would still have an impact on your customers with that same strategy?
Sarah:Yeah. The lowest time, highest impacts personalized notes. And there's a lot of companies out there that will do handwritten notes. Some of them actually have people writing, but there's machines that do it now as well. Also send a small gift card. Yeah. You know, maybe like we have a meeting coming up and I just want to send you 10 bucks for coffee.
Priscilla:Yeah. Or for SaaS companies, like I know for BuzzBrout, we've built into Buzzsprout the ability to give credits to customers. And so then you don't have to send a gift card. You can send credit. Oh, that's brilliant. You can just surprise people in the middle of the week with some credits and a nice written email. That doesn't take much time. It's very low budget and it's still gonna give you a little bit of that impact.
Sarah:Yeah. I think the primary rules of gifting are does it make sense? Like, am I just sending a random Amazon gift card and people are like, thanks? Yeah. Does it mean something to the person and can they use it?
Jordan:I really like your idea, Sarah, about sending a video to a customer too. Like to me, that kind of has the same personalization as like a handwritten note that you like took the time to like just take a video real quick and just be like, hey, really proud of you making five years in this. We're all excited in the office for you or something like that and send it to them. Like that would mean so much.
Sarah:And it's very low effort. The other thing I would say, if it's a budget thing, is run a trial.
Jordan:Yeah.
Sarah:See if you can get a small amount and compare it. I mean, be a scientist and say, I'm not going to gift this group, select it at random. I am going to gift this group, select it at random, and maybe, you know, wheel down from there, maybe only ICP or whatever. And then show what impact does it have on their product usage, on their renewals, on their sentiment? Do they post on LinkedIn? You know, what happens when we send those gifts? Maybe that $20 gift turned into a $2,000 deal. You don't know how that's going to work out.
Priscilla:Yeah, exactly. And when you're trying to get buy-in, if you've done those trials and those tests, then you're going to have a much better job getting that budget for that.
Sarah:Like any change in business, take numbers and you're good. Yes.
Priscilla:I was talking with someone a couple days ago about AI. And one of the things that he mentioned, and we've talked about this so much, I'm sure, but taking AI and using it as a way to do the mundane things that we don't want to do so that we can focus on these things that are not scalable. So for some companies, sending highly personalized gifts to every single client isn't going to work because of the number of clients they have or the type of service they're running. But you can take these mundane emails about how to log in and let AI help you with that and then focus your time on okay, how can I take this thing that's really not super scalable for us and still impact 20 customers today, which honestly is more fun than helping someone log into an account. 100%. Figuring out what to send them. But I do think it's one of the cool things about AI and the way that it can impact things like this is it lets us do the non-scalable things. And this is a great example of that.
Sarah:So one thing I do on anybody I work for, yeah. And I'm gonna reveal a little secret they may not know, is I set AI to do some deep research on them. Okay. And especially, you know how a lot of people don't have their professional email on LinkedIn? They have their personal email. Add that in so then the AI is actually running through their personal stuff too. I don't know how people feel about that. But what I have at return is how does this person take feedback? What are this person's interests? What do they care about? What have they talked about? Like what is their focus? And you can switch that to what are they interested in? What do they care most about? And maybe it's not a thing. I have an employee who's very involved with the Macaw Society. They work on preserving the Macaw birds down in Peru. And I know if I donated to that charity in her name, that would just make her day because she cares about it.
Jordan:Yeah. I think that companies similar to like ours are a little bit of an advantage because you know their interests. Yeah, we know they they talk about their interests, they talk about every intimate detail themselves and publish it weekly. Yeah, they publish it weekly.
Sarah:So we got we gotta figure out how to run some transcripts through. Yes, that would be fascinating. You might learn something about them they don't even know. Yes, scary. But but what I'm saying is there may be more ways to use AI to take more time off of your plate. Yes. And you can even run customer info through AI to be like which customers are at the highest risk that we may not want to spend the money on gifting versus the ones that are a little ambivalent, where maybe just a little push of I care would make a difference.
Priscilla:Yeah. Every day I feel like I'm learning more and more things that we can do with AI that can make our lives easier and simpler and better. So it's very cool. One thing we talk about on our team sometimes is this idea of doing for one what we wish we could do for everyone. So if you're listening to this and you're like, I just don't think I'm gonna be able to get my team to buy off on me starting this whole thing of gift giving. The idea that you could do this for five people is still gonna be incredible. So just because you're thinking, I can't do this for all, you know, 200,000 customers we have, it doesn't mean that you can't do it for five. And so, even just talking about this, I'm like, man, I kind of want to give everyone on my team like, hey, you have a small budget, pick four people next month and send them a gift. Let's just see what we can do. So early on, we talked about ways to not feel promotional or gimmicky, but what are some of the common mistakes that you've seen companies make with gift giving so that we can kind of let people know to avoid those? What are some of those common mistakes?
Sarah:The first mistake would be not checking with your legal team. Oh good one. That's a very good one. Yes. So depending on your customers, there are a lot of laws, especially around healthcare, government employees, people in finance. Oh you cannot just randomly send them a gift because they may lose their job if they accept it. Yep. And that would be bad. Yeah. Especially if they're of an advocate for you. So check with your legal team and see what you can do. In that case, sending a video or a handwritten note, perfect.
Jordan:Yeah.
Sarah:But there are laws about like the value of the gift, pre-branding, pre-shipping, things like that, you know, true value of the gift, which is how you get around healthcare gifting. And so check with that. Check to see if they have any gift giving restrictions at work, because again, you don't want to get someone fired. That's a bad look.
Jordan:Yeah.
Sarah:The other thing I would say is start small. A lot of people are like, oh my gosh, we have a budget and we can send gifts. I'm gonna send gifts to all 30,000 of our customers. It's probably not effective to do that.
Priscilla:Yeah. When you were talking about, you know, trying to get buy-in. Measuring success is a big part of this, right? You have to show the people who are footing the bill that this is successful. So, how do you measure success? How do you draw that link to the gift and customer loyalty?
Sarah:I think it goes back to that gifting strategy. Figure out why you're gifting first and then measure that. So if I want to know if gifting improves retention, if done during onboarding, I'm gonna track all of my customers who were onboarding. I'm gonna track who I gifted. Uh, probably also track to see if that person is still with the company, because there's a lot of turnover in companies. So track that too. And then see of those customers who were given a gift, how many renewed, of the ones that didn't pick, how many renewed. And maybe at what value.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:Or if you're not running on a renewal thing, maybe it's a purchase thing like Chewy, I am betting they've got some numbers that show if you send flowers in a painting, that person is coming back with their next pet. Yeah. And they're going all in on the puppy gear or the kitten gear. Yeah. So if you have a customer marketer on your team, they're gonna eat this up because they already know how to do all of those numbers. The other thing is that if you are using a corporate gifting tool, it probably already has stuff tied in to help you make those calls. I know Loop and Tie, Sendoso, Brilliant are some of the companies that have really done a good job of integrating with Salesforce, integrating with HubSpot. So you can see who has received a gift and what happened next. Yeah. Oh. So utilize your tech stack. It's there. Yeah. You've got a way to track those things. And then talk to your data team. There's probably somebody, if you don't have a customer marketer, you're not set up on Salesforce, if you have somebody that's just pretty good with data on your team, they can probably help sort out based on what you've got going on in your own company to see where to measure that impact.
Priscilla:Another thing that I was gonna say was, you know, don't forget about customer feedback quotes too. Oh, yeah, like share that kind of stuff. I think sometimes we get very like data focused, and data is great, and it's such a good way to show there's a connection there. But when you hear from someone that they've been touched by this gift or it made an impact on them, grab those quotes and save them somewhere and have those ready. Cause I really think that is so powerful as well, and sometimes is not focused on as much as the data is.
Jordan:Oh, yeah. Whenever someone like posts about Buzz sprout, we're constantly like taking screenshots from social media. If we notice something really touching, we will take a screenshot, post it in the company chat.
Sarah:Yep. I do a thing as part of my monthly reporting and I call it the Glimmers page. Oh, glimmers, glimmers of like happy little things that people said. But we had a field at Alice in every gift because they were all digital or mostly digital after the pandemic. And it was just a thank you field. And my team was responsible for watching that field because sometimes it was something didn't work and I had to fix it and they wouldn't tell us any other way. It was just in that field. But it felt really good to be able to go back to somebody's manager and say, Hey, Jordan gave this gift and look what this person said.
Priscilla:Yeah. So for anyone who's listening who wants to start incorporating gifting into their customer experience, maybe for this holiday season, or maybe since holidays aren't the best time, maybe for February. What is one small step that they can take this week to get started on that and to start testing those things out?
Sarah:I would say choose a subset of customers that you think in whatever way might be impacted positively by a gift. And that could be somebody that's just maybe that's the customer that's been with you the longest. Yeah. Or, you know, somebody that has been such an advocate and brought in other customers. And then figure out what your budget is to see how much you can spend, because that really informs what you can do. Some companies have, you know, top flight golf set budgets, and some of us don't. Um figure out what that is. Maybe it's a note, maybe it's a loom video, maybe it's a box of chocolates for talk in February.
Priscilla:Yeah. I would also say just as a leader, you can start fostering a culture of encouragement, honestly.
Sarah:Absolutely.
Priscilla:If you just want to start getting people thinking in that way, and maybe you're not going to start actually physically giving gifts tomorrow, but maybe you just want to start saying, hey, don't miss an opportunity to encourage someone when you're in the support inbox today. Look for ways to delight people. And then as you start getting that culture of encouragement in place, then you go, hey, now let's take this up a notch and let's see what we can do with some physical gifts and let's look into sending them those chocolates and things like that. So I think if you're really looking for that like first step and you're in a place where you're like, we're so far from sending gifts. We barely do good customer support. Good point.
Sarah:It is a mindset. And look around for what you can leverage as a gift. It may be something that you don't think about. Like you're talking about Buzzsprout credits. That's not something that is going to be expensive for your team to do. So maybe give everybody a credit budget or a refund budget or something like that that they can use.
Priscilla:Well, and I also think, you know, you've mentioned a couple of times handwriting notes. And that's so easy to do as a customer support person. If you have five minutes, you can handwrite a note. And most of the time you have a billing address on file and you can send a handwritten note to a customer with very little hit on your time and money. And so that's another kind of, you know, if you're really at a place where you're listening to this, maybe you're not a support leader, maybe you're a support contributor or professional, and you're like, I don't work in a place that has this kind of a culture. And I'm not going to be able to sell my team on gifting. So how can I make an impact by myself without a budget? That might be something that you can do is take five minutes and write a letter and send it off.
Sarah:Yeah. And your marketing team may be willing to share a logo with you so that you can run it through VistaPrint for some cute note cards or something like that. Yeah. We had that when I worked at Olark Live Chat, I had a stack of note cards that had our logo in like holographic ink. And it was so quick to just be like, hey, I notice you've been with us for three years. We just really enjoy you as a customer. Have a great day. That's so nice. So simple.
Priscilla:Yeah. And then it comes out of the blue and it makes them feel cared for and known by your team. Because how often do you get a handwritten note in the mail? Like when was the last time that ever happened? Never, never. It does not happen anymore. So then for the bigger companies, the ones that maybe do have the budgets for this, you've mentioned a couple third-party services that people can work with. Maybe which ones do you recommend for those companies that have a budget for this?
Sarah:It depends on your size. So if you're just getting started and you're not sure where to start, maybe you just want to do some gift cards. Brilliant is great. They have a really good selection of gift cards and they also do charity donations.
Priscilla:Oh, that's really cool.
Sarah:Because if you can't accept a gift, you can probably be like, thanks for donating to my favorite charity in my name.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Sarah:Another one that I really, really love, totally in love with them, is loop and tie. Okay. They're very eco-conscious. They have collections like, you know, the BIPOC collection, the woman-owned collection, they have kind of artsy gifts, but they focus on choice. So you're not always picking a gift. It's like, here's your budget and your theme. Oh, that's cool. And then your recipient gets to pick the gift. That's great. The bonus there is that you don't have to know their address. So if you don't have someone's address, they take care of it. That is nice. And then if you're on the larger side, Sendoso is really the big player and they're the ones that can handle like, I need to ship 4,000 cutting boards that are personalized to a warehouse and I want them all to go out on the same day. Whoa. They're the big, big and they can do custom kitting. Big scale. Yeah, employee onboarding kits for large companies. And they also have a lot of AI functionality. So they can do some of that AI gifting research in platform and then tell you in Salesforce what the impact of that gift was. Wow.
Priscilla:That's awesome. So if you had one takeaway to share, because I feel like we've covered a lot in this conversation. Oh my gosh. One takeaway that you want people to keep when they turn off this episode.
Sarah:I think my biggest takeaway would be don't overthink it. Don't get so wrapped in the what if and what about, and then later, don't think two years down the road. Think like one small thing I can do right now. That's so good. Send a note.
Priscilla:Send a note. Just send a note. Everyone listening to this should pause the podcast, write a handwritten note. Yes. Whether it's in support or honestly just to a friend, send a note. It makes it a little bit more.
Jordan:I was about to say it to the mom.
Priscilla:Yeah, send it to your mom. That's your mom. I think it's so fun. I think, you know, delighting customers is probably one of the most fun aspects of the customer support industry and just this job as being able to make someone's day. And I don't think it gets enough attention. So thank you for coming on and talking with us about it. I think it's really, really fun to do this kind of stuff. And it reminds us that this is a really fun job. Like the puzzle side of it is really fun. But this aspect of getting to delight and surprise customers is the best. Like we shouldn't take it for granted. It really is the best. It's so much fun. That's why I'm still here. Yeah. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights because it really can be really fun. And I feel like we both learned a lot. I've got so many ideas just like running through my head right now. I'm ready to go Christmas shopping right now.
Jordan:Me too.
Priscilla:This is the holiday spirit. So before you go Christmas shopping, I know that your experience goes way beyond gift giving. So how can people find you and learn more about scaling teams and leading remotely? How can they find you?
Sarah:Uh, LinkedIn is really my primary place. And then I'm also very active in the support-driven and elevate CX communities. So you can almost always find me there.
Priscilla:Which are fantastic communities. If you're not part of those, you should be a part of those. Definitely. And we will link Sarah's LinkedIn in the show notes. So if you want to just click on that link and hop over and send her a message, you can. And I'm sure she will share all of her great insights on everything else that she is an expert in because there's so much more than gifting, but it was so fun to talk about gifting. So thank you so much for being here, Sarah.
Sarah:Thank you for letting me come and talk about something fun like gifting. It's been a joy.
Priscilla:Now enjoy your Christmas shopping. Yay! So usually this is the segment where we read a support story or answer a real life support question. But today we're gonna do things a little differently because it's December, which means the year is ending. Yeah. And we are wrapping up our second year of Happy to Help. That's so wild. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It does not feel like it's been another year.
Jordan:I don't even know where it went.
Priscilla:It really is crazy how fast 2025 went. Someone said to me the other day, Oh, you've been podcasting for two years. And I was like, that's so weird. What? Isn't that wild? Oh. Two years. It goes so fast. It really does. So I thought it would be cool to take a minute and look at some of the episodes that we did this year. Yeah. And just highlight how much really cool stuff we got to do this year through this podcast. So we've covered topics like AI and customer support. Yeah. And journey mapping. And we've talked about communicating with developers. We did that episode with Tom back at the beginning of the year about ways to communicate well with developers when you're in tech support. Which is so good to know. Seriously, we did an episode on customer education and the importance of customer education. Kara joined us, which was great. We did an episode on managing remote support teams. Yeah. We've had some really, really cool guests this year. I think this is the thing that's the most exciting to me is that we've had some really incredible guests. Yeah. We had Chase Clemens from 37 Signals, classic. We love him. He'll be on next season for sure. Yeah, of course. We had Connor Pendergrass. We had Matt Patterson from Help Scout. We had Erica Clayton, who was so much fun. So we had Sarah Betts today. We had Stacey Sherman from doing CX Right. She's fantastic. And that was such a great episode about journey mapping. Yes. And then we had Brittany Hodak, who talked about super fans with us. And that was. So much fun. And music. And music and a little bit of Taylor Swift. Yeah. She has tied in everything we love. Yeah. What a good year. It really has been such a good year of podcasting, of conversations, of creating remarkable support experiences for customers. And so anyone who's listening to this who shares this with their colleagues or their friends, like I really appreciate it. It has been so much fun to do this every month. And I'm really excited for next year and some of the things that we're talking about and planning for with our upcoming episodes. So we're not taking some big break. We'll have an episode come out in January, but I'm just really proud of the work we've done this year. So thanks, Jordan, for editing all of it and making me sound smart and contributing to these conversations. It's been a lot of fun.
Jordan:It has been. Yeah, I think that it would be a good opportunity for our listeners to tap the Texas Show link in the show notes if they have any ideas for people we should have on as guests or any ideas of like topics we could cover. We love getting topic suggestions because it's hard putting content together. So if you want to give us uh some softballs for us to hit, that would be great.
Priscilla:Yeah. Like what are you struggling with right now? What is it that you're trying to figure out? Yeah. And you want an expert who knows what they're doing in that field to come in and tell you some strategies. Yeah. We can find that expert. If you tell us what you want that information on, we can help find that. So yeah, definitely. If you've enjoyed listening to episodes or if you have questions or episode ideas, yeah, tap the send us a text link in the show notes and send that in to us. And we would love to do an episode specifically on your topic for you. Yep. All right. Well, Jordan, congrats on another year of Happy to Help. Congratulations, you too. This was fun. We will see you next year in 2026, and I am so excited about it. So I want to once again thank Sarah Betts for being here today and joining us on the episode. And thank you all for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
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