Adam Rabinowitz is the Head of Customer Experience at Flock Safety, the first public safety operating system that is empowering over 1,500 cities to eliminate crime and contributing evidence to help solve 500+ criminal cases every single day.

Before Flock Safety, he served as Head of Support Operations at Instacart. We sat down with Adam to talk through his tactical expertise in customer experience, diving deep on:

• Informing product design with customer feedback
• Building a scalable and confident CX team
• Refining the optimal user experience

Guiding Principles: Making the Customer’s Life Easy

At Instacart, Adam helped scale the support team during hyper-growth, which taught him the importance of understanding his customers and delivering on their needs.

He recounts his early days at Instacart when customers frequently reported grocery items as missing, lost, or damaged. His mission was to encourage customers to trust another person to accomplish such a personal task: grocery shopping.

So to get customers comfortable with delegating that activity to Instacart, he knew they had to trust that they’d be well taken care of if things didn’t go as expected.

Through his work, Adam felt he had a genuine impact on the company and that he could deeply understand users and deliver on their core needs.

By interacting with customers and helping solve their problems, he slowly got deeper and deeper into the CX landscape by taking on a leadership role at Flock Safety.

Building Out Support Operations at Flock

After working in field offices his entire career, Adam wanted to be in the room where the decisions were made and use his knowledge to create an optimal customer experience.

That opportunity presented itself two years later at Atlanta-headquartered Flock Safety.

When he first joined the company, it had approximately 50 employees. Now at 400 employees, he’s thrilled to have helped shape the company’s growth trajectory while establishing the high level of customer service his team can provide as a common reason for customers renewing and expanding.

The success that Adam achieved at Instacart directly informed how he scaled the CX team at Flock. However, Adam recalls that Cohere plays a major factor in keeping a lean support team.

From day one at Flock, Adam focused on delivering a top-tier customer experience that starts with a product that’s easy to use and an engaged CX team member that thrives on their ability to help.

In an ideal scenario, it would be a rare need for a customer to connect with a “how-to” question. But if it occurs, the quality of the interaction should leave the customer satisfied, impressed, and comfortable reaching back out should the need arise again.

The Defining Pillars of a High Functioning CX Team

Adam discusses the benefits of empowering the “front lines” to do what it takes to get the answers the customer is looking for.

He explains that when an employee comes from another company, especially one with a large hierarchical structure, it isn’t natural for them to reach out to whoever it takes to get a confident answer to the customer’s question.

Regarding the three qualities he looks to ingrain in CX, Adam focuses on:

• Customer-obsessed employees
• Transparent internal structure
• Empathetic communication

He trains his team to never be afraid to ask questions and he gives them the confidence from early on “to always put the customer first”.

Adam also instills in his team to never have the fear of “barking up the wrong tree,” leading to the quickest and most accurate answer. In turn, this is rewarding for the customer experience employee as he believes that employees are motivated by positive user experiences.

For an employee, the interaction was meaningful for them as they handled the problem, learned from it, and were tapped into the experience of creating a product based on customer needs.

How Flock Leveraged Cohere to Drive Results

Adam points out that Cohere yielded faster, more efficient customer interactions and useful feedback for Flock’s customer support team.

As the typical Flock Safety customer either works in law enforcement or is on the board of a homeowners association, trust and responsiveness were two important aspects of the customer experience.

Since Flock’s technology enables users to search for evidence, namely license plate footage, in the event of a crime, they needed to implement privacy measures to ensure that private information remains private.

Cohere enables Flock to properly help and guide their customers securely without having to do anything on their end. Adam relayed that Flock’s service is quite similar to “pulling up a chair next to the customer with their approval and assisting. Using Cohere, we were able to increase customer loyalty because it showed our users that we invest in a great customer experience.”

Adam explained that with the customer often in a heightened emotional state when contacting Flock Support, the team has a great responsibility to handle them, their information, and their situation with care.