Intelligent support operations really benefit the entire organization with support being at the center of the data collection.

For years, revenue, development, and IT have had operations teams to help them be more successful. These Operations teams provide tooling, insights, and enablement to their respective teams by analysing data, enhancing tool sets, and designing effective processes. More recently, these concepts are being applied within Support.

Support Operations has become more popular because of the advancement of the tools in the market and an increased focus on customer-centricity. When implemented correctly, Support Ops will enhance your customer experience and help you deliver higher-quality support services. Matt Dunn, Senior Director of Technical Success at SauceLabs, has made investments in ‘Intelligent Support Operations’ for his team and the benefits have reverberated across departments.

What is Intelligent Support Operations?

Q: I would like to start off with defining ‘Intelligent Support Operations’ given how new it is to most audiences.

Matt: I see Intelligent Support Operations as cutting down on repetitive manual work and automating where possible. This enables your support engineers or agents to focus their time on what they do best – tracking down issues and talking to customers.

By this, I don’t mean things like ticket deflection. What I’m talking about is making it easy and quick to be able to get the data you need to answer various questions. This data can be used for either customers or internal stakeholders to intelligently bring context to an issue or flag details that require their attention or actions.

Q: Why is this a function worth investing in?

Matt: I’m sure like a lot of companies, at Sauce Labs we have data in various disconnected systems. Before we started on this journey, bringing that data together to answer questions or gain insights required laborious and manual work. We have support tickets, internal tickets (e.g. bug reports) and account data in separate systems. 

Native integrations allow those systems to work together, but only in a very functional fashion such as linking tickets to bugs. Let’s say we want to gather data on the customers who have reported a particular bug, or requested a particular feature, or who were impacted by a particular service incident. We’d need to know who those customers are, what is the total Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) associated with the bug/feature request/incident, etc. To come up with that data we had to export data from multiple systems and manually combine it.

With intelligent support operations we can find that data, report on it and provide that to other groups within the company such as Product and Customer Success instantly.

Similarly, we can combine various factors and pieces of data to help prioritize support tickets, predict (and get ahead of) ticket escalations, notify Customer Success Managers of accounts needing attention and more.

Why Implementing it is Crucial for Customer Experience Success

Q: What specific problem or challenges prompted your organization to go to market for a tool to solve these problems?

Matt: A couple of things really. First of all, like many customer support and customer success organisations, we were very reactive. We had data on the number of tickets being opened by each customer or each topic classification etc, but it was difficult to get a sense of a customer’s sentiment through their support tickets without having to go and do a lot of reading. As a result, tickets and issues get escalated, and no matter how good your escalation management process is, by that point the customer is already frustrated.

The other problem was that in order to keep track of support requests raised by their accounts, our Customer Success Managers were copied on every support ticket update, meaning they were inundated with emails. Working through all of that and finding what needed their attention was very difficult and time consuming.

We implemented a tool called TheLoops to solve this. Working with them, we’ve been able to predict and get ahead of ticket escalations with intelligent insights. We’ve been able to highlight accounts and tickets that need attention, rather than having a CSM have to wade through email.

Q: How does Intelligent Support Operations integrate with your existing tech stack?

Matt:  We use Zendesk for our support ticketing system and customer feedback, JIRA for internal bug reports, Productboard for feature requests and product roadmap tracking, Salesforce as our CRM and Slack for internal communications TheLoops has been able to easily integrate with all of these systems (and more), combining data and pushing notifications and insights to where they are needed. It sort of just “fits in the middle” to help aggregate and combine all of those other systems.

Key Aspects to Focus on 

Q: Are there any specific instances where it helped uncover insights that were previously unnoticed?

Matt: One main thing is that there are things we’re looking at right now around intelligently grouping and summarising tickets that look like a feature request, so we can easily feed that into our Product team. We’re also working on intelligently classifying support tickets way beyond a simple topic dropdown list.

Customer feedback is incredibly important to us. We review every negative survey, and usually follow up with customers to get further feedback, or to re-engage with the customer. Customer feedback is very helpful for uncovering coaching opportunities within the team, identifying process improvements, and gathering product feedback. All of this helps provide timely insights to our Product and other teams around emerging trends. 

Intelligent support operations really benefit the entire organization with support being at the center of the data collection.

In general, it all amounts to time savings and efficiency. All of these things were possible before, but with a lot of manual work. Now we can quickly and easily get data driven insights when it matters – often enabling us to deal with issues before they really blow up.

It’s helped us to focus our amazing support engineers on what they do best – helping our customers solve problems – whilst enabling our support management team to get ahead of escalations before they happen. 

Q: What challenges or limitations have you encountered while implementing or using the tool?

Matt: Not so much a challenge or a limitation, but remember that this is not magic. It pays to be clear about what it is you need and why, what data you want to use to combine to create insights and what it is you need as an actionable outcome. These tools can be incredibly powerful, but at the end of the day the outcome will only be as good as the question you ask.

The post Support Talks: Enabling Better Products and Services with Intelligent Support Operations appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Read how sales representatives and support leaders can better prepare themselves for meaningful sales conversations.

Support leaders are inundated with cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages about buying technology. Tools can improve support services and customer experience in so many ways that selling to support leaders is a significant addressable market. This trend has spiked lately with the rise of AI-enabled platforms.

But support teams are famously unique when it comes to selling. We often do not have the budgets that sales and marketing teams have, nor the resources to implement and maintain tools. Selling to support leaders is difficult. Chris Martinez, Founder and CEO of Idiomatic, has been battling this difficulty for a long time. So I asked him to share a bit about his experience. In our chat, he explains how both sales representatives and support leaders can better prepare themselves for meaningful sales conversations.

Q: The technology landscape in Support/CX tools is massive. How do you stand out and build your niche in a market like this?

Chris: When we got started we had a very opinionated view of what could be better about support. Namely that support should be the #1 source of customer intelligence informing every other part of the organization. We believed that support should be a strategic resource and not a cost center. That is still our view to this day and we try to hold fast to that core underlying idea as we navigate this landscape.

Not many people are willing to truly bet on this as an idea and we are far from accomplishing our goals of making this true for every successful business. We stand out because we focus on the insights you can gain from all of your support conversations, not just on making agents faster or more efficient (although that is one of the benefits of our insights).

That is how we stand out. I would say that every product company needs to form their own strong point of view on what they believe. Then they can explain how their product is best at solving the problems associated with that belief.

Q: How can a support leader find the best tools? Should leaders rely on Googling to find tools in a given space or does that reward ones with the most marketing budget?

Chris: I’d agree that checking things like Google and G2 can bias towards those who have the most budget. But it still helps get a sense of what products to start with. My advice is to ask your peers because you don’t really know how any tools perform in the wild until you talk to someone that has been working with them already.

I’d also have meaningful sales conversations with the companies themselves. Normally you can get a feel for what it’s going to be like getting support from them and how nice they are to work with in the sales process.

Q: What challenges are unique to selling to support leaders?

Chris: I’d say that it helps if you are a nice person. Support people are empathetic people that can read others easily and quickly. They are able to sniff out insincere offers of help and those who just want to sell, sell, sell and don’t actually care about their problems. So who you are and how you treat people matters a lot. 

I also find that support leaders are often not very empowered to buy anything “extra” in terms of budgets. So they need to be completely sure of their investments and have to fight to get resources.

Lastly, support leaders are used to solving their problems with people. It can be challenging when bringing a new technology to market. You are asking them to balance the mindset of spending this budget on adding to the team versus technology. It’s therefore so important to recognize this balance. If you want to have a meaningful sales conversation, you will have to address the trade-offs.

Q: What do you see as a support leader’s most important considerations in tooling?

Chris: ROI, ROI, ROI. Support leaders are ultimately, and unfortunately, running cost centers, so they can not invest in something unless it has significant ROI. (Although products like Idiomatic are trying to help turn this around.) 

For this reason, selling a support product needs to focus on actionability. Support leaders often ask the question “so what,” as in “so what can I do with it now?” What decisions can I make, what can I improve, what can I save, etc.  These questions are always top of mind and are critical to have clear, empirical answers for. It’s not acceptable to use buzz words or generics. Be specific. What does your product do and how does that benefit a support team?

Finally, it often is important how easy a product is to implement. Specifically, how many technical resources on the buyers’ end they will have to utilize to implement the tool. Support leaders are often not given any internal development resources, so having a tool they can implement without talking to engineering is ideal for them.

Q: How can support leaders make better purchasing decisions and what can they do to help make the sales cycle easier for all parties?

Chris:  I think demo video tools and custom demos can be used more to shorten the sales cycle. Any content that helps explain how a given use case is solved is valuable. I also think talking to existing customers of the product is very helpful. 

Sales will always want to know a budget, so having that in mind always helps. Also, knowing what your cost per ticket is would be super helpful in calculating ROI of any tool. These two things will help simplify decision making. 

Also, having a clear idea of what pain you are trying to solve goes a long way. Often, I’ll talk to support leaders that have some vague ideas that they think technology could help them but they haven’t thought it all the way through. 

So they come in and say: “I think I want to get more insights from my Zendesk tickets”. To which we’ll say “OK, what do you want to do with those insights? Are you looking for product insights to feedback to your product team? Are you looking to cost insights to see how you can streamline customer operations and save yourself money? Are you looking for bugs to fix?” The answers to these questions matter. Many tools do many things, so use cases are important. If the customer comes in knowing how they would use the tool if it worked perfectly, that can make for a more meaningful sales conversation.

The post Support Talks: Better Conversations when Selling to Support Leaders appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

A balanced scorecard provides a great way for support teams to discuss success and areas for improvement during 1:1 meetings.

As Customer Support Leaders, we understand the importance of conducting meaningful 1:1 conversations with team members. These conversations ensure their growth and align their goals with the broader objectives of our organizations. One of the many one-on-one frameworks that can be used to produce excellent results is the balanced scorecard.

A Balanced Scorecard is a performance measurement tool that enables a leader to assess and track various aspects of their operations and align them with strategic goals. Using this approach within customer support teams allows agents to take ownership of their performance and drive meaningful outcomes. Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience and Support at NumberBarn, uses this technique with his teams to great success. He and I sat down to discuss how leveraging this one-on-one framework can elevate customer support excellence, foster agent growth, and cultivate lasting customer relationships.

Can you provide an overview of how you implemented a balanced scorecard in support? 

Jeremy: As we built a balanced scorecard for our support team, we sought to display only metrics that were within the agent’s control, which required quite a bit of simplification. First, we felt that Customer Satisfaction and Service Level were not completely within their control. While something they contribute to, it was more appropriate to share the overall team score. 

Then, since our main channel is email, we display emails sent per hour and show them where they stand in comparison to the team average and predetermined goal. However, showing them quantity can prove disastrous if not balanced with quality. That’s why we display the results of quality assessments just below that. This simplicity has given both agents and supervisors some much-needed focus.

Finally, for our other channels, we’re moving more and more toward showing an occupancy metric. This is the percentage of time agents are occupied versus their scheduled work hours. There are still some variables with this one but it’s leading to conversations around how productive our team is being with their time.

How did the use of a balanced scorecard one-on-one framework enhance the quality of 1:1 conversations? 

Jeremy: Thinking about this in terms of before and after, I will say that it’s incredibly difficult to discuss productivity and quality with team members without having the metrics to back it up. Since establishing our scorecard, we’ve been able to show our lower performers where they can improve and set goals that are revisited on a regular basis. Of late, our 1:1 conversations have turned into celebrations as we see folks meet their goals. It’s amazing how that works!

We also found that we couldn’t just show people the quantity of their work. In an environment where some folks work part time and others full time, we had to marry metrics like emails sent with hours worked. Emails sent per hour worked gives us an apples to apples comparison across our team.

Also important in our 1:1 conversations with team members is caring for them as people. We talk about how they’re doing both inside and outside of work. What are their career goals, how’s school going, how’s their family doing and how can we best support them? Agents who are valued first as humans are much more likely to perform at a high level in their work.

What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) did you include in the balanced scorecard?

Jeremy: As mentioned earlier, we share quantity of work metrics to show productivity as well as quality of work metrics to ensure a healthy balance. We also show team-wide metrics because our entire team can help us achieve great customer satisfaction and help us hit our service level targets. 

Another metric that I didn’t mention is contribution toward self-service which is part of our Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) initiative. We love it when our team sends knowledge articles to customers to resolve issues, actively suggests edits to existing articles, and submits drafts for new articles. 

How did these metrics contribute to delivering meaningful outcomes?

Jeremy: Initially, one of our biggest challenges was that the support team felt understaffed and overworked and ownership felt that both quality and productivity were lacking. By implementing this balanced scorecard in support, we’re able to confidently say that our team is working at an optimal level — or at least trending in the right direction. This allows us to confidently ask for more people and resources as needed. It definitely improves the level of trust between management and ownership at our company. 

How did the balanced scorecard approach help in aligning individual agent goals with the broader objectives of the support team and organization?

Jeremy: Our mission as a company is as follows:

We believe behind every telephone number there’s a beautiful idea, opportunity, or person. We strive to create those meaningful connections every day.

I tend to shorten this and say that we are all about making meaningful connections with our customers. By working at optimal productivity, we ensure no customer has to wait too long for a solution to their issue. And quality ensures that every experience with our customer support team is a good one. The fact that we continuously achieve customer satisfaction levels over 90% indicates that we’re mostly getting this right. Are we perfect? No! But I like to think that we are continuously improving and working toward this goal.

Were there any challenges or obstacles you encountered during the implementation of the balanced scorecard in support? 

Jeremy: The biggest challenge for us was finding the best, most sustainable way to present this data to our team. We were able to get about 90% of the way there by creating dashboards in our ticketing system. The inability to pull in data from our HR/time tracking platform compelled us to create our own dashboard in Google Sheets. 

After a bunch of YouTube videos and formulas and about 30 minutes of data input each month, we can now present a one-page dashboard to agents during 1:1 conversations with just a few clicks. We’re constantly on the lookout for software that can do the job but this system is working for us for now.

What tools have you used to manage this program, both from the agent’s point of view, but also to show that success to your leadership?

Jeremy:  Mainly a Google Sheet packed with a bunch of formulas is doing the trick for us currently. We actually did create individual performance dashboards in our ticketing system.  That way agents can see how they did on a daily basis. Still, we use the spreadsheet during our monthly 1:1 conversations. It’s definitely come in handy when leadership asks how a particular team member is doing and we have the data at the ready.

The post Support Talks: Balanced Scorecards in Support 1:1s appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

“What are partnerships and how do they tend to work in a customer experience context?”

Customer expectations are high when contacting support. In many cases, an agent needs to understand the ecosystem their products are in and not just the product they support. If you integrate into a tool, or claim to have domain expertise in a given industry, expectations can rise rapidly.

While the product you sell might be a leader at some aspects of a given marketspace, it likely isn’t an all-encompassing solution. For example, we wouldn’t expect a telephony system to also be a help desk, but if they integrate with a help desk that would really enhance it’s value.

Further to that, what if the telephony company could help ensure you were set up for success with your help desk and their tool? These types of value-add services can easily be created with strategic partnerships in Customer Experience with companies that complement what you do.  Ben Wright, Founder of Partner Fuel, recognizes the value of partnership across an organization with his years of experience in the space. We connected to talk about how adding strong partnerships in customer experience can improve the services you offer.

What are partnerships and how do they tend to work in a customer experience context?

Ben: One of the core tenets of partnerships is reciprocity! Therefore, a partnership in any context is really a mutually beneficial relationship.

To give a more real example, if an outsourcing company was to partner with a support tool company, there would be benefits for both sides. The outsourcer would refer business to relevant partners if they hear that a specific customer isn’t happy with their current support tool or has a new use case. Similarly, the tool company would refer back when one of their customers needs to expand their support services. Another benefit is that both companies show their domain knowledge by being aware of relevant tools and services available to help bring value to their client.

Both parties in this context are getting benefits from the relationship.

As CX leaders, we are always looking to drive more value. For example, Support, because it is often seen as a cost center and Success because they are in charge of renewals,etc. You mentioned value above, can you expand on how to drive more value?

Ben: Partnerships provide organizations with an opportunity to offer comprehensive value to their clients. By partnering with organizations that offer complementary solutions and services, companies can provide more than just their core product to their customers. They become trusted advisors that can consult on areas outside their primary expertise.

CX leaders should care about these interactions. Partnership leaders need to educate them because CX teams that can provide knowledge and guidance at a wider industry or business need level add value to your customers. It increases trust that your agents understand your customers’ businesses.

Partnerships influence all departments and enable companies to make knowledgeable recommendations and establish themselves as true experts. Partnerships in customer experience foster stronger relationships with their customer base.

Often, people compare partnerships to hiring new skills or building solutions internally. What are the costs/benefits/opportunities of these options?

Ben: Developing new features or a tool can be expensive. When identifying gaps in a product or service, partnering with organizations that already offer the desired features can be a more cost-effective solution. Due to the current macroeconomic climate, it may not be feasible to allocate resources for building every necessary feature.

If a feature is not feasible and your customers are looking to you for solutions, a partnership can help solve this gap.

Specifically, co-market with partners. Co-marketing is combining your companies’ perspectives to present a more holistic solution to the clientbase, reach new audiences and strengthen both of your brands.

Partnerships can also benefit every department even though they often only focus on new leads. Interoperability should also be a focus. Integrations are important to prospects because, when done well, they have better CX which improves adoption. Working with a partner to integrate their offerings and fill customer needs is an efficient way to create this environment.

When in the life cycle of starting/growing a team should these types of partnerships be considered? And does that change over time?

Ben: Partnerships are applicable at all stages of a team/company lifecycle. For any company or organization there are benefits with partnering with other companies. They include:

• Increased revenue (through referrals)
• Increased brand awareness (through co-marketing with partners)
• Ability to sell into new markets (for example if you have partners that sell into EMEA, and you don’t have a footprint there, you may be able to gain exposure to these markets through partners)

However, for a partnership program to be successful there needs to be effort and attention given to building those relationships, content, and awareness ideas. These factors often prevent newer companies from trying partnerships, as it requires time and effort.

How to do you measure the success of a partnership?

Ben: I go back to where we started off, with the principle of reciprocity! A partnership is successful if both sides are getting value. An ideal partnership looks like both parties putting in equal effort, resources and time to the relationship.

One thing I love to tell people about partnerships is that you should spend as much time as possible trying to generate leads for your partners. A lead sent in your partner’s direction is the best way to kick off a relationship and will usually result in an increase in effort on your partner’s side.

Are there any tools that you use to help strengthen these partnerships or increase its value?

Ben: There are specialized tools available in the market that aid in creating effective partnerships, including PRM (Partner Relationship Management) systems. PRMs help with tracking leads generated by partners, as well as providing training and enablement resources. PRMs allow for a comprehensive view of the partnership and engagement tracking.

Tools such as Crossbeam and Reveal offer account mapping capabilities that allow for combining CRM data with partner data.  This enables the identification of mutual customers, potential customers, and current customers of partners that are open to introductions.

This valuable data provides actionable insights for going to market with partners, and can greatly enhance the partnership’s value.

Share data through tools with partners. Examples: Do we have mutual partners? Can they help influence the deal? Can we provide more value together? The more you know, the more of a trusted advisor you can be, no matter what department.

The post Support Talks: Adding Partnerships in Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Recruiting a customer experience talent is always a challenge.

Hiring is important for every role at a company. The time and effort to interview, onboard, and train are costly. If a hiring mistake is made, the impact on the team, and company, can mean delays in projects, reduced morale, or at worst a disruptive pivot of a team.

Recruiting top Customer Experience talent has added complexities because these hires likely impact customers directly. Kristina McDougall, Founder of Artemis Canada, has been working in recruiting for over 20 years and has watched CX develop as a function with many roles. I asked for her insights on recruiting in general, some key considerations for hiring customer experience talent, and how technology can (or cannot) help.

In your experience, is recruiting for Customer Experience-focused roles different from other roles?

Kristina: CX has really evolved over the past decade. The SaaS model has blurred the lines between marketing, sales, conversion, on-boarding, training, support,and retention. Since CX is part of all of these functions, it is important to understand how each company defines CX and how collaboration works across the business at every customer touch point.  Like many other roles, you have to unpack a lot before you really know what a company means when they say CX.

Likewise, you need to understand individual candidates’ CX experience. Roles with similar titles have vastly different responsibilities, deliverables, and metrics in the market. Strategies and skills differ broadly depending how you define your customer: Direct to consumer, SMB, Mid-market, and enterprise are all different. A recruiter needs to understand those differences and how that changes the hiring profile in leader and individual contributor roles.

Are there any talents in CX Leaders that remain constant?

Kristina: As said in the previous point, roles can differ pretty drastically, but there are some constants. Data is a big one. The need to measure results in meaningful ways and to demonstrate how the bottom line is impacted by various CX activities is key. And because CX touches just about every other function, collaboration across teams is also critical. So we also look for ability and evidence of engagement with other disciplines, gaining buy-in, and presenting new ideas. With Customer Experience talent, communication style, and ability to upsell/renew without being or seeming “salesy” are also skills we tend to look for. Solutions and service orientation (but with an eye on revenue) is a really important skill.

Any favorite questions you ask these candidates as you vet them for your clients?

Kristina: I focus on how the candidate builds trust with clients. CX is a trust-building job and so understanding the candidate’s perspective on trust and how they foster it with others will be important to any role in this area.

In the last question, I mentioned service-oriented. That is really important to CX. Does the candidate understand their customers, both internal and external, and how they service both groups?

Not just for CX, but we always ask candidates to describe their ideal role. We want to get a sense for the management style they prefer, the scope of the ideal role, how they prefer to collaborate with peers across the business etc. We understand that ideal fit is rare, but we can look at where things align and whether obvious gaps can be addressed.

What misconceptions or errors do you see when it comes to job descriptions or business needs?

Kristina: We see companies getting excited about people with experience in larger, big-brand companies. However, what they more often need are builders who might come from start-ups that are not well known. In many cases, the big company person is ill-prepared for the work that needs to be done in a start-up or scale-up. They will struggle without the infrastructure of a big organization. All experience is not equal, and when designing a job description, you should consider those profile details.

Domain is another interesting qualification. CX roles will sometimes require technical know-how in the specific organization industry (eg. finance, construction, healthcare). This ensures that reps and leaders can understand, empathize and gain trust and credibility with the customer base. More often they will require experience in a similar role, using similar systems, or working in SaaS for example.

Leaders should ask themselves what someone is more likely to learn in the first 3-6 months of a role if they are to be exceptional. It is often worth investing in system and product training in a passionate domain expert. Hiring someone who is smart enough and excited enough to learn is key. Accessing domain experts also opens up the pool of talent for CX beyond other tech companies, bringing diversity and depth to your talent pool.

What are your thoughts on remote work? Do you see clients taking advantage of a wider candidate pool?

Kristina: Top candidates are definitely asking for a remote role as either a strong preference or as a requirement. The recruiting company has to consider the viability and openness to remote to recruit top talent. More than a few days/week in the office is a tough sell right now. 

Companies that permit remote work will have an advantage. These organizations are not only attracting the strongest people, but the flexibility enables them to recruit from a less-constrained pool of candidates. Wider geographies equal more diversity and more people to recruit from.

CX especially is well-suited for remote work. Clients are often in different time zones, so you can hire based on client geographies rather than corporate HQ. In addition, since most of their work is external, there’s often less internal peer collaboration needed than something like development, for example.

There are still advantages to working in person. Our experience shows that collaboration, learning, mentoring, and coaching of teammates are facilitated more easily in person. Data shows that layoffs affect remote employees disproportionately more than those who worked in-office, which indicates that there is a benefit to face-time with peers and leaders.

Artificial Intelligence tools are creeping into the recruitment and hiring space. Where is (or isn’t) their place in the hiring process?

Kristina: AI can leverage data in the research phases of recruitment. It simplifies accessing, consuming, and evaluating job and company information for individuals and candidate profiles and resumes for companies.  But there is a danger in making assumptions about ideal fit in tech companies that differ tremendously across culture, stage, etc.

Candidate experience requires a good balance of authentic human interaction and simplification of any tedious steps. Meanwhile, things like scheduling of interviews, preparing candidates and interviewers in advance, and background checks are great targets for automation.

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The voice of the customer is a critical component of producing products your customers want.

Using Voice of Customer (VOC) feedback is critical to an organization’s success. Ultimately, in any of our businesses, we produce products that need consumers. If those consumers are telling us what they want and we don’t act on it, they are more likely to find someone who does. Nat Onions, VP of Customer Experience at Customer.io, noticed this issue with her team, and set about reestablishing a collaborative environment for Success and Product to use Voice of Customer feedback to improve their offerings and customer experience.

How did you begin to see an issue with feedback being used?

Nat: Our CSMs have always been diligent about keeping customer records updated in our tooling. Over the 5 years that our CS program has been running, we’ve perfected the process and expectations for customer record maintenance, and writing detailed product feedback notes is a huge part of that task.

However, I started to notice a gap. While the customer records gave me great confidence that our CSMs were working well with customers and asking the right questions, which in turn resulted in great notes, I noticed that not all of the product feedback notes were making it into our dedicated Slack channel for product notes. 

I started hearing from members of the Product and Engineering Teams, who were a little concerned that the volume of feedback being passed on wasn’t as high as they expected. I assured them that notes were being taken, but I of course, wanted to dig in with my team and talk this through.

I discovered that the CSMs were self-triaging their product feedback notes and only passing on the feedback they saw as the most important – typically either highly positive, or with very specific criticism. All of the great notes that the CSMs had on the things in between were staying in our CS tool and never making their way to the feedback channel.

What were the impact  to your business of the decline in sharing all Voice of Customer feedback?

Nat:The intention behind this was good. The CSMs didn’t want the feedback volume to be too high for the Product Team or to overwhelm them with feedback that “wasn’t relevant”. But the Product Team let us know that anything and everything is relevant. They wanted all the feedback they could get their hands on. 

By not passing on all of the feedback and instead trying to focus on what CS considered the relevant highlights, we were limiting the Product Team’s insights that they rely on in order to iterate and improve our product and features. The CS Team is trusted with the handling of all our biggest customer interactions, and so keeping a lot of that feedback in silo (however good the intention) impacted one of the most important cross-functional relationships in our company – Product and CS.

The financial impact to the company wasn’t huge, but we did see a small number of instances where a customer churned and when investigating the reason we found that the product gap these customers cited was so close to release. The CS team wasn’t surfacing enough feedback, and we also had a missing piece in the form of them not knowing enough detail about the Product Team priorities.

How did you go about improving that product-success relationship?

Nat: The Product Team was the first to move on this, which was a helpful way for CS to get an idea of the standard that the Product Team was looking for. They started to share a “Weekly Product Priorities” write-up which gave details of what they had shipped that week, how progress was looking on the next priorities in line, and what the order was for the projects next on the list.

Having this in front of us sparked the next question for CS: What if we feel like these priorities aren’t in the right order for what our customers are asking for? 

It’s a daunting task to go to a tenured team of experts and essentially challenge their work. But CS knew deep down that we needed this cross-functional relationship to be strong, trusted, and have mutual value. 

My first step was to meet with our VP of Product to pose the question to him – “Hey Brian. We’re seeing Voice of Customer feedback that I think might indicate needing a shift in your team’s project priorities. How can we work together to get something done about this?”

There wasn’t even a hint of challenge in the response. Brian was thrilled that the CS team was raising Voice of customer feedback, and that we wanted to establish some deeper discussions on this crucial business element. And so the Product Managers & CS Monthly Session was born!

Every month, the CS team prepares for this meeting by collating a list of “quick fire” questions prompted by customer feedback. Examples are questions such as “will the initial version of feature x include y and z capabilities?” and “are we still on track for the projected delivery date of feature abc?”

Following this, CS presents up to 3 ‘deep dive’ cases. These are more complex customer use cases that present a larger prioritization discussion. Typically the outcome of presenting one of these cases is that the product team provides detail on how this case can be solved, and where they think this work should fit in the priority list. The result isn’t always a roadmap change (sometimes it is, though!), but we do always get an unbiased assessment from the Product Team on how we can deliver the most impact to the most customers in the order that we tackle our projects. 

Hearing this kind of detailed and regular Voice of Customer feedback went a long way for the Product Team, and it also gave CS motivation that their insights and ideas were being heard and acted on. So the next phase was to get a feedback stream flowing more regularly, without putting a ton more call time on everyone’s calendar. 

Now that CS knew that the Product Team wanted all of the feedback they could consume, the next step was obvious. We just needed to get all of the great CS notes surfaced for the product team to get their hands on, without creating extra work for either side. 

We’re lucky to have a skilled Team Lead on the CS Team (shoutout to Jp Valery!) who was able to whip up automation here without breaking a sweat. He connected the CS tooling to Slack so that every time a CSM added notes to a customer file it would automatically create a formatted Slack post in a dedicated feedback channel that the Product Team could access whenever they needed. It sparked so much great discussion, and we eliminated the issue of feedback living in a silo. 

After establishing your monthly sessions, prepping these customer use cases, and automating feedback sharing, what outcomes did you see?

Nat: The first outcome we saw was a big increase in trust. The CS team felt heard and valuable to the product process, and the Product Team gained a lot of confidence that the CS team was working with our customers in a way that allowed us to build the product that we know people want and need from us. 

Knowing the full extent of the value that comes from the CS insights now, we have a notes leaderboard to incentivise the CSMs to continually share their findings. We also have an archive of records from the CS<>Product meetings with follow-up items, so that we can keep track of what has been discussed and acted on. 

It’s difficult to track the exact business impact in terms of financials for this, as I don’t know that we can attribute any customer’s full contract value to a single feature development. However, we do know for sure that our relationships with customers have improved due to the internal relation between these two teams getting such a boost. CS and Product are now working much more closely together and the outcome is that customers see how close they are getting to the people building and improving their experience every day.

Voice of Customer feedback is ever-adapting, how will this program evolve?

Nat: Our next step is to improve the efficiency with which we handle Product and development requests from our biggest customers. In order to boost our credibility in the marketplace with large brands, we will be building a process and committee dedicated to how we assess individual customer requests. We always strive for maximum impact with our developments and product work. So our next phase is to explore what individual impact looks like as we start to build partnerships with more and more enterprise customers.

The post Support Talks: Voice of Customer Collaboration between Success and Product appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Customer retention is an important topic for all departments to understand.

Typically the onus to renew a customer is on account or success managers, but all aspects of the customer journey contribute to retention. Clay Telfer, a Customer Success Executive who’s built and led Success functions since 2011, wanted to explore how different retention strategies could work.

Benchmarking these strategies across companies is difficult. With different customer personas, business models, products, etc., some strategies that work great for company A, may fall flat for company B. How can you determine which will have the most meaningful impact?

What did you observe that sparked an interest in running this experiment?

Clay: My old boss and I had a friendly disagreement that I’ve seen a lot between Customer Success professionals. I prefer retention strategies that focus on providing an effortless experience to the customer. She preferred retention strategies that focus on “Wow” Moments, Surprise and Delight, and so on. 

There’s a time and place for both approaches, of course! We just disagreed on which approach was generally the most impactful. And then my boss had an idea that might improve our retention, and which had the added bonus of letting us test the success of a Surprise and Delight strategy.

(It’s worth noting that I’m speaking specifically of B2B here, and B2C may have different results.)

Craig: Can you explain the experiment and your starting hypothesis?

Clay: In this experiment, we split our new clients into a Control group and an Experimental group. If you ended up in the Experimental group, then we’d send you a surprise gift each month for your first six months. Stickers, swag, and similar things that we knew our clients enjoyed. If you were in the Control group, you didn’t get any of these gifts.

For six months, we put every other client into the Experimental group. Over the course of a year, we compared the customer retention of each cohort – Month 1 Control vs Month 1 Experimental, Month 2 Control vs Month 2 Experimental, and so on. At the end of this experiment, we’d have six cohorts of each group to compare, each of which would be between 6 and 12 months from their initial purchase.

As you can probably guess, we actually had two competing hypotheses here! My boss thought that the Experimental group would have better retention numbers than the Control group, and I thought they would have roughly the same retention numbers.

Did you control for any other factors? Tickets? CSAT or NPS? Did you feel those were relevant to the experience?

Clay: We didn’t, and I think doing so would largely defeat the purpose. We wanted to test the effect of this on our customers, and some of those customers are going to have a hundred tickets, or be unresponsive after launch, or give a really great/terrible NPS score. 

We started by identifying a handful of situations where a customer would cancel during onboarding or soon after launch. These were instances where a customer would realize very quickly that they had misunderstood a fundamental aspect of the service, and in those cases, we’d unwind the contract.

For these customers and only these customers, we’d remove them from either group. Since the first gift for the Experimental Group was sent roughly a month after launch, that was pretty easy.

We also removed a couple of clients where we’d sold them custom solutions. That customer profile would be getting an entirely different customer experience and couldn’t be compared to other customers. We also verified that the control and experiment groups were distributed fairly randomly across regions and other variables.

Outside of that, as we analyzed the results, we’d just compare some of the basic stats between the two groups and make sure there weren’t any large discrepancies. If we’d found that Experimental Group 3 had a vastly different number of tickets than Control Group 3, we would have looked into that.

But the thing is, you should expect to see differences like that. What we’re doing is testing a different customer experience, right? So maybe the Experimental Groups are going to have way better NPS scores, or way more tickets, or something else. That’s not a flaw that needs to be controlled for, that’s the exact information you’re trying to learn.

Craig: What tools and processes did you use to drive the A/B tests?

Clay: Google Sheets. #startuplife and all that, right? But also, for something so experimental, we didn’t want to invest too much time or money in tools or processes for something that might get thrown out after the experiment was done. 

I was able to put together a structure that kept this to about 10 people-hours per month, and most of that was just the physical packaging and shipping of the gifts. We’d get five people who could spare an hour and sit down at a table to fold fancy cardboard envelopes into shape, pack them with stickers and thank-you notes, and all that. The rest was tracked in Asana and those Google Sheets.

Craig: What were the results and did they surprise you?

Clay: The results were actually surprising to both of us – the Experimental group performed worse than the Control group. I hadn’t expected the gifts to make enough difference to be cost-effective, but I certainly didn’t expect they’d hurt our customer retention efforts!

Craig: That is shocking! What conclusions did you draw from that?

Clay: The biggest conclusion is that it’s important to test all your assumptions. It would have been so easy to think “Sending free gifts can’t hurt, everyone loves free gifts, let’s just start doing it and see how it goes.”

I think this is especially true with customer retention experiments just because of how long they take. So much of what we do is impacting not tomorrow but three or six months down the road, and that can make it tempting to just run with something you haven’t tested.

My second conclusion is that the Surprise and Delight strategy isn’t as effective for B2B clients as a lot of CS folks think it is. Do you know what our clients really wanted? More space. Each of the individual gifts was well received, and the same items had gotten great feedback from existing clients in the same demographics, but it added up to too many touches.

And even in the earliest months of the lifecycle, it wasn’t improving customer retention. Making your product champion a little happier doesn’t really change the ROI calculations that their company is doing.

Craig: What would you recommend to other companies looking to test similar strategies?

Clay: Two things. First, it’s all about the details. As an example, we couldn’t send the gift boxes to all experimental customers at once, because they had signed up at different times of the month. To make sure everyone was getting as similar an experience as possible, we had to send out 3 shipments a week.

That way someone who signed up on January 3rd would get their first gift around February 3rd and someone who signed up on January 26th would get their first gift on February 26th. In any kind of test like this, it’s vital to make sure you’ve found all those little things that can prevent the experiences from being truly apples-to-apples.

Second, make sure you’ve got a test that uses minimal resources. Because this experiment didn’t cost much in terms of money or people hours, it wasn’t that big a deal when it didn’t pan out. We’d spent some resources to answer a long-standing question, which was “should we shift our customer retention strategy more towards Surprise and Delight?”

And even though the answer turned out to be “No”, it was still kind of a bargain. In the end, we spent those resources to make sure that we didn’t commit a lot more resources to a larger shift in retention strategy that wouldn’t have panned out for us. 

The post Support Talks: Customer Retention Experiments (and its shocking results) appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Support agents are too often thought of as entry-level employees. 

In reality, the combination of dynamic people skills and vast exposure to your product provides a great foundation for a career path anywhere in your organization. Robust career pathing in customer support is critical. 

In our conversation, Erin Willis, Program Manager of Vendor Management at ClassPass, shares their support story. Let’s explore how others can use their experience to shape programs that professionally develop support agents.

When and where did your customer support journey start? 

Erin: Around 2013-14, I moved from San Antonio to Austin, Texas because something was happening in tech and I wanted in. After burning out from working service industry and retail jobs, I needed a change. Nearly all of my professional experience was developed at companies. For five years, I worked at Chuck E Cheese’s. I then moved to Nordstrom for two years in customer service. There, I excelled in fixing every receipt printer, mobile Point of Sale iPad, and cash register on the sales floor.

After exiting retail service management, I knew I would have to target something entry-level to break into tech. I started browsing technical support roles on Craigslist and Indeed and eventually found a part-time ecommerce support role.

The hours were 3 pm to midnight, and it included handling phone support, live chats, and email. It also required some light HTML knowledge and general troubleshooting skills.  During the interview, I explained how I tinkered with the HTML on Myspace and all the iOS troubleshooting those Nordstrom iPads. I got the job. (I still miss the days of glitter cursors.)

What sort of ambitions did you have when you first set out in the support profession?  

Erin: In the beginning, I was totally clueless as to the kind of career paths that were possible for support professionals. I figured I would try and work my way up in either management or “coding.” I even ended up going through a front-end development fellowship at one point! But I learned quickly I was not interested in code and would have to develop other skills if I wanted to grow. I always had a love of smoothly running processes and great people management, so I mainly focused on those areas. 

I was really fortunate to have a great team lead early on too. They took the time to onboard me to the world of SaaS and technical / customer support. They also coached me on how to grow in, or out of, customer-facing roles. We’re still in touch to this day and I usually like to check in whenever I start a new role. 

Having someone invested in my career path—before I could even start to think about it—helped me understand the opportunities that were possible. It also developed a lifelong interest in customer experience. 

What advice or resources did you find that helped narrow the focus for your career path?

Erin: I joined the beloved Support Driven community in 2017. This was a turning point for my professional development. That Slack community was incredibly validating and supportive and I discovered a wealth of resources I never knew existed. 

Once I joined, I consumed every article, blog post, and Slack thread I could get my hands on. I started applying to roles I would have otherwise talked myself out of and built the confidence to interview at early-stage tech start-ups. 

This gave me access to “many hats” type of positions and exposed me to other parts of the business (and other support functions). I absorbed as much on-the-job training as I could. Typically nestled under Operations, I joined a few support organizations and ended up focusing on the following key areas: support operations, billing support, people management, and business operations. 

I advocated for my professional development with my employers and got to attend continuing education opportunities like Zendesk customer training and support conferences.

After moving past the “entry-level” feeling, I began to think more intentionally about my career path. 

I took calculated risks to continue growing as well as learning through professional experience. I definitely made a few moves in the wrong direction over the years, such as paying for a Data Analyst bootcamp only to find out it wasn’t for me.  Taking calculated risks was a part of my personal process. I want to acknowledge it’s not always accessible for everyone and we all have our own tolerance for the unknown. 

The key advice I have is: It is most helpful to be adaptable. 

Being able to explain how my customer support skills will adapt to the specific industry or organization has set me apart when job searching. I’ve now been fortunate to work in a myriad of industries and company sizes.

This is all due to successfully adapting customer service skills to my career. I believe having an adaptive mindset about your customer support skills will help you stand out and, most importantly, ensure you continue to enjoy the work you do.

Are there any tools or apps have you found helpful in planning and managing your career growth? 

Erin: Trello for keeping track of job applications, interviews, and learning resources. Notion for personal checklists, reminders, and ideas. Whimsical for mind mapping and visual representations of ideas and learning journeys. I also used Webflow for my personal resume site for many years and loved it. It’s perfect for designing and hosting an online CV. 

What advice do you have for leaders who want to see their employees flourish like you were able to?

Erin: Ask them! Talk to your agents about their goals. Suss out their interests and where else they can apply them. It may not be a straightforward conversation at first. Maybe one of your agents writes fan fiction in their free time and would enjoy content or knowledge management. Or perhaps your resident Excel or Google Sheets whisperer would find Data Analytics exciting. 

Secondly, I would encourage leaders to provide opportunities for shadowing and peer-to-peer mentorship. This can help create a culture of lifelong learning on your team, or even better at your entire company. Offering personal development budgets as a perk would also work here.

Empower agents to develop their own career paths through individual development plans which focus solely on professional development.

To succeed with these initiatives, prioritize and measure internal mobility and work with your talent team to ensure there is support within the organization to help people grow.

Finally, don’t force it. Everyone has different goals, resources, abilities, and interests when it comes to developing their career path. These factors aren’t immune to systemic societal issues and each of us has different incentives and motivations that go into creating our ideal career. You want to guide agents at the right time, and applying a blanket approach might disincentivize a normally productive agent. 

What advantages are there for a leader to take those steps?

Erin: For the company, it’s a smart investment. Investing in career pathing reduces the high costs of turnover and external talent sourcing. You also build a pipeline of great leaders in the process, which can further help you spot growing talent in your workforce. You’ll also begin to understand what uniquely motivates your agents. 

Watching an agent grow and move on to bigger and better things, even if it ends up being outside of your organization, will still bring benefits in workplace reputation and beyond. It’s also incredibly rewarding as a leader. 

And really, it all comes down to the fact that it’s great for your employee and customer experience to grow and retain talented people.

The post Support Talks: Career Pathing for Customer Support Roles appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Why it is so important to invest in developing a self-sustaining team? Find out in our newest episode of the Support Talks.

In Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley’s book, Simple Truths of Leadership, they observed that “The most important part of leadership is what happens when you’re not there.” The idea that leaders must be present in order for their teams to function not only encourages micromanagement, but it distracts both the employees and the leader from doing their best work.

Creating a strong team means that you trust them to consistently and reliably perform without someone looking over their shoulder. This autonomy leads to more employee engagement.

Jerry Ishmael, Client Support Team Manager at TrackTik, believes that this autonomy leads to self-sustaining, higher-performing teams. In this chat, we discuss the benefits of this leadership approach.

Let’s start with defining what does Self-sustaining team mean to you?

Jerry: The obvious definition is that you are able to provide for your own needs without help from others. I often quote a more robust definition from Wikipedia:

“Self-sustainability and self-sufficiency are overlapping states of being in which a person or organization needs little or no help from, or interaction with, others. Self-sufficiency entails the self being enough, and a self-sustaining entity can maintain self-sufficiency indefinitely.”

In our world of Support, self-sufficient is easily associated with the numerous initiatives and programs that build self-service resources and tools for customers. These initiatives are closely linked to the organization’s needs to satisfy customers and reduce churn, which leads to a healthy lifetime value (LTV) per customer, which in turn helps maintain revenue.

What we often don’t consider in this model is the employee experience. I believe that it is obvious to state that employee experience directly correlates to how we treat our customers and guide them to sign-up, buy, and use the product and services we support.

How does this approach relate to employee engagement?

Jerry: To have a self-sustaining team would be to invest the same, if not more, effort developing the skills and resources that allow for team members to service customers and ultimately get to a solution. Leaders of Support and CX must enable their teams as a prime objective. This usually starts with training.

Training needs to be viewed beyond ‘onboarding in your role’ to ‘onboarding in the organization beyond your role.’ Engaging and presenting to your team members how the business operates in all capacities and demonstrating that what they do in their role impacts others is key. Setting OKR’s that are publicly visible and actionable within the organization facilitates this.

A clearer objective helps the team understand their role, their impact, and their expectations. Provide your team with all the information and data they need to complete a task. Training on how, where, and what they can do as part of their role is one step of a self-sustaining team.

Additionally, the individuals want to know what they are doing well. So this clarity and training helps with career development when people have yearning to grow or move to other parts of the organization. It helps focus 1:1 meetings where we can discuss tools to build out their own portfolio to get to that next level.

Promoting a common vision helps to remove the clock-in/clock-out mentality and focus on relationships, both with customers and internally. It also removes the need to micromanage the metrics. Metrics should be developed in a way that is very accessible and holistic. “What value is the individual providing?” vs “are they achieving a number?”

I also involve the team in the KPI setting, as how each agent achieves OKRs might be different based on individual strengths. Many companies cascade goals from “Company” to “Team.” I take it one step further, to the individual contributor. Then in 1:1s we can follow up on the objectives: “What have you done to achieve these objectives over the past week?”

This added flexibility and autonomy allows the individual to focus on the parts of the role that are most engaging to them, while still aligning to the role and the company’s goals.

And finally, we give access to the Calm app, involve our team in awareness of mental health and DE&I initiatives, as well as allow volunteer days. These types of benefits and resources help keep stress low both inside and outside of work. Being more aware of these important concepts, and having the time and autonomy to practice them is a huge benefit to employee engagement.

How does a more engaged team benefit the business or the customer?

Jerry: Well, I mentioned that each individual has their own KPIs. This gives the ability for those with higher aspirations to work towards roles and responsibilities that produce higher value to the organization and ultimately to the client experience.

It also gives the ability for leadership to focus on being a servant leader that can advocate for the team and ensure they have what they need to succeed. In fact, self-sustaining teams help direct leadership based on what they are reacting to on the frontline providing an agile organization able to accommodate the customer quickly and efficiently.

But mostly, autonomy gives agents the ability to manage the response, solution, or next steps for customers without delay. I encourage the creation of their own processes and resources to get to the one common objective.

There have to be some guardrails, for example, OKRs need to be used to provide guidance and planning has to include your team, but in general, processes and workflows are more organic and practical when created by the people who actually have to execute them. Which makes them fit perfectly with the customer expectations they hear every day, and often are optimized for the business.

With so many goals across the team and with a stated goal of less oversight…

Craig: …how does the team, or leadership for that matter, monitor and measure success? How do you stop this from becoming chaos?

Jerry: Using open and transparent OKRs that anyone can monitor and react accordingly is step one. Holding 1:1 sessions regularly with your team is an opportunity to “check-in” on the objectives whether at the organization level or individual level and get a pulse on where they are and how the self-sustaining work contributes to the goals. And if there are any discrepancies there is no ambiguity to correct course, since the goals are clear.

Coaching becomes easier to do. This approach also helps front-line leaders feel more empowered to monitor progress and manage individuals and spend less time trying to coach to a metric. And since day-to-day operations take up less leaders’ time, they are able to dig deeper into trends, such as escalations to client success or engineering that can be coached and drive more efficiency.

What’s the next step for a program?

Jerry: The biggest thing this type of program allows is that the team operates more effectively and needs less guidance, this allows the leaders to advocate more across multiple departments. I hope to do more relationship-building and bring some of these concepts to the other teams.

I also want to make sure we are constantly adjusting prioritization and that expectations are clear as situations adjust. Something as simple as the expectation of using an emoji reaction to an important Slack announcement needs to be reinforced. This model only works when communication and change management are constant and clear and we can always improve on that.

The post Support Talks: Building and Measuring Self-sustaining Support Teams appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Common problem Support leaders come up against is that it’s difficult to tie their work to sales or renewals.

Craig Reid, Director of Customer Support at Integrate, has started to bridge that gap to help amplify the value of his support team internally at the executive level. We sat down to chat about this program and how others might be able to bring this to their organizations.

What was the challenge that led you to start this project?

Craig R: The challenge that we started with was this whole idea that I would come to work and try to motivate the support team. We often were left out of recognition and that bothered me for quite a while because I could see what was going on behind the scenes. So I wanted to find a way that I could use data to highlight the work support was doing. All the amazing bits of value we were providing.

And where did you start to help illustrate this value?

Craig R: So I started looking at Salesforce as our source of truth. That is already Sales’ source of truth, so it made sense for it to be ours as well. I partnered with our Business Intelligence (BI) team and worked with them to plug Salesforce and Zendesk data in together. I wanted to see any correlations of who was submitting tickets and who was renewing versus the opposite. That was the start of this journey.

Now we are starting to build momentum. We had to build a structure to figure out the channels with which we were hitting customers. By that I mean, for example, the help center. It is a very important channel. We hired a content specialist who could come in and track who is reading our articles.

I thought this would be really simple. But it is very difficult.  We launched a partnership with Zendesk where we could track internal users versus external uses, so we could plug that data into our BI tool and then start to see correlations between help center use and renewals.  Then we went even deeper and measured the same against any access of our support team.

We wanted to see whether customers who use support are more likely to renew. This allows us to target customers that were not using support and share our support contacts and links. The hope is that we can track if this changes the trends in renewals and I hope this gets us a bigger seat at the table.

This program has been wonderful for our team. It breeds more recognition and better employee retention. We are nowhere near finished, but it’s been great to sit with the BI team and highlight the opportunities and peel back the layers of data to see where we have grown and where we can grow.

That is absolutely incredible! What a positive outcome. There is clearly a lot of work involved here. How did you pitch this or gain buy-in for this type of initiative?

The way in which we were able to start this was with data. It started with our CSAT. We have always been in the high 90s and one thing I have always said is that we get quite a lot of comments. They are usually either about a great experience or at the other end of the spectrum, a very bad experience.  So that enabled me to drive the importance of the fact that customers love talking to support.

It got attention and people were curious. We have got all these tickets flowing through and CSAT is steadily high and still getting great feedback and comment. That enabled me to get my foot in the door. So I needed this data to show there was more value here. My current leader is very customer-centric, and this is so valuable to these projects. He understands our importance and was curious as to what we could do because he hadn’t tackled this before.

It is kind of intuitive that support helps retention in most cases. So that maybe wasn’t too surprising. Was there anything you learned from the data that you weren’t expecting?

 It enabled us to help other teams. The education and training team could use this data. For example, we have X company and they have submitted all these tickets to us and they never had this type of visibility. So they could use that to help us with ticket deflection. 

And even the product team could use this data to help make the product more intuitive and to reduce the number of tickets coming in by adding more self-service.  Sometimes teams don’t get that holistic view, and this was a great win to help them.

So now you have all of this information, you are providing more data to many functions in your organization. How do you use it to improve customer experience?

Craig R: We were able to utilize the tool Pendo to help with in-platform engagement. So we could target customers who were not interacting with us and provide them with guidance.  We could tell to whom and where we were best able to help and make data-driven engagements.  We hope this contributes to happier customers and better experiences.

There was definitely a call to action coming from the data. The next goal is to look at ways to improve our customer community to push this even further and turn it up a gear. What can we do to contribute to happy customers to keep this momentum? We have to stay tight with these other teams, Salesforce, BI, and product for example. We had to do a lot of data cleanup and rebuild some foundations of Salesforce and Zendesk to ensure the data was inputted in the right way to drive this.

Who should own this? Does Support need to be the driver of all of this, or should there be dedicated teams that highlight across the organization areas of improvement?

Craig R: This was a gap and I saw the pain, so I took it on. Support doesn’t necessarily need to own this whole process, but I gravitate towards innovation and since no one was doing it, I want to. There is likely a team that needs to own this, but it is really a company-wide initiative because of the stakeholders involved. Success, product, BI, and most teams in the organization can and should be involved. Getting to that point would be a huge win.

The post Support Talks: Bridging the Gap Between Support and Sales appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.