Elevate Podcast

Elevate Podcast episodes:

• 01.04.2022

  Val Liberty Will Heal Your Soul, Part 2

  We're back with Val Liberty from Balsamic, talking about having interactions with hard customers. You know...those people you can never please. One way to combat the burnout of dealing with terrible customers over and over, Balsamiq has created a culture...

  
• 01.04.2022

  Stephanie Lundberg Took A New Path

  Sarah has a great conversation with Stephanie Lundberg from Abstract about the opportunities in the customer experience world. There are helpful insights about growth from support to product. Stephanie shares her own experience exploring the two paths of support, the...

  
• 01.04.2022

  Carter Gibson Believes in Community at Google

  Sarah sits down with Carter Gibson, an internal community manager at Google. They discuss what a community manager does, the importance of a strong community in a company, and fostering a strong culture. The two have a wonderful conversation about...

  
• 01.04.2022

  How to Be Bad with Mike from Trello

  Sarah speaks with Mike from Trello about having difficult conversations with customers. The two chat about the fine line between customer advocacy and company loyalty. Mike provides insight on dealing with pushback, building up trust with customers and your team,...

  
• 11.05.2021

  Lance Conzett's Dream Job at Uber

  Sarah sits down to talk with Lance Conzett from Uber. The two discuss customer support as a great resource to learn how the customers interact with a company’s product and services and how that translates to working in all departments....

  
• 11.05.2021

  Matt Patterson Will Improve Your CX

  Sarah speaks with Matt Patterson from Help Scout about making customer support better for not only the customer but also for the support specialists. Matt and Sarah discuss customer-centric mindsets for companies and their products. The two share thoughts on...

  
• 11.05.2021

  Natalie Mercuri is a Plaid People Person

  Sarah speaks with Natalie from Plaid about personal and professional growth, going from an independent contributor to a manager. Natalie is building a consumer-facing team at a new company and shares some insights on the trajectory of building a career...

  
• 06.10.2020

  Jordan Munson Has Boundaries

  You know Wistia, right? We love Wistia. They haven't even paid us to say this, in fact WE pay THEM to be friends. That kind of raving loyalty from customers comes from having a healthy relationship with those customers, and...

  
• 06.10.2020

  Val Liberty Will Heal Your Soul, Part 1

  We can't tell you how needed this talk with Val from Balsamiq was. Uplifting, funny, positive, empathetic - all those things we all need in one big conversation about life, careers in CX, and bad customers. We had so much...

  
• 06.09.2020

  Rick Myers is Successful

  What is customer success? I have no idea. Too many companies use the term for too many things, and most of them are doing it wrong. Our dear friend Rick at Linode is actually doing it right by defining clearly...

  
• 04.21.2020

  Ryan Klausner Will Send You TP

  How are you doing? What's going on in your world? Do you need to talk about it? Are you out of toilet paper yet, and can you believe that's a valid question? Ryan Klausner can't believe it either, but his...

  
• 04.21.2020

  We Have Anxiety/Let's Talk About Kirk Cameron

  This is a tale of 80's body swapping comedies, and also a good reminder that most of us use humor as a crutch when we are going through the most difficult of times. Colin has cabin fever and Sarah has...

  
• 04.21.2020

  Josh Ramsey Will Help You (Not Creepy)

  Remember our good friend, Josh Ramsey? You've probably seen him on stage a few times at Elevate, and maybe you joined him as he lead our group meditation? If you need a bit of a brain rest, Josh is your...

  
• 04.21.2020

  Jen Dary is Here to Support You

  Deep breaths, y'all. What a time to be alive. Don't you wish you had a mentor or coach who you could vent to and process with? That's why we invited Jen Dary on to talk about what managers can be...

  
• 04.21.2020

  Let's all work from home!

  We did not expect the world to catch on fire in March, 2020, but here we are. This episode is all about working from home, you know, what people are talking a lot about these days. But there's also info...

  
• 05.29.2018

  S2E4: People leave bad managers

  Being a manager takes skills, but managing a customer support or experience team requires a whole other world of skills that it's very hard to find training on. Lindsay Konsko of Nerdwallet is the expert at managing people-focused teams, and...

  
• 05.18.2018

  S2E3: Tones is making all the effort here

  Today we're hanging out with Antonio King, a superstar in the world of e-commerce customer experience. He agrees with our long-standing belief that CSAT is dead, but what's going to replace it? What should we be measuring instead? Let's find...

  
• 01.16.2018

  S2E1: Jon McCartie is not a spider-person!

  First things first - Skype updated and everything is ruined. Colin and Sarah riff a bit on why you shouldn't sneak up on your customers with goofy child-like updates, then they're joined by Heroku's Senior Manager of Technical Support, the...

  
• 08.17.2017

  Episode 9: Rick Myers knows about clouds

  Spoiler alert: Episode 9 was recorded right after 4th of July, which is why we are annoyed with having a holiday on a Tuesday. Today we're chatting with our old friend, Linode's Rick Myers! Linode offers cloud hosting for Linux,...

  
• 07.09.2017

  Episode 8: Too Many Cooks Make Benception

  This week we're joined by one of our past (and future!) Elevate Summit speakers, Ben MacAskill of SmugMug. Ben tells his story of going from researching cancer cures in a bio lab to handling support for a growing, bootstrapped startup....

  
• 07.06.2017

  Episode 7: Eric Broulette gets too many emails

  Today Colin and Sarah are chatting with the awesome Eric Broulette of Hudl fame! We're obsessed with Hudl's story of massive bootstrapped growth, and Eric shared a lot of behind the scenes of their bustling Lincoln, Nebraska operation. Keep...

  
• 06.16.2017

  Episode 6: Derek Homann loves support people

  Sarah sits down with Derek Homann to talk about his career in support, growing teams at massive scale, and what made him decide to start his own support-focused product, Median! Check out the newly launched Median at HelloMedian.com, and come...

  
• 06.13.2017

  Episode 5: Lee has to choose between cycle, convertible, or cabin

  This episode is full of big life decisions as Lee Matos of Gitlab joins us for an important conversation about his future: Bicycle or car? Or Car-cyle???? We also get into talking about being a support manager, and growing a...

  
• 06.08.2017

  Episode 4: Suneet owes Friendly's $5.25

  This week we're hanging with Suneet from Help Scout, one of our favorite support companies (and favorite people!). We jump right into talking about the bliss of remote working, choosing the right company to work for, our worst jobs ever,...

  
• 06.08.2017

  Episode 3: Nora West has all the hands.

  This episode, Sarah and Mike are joined by Nora West from Guru! Support teams are often the group best informed about customers' opinions and desires for your product, but many support teams struggle with how to effectively convey that information...

  
• 06.08.2017

  Episode 2: Ben McCormack is Addicted

  This episode, we're joined by Ben McCormack from FullStory! As support pros, are you *addicted* to the queue? Ben says you just might be. The same way you can get addicted to other things, your brain responds to the queue...

  
• 05.11.2017

  Elevate Philly Recap!

  A quick chat about some of the great talks at our recent Philadelphia event. Hosted by Mike from Trello, Colin from Pingboard, and Sarah from CoSupport.