Elevate Podcast

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 varied career in customer support over the years has lent him all the wisdom and experience needed to help guide people through times of weird crisis. We're so glad he's such a supportive part of our community and that he has really embodied those peer-to-peer leadership goals we've built the Elevate community on.

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 an anxiety attack, and here we are just talking about it on the internet.

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 guy. Lean in while he talks about managing with compassion, our responsibility to our IC's, and how to get invested in people's personal lives without being creepy.

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 doing to help their teams through troubling times. We just love Jen Dary. We know you will, too.

Be sure to check out her One-On-One packs (https://shop.beplucky.com/) and her workshops and training courses for new managers at BePlucky.com.

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 about our new professional membership association, launching May 2020!

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 she joined us to share some of that elusive wisdom about building a great management structure that we're all so eager to hear. You can check out more of her writing on support management (and even hire her to consult!) over at http://lindsaycanhelp.com.

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 out, together.

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 one and only Jon McCartie. Jon has a lot of experience building sustainable remote teams and he'll be speaking more about what makes teams grow, thrive, or fail at our spring support summit in Philadelphia!

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, which is super brainy and way above our pay grade. Rick runs their support team, and he shared a lot of insight into their hiring process, what it's like doing support for a highly technical customer, and he gave us a breakdown of their newly minted internal training program for their customer support team. Rick is a past Elevate Summit speaker, and he's promised to join us again for our spring event in 2018. *HE PROMISED!*

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. We also talk a lot about hiring, and how company culture influences team dynamics, and the pros and cons of running an entirely remote support team. We were so excited to catch up with Ben that you'll hear four voices this episode (Ben, Mike from Trello, Colin from Pingboard, and Sarah from CoSupport), and high fives to our editor Jonathan for splicing out all the overtalk!

PS, the episodes of Reply All 5 that Ben references are Episodes 71 & 77! (https://gimletmedia.com/reply-all/)