The Customer Support Podcast

Episode 14: (B2B) Manny Ruiz, VP Success & Support, InfluxData

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 Key Insights

  •  InfluxData -  600+ customers serving from 1-person startup to Fortune-50 companies
  • Support Organization -  non-tiered, roughly 12 people in US and UK. Very remote-friendly. Just started building customer success team. Case volume ~400 per month. How-to / Break-Fix case split 25 / 75
  • Support Tech - Used to be Zendesk; migrating to Salesforce ServiceCloud. GitHub open source for docs. Discourse for Community Forums [InfluxData being an open source company promotes use of open source products]
  • Case split across channels -  earlier >75% on email.  Now shifting towards web.
  • Knowledge Base - Separate KB doesn’t exist instead knowledge is added to product documentation. Though this will likely change in future
  • Cool Idea -  “Crowd sourcing for support answers” — worked very well at MobileIron (used a vendor called Directly)
  • What's broken in Support Tech Stack-- Integration between CRM, Case Management and Bug database is broken. One has to throw tools, consulting dollars to fix it! 
  • Focus for next 12 months - Build Customer Success Team
  • Online Certification/Education - No standard tool that exists; a few open source tools though
  • Metrics - Success : Customer Health (primary indicator product usage), Support: CSAT
  • What would you do differently if you were to do this all over again -  Focus on Customer Success deeply from the beginning; that way you understand deeply about customer and product-market fit.
  • Books:  

    • Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup - Book 1 The Company Journey

    Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup - Book 2: Change or Be Changed

    Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business

    ...more
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    The Customer Support PodcastBy Sandeep Jain
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