When do support leaders reach out to you — when they are in trouble (slightly less than 50%) e.g., customers are dissatisfied, leaving or complaining, support attrition etc., and when they are not in trouble (rest) — move towards strategic thinking, agent soft skills training etc.Customer Success needs to be advisory and not quota-carrying (almost all SaaS companies have Customer Success function, though most on-prem companies are still thinking about it)Metrics — More than half companies measure NPS. Focus needs to be on strategic metrics like customer retention (besides tactical metrics like CSAT etc.)CES (Customer Effort Score) — Issue is following: Do customers know what they are being asked? What to do if the customer says if it was difficult?Agent Productivity — Comes up all the time. Productivity is usually defined as cases/agent whereas it should be customers support/agent (# of cases is irrelevant).Support Agents screen is “terrifying”... at least 12 applications. Disconnected and best-of-breed applications!Chatbots - See a promise due to improvements in AI/ML but still need to see an actual working instance.Communities - They are more of “doing support in public” but not so much peer-to-peer.AI in Support - predict when escalation may happen, doing automatic quality audits etc.Agent Training - Recommendation: Don’t train in isolation. Have agents work on cases very early on.Case Assignment — Done by usually a person instead of automatic (AI can help here)Books: Trusted Advisor, David M., Charles G., Robert G., Difficult Conversations, Douglas S., Bruce P., Sheila H., Roger F.
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