The Customer Support Podcast

By Sandeep Jain

Q&A with Customer Support Leaders from both B2B and B2C companies. Hear their perspective on challenges, opportunities and best-practices in setting up a world-class support organization.

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FAQs about The Customer Support Podcast:

How many episodes does The Customer Support Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 24 episodes available.

The Customer Support Podcast episodes:

March 14, 2020Episode 24: (B2B) Abhay Solapurkar, VP Global Success & Support, SkyHigh Networks (McAfee)
SkyHigh Networks (Acquired by McAfee) is a CASB vendor serving roughly 600 customers (Fortune 1000 and enterprises)

Tierless support organization

Roughly 70 engineers worldwide organized in pods of technology excellence. Overall McAfee has 800+ Tech Support professionals

Support team sits with engineering and cloud ops

Customer Success Managers do consultative work (not comped on renewal)

Big shift in Support has come due to “Cloudification”

Important to focus on overall customer experience rather than on an individual metric like first response time etc.

Robust certification process for new employees

Technology stack - Consolidated with Salesforce, Financial force (professional services), tight integration with JIRA, Inquira (Knowledge Management), Exploring Chatbots (Aisera - doing pilot on consumer side for how-to cases).

Support app for customers

Incoming cases - 98% (email and web), 2% (phone)

How-to/Break-Fix Split - For on-prem (30/70), cloud (10/90)

Recommended Read - Good to Great by Jim Collins
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39min
January 06, 2020Episode 23: (B2B) Joshua Lory, Sr. Dir. Product Marketing, Global Services, VMware
Josh is Sr Director Product Marketing, Global Services, VMware

VMware has ~500K customers & partners around the globe.

Support is seen as competitive differentiator and growth engine for VMware and that's how they decided to run Support like product team

Org structure -- Roughly 2500 folks reporting into Chief Customer Officer (Scott). 3 teams — Support (Global Support Services), Digital Services (Product + Engg + Marketing), Customer Advocacy.

Technology Stack -- Salesforce (Ticketing, Knowledge Base), IBM Watson for Machine Learning/AI, Coveo for Search

Two internally built products -- Skyline and SupportHub

Skyline -- uses telemetry information coming out of VMware products to alert customers /partners about known issues in KB, security vulnerabilities, configuration best practices etc.

Roughly 7500 customers on the service, adding roughly 1000 customers every month. Average # of tickets being filed are going down

Skyline is included in support subscription and not priced separately

SupportHub — Integrated with ticketing system. Simplifies filing experience and reduces customer effort.

AI-powered support experience e.g., routing to best engineer.

Announced at VM World 2019 in partnership with IBM Watson.

Beta with top customers.

Releasing to more customers throughout 2020.

Vast majority of tickets come from web (myvmware) / Twitter support as well (integrated with Salesforce)

Metrics: NPS (51 for Vmware, Average is around 21), CSAT, Customer Effort

Recommend listen - Delta CEO Ed Bestian keynote at CES on how they used fit bits to understand customer journey

Resources — The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Crucial Conversations
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1h 6min
December 31, 2019Episode 22: (B2B) Ekaterina Syromyatnikova, Director Support, Wrike
Wrike provides a SaaS platform work management — project management and collaboration

Customers are small business to enterprise level. 20K+ across 130 countries. Freemium model

60+ people in support team across Eastern Europe. Two tiered support. Majority in Tier-1. Support Ops and Documentation team part of overall support team as well

Several thousand tickets per month across email, web, live chat (paid customers only) and phone

Incoming cases — 10-15% product issues. Rest how-to cases

Support tool stack: Zendesk, Guru (internal knowledge), Wrike (task management)

Friction points in Support: Integration of different customer facing systems e.g., last conversation with CSM, sales conversations etc.,

Priority for coming year - Premium support for enterprise customers / Self-service to all (agent chat is available to certain customers only today

Metrics — First Response Time (FRT), Time to Resolution, Quality of response (Customer Effort Score). Used to measure CSAT earlier — response rate was good but lacked in meaningful insights

Things to note — Support is not outsourced, opportunities for horizontal growth for support engineers

Books — Effortless Experience (Matthew Dickson, Nick Toman), Radical Candor (Kim Scott), Why its so hard to be fair (HBR).
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48min
December 06, 2019Episode 21: (B2B) Adam Rypinski, Sr. Dir. Digital Experience & Automation, Juniper Networks
"Single pane of glass for simplistic support is missing"
Adam’s team is responsible for support operations

Customers — Traditionally sold products to Service Providers but now sell to a lot of enterprises globally

Support Organization— Primary JTAC (Juniper Technical Assistance Center) — outsourced Level-1 support , Advanced TAC (Level-2/3 Support), Advanced Services, Resident Engineers, Named Engineer(s), Customer Care for administrative support, Customer Success (just starting). Teams are primarily global. Roughly 1200 people. Tier-1 /outsourced is roughly ~500.

Support Tech stack — Moving over to Salesforce ServiceCloud (ticketing, community). Search is Coveo. Believe in Buy (vs build). Mobile App is desired by missing

Incoming tickets — 75%+ over web, no email

Case deflection — Roughly 80% cases closed by Tier-1

Self-service — current channels requires effort and time on part of customer. Single pane of glass for support is missing

Chatbots — Trying out Salesforce bot for transactional support (update on case, re-send welcome email letter for subscriptions etc.)

AI/ML — lot of technologies (including open source) out there. Planning to use chatbot for transactional queries.

Metrics — MTTR is #1 target. Efficiency for internal Support as well

Support has changed dramatically over years — people want answers and solutions lot faster. Support channel is now mobile

Resources — Customer Success by Nick Mehta, Start with Why by Simon Sinek, Look at More by Andy Stefanovich
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45min
December 03, 2019Episode 20: (B2B) Patty Hatter, SVP Global Customer Services, Palo Alto Networks
Key metric for Services organization (from a SaaS perspective) is Renewal
Patty leads Global Services Organization — Support, Professional Services and Success

Palo Alto is going through a huge transformation from a hardware company to more of a SaaS company. Partners going through transformation as well

Huge focus on direct education to customers and even educating partners

SaaS changes entire customer journey from pre-sales to post-sales — handoff is even more critical

Clear customer journey map is needed to do this handoff properly

Self-service and machine learning are big themes in services

We need to take “outside-in” view of our customers

Need to stitch together experience across all teams (support, success and professional services) in a seamless way

Key Metrics — renewal

Suggested resources — Everything Reid Hoffman :)
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33min
November 14, 2019Episode 19: (B2B) David Tirazona, Vice President Global Support Operations, Netskope
“When a customer files a ticket, there is a fault in your product or training”
Netskope customers are across different verticals — government, financial services, healthcare, retail, tech

All support is provided directly by the company; no channel support

Global support with 3 centers - Bangalore, Santa Clara, London

Support team has two main components — Support and Small tools/infrastructure ops team
(roughly 60 people). Customer success is a different team.

Case volume — 1500/1600 (includes support pre-sales as well). 90%+ is over email/web. Phone is very less.

Cases are split following way — 55% How-tos, 45% Break-fix

Tool stack - centered around Zendesk (customer portal, knowledge)

Priority for 2020 — contact center (five9 etc.), messaging/chat, mobile app. Essentially any tech that elevates customer experience

Focus on simplicity, usability and supportability

What would you do differently if you were to rewind the clock — invest more in self-service and mobile experience

Knowledge — Support team writes articles but goes for review through technical documents. Right now knowledge is text-based, some micro-videos

Metrics — Northstar metrics are First Response Time, Resolution Time, Break-fix issue containment (vs going to Engg), agent productivity

Agent Productivity — measure # of issues closed per week/month along with CSAT

Netskope has Product Experience Engineering Team — very small team that focuses on this aspect

Zendesk categories (products/class of issues) etc. are currently selected by a drop-down menu; would be good to have that automated

Differentiating factor in SaaS is not the product but the kind of support you provide to your customers

Resources — Radical Candor, Good to Great, Leadership Pipeline, Can’t Hurt Me. Podcasts — a16z, masters of scale
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47min
November 11, 2019Episode 18: (B2B) Matt Dale, Vice President Customer Support, Illuminate Education
Illuminate offers several products for teachers, administrators, school districts and for parents

Primary folks calling in are administrators

Illuminate recently had a 5-way merger and had to integrate several ticketing systems — shared inbox, multiple Zendesk instances, Freshworks, Servicecloud. Done by a 3rd party — Import2.com

Incoming tickets — several thousand a month. Volume is double during back to schools months (Aug/Sep/Oct)

Matt leads the Support Team which is part of overall Services Team (Support, Success, Implementation, Migrations, Data Team, L&D)

Support Team has 3 directors (focused on different products)

Incoming ticket split over channels— Phone - 60% , Email/Web - 40% (rolling out chat as 3rd channel). Focus area -- How to reduce volume on phone (its expensive) and move it to chat or do deflection

Support Tech — Centered around Zendesk (ticketing, chat, community ,help), Phone (Talk desk), Maestro QA (evaluate agents work). Big believers in “incremental improvement”

Maestro QA — Connects to the ticketing system. Used to grade agents. Manually set certain criteria (people/tickets you want to grade, set certain questions) and then reviewed by human graders

Challenge — Running reports across systems like Salesforce, Netsuite, Zendesk, JIRA is a challenge. Existing integrations are basic and don't help

“No one wants to call support. How can we provide frictionless environment”

Products are very customizable and many questions are unique, specific nuances that are not covered by generic help docs. We need to understand the context of customer and case so that our agents can provide prompt service

Knowledge Management — Analyze user queries and understand what help docs are being used the most and use that as baseline for up dating knowledge. Roughly 3000 help docs across all systems

Top priorities for 2020 — Want to build a tiered support system, revamping help docs, Live agent chat

Learning Management System (LMS) — Both for agents and customers i.e., agent on-boarding (human intensive and not only content from general LMS, but also about Zendesk, support style etc.). Customer training — they had in-person train-the-trainer model earlier but that didn’t scale. Focus in shifting to put training in LMS and use that to train the trainer

Key Metrics — First reply time & Total resolution time (indicates backlog especially during busy season). Common ones — CSAT etc. Prefer actionable insights e.g., automatic email being sent to agents that gives them actionable data about how they did in a certain period

Recommendation of resources in Support — HelpScout Blog (content on Support is really good), Support Driven Community, Radical Candor, The Goal
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53min
October 17, 2019Episode 17: (B2B) Kimberly Gress, Vice President Customer Success, Energage
Energage initially started with product that does “Top Workplace”. Companies purchase Energage to get a better sense of the data and use that to engage effectively with employees.

Energage customers are small enterprises (50) to large enterprises (5000+ employees.). Overall 8000 customers; both paying and non-paying. Split is roughly 50/50.

Team - Roughly 7 onboarding and support team, customer education team (just starting), product services (just starting) and customer success (5 and expanding).

Technology — Case management (Salesforce), Contact Center (RingCentral), In-app education (Pendo).

Case volume — Roughly 1700 cases per month. 80% over email , Chat (15% over intercom), Phone (5% over ringcentral).

80% case volume is Tier-1 (cases that should not have been filed). Rest are Tier-2 (cases that require agents) and Tier-3 (case that require engineering to be involved).

Knowledge — prefer how-to articles more than video (text gives context quickly vs video). Knowledge creation needs to be part of case workflow (KCS — Knowledge Centered Support).

2020 Initiatives — Create a support portal, community (how to drive customers there first), knowledge management (keeping it current)

Would like to see average time per case going up which means agents are having more meaningful conversations — Metrics (Net/Gross Retention Revenue, NPS, CSAT, Customer Health Score, etc.,

Paid premier support is a good way to generate revenue for support teams (at Boomi, it had ~50% attach rate).

Chatbots — curious but not part of 2020 plan.

Resources: Podcasts - Helping Sells Radio, Revisionist History
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46min
October 06, 2019Episode 16: (B2B) Sanjeev Sisodiya, Vice President Customer Success, Postman
Postman has 8 million registered users across 400K organizations

Freemium model but support for all users. Changed internal perspective by not calling them “free” users but users who have not derived enough value to pay for the product.

Sales Support in Bangalore

Product Support needs responsiveness and is distributed across the globe.

10 Individuals across Hawaii, Austin, Portugal, Nigeria, New Zealand, India). That helps in managing round the clock support. Also, San Francisco and Bangalore are highly competitive markets.
Customer success Team 6 people

High Responsiveness — First response time in 30min - 1hr

Annual case volume - 20K
90-95% incoming cases over email and even twitter.

10-15% break fix cases / 80% or more are How-tos.

New agent Training — 2 weeks learning the product and then they get into actual support tickets.
Technology stack: Zendesk (ticketing, knowledge), Slack, JIRA/Confluence (root cause analysis, documentation), Public issue tracker on GitHub (bugs and feature requests). Engineering more engaged there rather than support, User Community

Unique thing — all conversations are logged on to ONE SLACK CHANNEL accessible by EVERYONE in the company. Provides complete transparency to entire organization and makes support more visible.

Priorities for next year: Premium Support for Enterprise Customers, Closing the loop — cadence between support and product teams to highlight product areas that need improvement. Also, provide feedback on “supportability” of features

What would you do differently if you were to go back in time -- Hire more people and distributed earlier, Treat free users as customers from day

Favorite business book -- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande
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59min
September 04, 2019Episode 15: (B2B) Francoise Tourniaire, Founder FT Works (Support Consulting)
Key Insights
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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58min

FAQs about The Customer Support Podcast:

How many episodes does The Customer Support Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 24 episodes available.