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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· Business

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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:

August 19, 2019Episode 14: (B2B) Manny Ruiz, VP Success & Support, InfluxData
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
1h 15min
July 31, 2019Episode 13: (B2B) John Ragsdale, Distinguished VP, TSIA
This is a special episode as John is a Distinguished Researcher at TSIA -- an organization that works with Support Leaders in B2B Technology world. Listen to it to understand what Support Leaders are thinking, what are they doing well, where are they struggling (where they are going to spend money) etc. Must-listen episode!
Key Insights
Fun fact: TSIA used to be called SSPA — Services and Support Professional Association

TSIA maintains a list of Business Challenges — Organizational structure: Swarming vs Tiered Structure, Metrics: What metrics should I be tracking / What’s the average, Self-service / Knowledge-Management, Channel Mix: Introducing digital channels and moving away from phone/email & Customer Experience: How should we track it… how to set compensation structure.

For SaaS vendors, most of the support questions are around how-do-I-something (vs legacy hardware vendors where most questions were around break/fix)

Chatbots: 17% of members say they have a chatbot in place but most of those are pilots and not launched. 30% of these customers have built themselves (John doesn't recommend doing it)

Workforce scheduling/assigning cases automatically is still being done manually/spreadsheets in B2B.

Only 5% of members have a mobile-app for Support. Making support website HTML-5 is not good enough … most of support websites have rendering challenges on mobile phones/iPads.

92% customers start with google search and if support portal content is not indexed, customers won't come to the support site. More than 50% of vendors are google-indexed though. Legacy hardware vendors tend not to do google indexing though

Support issues are going up 20% YoY… its hard for support organizations to grow in terms of people to match that demand so automation is a must

Knowledge Management: 41% vendors responded that they could get 30% or more productivity gains if knowledge was being shared better.

John is bullish about using RPA in Support.

Customer success is not a department but a culture! Also, using Professional Services team to do Customer Success.

Next-gen Support: Persistent, Personalized, Intelligent

Recommendation for CEOs: Don't treat Support as just a cost-center. They have the most visibility and influence with Customers & they can share great information and insight with engineering and product to make products better and control churn. Support also feeds into QA and engg teams.

Recommended books: Bad Blood/Theranos and Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders
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1h 2min
July 10, 2019Episode 12: (B2C) Brenda Guardado, Head of Support, Coffee Meets Bagel
Key Insights
Tech Tool Stack: Zendesk (Ticketing, Helpdesk, AnswerBot), Sprout Social (Twitter, Facebook), Mode (Data Science)

Ticket Volume: Few hundred tickets on a daily basis

Ticket across channels: 80% Email, 10% (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit), 10% (Google PlayStore, Apple App store

Case deflection with Answer Bot is ~5%

They have Tiered Support — Tier-1/Tier-2 (outsourced), Tier-3 (internal). 8 support employees

Metrics : First Response Time (FRT), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Full resolution time, Customer Request Volume

They decided to delist from Galaxy Store due to overhead of software maintenance, need for support agents to have a separate testing unit and lack of RoI in terms of users.

Chat "bots" didn’t work for them in the past but they are considering introducing live chat

Also, exploring customer communities after seeing good engagement on reddit
...more
50min
July 09, 2019Episode 11: (B2B) Bernie Kassar, Chief Customer Officer, Xactly
Key Insights
When does the role of Chief Customer Officer makes sense in a company's journey?

As CCO, following teams fall under Bernie — Customer Success, Renewals, Alliances (Independent Software Vendors or ISVs like Workday etc, System Integrators or SIs like Accenture, Business Development).

Why customer success and renewals are separate for them?

Tool Stack: Centered around Salesforce, Khoros/Lithium (Community) Kite (Search), Gainsight (Customer Success), RingCentral (Contact Center), Pendo (NPS)

Important Metrics — Churn, Customer Sentiment, Support Coverage, Training/Revenue of System Integrators.

NPS Surveys — Divide their customers in batches of 1/6th and run the survey every 2 months that covers all customers in an year. That way you get best of both worlds -- frequent customer pulse without sending too many surveys to everyone.

Business Books: 3 Biographies -- Steve Jobs, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Elon Musk and books by Malcolm Gladwell specially The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
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45min
June 27, 2019Episode 10: (B2B) Philippe Mesritz, VP Global Support Services, Khoros
Key Insights
Unlike most B2B companies, Khoros doesn't have tiered support. Philipe says a good way to think about their support is following -- Tier-0 is the customer, Tier-1 is the support community and Tier-2 is their own support.

Khoros provides support for primarily Fortune 5000 companies and their support team is structured accordingly -- 110 people globally. Philippe has 5 functions in his team -- Program Management (Surveys etc.), Information experience (document, in-app support, community), Support Engg (backend support), Enterprise Account Support / Technical Account Management and Technical support (biggest team..almost 70 people). Customer Success is done by a different team.

Philippe believes that in charging for support separately from product subscription (as long as the support is something that customers value).

Their technology stack -- No IVR, Salesforce case management, Community (Khoros), JIRA/confluence (Engg), Squelch and Pendo.

Incoming ticket bandwidth: < 1% social , <5% phone (going down), 55% email, 45% community case portal. Philippe's talks about why email is so high for them.

How to make communities successful: 1/ Provide a reason for customers to go to community ("whats in it for me?". 2/ Customers need to feel that they “own” part of the community (using gamification to encourage peer responses). 3/ Ubiquitous (insert community in blog posts, marketing newsletters etc.).

Chatbots can be successful only to the extent that they are option-based or workflow-based.

How best to organize documentation teams around the concept of Information Experiences (IX)

Next-gen support will be smooth, low-effort, predictive.
...more
1h 3min
June 04, 2019Episode 9: (B2B/B2C) Rick Gianvecchio, VP Customer Support, Okta
Key Insights
"Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking that they will call Support".

Why email is not a great channel for support (a consistent message that I hear from all my guests).

Okta is a unique B2B company in that they are actively looking at social media for understanding and resolving issues reported by customers.

70% tickets get closed by Level-1 support, 15% by Level-2 and rest by Level-3 (most sophisticated).

Best way to make a case go away is to push information upstream (towards customer) so that the case would not need to ne filed. Requires combing and understanding patterns in data. This "personalization of support" is what will be the bedrock for next-gen customer support.

Related themes around case tagging/categorization and case routing (Rick mentioned that if a customer had a great experience with an agent before, it might make sense to direct the customer to the same agent even if the agent may not be the person to solve the case; at least they will take it to completion).

Encourage agents to document solutions through Knowledge Creation Program.

Technology stack optimized around Salesforce.

Frequency of customer engagements is so high that Support needs to be seen as extension of the product team.
Favorite book -- Shackleton's Way by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell.
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58min
May 24, 2019 Episode 8: (B2B) Eran Ashkenazi, SVP Global Customer Support, SentinelOne
Key Insights
o SentinelOne has ~2500 customers (globally) which includes both Fortune 100 customers and small businesses. SentinelOne is also part-SaaS, part-hardware. All this puts a unique challenge on customer support — different language support, 24x7 phone service, customers coming through channel (distributors/MSPs) etc.
o Technology stack — standardized on Zendesk. Call center is TalkDesk. Search is Zendesk but could be better. Salesforce is the system of truth (CRM) and there is a desire to standardize around that.
o A good part of our conversation was dedicated to challenges in getting the tools to work with each other specifically Zendesk to Salesforce and how customer success requires yet another bolt-on. Queries coming through channel has unique challenges as well (understanding full customer context, making sure that issue context is transferred from partner to vendor etc.)
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58min
May 03, 2019 Episode 7: (B2B) Marlene Summers, VP Customer Support & Community, Zuora
Key Insights
o Team follows the operation principle of PADRE - Pipeline, Acquire, Deploy, Run, Expand. Covered here in detail.
o Technology Stack
Ticketing, Voice, Portal - Zendesk
Knowledge Management - Mindtouch
Online community - Lithium
Search - Solvvy, SearchUInify
Agent Training - Skilljar
o Marlene is currently focusing on following initiatives:
- optimizing Agent training and on-boarding
- understanding the persona of the person calling
- auto case routing (speed + accuracy = customer experience)
o Favorite business books:
Subscribed, Tien Tzuo
Nevertheless, She Persisted: True Stories of Women Leaders in Tech, Pratima Rao Gluckman

...more
58min
April 26, 2019 Episode 6: (B2B) David Rubinstein, VP Customer Success & Strategy, Reps.AI
Key Insights
o David introduced terminology — “Rep-first” and “Rep-experience” i.e., Focus on hiring and creating the best experience for agents in terms of giving them full knowledge about your product (especially the bad stuff).
o Don’t mix commercial aspects (renewal, upsell) into customer “success”. Just let them focus on on-boarding, adoption and value add.
o Tools — Completely on Zendesk stack. For data insights, use Zendesk Insights and Google Data Studio.
o Chatbots — not ready yet for primetime even for B2C.
o Metrics — David said something very interesting here. “I tell my agents that don’t think about the queue, its my problem. You focus on quality and answering right and answering good”. In summary, David measures himself on request-to-wait and his agents on CSAT, and one-touch resolution.
o NPS — hit or a miss because customer is not necessarily rating just the support. David uses NPS, CSAT and monthly interviews with customers to get a pulse of his customer base.
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35min
April 02, 2019 Episode 5: (B2B) Nir Galpaz, VP Technical Services & Support, Blue Jeans Network
Key Insights
o Hardware vs SaaS support — Risk is shifted to the vendor in SaaS world. This is both good and bad. Good because support is now being seen as part of the overall product offering and consequently support organizations now have a stronger voice internally. Bad thing is that if you lose a customer, its on you :)
o Future of Support — Exception Center and not a Contact Center.
o No email support — they are 2x/3x more inefficient in terms of solving the case as compared to web/chat-based cases. Why inefficient? 1/ Emails usually do not contain full context to solve the case. 2/ Email don’t offer real-time communication (like chat)
o Roughly 20% cases come over phone and rest over chat and web.
o First B2B organization (that at least I heard of) that is moving from inbound calls to outbound call i.e., customers request online to be called back at a certain time. Nir brought up that the biggest advantage in this approach is that when they make the call they already know about who the customer is and their entire context which helps them solve problems faster.
o Tool stack — Consolidating around Salesforce (CRM, KnowledgeBase,Search). RingCentral for Contact Center. They also plan to launch chatbots by end of this year.
o Favorite Business Book — The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People / The 7 Habits for Mangers By Stephen R. Covey
...more
51min

FAQs about The Customer Support Podcast:

How many episodes does The Customer Support Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 24 episodes available.