Key Insights

o First, no relation to our previous guest :)

o Their attrition is super low ~2% (TSIA says average is about 15%). They have built a collaborative culture in support e.g., Level 3 people do not own cases, they just help other folks close theirs.

o Panzura NPS is 82! Average for tech industry is around 21. One of th

o One interesting metric that Caeli does NOT keep track of is time-to-close. She explains why in the podcast. Caeli also keeps track of this unique metric (which I haven’t heard before but it actually makes lot of sense) — number of tickets escalated to engg.

o Support Tools — Salesforce for everything. 

o Caeli mentioned that search continues to be broken. Google search appliance (now EoL) was cheap and easy to setup and it worked. Current solutions are opposite.

o They build lot of tools/scripts internally around product health specially data warehouse that stores all the logs pertaining to a given case.

o Favorite business book — In search of Excellence by Tom Peters, and, Grit by Angela Duckworth. 

Key Insights

o Greg introduced the concept of "People-first Revenue Generation"  i.e., put People above Process and Technology.

o 5 Metrics that Support leaders should keep track of:

CSAT - Customer Satisfaction

FRT - First Reply Time

Requestor wait time 

Agent Turnover 

Agent satisfaction (Not EPS — Employee Promoter Score).

o Option Bots vs Answer Bots

o Support Challenge --   Companies continue to look at support as a cog which doesn't make sense in a recurring revenue/empowered consumer market. 

o Focus on empowering “both” customers and agents vs ticket deflection — different intent and will likely have different results. 

o Tiered support  will tend to create culture of competition. You need to watch out for that. Instead create culture of collaboration — “serve the person in front of you” i.e., Level 3 coaches Level 2 and so on.

o Customer Experience vs Support Experience 

o Favorite Business Book — “The Service Culture Handbook” by Jeff Toister.

Key Insights

o Hiring tips from James that I found to be really unique:

1. Good balance between senior/junior engineers (preferred ratio 2:1). Junior engineers usually turn out better than experienced folks.2

2. Don’t just look for EE/CS majors. James has successfully hired even bio/physics/maths majors who are also interested in technology 

3. Focus on hiring folks from outside the area (such folks will invest heavily in building a culture of assimilation)

o One thing that got my attention is that their attrition is 3%. TSIA says attrition in support is usually around 15% . James shared that they have taken following steps (specifically in their India support team) to control attrition: 1/ Invest in growing support engineers technically 2/ Hiring strong managers 3/ Offer slightly better than market rate.

o Split Customer Success team based on Customer ACV and their ability/interest in being advocates (this seemed a unique segmentation choice). Top bracket customers enjoy 1:10 or 1:20 (CSM/Customer) ratio. For other brackets, ratio is higher. Earlier they started with 1:50 ratio for everyone and that didn't scale.

o Tool stack: Zendesk (CRM/Knowledge Management), Ring Central (Contact Center)

o James says that NPS is the most important customer metric you can measure

o Favorite business book for James: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

Key Insights:

o Nutanix NPS is ~90. For B2B Technology companies, average hovers around 30. Clearly, Nutanix is doing something unique.

o The team that provides technology tools for Support sits within Engineering rather than in IT/Support. I thought this was super clever -- that way head count of the team will come from Engg budget rather than IT budget (Engg budget > IT budget). Also, that way support tools team is sitting closely with engineering allowing them to better align with the product.

o They have built on top of existing support tools (e.g, Salesforce ServiceCloud) to provide unique experiences for their customers e.g., with more than 50% of their machines sending data back to them, they can generate "cross-customer" insights  to do proactive support.

o Parag's favorite book: Measure What Matters, John Doerr,