Support Insights Podcast | CX & Customer Support Podcast by SentiSum

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Justin Rezende, Head of Support at Shopify Logistics about how he reduced reply times by over 90% at Deliverr and the specific method he uses to calculate actual transaction time on tickets. Justin will be taking us through the important role support touchpoints play in managing client experience, and how properly calculating optimal headcount can remove the guesswork in improving client relationships - as well as the negative impact an understaffed support structure can have. We'll also be discussing the acquisition of Deliverr by Shopify Logistics, and how staying aligned on the goal of making commerce accessible to businesses and delivering great experiences aided the transition. Plus, hear Justin's advice for anyone looking to take steps to reduce their own response times. Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Thibaut Martin, CX expert, about his fantastic achievements as Head of CX at Otrium, and how organizations can turn the perception of CS from that of a cost centre to a value centre. Thibaut will be taking us through how in his 3 years at Otrium, he's been building out their support model to support business growth, while managing to reduce first response time significantly and maintaining an impressive Trustpilot score of 4.5*. We'll also be discussing how tying customer issues to revenue, with the help of SentiSum insights, can help generate buy-in from other departments and center their strategies around VOC, resulting in happier customers. Plus, hear Thibaut's advice on steps you can take to supercharge the powers in your customer support department, turning it into a true value centre for the wider business. Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Nick Moreton, Director of Support at Hotjar, about how his team are working in unison with the Product team to create strategies that are centred around the voice of the customer. 

We'll talk about the challenges most businesses face in capturing unbiased customer feedback and implementing it in wider strategy decisions. 

Nick will also talk us through how his support team has been restructured to work closely with product, as well as how Hotjar are now using AI to analyse their customer support conversations and unlock in-depth customer sentiment insights they can act on.  

Hotjar's motivation is to not only be good at representing their customer voice, but to be incredible at it and have the best possible product feedback loop.  

Listen to the episode to understand some of the things you can do in your business to represent VOC in your wider business strategies, or head to our website to read the highlights.  

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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In today's episode we talk to Zack Bryson, Head of Global Customer service at Awardco, about how he enables his team to proactively look for opportunities in their support conversations to solve customer issues on a wider scale. Encouraging open communication and idea sharing with his agents means they feel empowered to look for solutions to root causes and are always looking at issues through the eyes of the customer.

Zack believes wholeheartedly in hiring for his team based on genuine care and passion for good customer service, and that it's his job as a leader to encourage career progression for everyone on his team to anywhere in the business. 

We'll discuss how this approach has lead to Zack having an agent attrition rate of only 7%! As well as his tips on how other businesses can encourage strong relationships within their customer service teams. After all, if you take care of your agents, they'll take care of your customers. 

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In today's episode we talk to Matt Bell, Customer Care Team Lead at Too Good To Go, about how his team and the wider business are always on the lookout for opportunities to educate their customers - and Matt's previous experience as a high school teacher makes him a real expert on the topic.

We'll discuss how Too Good To Go use in-app prompts to tackle common queries, reducing contacts for easily rectified issues, how they drip feed education into auto replies and canned responses, and how having a team who truly live and breathe the company values means this all becomes second nature.

Matt also gives his advice on how other companies can work towards aligning themselves on their core values and educating customers (as well as how to keep your bananas fresher for longer)!

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

In today's interview we sit down with the brilliant Aistė Sobutienė, the customer support director at Vinted.

Together, we tackle three of the most common myths in the customer service world:

1. The classic "the customer is always right".
2. All customers prefer dealing with a human, as opposed to a machine.
3. You always should exceed the customers expectations.

Aiste gifted us with a fresh perspective on these, with some ideas that may surprise you.

In this episode of Support Insights, we catch up with Fabrice Dowling the Global Head of Customer Care at HeliosX.

HeliosX is a group of healthcare brands (Dermatica, MedExpress, PharmacyLab) that run different business models and, as a result, have very different approaches to customer service.

Having seen exponential growth during the pandemic, Fabrice was tasked with organising and optimising a customer service department that spans the three brands.

Sounds complicated, right?

In the interview, Fabrice shares with us the challenges of setting up multi-brand support.

We cover the metrics, tones of voice, quality assurance, influencing leadership, and building a strong team culture.

There's a lot to learn in this episode for anyone interested in improving their CS division, especially those looking for a blueprint while their company acquires or expands service lines.

This week, Dimple Pattani, the Head of Frontline Customer Support at GoCardless joins me to talk about team culture.

GoCardless has grown rapidly in the last few years, adding a ton of new people to the team and significantly increasing ticket volume.

In the episode, Dimple explains the elements of a strong team culture, the core values, ways of working and management styles that have allowed her team to be high performing and efficient as they scale up.

You'll learn:

• The GoCardless growth story
• What empowering agents really means
• What culture creates a high-performing team
• What team-building events GoCardless does

This week on the podcast, I’m catching up with Svitlana Gaunt, the Customer Experience Operations Lead at Otrium.

Otrium is the fastest growing startup in the Netherlands and they raised $130m in March this year to accelerate the international expansion of their online fashion outlet marketplace.

In this episode, you’ll hear about how Svitlana and the Otrium team successfully set up a brand new outsourcing provider and ensured they delivered on Otrium’s expectations of premium quality customer service.

We get tips on motivating an outsourced team, instilling your culture even when you cant meet in person, and how best to communicate clear expectations.

If you listen through to the end you’ll get to hear a great definition of high-quality customer service and some tips on maintaining a customer-centric culture as you scale up.

If you enjoy the conversation, subscribe to our newsletter for more weekly actionable strategies from support and CX leaders.

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In this episode of the Support Insights podcast, we caught up with Emma Sopadjieva, Head of CX Analytics at ServiceNow (ex-Eventbrite and Medallia).

Emma's role at ServiceNow is "90% influence, and 10% data"—a description that resonates, I bet, with everyone who works in customer experience.

In this episode, we dive into what it takes to drive customer experience improvements in a business. From aligning CX metrics with other departments KPIs to demonstrating a clear ROI of investing in CX, this episode is a masterclass on influencing customer-centric change at a large company.

You'll find out:

1. The best structure of a CX department for a customer-centric culture.

2. How to prove that your company should invest in customer experience.

3. Why NPS is useful, but the drivers of NPS are what's most interesting.

4. How Eventbrite leverages customer support conversations to drive product improvements.

5. Why you should invest in text and sentiment analytics tools to run real-time analytics projects that REALLY influence decisions.

6. Why democratising customer feedback is critical to successful customer-centricity.

In this episode of the Support Insights podcast, we've caught up again with Cornelia Konstantyner, Head of CX at Organic Basics.

This week we're taking a look inside one of the most important global issues: climate change.

Thanks to Amazon's one-click culture, we've all come to expect one thing from eCommerce companies: super fast delivery, and super easy returns.

Brands chasing sales at all costs have optimised the purchase experience to encourage impulse, thoughtless purchases and immediate gratification.

But, with easy returns comes a hidden cost:

• It's predicted that Amazon alone, with their 50% share of the $600bn eCommerce industry, will represent 1% of US climate emissions by the end of 2021. That's predicted to rise to 15% by 2040.

• On average only 50% of clothes returned go back on sale.

• 5 billion lbs of returned goods go straight into landfills each year in the US.

• These are US statistics, but this is a global issue.

For a company like Organic Basics, which create climate-conscious clothing, the impact of one-click culture and free returns is top of mind.

Organic Basics is a certified B-Corp, which means profit is just one pillar of decision-making. The others are people and the planet.

The conversation this week centres on how brands can deliver great customer experiences while also caring about the planet. In particular, we look at the eCommerce returns process.

You'll learn:

• Why there is an issue with free and easy returns policies.
• What brands can do to make it easier for customers to care about the planet.
• The changes brands can make to reduce unnecessary returns from their customers.
• How you can start the conversation internally and start a movement to care about the planet.
• How data and analytics can be used to determine whether a return is worth it.
• What you can do as a consumer to reduce your climate impact.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

In this episode of the Support Insights podcast, we caught up with Cornelia Konstantyner, Head of CX at the fast-growing sustainable fashion brand, Organic Basics.

The Organic Basics CX team have built a really cool customer service experience, leveraging automation to prioritise incoming requests based on CRM data, language and the customer's funnel depth.

Cornelia and her team built a complex set of rules that work together to reduce response time to conversations that need a quick response—creating a win-win for company and customer.

In this episode, you'll find out:

• How to choose which support conversations to prioritise to create a win-win situation for your customers.
• Why it matters if a customer is subscribed to the Organic Basics newsletter or not.
• How auto-prioritisation drives efficiency, cuts costs, and increases sales at Organic Basics.
• How auto-prioritisation has significantly improved the agent experience.
• What planning and collaboration was needed to get the process set up.

If you're keen to dig deeper into prioritisation, you can check out an article we wrote recently: how to properly prioritize customer support requests.

Make sure you come back next week, we'll hear from Cornelia again—this time on the subject of creating an environmentally conscious returns process. Subscribe to follow along.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service podcast, we get a masterclass from Oleg Krasnov, Miro's Head of Customer Support during the pandemic hyper-growth period.

We find out what it's like to be a leader under pressure; to have 10,000 things on your backlog; and how to get through it with clear prioritisation, processes, analytics and systems,

Key points include:

1. The benefits of investing in support operations employees early on
2. Why you should map your customer journey, including your systems and processes.
3. Why support insights and the product-feedback loop are so critical as a company scales.

This week's guest is the incredible Lauren Cunningham, Senior Support Ops & Strategy Lead at Loom.

In Lauren's 2.5 years at Loom, the company went through a mind-blowing growth period—from 700,000 to 10,000,000 users.

For the customer support team that meant dramatically rising requests and issues to handle.

Over the period, Lauren and the Loom team used a number of tactics to reduce the percent of customers contact support from 4% to 1%.

For example:

• They built out a high-quality help centre, and viewership increased from 1 million per quarter to 3 million.
• Their web-app automation served 350,000 answers before tickets got created.
• Their chatbot reduced ticket volume by 15-20%.
• They used Loom's own product to deliver fast and personalised customer communications.
• They leveraged support insights to drive product improvements.

And, the best bit?

The Loom team prioritised customer experience, not ticket deflection, and their CSAT scores remained high.

In this episode, we also chatted about support insights and Loom's product-feedback loop.

So if you love customer insights like we do, listen until the end to hear how and why Loom shares support insights across the company.

To answer these questions, we're talking to Roman Siepelmeyer. Roman is the Head of Operational Excellence at GetYourGuide (who raised $484m from Softbank in 2019) and the ex-Head of Shared Service Center at Delivery Hero.

Roman has a lot of experience in designing and managing contact centers, including extensive experience in the outsourcing space, making him the perfect expert to chat to about this subject.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

This week's podcast guest, Charlotte Spain, heads the 'rider happiness' team at Buzzbike.

In the past year, Charlotte and her team have grown customer service at the thriving startup into a mature, customer-obsessed function.

She's built an internal brand around customer service, championed the role as a long-term career, and placed the department at the strategic heart of the company where it influences marketing, operations and customer happiness.

In this episode, we look at best practice from Buzzbike so that you get inspired.

You'll find out:

1/ Why it's so important that Buzzbike calls customer service 'rider happiness'.

2/ Why great customer service and experience is part of Buzzbike's DNA.

3/ What steps you can take to build a customer-obsessed culture.

4/ How to remove the negative assumptions around customer service.

5/ Why hiring from hospitality is the winning formula for finding great customer service agents.

6/ Why the customer service team at Buzzbike is so involved with marketing messaging.

7/ How buzz bike identifies trending problems affecting their riders.

8/ How Buzzbike uses the negative lexicon approach by Danny Meyer

This week on the State of Customer Service Podcast, we've got the incredible Teresa Anania.

Teresa is VP Global Customer Success at Zendesk.

Her role places her right at the heart of the customer service world. Every day Teresa and her team are focused on sharing best practice and problem-solving for customer service teams at the most successful global companies.

We got the answer to three core questions:

1. What are the top three trends facing customer support leaders right now?
2. What principles does Zendesk follow to deliver a great customer experience?
3. What are three ways Zendesk users can maximise ROI from Zendesk?
4. Bonus: Teresa's advice to those wanting to get to VP-level leadership

This is a rare opportunity to hear from someone who talks to and helps support teams from all over the world.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service podcast, we chat to CX leader, Nate Brown.

He and his team at Officium Labs been working closely with a Fortune 10 gaming company to help build them a best-in-class customer service experience.

The goals of the project?

1/ By 2023, reach 80% customer satisfaction (30% baseline). They achieved 90% by 2021.

2/ Increase lifetime value by 15% by delivering customer support to MVP game players by 2023.

3/ Achieve 35% automation by 2023

The incredibly talented team at Officium Labs have been hard at work and have seen fast progress towards all of these goals—they've generated and protected upwards of $4m over the course of this project so far.

This episode will teach you all about their approach to the challenge and give you some customer service improvement takeaways to implement yourself.

P.s. If you're not already part of it, the CX Accelerator is a great Slack channel to join to meet others in the CX space.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service podcast, we take a look at the link between customer support and product management.

With me, is MJ Marques who spent 5 years as a customer support representative before moving into product management in 2018.

We're also joined by SentiSum's own head of product, Kirsty Pinner. Who has built SentiSum's product to make customer support insight easy to access and leverage across businesses.

MJs move between careers make her uniquely qualified to answer one of the big questions this podcast episode answers: How can customer support professionals make the move into product?

Both MJ and Kirsty's background (building and working in tech for support teams) give them first-hand experience of the power of customer support voice of the customer data. So we deep dive into that and learn why product managers need to make better use of it as a channel of customer insight.

This episode discusses these key topics:

1. What is the link between product management and customer support?
2. What useful data can be found in customer support
3. Reasons why support agents and support ticket insights can be so powerful for product teams
4. How customer support teams can make their voice heard across the business
5. Why companies need to realise that customer support is the best training ground for almost any role
6. How to sell your skillset and transition from support to product—lots of practical advice.

Enjoy!

This week's guest on the podcast is Sham Aziz, the current Head of Customer Service at Selfridges (the famous British department store).

Sham has 20 years of experience on the frontline of customer service. He's lead teams across companies like Natwest, Ocado, Net-A-Porter and Fab.com.

We caught up with Sham just as the UK is coming out of lockdown. The timing made it perfect to dive into Sham's experience of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted his work over the past year and what he thinks the future of customer service will look like.

For the first time in history, Selfridges closed their doors. Like much of the high street, they shifted their focus online, had to shift to remote work and hiring, and saw significant growth in customer contacts.

But, amidst this chaos, there is opportunity. Opportunity to make changes happen quickly and become an agile company again.

In this episode, we take a look at:

• The impact of the pandemic on operating models

• Importance of customer insights and how to get them listened to (we also wrote an eBook on this recently here).

• How should the profile of who you hire change?

• A discussion on whether customer service advisors should be sales trained

• Why there has been a shift in customer service careers outlook

• Sham's ideas for the future of customer service

Adrian Swinscoe is a celebrated speaker, author (Read: Punk CX) and advisor in the customer service and experience industry.

In this week's podcast, we were lucky enough to catch up with Adrian about a customer service improvement project he recently advised on.

Adrian was approached by an agile, fast-growing company that wanted to make sure they were running an optimal customer service operation.

But, they weren't really sure how well they were doing.

We find out:

• Adrian's approach to assessing the company

• How he discovered some quick wins

• What changes were implemented to take their customer service to the next level.

We then dive into the future of customer and the technological changes you can expect.

That expert is Ed Deason, the current UK Head of Customer Service at British high street chain, Pret A Manger (find him on LinkedIn here).

He's got a ton of experience behind him running customer experience and service teams.

And, customer journey mapping was actually one of the first things he did in his career.

Together, we wanted to make a truly actionable guide that would help both customer journey mapping newbies AND senior CX professionals navigate the process.

I suggest watching the full video lesson first, and then referring back to this shorter 'summary' blog post for a refresher.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn.

(Follow us on LinkedIn for regular actionable content like this)

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations

 This week, Sharad and I had the pleasure of chatting to John Ernsberger, the co-founder of Stella Connect (an contact centre industry SaaS platform that just sold to Medallia!)

The interview was short but high value, we covered topics like:

• How to motivate employees in the contact centre, one of the toughest work environments.
• What John has seen change in contact centres during the pandemic
• How contact centres are responding to their employees working from home with a new tech stack, transformed communication and digital learning & development.
• How the volume and type of tickets taken by contact centres have changed in the past few months.
• Why there might need to be a fundamental shift in the characteristics of the contact centre workforce.
• How the way contact centres extract and use customer feedback has changed during the pandemic.
• How you can get more information to frontline staff to ensure you have efficient training and QA, operational metrics, and employee feedback loops.

Phew, we covered a lot in that time. Safe to say this episode was thought-provoking and packed with insight.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

We caught up with Megan Bowen, the Chief Customer Officer at one the fastest growing marketing agencies in the US, Refine Labs.

Megan joined the Refine Labs team just three months ago, and it's her first time being with such a small, startup-style team.

She's previously led customer experience projects at some leading technology companies: spending time between customer service and sales at ZocDoc, leading corporate accounts at GrubHub, taking up the reigns as COO at Managed by Q, and acting as VP of Customer Success at Platterz, covering success and support.

The customer experience at everywhere she's worked has been a mixture of technology and reality: whether it's tech & doctors, tech & food, or tech and office management. This means Megan has a rare insight into what it takes to create incredible customer experiences in the mixed reality world.

Topics covered included:

- How to help your team be successful, as well as your customers. Creating the right conditions for everyone to be happy and satisfied

- Helping your customers get real value, reducing churn

- Framing customer experience initiatives in terms of business results

- Creating win-win situations to benefit your customer and your business

- Investing in the empathy skills of your customer support agents

- How you can use the acronym LAAARing to coach your team to build communication skills

- Using call shadowing & asking questions to coach your team

- Being at GrubHub during their IPO

- How Megan merged the customer experience of 3 acquired companies into one experience at GrubHub. How did they choose what features to keep? How did they try to stop churn?

- How customer experience differs between corporate and consumer accounts

- Why GrubHub CX was so complex: how do you deliver food to 1000s of employees at the same time in the same building across 15 floors?

- Megan weighs in on the debate: NPS, is it really useful?

- Megan's thoughts on why qualitative feedback beats quantitative any day

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.