The Customer Support Podcast

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 :)

 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

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 ,
• 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.

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.)

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.

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

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,