Creating Customer Delight (Part 2)

Carlo Beckman is the Director of Global Support at Feedzai. He has over 18 years of experience in Customer Support, Customer Success and Customer Experience. Carlo has evenly split his time between enterprise companies, mid-size companies and most recently, start ups. Carlo has supported relatively simple products in the SaaS space in addition to more complex products that are housed “on-prem” at a customer’s location. He is familiar with both B2B and B2C business models. Carlo has a B.A. in Management and an M.A. in Leadership, from Saint Mary’s College of California. He is currently pursuing an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership, also at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Please find Part 1 of this article here

Hire (and retain) the Right People

Hiring

First, let’s talk about the type of person you want in a Support role and how you go about hiring them. At Feedzai, we have a very technical product. As such, we need to hire people that have the technical background that will allow them to flourish in our Support environment. Technical skills, however, can be taught. Due to that, I place higher stock in the the other traits that I highlighted in my previous section: empathy, cons. When interviewing candidates, I try to be flexible with their backgrounds. I don’t always focus on people who have only done previous customer support. While previous experience can be beneficial, you can limit your talent pool if you solely hire from that particular skill set. I also include people who have been in roles where they have had to exercise good judgement, and during my screens the people that really impress me are those that show traits such as independence, proactiveness, and can speak confidently. I am able to suss out these traits by answering questions that follow the “behavioral” interview techniques. These types of questions focus on things they have actually done in the past to help predict what they would do in the future. A couple of examples:

1. “Tell me about a time where you found yourself unable to move past a particular problem at work, what steps did you take to overcome the obstacle?”
2. “Do you recall a situation when you went against an established procedure or norm? How did you come to that decision and what was the outcome?”

Most Customer support centers want people that can just follow a script and have high call or ticket take rates. Unfortunately, in my experience, I have found that focusing too much on that type of expediency leads to a bad Customer Experience. At Feedzai, we focus on ensuring we have people who will be more consultative with our customers and lead them down the path to Delight.

Retaining

Now that you’ve hired the right person, you don’t want to lose them to attrition. To help with this, we follow a few simple rules at Feedzai. First, we have a structured onboarding for new employees. Second, we have weekly 1:1s within the Support team, in addition to a daily stand-up. Since we are spread across the globe, we frequently utilize chat to keep up-to-date with one another.

As the Director, I make sure that I keep my 1:1s, but I provide coaching around the clock. I have found this to be much more effective than just waiting for a weekly or bi-weekly 1:1. In addition, this allows the 1:1s to feel much less punitive, and allows me to focus on career or personal development.

To further help drive employee engagement, we involve my team in Goal creation. I have found that people are much more motivated in something when they’ve helped to create it. This also gives me a chance to explain how these goals nest under what Feedzai is trying to achieve as a company. Moreover, at Feedzai we provide each employee with a yearly budget for a training or conference of their choice. Finally, we work with employees to also identify development goals that they would like to achieve and help them make progress towards improving their overall skill set and help them manage their career.

In many instances, I often go directly to the team and ask them for their help in identifying ways to improve the department, be it through a new process, removing a process, a product improvement, or a new tool. I try to form more of a partnership with the team and would say that I facilitate more than manage. After all, these are the true subject matter experts who understand the customer pain points better than anyone else at Feedzai. The team has told me that they love the feeling of collaboration that this creates, while also allowing us to continue to improve our processes, tools and procedures.

Many people think that joining a Support team on the front-line means that their technical skills will atrophy. This couldn’t be further from the truth at Feedzai. Due to the nature of our product, we need people who are comfortable in virtual boxes, Linux, databases, and working with Java. Furthermore, our team acts as the initial point of contact for our proactive alerts, allowing us to diagnose a potential issue before it affects the customer. Furthermore, as time permits, we also work on the backlog of bugs, which allows us to work directly with our code and gets our Support Engineers facetime with QA, Product and Engineering.

The other myth that I hear is that a front-line Support Engineer can’t really own the customer issue end-to-end. Once again, at Feedzai, this just isn’t the case. While we may need to escalate to help drive resolution to a particular issue, the Support Engineer is responsible for continuing communication with the customer and owns resolving the issue. As the team continues to grow, we will double-down on this philosophy by moving to an account management model, where a Support Engineer will have a portfolio of customers for which they will be a complete subject matter expert, and the primary point-of-contact or escalation point. All of these things lead to a more engaged and delighted employee. In all honesty, this is the true first step to Customer Delight.

Gather (and execute on) Customer Feedback

While it is extremely important to resolve customer issues in an empathetic, consistent and concise manner when they arise, even more importantly is being able to prevent previous issues from rearing their heads again. This is where cross-functional collaboration between Customer support and other departments comes into play. Support is a treasure trove of information, especially for the Product, QA and Engineering teams. The best way I’ve found to disseminate this information is to create a couple of reports that show the categorization and frequency of the top issues that are submitted to Support. I utilize my CRM (Zendesk in this case) to help me with this categorization. By providing this information to the Product, QA and Engineering teams, Support can help pinpoint problem areas within the Product and also help inform process improvements across functional boundaries. This usually leads to feature requests that help improve the product, or to enhancements that remove a particular customer pain point.

In addition, it is important to measure and take action on Customer Satisfaction surveys, along with Net Promoter Scores (NPS). At Feedzai, we keep the Customer Satisfaction Survey very simple, with a Yes/No answer to the question: “How would you rate the Customer Service you received?”. I am happy to report that most of the time we average 100% Customer Satisfaction, based on a participation rate between 20–25% of all resolved tickets for the month. In the event that we do get a negative score, the team follows up with the customer directly to see what we could have done to improve the experience the customer had and document that learning so that it isn’t lost.

We are also moving towards a scalable use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to help us get product feedback from our customer base. Currently, we rely heavily on user testing focus groups to help us understand what our customers would like to see as enhancements or improvements within the Feedzai product suite. This direct feedback from our customers helps to shape our product roadmap and helps increase the likelihood of creating Customer Delight.

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of the steps that Feedzai Support takes to help drive Customer Delight. To summarize, we do the following:

1. Provide Support where our Customers want it
2. Give empathetic, consistent and concise support when resolving issues
3. Hire (and retain) the right people
4. Gather (and execute on) Customer Feedback

Following the steps that we have outlined in this blog post, Feedzai has been able to consistently create and promote a culture that focuses on Customer Delight. I want to thank all of Feedzai’s customers for their business and all of the teams that provide guidance and expertise to the Customer Support Team.

Did you find this article interesting? Do you have experience supporting a technical product? Are you looking to join a company with a great culture, cool products and fun people to work with? If so, we are currently hiring! Come join the team!