6 Customer Support Lessons We Learned at Elevate Summit
A few weeks ago, Guru traveled to Palm Springs, California, for Elevate Summit, a peer-to-peer customer support event put on by the folks at cosupport. Guru is quickly becoming a part of the support stack, running alongside ticketing systems as an internal, agent-facing knowledge base that allows reps to stay in their workflow. We surveyed over 50 support professionals — both in leadership positions and agents with the hopes of learning more about our support customers and their pain points.
Both the talks themselves and the surveys we collected left us with the following takeaways:
1. All-Hands Support is Quickly Becoming Best Practice
“Engineers don’t need to be ‘taught’ empathy, they just need opportunities to practice it” explained Twilio’s Lauren Buchsbaum. Lauren was one of many speakers to preach the importance of all-hands support, which calls for non-support employees to answer tickets to better connect with customers and understand their pain points and use cases. At Twilio, every new employee needs to spend 2 hours answering tickets, and engineers routinely take shifts to build empathy for customers. In this program, there have been 241 rotations and 1500 tickets answered.
Rachel Beyer and Chris Wyman from Credit Karma detailed a similar program. Rachel emphasized facilitating empathy with your support agents on behalf of your members. To do so, listen to your support agents, to your members, and get a really good understanding of what upsets them. Credit Karma has a similar all-hands support function, where every new hire is required to shadow support and answer tickets.
Lauren gave some great tips for how to get started with this program.
- Everyone should do all-hands support, regardless of company’s size.
- Make sure the people in charge are rallying for all-hands support.
- Engineers don’t need to be taught empathy, they just need to practice it.
In order to make this successful, you need to make sure those non-agents taking support shifts are well equipped to handle the “knowledge gap,” as Rachel described it. For Credit Karma, this includes some informational decks employees must review before starting their shifts.
Twilio also tries to shield these non-agents from any and all administrative work associated with support, letting them focus solely on answering customer questions. Lauren described an auto-assigning workflow to help achieve this admin-free all-hands support environment.
2. Slack is firmly entrenched in the support stack
One of the questions we had going into Elevate was around inter-team communication. We asked how support teams communicated and why. 73% of survey respondents mentioned Slack as their primary tool of communicating internally (compared to 14% for Email). Agents need to move fast, and Slack enables them to ask teammates questions and get answers immediately. Given the rise of live chat as a support channel and the importance of metrics measuring speed like median first response time to respondents, this makes sense. Real-time messaging as a medium for both internal and external communication is now the standard everyone expects.
When we asked what the most meaningful metric to support teams, we received the following answers.
- 33% said Median First Response Time
- 25% said Total Ticket Volume
- 20% said NPS
So, why is time so important to support teams? For starters, according to Forrester, 71% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service. Given the speed at which speed impacts customer satisfaction, it’s critical that agents communicate quickly. The days of waiting for a team member or manager to respond to an email question are over — Slack empowers teams to communicate in real time to get the answers they need to respond to tickets faster.
3. Career development is top of mind for support agents
One of the biggest themes that emerged out of Elevate was the need for support agents to have clarity with respect to career development. For support leaders, the challenge is keeping their support agents engaged and enthused. For agents, the challenge seems to be finding out where to go after support.
So what kind of roles can a support agent grow into? Beyond the obvious support leadership role, two talks gave some alternative routes for support professionals to consider.
QA: Jon Lane from Harvest discussed his unique journey from support into QA. As a QA lead, Jon spends his time coordinating with the product team from everything to new launches to managing the QA team itself. His product knowledge and experience with customers has uniquely positioned Jon to be an integral asset to the product and development teams at Harvest — writing test cases, run those test cases, and writing automated test cases.
Program Management: Rolf Middendorp from Google gave insight into the ideal structure of support teams. Accord to the Rolf, program managers make other team members more effective and efficient. They create repeatable procedures for events/tasks that happen frequently, implement knowledge management procedures and tools, manage system implementations and changes, and more. Arguably the most important point Rolf made regarding program managers was the distinction between a program manager and a team manager. Team manager should focus on developing the people, whereas program managers should focus on developing the process. If you’re scaling your support team quickly, it might be time to pluck a process-oriented agent out and put him/her in a program management role
In any case, few roles offer the combination of customer empathy and product expertise as support. As a result, customer support professionals are incredibly valuable assets, and can leverage their skills in a number of different ways in an organization should they choose to.
4. CSAT Doesn’t Tell The Whole Story
Nic Bryson, VP of Customer Support at Wrike, had an interesting take regarding CSAT. According to Nic, although it’s a standard support practice, so much so that it’s built right into many support tools, CSAT doesn’t drive a lot of actionable insight. Asking a general “feel good question” isn’t particularly helpful.
Nic suggests customer survey questions that ask something specific, such as customer effort, to get more meaningful feedback to give insight where you can drive further improvements in the customer experience. After all, isn’t that really the goal of all support teams?
5. Teams need access to knowledge in a lot of different places, but it’s often stale
While 76% of respondents said they have an internal (agent-facing) knowledge base, only 39% said their company updates this internal knowledge frequently. Additionally, teams are storing internal knowledge in a bunch of different places.
A whopping 92% of respondents noted two or more places their agents need to search through to find information and 69% said they had three or more different places. What’s clear is that a majority of organization have not designated a single source of truth for internal support knowledge. This is certainly inhibiting your support team from responding to customers as quickly as they can. With the pace of which your product is constantly evolving, your support agents need a single place to go to look for knowledge. In doing so, your entire team becomes more consistent and your agent’s productivity improves as well.
6. Support should be part of your product feedback
At Buzzfeed, feedback is functional. According to Bari Jay and Brandon O’Dell, product support specialists at Buzzfeed, support helps connect engineer’s tech with users, and often results in feedback. In order to take best advantage of this feedback, teams need reliable data tracking techniques, recognition of user feedback, and timely and accurate data.
A main part of that data collection hinges on putting support in your actual product, explained Douglas Hanna of Zendek. Here are a few ways Douglas suggesting doing so:
- Make it easy for customers to contact you
- Put contact information in app
- Make it easy to add context to their conversations with you
- Bring support into your app
All of these give you access to data that can be particularly helpful in improving the support experiences for your customers. Data that can predict and suggest how best for a customer to contact you regarding certain issues, route requests to the right people, and manage SLAs. Additionally, this data can be leveraged to help manage volume and resources.
As first-timers to the event, our team was overwhelmed by how many Elevate veterans there were in attendance. But reflecting back on the event now, it makes sense — it was a genuine, peer-to-peer learning environment, and it’s clear organizer Sarah Hatter has worked hard to ensure this environment.
If you’re a support professional or leader, you absolutely have to check out Elevate. The next event will be in late March in Philadelphia!
If you’re at all curious as to how we hope to continue to fit into your support world, open a free Guru account and see for yourself how an internal knowledge base that lives in your agents workflow can impact your key support metrics.
