158: Year in Review: Numbers and Beyond

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello, and welcome to episode one hundred and fifty-eight of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I continue to look back at 2020. As I record this episode, I'm closing in on 10,000 downloads of the podcast, which truly staggers me and is a number that I have been looking at quite obsessively over the last year. I've been looking at its rate of growth. I have been looking at ways in which I can influence it. I've been looking at the types of guests, the types of conversations, the formats, the time of posting, and all the influences that might be brought to bear on the rate at which that number grows. Of course, it'll always grow. And it's a number that I have become a little obsessed with because it's pretty much the only number I have to focus on for this podcast. It doesn't actually represent anything other than a signal that people really are listening out there and that you are finding, and I hope continue to find value in what all of these great guests of mine have have brought to the show. All of the all of the insights and candor of the last year is just to me an amazing resource. And I hope that you find it as an amazing a resource as I do. I've been lucky enough to form one half of these interviews, asking the questions, such a small role. But I I've learned so much from these people and I continue to learn. And I hope you'll join me in 2021 as we continue on this journey together. But as I tip that 10,000 downloads, it reminds me not to focus too much on one number. It's a number, it's fascinating. But what's the value of it as a standalone entity? We really should take some time, as my guests reminded me, to look beyond the numbers. When you start looking at individuals as numbers on a spreadsheet, you're you're effectively reducing them to robots. Right. Yeah, cogs on a machine, exactly. So if that's how that's how you you view them, you're only ever looking for efficiencies.

Ash Rhodes: 2:50

Exactly. You are you're saying it's so much prettier than I could, but that is exactly what I would. If anybody in my life takes anything away from anything I say is that don't treat your employees as numbers, please, for the love of God. Like treat them as human beings and don't do that.

Natalie Ruhl: 3:14

One thing that we have is a point person program, that's what it's called. That means that every agent in my team also is to like a 30% part of the product team that kind of like deals with a certain topic. So that can be anything from like a transactions-based thing where you know we have someone that mostly looks after like transactional and and and checkout issues when they are working with that same kind of like department on the product side to kind of like talk about current issues, talk about things here or there. So when I look beyond the numbers, I also look at like how successful has this relationship been, you know, how is that how is that going? How um what kind of things have they been driving and and and how how has that kind of impacted the team, maybe even impacted the tickets?

Jenny Dempsey: 4:12

And how is that helping them to grow? I was an English major and I specifically changed to an English major in college because I didn't want anything to do with numbers. Um so I do have very strong feelings, but I have shifted a lot of beliefs over the years and become a little more friendly with metrics simply because metrics tell a story, and I love stories, and stories help us grow and um improve. And so I've tried to do things a little differently because there are some very general metrics. Yes, we want CSAP, we want MPS, we want, you know, how many tickets we get, how many tickets each agent is doing, the you know, first response time, yada yada. Yes, of course, there are some that are very basic and very important. Um, but I, you know, we don't necessarily, we don't judge our agents on, you know, call time or email time and all this stuff. So while we have those metrics available, we don't really do anything with them. And that might make us weird. Um, that might make me like maybe I will learn in the future that I need to, but right now it is not of importance. But what is important again goes back to the story. So one of my biggest and most favorite things to do is to see what types of tickets are coming in. So I work very hard, like for example, with the development team, on making sure that what's the options on the drop-down menu that the customers select when they reach us are clear and make sense and we can measure those. Um, I look at all the macros that the team uses, and every single macro is tagged with a particular ticket or with a particular ticket type, and we measure those. I measure help desk articles, how many views are on each of those? What types of words do people search for? Because that's what's going to help me build the new article. That's what's going to help me write an informative, casual blog post. That's what's going to help me build a new training page for the team. I look at things, metrics, just a little bit differently. And um I would choose that because that tells me more of a story.

Meredith Molloy: 6:17

I'm a firm believer in, you know, in the numbers and in leading and being a support leader that is data driven. I think that said, what is even more important is to look beyond the numbers and balance it out in a human way. For me, I lead in a way where almost every metric that is a number, there is almost always a qualitative piece of feedback from customers that is the other side of the coin to that number. Um and when presenting numbers to an organization, to senior stakeholders, um it's always important to always provide the why that lies within that qualitative feedback and not just that, oh, well, CSAT is, you know, 92, yay! Um, but really looking at that verbatim feedback behind some of those metrics that is so incredibly important.

Mike Redbord: 7:24

I think this is actually a really, really interesting topic, especially for teams that are growing really quickly. Because when you're small, I think you know what good looks like, and you know when you have a customer in front of you, or when a peer of yours or you know, a member of your team has a customer in front of them that they're just doing a fantastic job with. And you can call that whatever you want, delight or something, and you can try to measure it in certain ways, whether it's NPS or C CSAT or CES or something, but you know it when you see it. And I think as you get bigger, sometimes you know, you tend to manage by numbers and you manage more off the spreadsheet. And that's a very natural thing. But what that does as you build is it can sometimes bury those stories and bury what you know greatness uh can look like inside like the little crevasses of that spreadsheet. And managers and leaders don't tend to see them. So the question then is how do you, while you build and while you add all these metrics, still continue to provide that world-class customer experience, head off that next issue, like really be delightful and on tone and know, you know, know who you're talking to. And I think that that is where the stories lie. And so I love it when teams can share those kind of stories and kind of stand those up as examples of the right way to do the work. And it's like, yes, sure, I did X, I did 20 cases today, but here's the one that is like the perfect case because this is what happened with the customer, right? And in almost every case, it's the focus on the customer that will be the best possible story that you could tell.

Charlotte Ward: 8:51

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one five eight for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.