166: Slack Support with Vlad Shlosberg

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 166 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is Slack support, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Vlad Schlossberg. Vlad, it's lovely to have you join me for the first time. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Vlad Shlosberg: 0:41

Yeah, and uh happy to be here, Charlotte. Thank you. Uh so I'm Vlad, founder of Focal.io. Um at a basic level, uh we we build tools to help companies create amazing relationships with their customers on Slack.

Charlotte Ward: 0:55

That's awesome. Uh it's uh very, very fortuitous for me then that um we're talking about Slack support this week. Um it's a mighty coincidence you've turned up, Vlad, but um I know that uh you have a great deal of uh exposure, if that's the right word, certainly experience, certainly opinion, certainly expertise in providing Slack support, right? So I would love to spend the next 10 minutes or so kind of exploring some angles of that with you. Um and I think I think one thing that I would like to kind of batten down first is exactly what Slack support is, because I think we all have a uh a different understanding. Maybe some of us are in organizations now that have, I know I am, one or two shared Slack channels with one or two customers. It's a bit hit and miss. It's not necessarily entirely clear what they're for. Um, so so maybe maybe you could tell me what you think Slack support really means.

Vlad Shlosberg: 1:56

Yeah, um, yeah. So so at a at a basic level, it's it's just companies working with each other over Slack, right? Um and there's a bunch of ways that people do that or companies do that. Um one approach is they build Slack communities, then there's they take over bigger communities and they create subcommunities. Uh, some are private channels. Uh very commonly it's what you just described is uh shared channels. I think they're they're called Slack Connect or something nowadays. Um but but what what like one of the interesting things that I think about uh Slack support is that it's not just you know the technology that it's Slack and just talking to somebody over Slack, is that um it's it's kind of forcing companies to rethink that the way that they they they rethink their support paradigm. Um so and companies I think are moving more from a support model to more of a customer success model. So so let me let me ask you actually, what what do you what do you see as the difference between support and success?

Charlotte Ward: 2:52

Oh good question. Um I well I I I guess in my mind my mind immediately goes to the really traditional definition that I've always heard, which is around support being reactive and success being proactive. Um But I think I think the the remit are actually bigger than that. I think I think support is there to help customers solve quite specific problems and answer quite specific requests most of the time. Whereas I think success have a wider, more proactive remit to maximize success of the product or service that they are that their customers are engaging with you in. That's how I would see it.

Vlad Shlosberg: 3:40

So I yeah, I like that. I like that it's you're taking the next level as opposed to just thinking about it. Like the definition I've always heard is the transactional versus relationships, right? Um, but but I but I like the the or the reactive versus proactive. But I like that that level of the next level of it. The the it's it's the support is a very specific thing versus your building relationships, you're you're creating things. I think I think one of the the the best uh definitions that actually that I heard for this is is actually from a customer that was the most formal definition is um I want customers to think that I'm their best friend and somehow just remember to answer them. So it's it's you want to it's so I think I like that. It's that it's that relate, it's you're basically building a relationship that you want to be like their best friend, or really the the word I like is trusted advisor. So you want to become their trusted advisor and you want them to feel like you are just there only for them and nobody else.

Charlotte Ward: 4:34

Gives you a bit of that that definition perhaps gives you a bit more license to blur the lines a little as well between support and success, doesn't it?

Vlad Shlosberg: 4:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Charlotte Ward: 4:44

Do you think that using Slack for support and using Slack for success are really very different then? I mean, particularly if we're considering those slightly more blurred lines.

Vlad Shlosberg: 4:57

There's not really much of a difference between Slack support versus Slack success. Um I think it really depends on the type of product you're selling. Um, but at the end of the day, it's it's one statistic that I think that might kind of clear it up is that I looked at 53% of all customer churn happened for poor uh for um because of these relationships, because of relationships. So it's because of a combination of customer uh because of onboarding, because of weak relationship building, or because of poor customer service. So it's that really if you want to build a great relationship right away with your customers, um, then I think you should look more at a customer success model. If you have just a customer support model, then you're probably not doing things like long onboarding uh processes. You're probably just doing something that's more transactional. And because of that, um you could still do things with Slack support, but you're not looking at a you're not looking at the same success type of model. You're looking more of a transactional support model, which is which is great. So I think both of these uh models actually have a very good uh translation into how you can help, how you can work with customers on Slack.

Charlotte Ward: 6:04

So you talk you talked briefly there about the complexity of the product potentially being a factor in suitability for Slack as forming part of the support model or or the success model. Um and for me, I think one thing that I've often relied on, relied on when it comes to supporting technically complex products is the written is is communications in text form, you know, whether they're through a a portal or email. I think I think I've always felt they're more appropriate for information exchange and for understanding status and things like that. And I think they're much more appropriate than say phone support or probably even chat support, actually. And I think I think this is a an area that I think probably sits more is more centered around a B2B scenario as well. So I think all of those things feel like they have quite a good fit for using Slack as a support tool, as a communications medium and channel. Um do you think that's a big driver, the complexity of the product? I mean, how how would I know if my product was something that would sit well in this space?

Vlad Shlosberg: 7:21

Yeah, totally. And I I mean I think you know, some of the things you're bringing up, like chat and then and just the way that people start thinking about um when they are introduced to Slack support and they're thinking, well, we have chat or we don't support chat or something, right? And I think that that's the first thing that people usually think about, but it's actually not usually the right thing to think about. Um so I think if you're if you're if you have chat support now, right, and you have the resources to support people using chat, um, usually those products I think are generally more you know very simple questions and answers, right? So things that take maybe a minute to respond or a couple minutes to respond, you know, I booked an airline ticket, I need to change it, something like that, right? So those types of things are actually translate pretty simply to Slack support, right? That somebody asks you a question in chat, instead of asking you a question in chat, they can ask you a question in Slack. Um, the only difference here is that they don't have to, you know, stay within your website, stay within uh some product. If they're, you know, if let's say you're building some kind of engineering thing or some kind of thing that doesn't necessarily require them to be in your in your app all day, then they can continue not being in your app. Um but yeah, as you get more complicated, right, it's it's an interest, it becomes even more of an interesting question, is that when your support model is something that might take days or weeks to respond, right? Let's let's say you have some crazy thing that requires a lot of infrastructure or something, right? And then your ticket time might be you know an hour to first response, and then days and weeks till actual resolution because you're spending a lot of time debugging. Actually, in this case, most people think of you know the chat support and they think, well, we can't do chat, so we can't do this. But actually, this is a much, much different, a much more interesting approach for Slack. Because here you can go, you know, you have a specific topic and you have a specific um uh ticket, for example. If this is a ticket that's gonna take you a week or two, you can create a shared channel, right? You can create a topic, uh, you can create or create a thread within a shared channel, right? And you can have that back and forth. And the thing that that's interesting about Slack as well is you have in in chat, you have the expectation that someone's gonna respond within the first minute, five minutes or so, you know, or a couple minutes. Um within Slack, you actually don't have that expectation that a lot of times you'll message a colleague and only respond the next day, right? You can also set expectations, right? You can say you can have things that respond to you to say, or to respond to that customer and give you the expectation of time to say, hey, because this is more complicated, you might respond right away, uh, or your your CSM or your support person might respond right away with a guy, hey, we got it, but you might actually spend the next few weeks actually working on this, and you can kind of keep status within that thread or within that channel.

Charlotte Ward: 9:58

That's really interesting, actually, because I don't think I'd really realize that that was possible in Slack. I I and then this is exactly the space I'm in now. Uh, we it's those kind of response times and that kind of resolution time, and and that's the kind of space I've been in pretty much throughout my career. And I think that um I I my natural expectation, therefore, has always been to go to email type communications where it's it's a drop and leave a message almost, and not expect to hear maybe for a day. Um so you mentioned a few things there, which I think are some of the concerns that I've had about Slack support. Because to me, within my organization, Slack is very much a vibrant living communication tool. Everything is very real time, and I know as as as a as somebody who's worked exclusively remotely for 16 years, that actually communications when you're remote don't work well real time, but that just happens to be where I am right now. So my current current experience of Slack is very real time, and it is less of that drop and leave a message and expect to hear the following day. Um, which feels to me when when you're getting into that territory of things running for days or weeks, like it's very easy to lose track of, like it's very easy to kind of lose a handle of the of the numbers, the speed, the the load, and and all of those things that you would more naturally be able to gather in a CRM, you know, in in Zendesk or Helpscout or whatever, whatever it is you're using, right? So I'm kind of interested just as we're just as we close out perhaps, you can if you can tell me how do you get started in some of those areas? I mean, how how uh are those things possible? Can can I keep track of this thing that is the sub this the kind of what feels to me like this secret support that's happening over on Slack and isn't directly accessible in Zendesk. How does that work? What what happens there?

Vlad Shlosberg: 12:11

Well, that's uh that's a great question. Um, I mean, so the first thing is you can do is uh go to focal.io slash get dash started. And we're actually publishing a white paper uh so by the time this release uh you'll see it. Um and it's a white paper that's gonna talk about just how do you actually get into it, right? Is that how do you create the shared channels? What type of model is best for you? Is it better to create a community-style support model? Is it better to have shared channels? Is it better to have private channels? Um and then we'll talk about some of the uh products that actually go into it. So focal is our product, and this is kind of our ability or it gives you the ability to create tickets around uh conversations, and it gives you the ability to track these conversations. But also one of the things that actually, you know, I'm really, really excited about that we're releasing very soon is this ability to see a customer profile, where first of all, we'll pull up information from things like your CRM and you know and public information about the company, about the user, about their LinkedIn profile, that kind of stuff. But then also what we're gonna do is we're gonna use AI and sentiment analysis to understand just the person's intent, right? So we'll look up what is the person talking about to understand them. We're gonna look at uh previous conversations and previous uh conversations of that organization to understand how it is that the organization feels about your product and and and to really give you that extra edge on that customer success model, not exactly not as much on the customer support model.

Charlotte Ward: 13:38

That that's fascinating because that makes it really powerful. That that means it's more than just a uh closed conversation happening in a channel somewhere between a relatively small group of people. Um it becomes much broader than that and um can draw on all of those external uh information sources, but but even more valuable valuably, if that's a word, surfaces it actually within your organization, I guess, uh across your organization in ways that that uh gives gives you quite a um quite a unique view of that customer relationship, I guess.

Vlad Shlosberg: 14:18

Yeah, and and and I think one of the interesting things there is that it's that cust so companies collect all this information about about customers, um, and they have it in all these different systems, right? But I think really the thing that you really want to do is you want to display all of the relevant information at the exact time that it's needed. And a lot of times that is when you're talking to the customer, right? So what we want to do is we want to make it so that you can see all of the relevant tidbits that are gonna help you provide that extra bit of support, provide that you know, extra insight. Maybe it's that, you know, what were the last things that you talk to that customer about to just to even onboard the thought process faster, right? So that it's I think it's it's one of the interesting things is how do you get the relevant information to the right people at the right time.

Charlotte Ward: 15:05

Yeah, and and therefore, and thereby help them build that relationship that you talked about.

Vlad Shlosberg: 15:11

Yep.

Charlotte Ward: 15:12

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much, Vlad. Okay.

Vlad Shlosberg: 15:15

Thank you, Charlotte.

Charlotte Ward: 15:19

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