201: Fireside with Ethan Walfish

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and one of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Ethan Wolfish for a fireside chat. Today I'd like to welcome back to the podcast Ethan Woolfish. Ethan, it's lovely to have you back. And this week, you're here for a fireside chat, and I understand you'd like to talk about understanding your customer's context. I'm looking forward to this.

Ethan Walfish: 0:50

Awesome. Thank you for having me. And I I really I love this topic. I think this is a really cool one to be able to dig into a little bit more. And I'm hoping we can have a cool conversation about this today. So thinking about customer context is something that I do a lot of. And in college, I studied media production. And one of the classes that I took that I hated, but has in some ways stuck with me was media criticism and theory. And one of the things we talked about was how do you apply various criticism theories to a piece of media? And one of the things that I've thought about over time is that every customer email is a piece of art. Really? Really? Do you think? I think that's true. And if we and if we think about it in that light, that we can take this and we can apply some of these theories that have been devised by scientists and linguists to derive additional meaning and context from those emails. And one of the theories that that drove me crazy, but I actually think is one of the more important and meaningful ones, is semiotic theory. And if you don't know about this, there's a lot of YouTube videos out there. I watched a few in preparation for this to sort of refresh my brain on this. But there it's it's kind of a long-winded theory that basically boils down to there's three elements of deriving meaning. There's the sign, which is what is the um what is the actual physical thing, there's the denotation, which is the the literal meaning, and then you have your connotation, which is your your signify, your derived meaning that comes out of it. And so uh one of the examples that my professor used to give that he he would shout at us regularly with his very Flemish accent, was that it's seven o'clock. And that would be the literal sign, right? The literal sign is that um is just it's seven o'clock. So that is actually maybe, say, our customer email. And what we can get out of that, the the denotation, is the physical time, right? It is actually seven o'clock. But the connotation is something that we draw from the additional context that we can draw, we can take around that. So maybe it could be that you're late for work, if you're still in bed. That could be something that you could come out as a connotation for that. It could be that it's time for dinner, right, if you haven't had anything to eat yet. It could be it's time to stop working. It's 7 o'clock at night. You have it's time to stop working, you're sitting there at your computer. And so by thinking about this, we can we can try to derive additional meaning for a customer. And and I'll give you an example of how I actually was able to do this actually today with a customer, and I think I was able to provide a pretty good experience through this. And um for this particular customer, they reached out and they asked about a bunch of functionality in the platform. And that all made sense to me. It was I could very well answer very strictly just what they'd asked me. But what I was able to pull out of there was a sign that their email domain told me that they were an integration partner. And so what I was able to determine is based on the the connotation that they're an integration partner and the connotation that they're asking about feature sets. What I can do is take those two things and come to the conclusion that they're talking to mutual customers about our feature sets. And what I was able to look at in this situation is they were asking basically about two features. But I realized that there's actually another feature that I sent them documentation about because I said if you're talking about these two things, you probably also want to talk about this thing. So while they didn't ask that of me, I thought that there'd be a helpful piece that I could continue to give to them.

Charlotte Ward: 4:25

That makes sense. That makes sense. And um it strikes me that in that particular example, what you drew was quite factual information and what f from the the email you had in front of you. Um that that and and your response was therefore relevant and factual, further extended information that they didn't necessarily ask for. But I think what I'm also thinking as as you described this theory and its structure, it's and its application to customer emails is that it's probably quite a useful tool for building a greater sense of empathy and understanding with customers as well, isn't it?

Ethan Walfish: 5:09

Yeah, I think that's another really good example. I mean, and the classic we would hear from in that case is the customer that writes in in all caps, right? We know in that situation. We know in that situation either either they're they're their keyboards broken or they're really angry at us.

Charlotte Ward: 5:23

I have a I have a very tiny story exactly in that ballpark for you, which is that in a long, dim and distant uh previous employment of mine, we had one particular customer who we had a a regular relationship, I hope I will say. Um, and we fixed and they filed everything. Every single case came in as a severity one. And the thing that we used after their their um customer defined definition of their customer set of oh god, what's the word? Their customer applied. Okay, um the thing that the thing that we uh the thing that we found after realizing that they were logging every single case as a severity one was that the real priority for them was to be found in the number of exclamation marks that they put in the email. So it you you got a severity one, it was logged in all caps, but you got four or five of these a week from this customer. And actually, what was the biggest uh I guess this would be the the denotation, maybe? Well, I don't know. You'll have to remind me in your theory where what it is.

Ethan Walfish: 6:36

The the denotation, the denotation would be the number of exclamation marks, and then I think your connotation would be what you can, your sort of your derived meaning from that, I think.

Charlotte Ward: 6:43

Exactly, how urgent it really is. Uh, we would just simply count exclamation marks for that customer. And that told us how urgent it really was for them.

Ethan Walfish: 6:52

And and I've I've a similar example for that is we had a customer who used to write in with a lot of italics in bold and and colored text, and and really what they're asking for was they were making really specific requests. And in that situation, what that told me was these are really specific requests, be shared, be sure that the the bold parts we're doing correctly. These are the most important parts. They're telling us that with that text.

Charlotte Ward: 7:17

Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting, actually. Yeah. I I'm just I'm just picturing that email now. That's why there is a long pause. I'm just I'm just picturing like the the this kind of uh, you know.

Ethan Walfish: 7:32

There's a lot of other, there's a lot of so much other context we can get too, right? What is the size of the account, right? Is the is the account post-onboarding? Are they still onboarding? Have they copied their account manager on it, which might give you another indication that, at least in business to business, that they're frustrated because they're basically at the same time as reaching out to us as they're escalating that ticket at the same time? And and I think all of these sort of pieces, we can really start to think about what is the additional context beyond just that customer email? What things can we can we read into from that email in order to try and pull more context together so that again, from that first email, something we talked about before, from that first email, how do we provide a complete and comprehensive answer to that customer?

Charlotte Ward: 8:16

There's a linguistic aspect as well, isn't there? I think that so we've we've talked about drawing things out of you know, domains, out of CCs, out of typography, out of number of exclamation marks. But I think also there is a tendency for us, and and I think this is where interpretation through a prism of different cultures is quite interesting. Um, and that is where customers will give you phrases that are clearly kind of signposts to how they're feeling and how and their context at that particular moment. Um, and part of your job is interpreting those phrases, particularly in the context of what you know about that customer. So you will uh and some of this is obviously drawing on national stereotypes, but there are there are lots of factors at play here, and not least of which your particular relationship with any individual customer. But but you know, I'm just thinking a conversation I had many, many months ago, or it feels like a million years ago with with our current uh pandemic situation, but but uh many months, many months ago with I Ash Rhodes, I think it was, um, where one customer will say, like, tell you how pissed off they are in no uncertain terms, and you can take that pretty much at face value, but how another customer will say something like, Well, that's not ideal, and mean exactly the same thing.

Ethan Walfish: 9:41

Yes, yes, and that's and that's another good thing, right? And and again, it's sort of you're drawing on additional context of of sort of previous relationships with that customer and of their their culture in many situations. And there's a whole other conversation we could have about um cultural communication and across across uh borders that uh that I think is interesting, but yeah, that that might be a separate one.

Charlotte Ward: 10:02

I think we've got to come back to that another time. Thank you so much, Ethan. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash 201 for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.