239: Fireside with Craig Stoss

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 239 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, please welcome Craig Stoss for a fireside chat. I would like to welcome back to the podcast today, Craig Stoss. Craig, lovely to have you back. Uh, I guess we are here for another fireside because you have something you want to talk to me about. What is that thing? Welcome back first.

Craig Stoss: 0:46

Yeah, no, thanks for having me back. I uh I thought we could talk today about kind of meeting your customers' uh expectations for channels and how you deliver the support services that you that you offer. Uh it's been something that's been on my mind a lot recently, and uh, and I really see an evolution, you know, in my time and support. And uh and so I think it'd be interesting just to chat about how we can make sure we're offering the services in the way that our customers want them.

Charlotte Ward: 1:14

Excellent. Yeah, I mean, I you know, I've been in support a long time. I've seen a lot of channels. And uh yeah, I mean, back when omni channel was the new thing and like we're gonna we're gonna add a channel, gonna go to talk to our customers in two places. Imagine that. Um yeah, time like this this whole this whole um idea of how we talk to our customers, setting expectations across different channels, whether we even acknowledge that we're talking to our customers across different channels, is kind of it's evolved so much over my time in support too. So this is this is a really interesting topic for sure.

Craig Stoss: 1:57

Yeah, I mean it's and I think that that's the problem, right? One of the things that I I noted when I was talking to someone else about this topic was customers. I mean, think about how you expect to be supported. You know, you you want to return a physical product, or you, you know, you're you're having you're struggling with, you know, Microsoft Office on your desktop or something like that, right? And um both of those, you have different ideas of how to be supported, right? You know, when you want to return a physical product, you expect to have a person, you want to talk to that individual, you you want them to have information about you so you don't have to have receipts and you know they they can look your your met your um your refund up, you know, maybe based on your credit card or something to that effect. Um, you know, and then when you're you know dealing with a software product, especially consumer B2C product, you know, you you probably aren't going to call Microsoft in that case. You're you're probably gonna search Google or or go to their their their website and maybe see if they have a chat widget or something. And I think that's an evolution that that has happened over the past 20 some odd years, right? I mean, when I took my first support job, it was 100% on the phone, and and even that was a bit revolutionary at the time, right? You know, like you know, having people sitting on the other end of a phone and and someone paying to call you but uh for for um B2B software. Um, you know, I remember people, I still in my early support days in the in the early 2000s had people faxing us log files because email couldn't support the file size you know limitations of sending attachments. Um and and so and and people were just used to it. And and so you have to understand that that there's so many new possibilities that the consumer, your your customer, might not even know how they want to be supported in some cases because they're just so used to, well, you know, do you have a phone number, do you have an email address, or do you have a knowledge base that I can search on Google? And and they and they just that's just the defaults. And then all of a sudden you introduce cool new things, uh, maybe you know, bots or in product support for the SaaS world. Um, you know, you and I have talked a lot about the IoT and SAS world, you know, supporting people where they are and and and looking at data and patterns. Um, I think that's the the evolution that people now maybe don't even realize they're being supported. You know, they they you know things just happen magically. And so how do you align with that? Like how do you how do you align, you know, with with what customers expect when they may not even know what they want, you know, in this case?

Charlotte Ward: 4:35

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I uh I I'm I the the memories of uh receiving log files by fax and putting a request in and having um tapes shipped to us that then had to go off to a data center to get loaded. My very first help center software. Here we go. This this this could take you on a bit of a mental journey. I was working in a technical support call center B2B. The very first help desk help desk software I used didn't have Word wrap. Wow. So you literally, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just like it was new, like it was a it was whatever it was, 80 characters or 120 characters or something wide. You just hit a new line to start the next line. Very, very um, it was a terminal essentially, you know. So yeah, yeah.

Craig Stoss: 5:35

I remember the days we're we're trying to import rich text into uh Sebal, which was I don't even know if it exists anymore. It was an old CBA.

Charlotte Ward: 5:43

I supported SIBL. I was on the C. I bet you called into me at some point.

Craig Stoss: 5:49

I may have talked to you and heard your wonderful voice on the other.

Charlotte Ward: 5:54

That's the first time I've heard anyone say that name back to me. I did nearly two years in SIBL support, technical support. SIBL. Well, this is the trip down memory lane all of a sudden, isn't it? I uh yeah, I I yeah, I love SEBL. I back then I loved SIBL.

Craig Stoss: 6:13

It did the job, right? And uh, you know, and it was I I always loved when when Salesforce came out and and the interface just looked so much like Siebel's, but it was just you know with the the web technology built into it.

Charlotte Ward: 6:27

It really did. Yeah, yeah. So wow, wow.

Craig Stoss: 6:31

So anyway, back to topic. So I think that what we end up doing, and and what I, you know, what what I've seen at so many companies is we do these like surveys, or we literally ask, how do you want to be sported? And people are like, Well, I want some I want a phone number. And it's like, okay, that, but that's the starting point, right? You know, when do you want that phone number? What countries are you using that phone number? Uh, where should that phone number be stored? Uh, is that phone number 24 by seven? What's the SLA on that phone number? Like, there's so many questions that come after um something that seems, you know, on the surface of I offer a phone, you know, a phone line. Um and and and then we had out, you know, now we have Slack and chatbots and text message support. Uh, you know, it's it's incredible to see all of these options pop up. And I think that different demographics want different things. I think that different um situations require different things. I uh there's a company uh that I have done some consultancy with that uh does does deliveries, and so they'll send a delivery email out that says, Hey, here's your order, here's here's um the delivery, you know, the tracking kind of number. Um, and you know, it's expected at 1 p.m. on Tuesday. The number of email, the number of responses to support that are just forwards of that email or replies to that email saying, Hey, the third item on this list did show up at one o'clock, like you said, is is enormous. And and and but so like every every email comes in with the same subject line of your deliveries on the way, you know, and um, and so is that a great way of supporting people? Like having them have it, you know, you know that they're already in their email, you know that they're confirming, you know, okay, what should I order versus what did I get? It, you know, is there a better way than having them have to reply or forward an email? And and I mean, maybe that is the best way, but how many emails do you get that are those types of emails that say do not reply to this email address?

Charlotte Ward: 8:37

Oh, yeah. And I think um, I think this is um, I think there's a little bit around uh user experience in terms of how people interact with these things. And and I use that term quite specifically rather than customer experience because I think that we we can look at that at from a very like technology point of view, right? I think that the the design that has gone into the way that uh that customer sees and interacts with that piece of content, really that is just another screen you're presenting them with. Um and there, I don't know if you recall, there's a you must have seen it, I'm sure. There's a an image if you Google Search UX design and grass and path or something to that effect. There's that famous image of the designed pathway where beautifully laid out uh paved right angle going around a patch of grass, and then people have just worn a pat a pathway thin across the absolute diagonal of that patch of grass because it's the path of least resistance for getting to where they want to go. And in terms of the situation you described there, there might be a better way, but if you still provide people with a path of least resistance, they'll take it.

Craig Stoss: 9:52

Yep. Yep, path of least resistance is is absolutely, absolutely a thing there, right? I um I think you're right about user experience. And then I was talking to uh a leader about knowledge management the other day because we were looking at a new knowledge management strategy, and um we talked about the fact that sometimes you don't even know who your who your your users are, speaking about the difference between user experience and customer experience. So, for example, does your knowledge base need to support potential customers? And do they want to be supported in a specific way? Because, you know, if you're doing an RFP across you know the industry and you want to just do a quick skim of how easy is this product to use, um, you know, what does the interface look like? You know, maybe your knowledge base needs to support something like that as opposed to because people know that the marketing material is always going to be marketing material, like meant to show off the nice, neat, nice things and the fancy screens and the cool videos with the sound in the background. But from a support perspective, people want to know what's what's reality? And and they're maybe they go to your knowledge base. So um, you know, how do you structure your knowledge base to support both your potential customers and your your um your your actual customers? And can you actually change the way you drive uh revenue because of it? So um is that a preferred channel of support from uh from a set of customers that that you don't even have yet? Um I there's so many options like this that go beyond surveying. And I think that's what my point is here is that you know it's not about you know your path example is great. If you say, hey, what do you need to get from point A to point B? And they say a path, and you build the path, and then it's like, well, no, but this direction is is easier for me, then you haven't done your your leg work. You know, you've asked the you've asked the initial question, but you haven't done that that follow on of okay, what does that path look like? What material is that path made of? We had a we had a situation just down the, you know, I live in in Canada and and we just had a bit of a thaw last week of some of the snow, and then immediately the next night it froze, and um the snow plow put chunks of ice in front of my neighbor, well, not my neighbor around the corner, in front of their their their driveways, and and so big that they couldn't move it. And and you're thinking about you're thinking about, okay, well, if someone had just said, I want my my road snowplowed, which is a fair thing, but what they forgot about it is that that was where the drainage system was because it's on a hill. And so the snowplow putting the ice in front of their pathways is probably an unintended consequence and you know that no one thought about. Um, and that's that's what to me, support preferred channels is about is finding out a the unintended consequences and preventing them, but also using you know other insights than your customers on how to make those determinations. So by that I mean um things like my example with the email forward. You know, you know from data by looking at your your see your ticket management tool, that's where customers are most responding to your or uh most contacting your support team. You know that. So is that the best way to do it, or is there a better way of doing it? I don't know the answer to that, but you know how that you know how that data, that insight. And um I think that in again, going back to SaaS and IoT, I think there's a huge opportunity to understand personas of customers, right? You can say, you know, you're in this tier of of our plan, you're using this set of features, you had this error, you were likely doing these things. Here's support, here's a here's a widget that pops up, here's a knowledge base article that that shows we're going to help you. Um we use a system for our HR Sis uh HRIS and uh um I was doing I was had to approve someone's pay raise, and it just kept popping up saying, you know, when errors occur, try again later, and and talk about an awful way of supporting people because there was nothing to indicate what that error was. I just couldn't do anything. And I ended up my HR team had to go to the company themselves to get uh get an understanding of what that error was. I said, That's just you know what I was doing, you know what screen I was on, you know, you you always knew something was wrong. Tell me what was wrong.

Charlotte Ward: 14:14

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's um and you know, you said you said a second ago that you you don't know what the right answer is. Um, and that's because there is no right answer in terms of what the channels are that you make available to your customers, how you segment those customers across those channels, what you know, what um point you introduce a channel, or even God forbid, take a channel away. Can you imagine that's also a valid decision? Um, but I think that um I think the thing that strikes me about channels is that I mean this is this is the aid age-old kind of omnichannel uh ideal that I was presented with back in the late 90s, I think, which is they should all join up, and that's the main thing. And I think it it's it's great if you can be ever present and always available across 10 different channel types, but it it is figuring out what is appropriate and and you know what um what where phone support is appropriate for one situation definitely wouldn't be appropriate for another, you know, and uh and therefore from the business perspective, it's uh it is a conversation you have to have around it efficacy and return. And and that that return can be either in efficiency or as you said, it can begin to touch on revenue, right? And I think that you have to figure out what those measures are.

Craig Stoss: 15:45

Yeah, I really like what you said about them all have to join up, right? I think there is uh an element of the only way to truly do this and truly move to your customers' preferred channels with them is by measuring these things in a in a comparable way. So, you know, we know that that you know, phone system might have a different tracking system than than a chat, tech chat system, than a text message system, then an email, then you know, all of them social media support is probably a great example because it seems to be always separate from the main ticket management tool. But you need to be able to compare them. What are the volumes? What are the uh average handle times? What's the uh you know, what are the types of tickets that come through these channels? Because all of them, um, you know, that helps you adapt. You know, it helps you, it helps you say, well, hey, you know, the types of tickets that come through social media are just vastly different than the types that come through email. Therefore, we have to train social media support differently. And and the only way to do that is track them in a comparable way. Um I would argue it should be in the same ticket management tool, um, you know, through some sort of integration, but I don't know that that's necessarily mandatory. It's more of just measure the same metrics uh between this between all the different channels.

Charlotte Ward: 16:58

And and I I would I would add to your list as well um of things to consider, and that is expectations, you know. When I when I contact a support team through in-product chat because I'm in the product that is a SaaS cloud product and I'm on a screen and I've got a question and I need it answered right there in the effectively in the product, I expect an answer pretty quickly. Um if I'm texting or I'm on Twitter contact, I expect an answer pretty quickly. If I'm emailing a support team somewhere, I I'm okay with that might be half a day because that's the cadence for email and that feels or a day even. I mean, beyond that, it starts to feel a bit ridiculous, frankly. But but it depends on the type of relationship, but the expectations of the channel from the customer perspective. That everyone will have their own kind of perspective on what is reasonable in inverted quotes for the type of communication.

Craig Stoss: 17:59

Agreed. And and again, that that's something the customer needs to define too often. I just I I hear these numbers like, oh, it's a two-hour SLA on emails. It's like, okay, where'd that, you know, did you just pick that out of a hat? Is that is that what your customers want? Are they, you know, to your point, half a day seems more reasonable to be four hours uh or or 12 hours, or is 24 hours reasonable? I I again, it depends on your industry, it depends on your demographic, it depends on the nature of the ticket, maybe. Um I uh there was a great podcast I I hosted a while ago with a person who said that their way of doing this was removing this concept of priorities and just saying, we offer an awesome support. We're gonna get back to you within X number of hours, and that's our base support, and it's you know, industry leading, etc. And then there was like a button that you could check that says, no, this is even more important than that awesome support, you know. And and you think that'd be you know, full of abuse? He said it wasn't. He said they had like a 99% rate of, yeah, this is truly critical because customers recognized, yeah, you know what, this is fine for three, four hours because that's what I'm used to. And people who had a critical issue said, No, I want to be contacted within the next 20 minutes, and they would click that button. And and so you know, the abuse rate was really low. And and either way, the customer was getting exactly what they expected back.

Charlotte Ward: 19:24

As a what they expected, yeah.

Craig Stoss: 19:27

Yeah, what they expected. Because you literally said, here's our red normal SLA, or do you want super awesome SLA? You know, like um, you know, and and that to me was genius. You know, uh, I worked at a company that used to argue with customers about the priority of tickets because it set the SLA. And I was like, why? Why are we arguing with customers? If they tell you it's critical, sure, maybe internally we say, Listen, yeah, critical, but you know, you know, we're we'll we'll treat it a little bit lower priority, but you know, as long as we're meeting the SLA the customer expects, that's the that's the point.

Charlotte Ward: 20:00

know not some setting in in your ticket management tool uh you know that that the customer can can arbitrarily set so um yeah just all about expectations and and and expectations evolve maybe that's the last piece of of this chat is uh don't assume that because you're offering these channels today that's what you should be offering tomorrow right that oh for sure technology evolves customer uh expectations evolve your product evolves or you add new products that need have different expectations um yeah and that that to me is another big red flag uh is that people just say well we've always done email support and and we're just gonna keep doing it and it's well is that is that right is that what your customers want yeah absolutely um support is is nothing if not ever changing but but also very measurable so we we should we should be able to measure take stock and uh and react to to what we see to the the expectations of our customers for sure yeah at least quarterly you should do some sort of assessment for sure yeah yeah thank you so much for joining me today Craig been absolute pleasure as always and um I like to think that somewhere there is a phone recording of me providing you with technical support in around 2000 2001 somewhere around there wouldn't that be incredible eh in a small world and all that yeah yeah I'm almost tempted to go digging but if we but had the time thanks so much for Charlotte uh always a pleasure talk to you soon that's it for today go to customersportleaders dot com forward slash two three nine for the show notes and I'll see you next time