Matt Dale joins me today to talk about Support Data: when to get started (clue: now!), and how to make it understandable - and therefore useful - for the rest of the business.
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Transcription
Charlotte Ward 0:13
Hello, and welcome to episode 251 of the customer support leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte ward. Today please welcome Matt Dale to talk about support data. I’d like to welcome back to the podcast today. Matt Dale. Matt, lovely to have you back so soon into the new year. Thank you for joining me on the panel recently, and we’re here this time to talk about support, which is the promise of this podcast right. Welcome back.
Matt Dale 0:46
Glad to be here, Charlotte, always fun to hang out with you. And you know, talk about support.
Charlotte Ward 0:51
Awesome. So you had a topic in mind today, didn’t you? Which was Yeah, kind of data related, right.
Matt Dale 0:58
It’s something that’s kind of near and dear to my heart. I’m, as you know, I’ve been consulting in over the last year. And one of my companies that I’m working with is an E commerce company. And so we just got done with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays, and all that fun stuff. And it really made me reflect on the importance of, of data, what we do with it, and all that kind of fun stuff. So I thought it would be fun today to have a conversation about that, hopefully valuable for us as we converse, and also for the audience, too. Yeah,
Charlotte Ward 1:25
yeah. It’s it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons. One, I love support data, too. I love data. Three, I work for a data company as a day job. And I love not just generating data, but finding the insights that only data can give you, you know, and I think that support produces so much data, even a pretty ordinary in invite, I mean, no support team, obviously is ordinary, but even a pretty kind of cookie cutter support environment. Again, none of those exists. But even in those environments, they produce a lot of data, right? But but I guess you know, we can we can be really intentional about what we create. We can be intentional about what we’re looking for in there, because it exists. We’re generating it all the time. Right.
Matt Dale 2:12
And I think I think the fact that we’re generating it is fine, but I think it’s really what are we going to do with that? Are we are we generating it and organising it in the right way and structuring it? I remember a conversation we had at a conference where he talked about data and structured data and keeping things organised like that. And I think that’s just collecting it isn’t good isn’t isn’t worth anything. It’s what are you going to do about it right in you hear companies say, Well, we’re a data driven company, or we’re a data informed decision making process. And I think, in many cases, that’s an aspirational value, rather than, hey, this is who we are actually, what we do. And I think our job, as I like to think about it in support is that we’re the voice of the customer to the company, and we’re the voice of the company to the customer. And I think, as we talk about what what is the customers feeling and all that information that we have, we need to put it in a format that others in our organisation can actually do something about, and make it so that it’s relevant in the context of what we’re talking about. Make it translated into the language that yeah, no, yeah, there’s a person. Yeah.
Charlotte Ward 3:18
No, I was just going to touch on exactly that. Yeah, it’s super important that it’s understandable by the rest of the business, isn’t it? There is there is zero point in producing a bunch of data points that have support specific acronyms tied to them that the only you understand the deep contextual relationship between like, you’ve got to simplify, and you’ve got to translate for the business. Well, I
Matt Dale 3:40
had one quarterly business review with our leadership team a few years ago. And the CEO, there were some challenges, but the CEO was basically like, look, I don’t have time to go deep on this stuff, my my experiences is an inch deep and a mile wide, like helped me understand what I need to know here so we can make the right decisions. And the perspective that was shared there was in the context, I was like, oh, man, like I’m frustrated by this, I’ve prepared this really great meal for you all this information for you to digest and do something with and it didn’t meet the needs of that particular audience in that particular way. And so I think, again, kind of being aware of how we’re coming across, be aware that the things that matter to us aren’t necessarily the things that are going to matter to someone else, unless we unless we prepare it in a way that ties it into what matters to them. And just leaving that data, kind of, you know, oh, this is this is what this is what man, like, it’s not it’s not good enough to do that. Also, I think a big challenge that we have with support is that it’s easy to take the things that we collect and keep them in isolation. So instead of saying, hey, let’s let’s tie this in with the data from our CRM, or let’s tie this in with the data from our usage that are that our product development team has Yes. Or if we’re at ecommerce, let’s tie this in with our sales and put these things in context. It’s one thing like in any commerce to say, well, we’ve had you know, 30 People that have returned an item that was broken in shipment, if we don’t tie that to, hey, we shipped 300 items, or we shipped 3 million items like those, that number doesn’t matter without that context, and it may be a really big problem. Or it may be, hey, that’s just a small percentage of what what’s actually going on out there. And that’s really unacceptable for the business. And so, again, being able to kind of think about that, in the context of what’s going on with the business is really important.
Charlotte Ward 5:23
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The context is, is a big part and knowing when to switch between, you know, representing that number one way or another is a big part of the translation that we just talked about, I think, you know, your, your note of like, is 30 acceptable or not, is a really interesting one. Because it might not be acceptable, you know, but but as a low percentage it might be what are the actual numbers and what what, uh, what does this represent in terms of what we’re trying to achieve as a business is super important. The other thing I would say is that sometimes this is like really back to basics versus just think in terms of sometimes representing any number to the business, you have to pick the right way to do it, you know, you’re 30 hours or your 0.1% can be read very different ways. One metric that I like to make quite a lot of use of is, is a sort of, let’s say, it’s a slightly customised version of customer occupancy, which is a traditional call centre metric, but I use it because of my team do such varied work, I have to be able to identify certain buckets and certain buckets kind of, I consider to be customer work or not, essentially, it’s a really good measure of how scalable and how healthy a team is, whether you’re in you know, ecommerce shoe returns, which is always my go to kind of simple sport environment, or, or a deeply complex managed service, such as I’m leading now. But I represent customer occupancy most of the time as a percent. And you know, I talk to the business about a 70 to 80% window is ideal, that gives us bandwidth for this, you know, functional development, personal improvement, team meetings, etc. We did once hit 96%. And I just put it on a chart as 96%, there’s about a week later, when I finally realised, that’s an hour and a half per Support Engineer, where they’re not with customers. And actually, that’s a much more compelling number saying one and a half hours where they’re not dealing with customers, by the time they’ve done their one to one and a team meeting. That’s it, there’s no time for anything else, that’s much more compelling. And so I think being able to talk to the business in the in, you know, using the right representation of those numbers as part of that translation, and and it makes it easier to hook into other parts of the business so well, as well, which I think is an important part of what you’re saying.
Matt Dale 7:47
Yeah, we did a de commerce company. Looking back at our Black Friday, Cyber Monday this year, compared to last year, we had the the sales numbers we had the number of tickets that came in, one of the things that we were really focused on leading up to that, though, is how do we how do we reduce the volume that’s coming in, like on the support team, I like to joke, you know, we don’t create the tickets, we solve them. And, and I know, you and I may have a different opinion on that. Because sometimes teams actually like I create a ticket on behalf of a customer. But what I mean by that is really, we often don’t have the the ability to fix the root cause, you know, we’re not the ones that actually building the product. We’re not the ones that are actually, you know, my case in the warehouse fulfilling the product, we’re relying on other teams to make business decisions. And the combination of all those business decisions is felt very acutely by our teams, on the front lines, any any bad decisions upstream will cause problems with our team right now. And any good decisions will result in positive things. And so one of the things that we were looking at this Black Friday, Cyber Monday was not just how many sales? How many tickets? How quickly did we solve it, but we really, really said, Hey, how many? How many? Sales? Does it take two to create a ticket, right? Like how many customers can we interact with before we have to create a ticket. And so last year, as we looked at that, we were dealing with about about three and a half orders result in one ticket, which we have a high touch product, there’s some complexities, you know, Your situation may vary. But But this year, as we went through that over Friday, through Tuesday, we went we went to 5.75 orders per ticket. So that was a really big increase in our team’s ability, our company’s ability rather our customer, we made it easy for customers to take advantage of the sales that we had, we had we had a really great, you know, the sales are way up. But our team was able to get a similar volume that we saw last year, because we put a lot of work in upfront and and the numbers that in the story that we were telling what that data really said, Hey, are these levers that we’re pulling really making a difference or not? And in this case, they really were and again, that tells that story like we’re talking about how do you how do you look at the right thing, put it in the right context so that the people you’re trying to talk to you in my case, the other members of leadership team, you know, hey, great job marketing, great job. We did what we needed to do and that that helped our customers.
Charlotte Ward 10:03
You said something really key there for me, which is that you put the work in upfront. No, none of this happens right on the day you need it. And I think that that busy times of year are just the worst time right to try and answer questions that you should have and been able to answer before. Right. I think that’s that’s it, it’s working data collection, which is something that I know we talked about that conference you’re mentioning, but data collection, data creation, thinking about what you are going to need, what you expect to be able to action from it. And getting that all done ahead of the curve is. I mean, that’s, that’s a commitment, isn’t it?
Matt Dale 10:45
It’s always the dream to because I think for me, the worst feeling is, hey, we got through our busy cycle. And someone asked me a question, they go crap, like, I didn’t structure the data collection in that way, or I didn’t think about answering that question I done. So I might have been able to add a field as we’re, as we’re going through the tickets or add a resolution or contact reason or, or a tag that would have been helpful. So we could lasso those tickets, and then quantify them without having to do it by hand. And so, so yeah, I think it’s really important, you know, as we, for those new leaders out here, in this new support role, I haven’t done this before. You really want to think through how to what are we trying to collect? What are the questions that other teams could be asking? Because we’re a great source for that, that the data that exists? What are they going to want to know? And how are we going to want to kind of collect that and relate that data to other things? Are there unique identifiers that we need to have in place? You know, how are we going to say, you know, counting unique tickets, or how we’re going to tie this into a sessions in our product and things like that? And, yeah, so I think I think there’s a lot of work upfront thinking about how do we, what do we want? And before we get to that busy season, you know, how are we going to collect that how we’re going to structure things. And I think the other aspect of that is really, once we’ve done the work, once we’ve gone through that busy season, having a moment to reflect my leaders, and I sat down at the Commerce, you know, a week into it and went, Okay, what went well, what do we need to tweak? What do we need to fix. And then as a, as a company, company, leadership sat down, and we brought the findings from our different teams and said, okay, here, here’s what we want to do for next year, because you know, some of the stuff, we can make a change tomorrow and change how we’re collecting it other stuff. It doesn’t even show up until we’re in that busy cycle. And so the odds of us remembering this, you know, nine months from now, as we’re preparing for the next one, that’s just not going to happen as easily as if we think about it right now. Think about what we want to change and kind of go from there.
Charlotte Ward 12:34
Hmm, yeah, yeah. And I think you know, you, you mentioned something, which is a big data point support, which is tags. And I mean, I, we could do an episode on tags. And I say that with competence, because I’ve done at least six episodes on tagging in this podcast, in the previous 240 Something episodes, we’ve covered it quite a few times. And there’s a lot of strong opinions out there about tags. But I think that the point you made, which is an interesting one, which is making sure we’re able to answer those, making sure that we’re structured enough in our approach to generating that data, whether it’s tags or anything else ahead of time, so that we can answer the questions that are the teams are going to ask us, either before that big event, or after that big event, and, you know, being prepped on either side is, is is a win is a win? Not, you know, no two ways about it. But But I guess my question to you, without making this a whole episode about tagging is, how do you know what they’re going to ask how do you know what data other teams needs? And obviously, with reference to tagging? This is pretty clear. Like what what we’re hoping for we’re, we’re hoping for some tag suggestions or something. Right. But how do you know?
Matt Dale 13:54
I think there’s quite a lot of variability. With tags, obviously, you’ve had several conversations on the other podcast about that. I think there’s there’s a couple things that I would do sort of out of the box, you know, again, as a consultant, I come in, and I help a lot of different businesses. And one of the first places I start with is, and this is more ticket fields and tags, because we can control the data that’s coming in if we if we have drop down fields with pre selectable options, but I like to kind of think of it either two or three axis method. Why did the customer Why Are they contacting us? What was the what was the reason for contact? If you’ve got multiple products? A second second drop down will be What product are they using? Or what area of the product are they in? And then the last one is resolution like what do we need to do as a team to figure this out and to resolve the situation? In a software environment? It might be a bug, it might be you know, shared knowledge that was available on the website, we shared knowledge, it wasn’t available on the website, which may then lead us to say, Hey, we should update the website or our knowledge base or something like that. But kind of thinking through what are the like, why are our customers contacting us what product and then what do we do about it? So using that kind of as your, your, your framework, which I think, is pretty universal, if you’re not doing something kinda like this, you’re not going to be able to give that feedback to those product teams or, or the product developers or whatever it is, it’s not going to, it’s not going to be actionable for them, because you’re not segregating the data in the right way. On top of that, then I think really, really trying to understand what’s going on with the business. So this time we had a tag, in addition to those three axes. In the in the fields, we had a specific tag that was for the coupon code that our customers are trying to apply in the in the sale. And it was cool, because we would, we would apply a business rule that said, if if this if this word, or I think we had cyber, we had discount, we had the three or four words that we used, but it would add that tag to the ticket. And then we had a view that was set up so that it would pull all the tickets that have that tag into it. And we actually had our marketing team helping us out there, there was a very specific question that some of our customers were having about placing the order, applying it to their subscription. And we were able to take a chunk of our tickets and have non non highly trained support people deal with these fairly basic issues while we’re in the middle of a crisis and answering some really in depth stuff. So we’re able to kind of skills based routing, if you want to, if you want to call it that, but but utilise other members of the company, to get us through a tight period where they weren’t very busy, they’ve done all their marketing things, and they were able to help place the orders. And so that was a case where a tag was super helpful. And then we went back in and have looked at that and said, Okay, how many how many tickets that we really saw that had that tag? How effective are these resources that we pulled from this other team? And kind of go from there. So I think being creative and thinking about the needs of the business or thinking about the needs of your team? How can I use this information to to Lhasa, this group of tickets, this group of interactions and then do something with it, whether that’s in the moment like we did, or whether that’s after the fact where we’re saying, Okay, this whole thing happened now now what do we do, we’re going to have a post mortem, or we’re going to figure out how to prevent, you know, future occurrences deal with the root cause and stuff like that. So understanding where you’re going to what you’re going to do with it will kind of dictate what sort of tags you want.
Charlotte Ward 17:03
Yeah, yeah, I’m with you. I think that I think ticket fields are, are super powerful for particularly that point of triage. And you had an interesting one, which I haven’t really used before, which is the ultimate like high level resolution descriptor, but, but the way I approach tagging in inverted quotes with those dropdowns, which are effectively tags by another name, right, but I have the the idea of which I think you said, Why, why, you know, what is the reason the contact reason, I would say job to be done, I have jobs to be done as my first level tag, and underneath that, the challenge, so whether it is a bug or a performance issue, etc, etc, etc. That’s super powerful product, and it’s super powerful for us longer term, but I haven’t been capturing a really high level statement of the resolution yet, I might, might consider adding that. The other thing that I think we often miss about this kind of data capture this really high level, this kind of descriptor of, of what the customer is doing is that I think that we don’t call that voice of the customer. To me, I think that is the voice of the customer, because the customer isn’t always talking to us in an interview. And in fact, if that’s the only voice of the customer that you have is your your pre selected, you know, four conversations a month with your favourite customers, then that’s not a voice of the customer. But I do see that kind of moment of triage is a really important metric for any voice of the customer programme to.
Matt Dale 18:42
And I think I think you’re right, that it’s something that we often miss. I’ve worked in many companies where it’s, you’re the product team, well, we’ve got our voice of the customer initiative, and we’re gonna call these people we’re going to do this thing. And it’s, I think that can be a helpful exercise. But I also, I’ve pushed back on that in some cases when I’ve when I’ve been there, because it’s like, we’re already talking to the customer quite a bit. We have this data. Maybe it’s unstructured, or maybe we’re collecting it in the wrong way. But we have just a wealth of data about the customer about their interactions about their their frustration with their pain point. Why aren’t we why aren’t we using this and in some cases, that’s that’s on us as support leaders, we’re not making it accessible and starting those conversations with leaders on the product side or on on the marketing side or wherever, whatever team happens to need that information. In other cases, it’s because the company is not really thinking about that as a useful type of data. And so again, being able to speak their language, tying what we have back to the things that matter to them in a proactive way, can then help them go oh, this is this truly is part of the voice of the customer initiative. And this is something that we want to focus on.
Charlotte Ward 19:46
I completely agree. And I think back to a question I asked you earlier, which is, you know, how do you know what those teams are going to need? Ask them right? Actually walk up to your product people and say, What could I tell All you that you can actually action, what format is best? How do you want it structured? What do you want to see out of these 10s or hundreds or 1000s of tickets that I’m ever getting every day or week or month? Right? That there is all in there. And if you can find different ways of extracting it, so those actionable as soon as possible by another team, that’s really powerful.
Matt Dale 20:22
I would say on that note, too, I’ve done that at several companies. And they’re like, oh, I don’t know, you get that response? That’s not an uncommon response. Don’t feel like you’ve done something wrong. Yeah, I think that’s the point when then you say, Okay, well, here, let me show you some of the things that I have, here’s what we’re collecting, here’s why we’re collecting it. Here’s how this might tie into what you’re looking to do. And I found that, that as the as the follow up to the conversation, where you kind of get a little shut down, then they suddenly go, Oh, that’s really interesting. Let’s, let’s tie that back to this over here. And then and then you have a dialogue, instead of instead of you going well, they didn’t they didn’t want anything. So I’m not going to do anything. I would just say no, you have the data, you know, some of the stuff that you think they’re gonna want. And in the event to where it’s like, Hey, this is a it’s a big sale, or it’s a, we had an outage and there was frustration, we had a new product launch, think about the kinds of things that you would want, if you were a product person or a marketing person in the in that situation, provide them with something knowing that it’s not going to meet their needs, but you’re doing kind of meeting them in the middle. And that’s going to spark a conversation, which then will help you push the organisation to use the data that your team has in a much better way. Yeah,
Charlotte Ward 21:26
yeah, absolutely. It has to begin with that conversation. I couldn’t agree more. And you are often then again, I’m not sure. I don’t know what can we do? What what what do tags now what you know, it’s kind of like you might get that from people who don’t know your CRM inside out. Right? Your your ticketing system and inside out? And yeah, just saying, Well, this is what we could do. And producing something, but a graph in front of them and ask if it’s helpful, you know, yeah. And
Matt Dale 21:52
oftentimes that I was in one of the QBR meetings, and we had a, one of the executives like, hey, I want to see I want to see this particular data organised in this way. He was concerned with this byproduct, the it was kind of like bucketing the types of requests that got solved in certain periods of time. And I had all that data, but I wasn’t presenting it in that way. And that was something that for him was very powerful. And so he said, Can I see it this way? And so the next one we had I said, you know, I reached out to him on Slack ahead of time. Is this what you’re looking for all that’s perfect. And it ended up being report that we really utilised quite a bit as an organisation moving forward is not one that I would have thought of on my own. But it because we had that conversation, because I opened it up and said, Well, here’s what I have. Let’s, let’s go deeper. What would make it make more sense? How can I how can I tie this back to something that matters or whatever. And that really helped.
Charlotte Ward 22:40
So yeah, and I think I think, I think, to that point of like, you have all the data, but how you slice and dice, it’s really, really important, but also not fixed in stone, you know, I would my graphs change every few months. Yeah, if
Matt Dale 22:55
you’re not looking at it, both your graphs and what you’re collecting, like you should be, you should be actively reviewing your data internally as a support team and with the rest of your leadership in the company. And then using that to go, oh, we need to be collecting it this way. Or hey, these things that we track that were really important last year, we fix that root cause and now we’re moving on to something else. It’s okay for it to change. In effect, it should if you’re if you’re really being healthy, because the business’s needs change all the time,
Charlotte Ward 23:21
all the time, all the time, people come and go. And actually what, what I found is that I never throw away a visualisation or something, you know, I never trash it completely. If it’s not any extra effort to keep producing that data or that chart, I’ll keep it in, you know, like, way down on the tabs in a spreadsheet somewhere, because I know I’m going to need it at some point again, and you’d be surprised how often going back to a visualisation actually is quite useful. Well, this is how we used to look at it. And now what I’ve done, because we’ve excluded this, you know, those kinds of things or, or looking at looking at by month now rather than well over, you know, it kind of it helps you. I think it builds confidence. It’s, you know, in you and your data and the rest of the business. And it makes you much more articulate about your own data, I think and you should be you should be not only familiar with your data, but articulate about it as well, because you have to be able to sell it right. Right. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for joining me today, man. It’s an interesting conversation. Data’s always interesting to me. So come back, and we can maybe we’ll have another tagging conversation. Maybe we should.
Matt Dale 24:29
I think we should. I enjoyed data too. And I love our conversation. So thanks so much for having me today and starting off this new year. With the podcast, I’m super excited to see where things go this year.
Charlotte Ward 24:43
That’s it for today. Go to customer support leaders.com forward slash 251 for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.
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