75: Support Contributing to Revenue with Josh Magsam

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 75 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is support contributing to revenue. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Josh Magson. Josh, it's lovely to have you back again. This week we are talking about support contributing to revenue. And I think that there are some less obvious ways that we might be able to draw that line right between support and revenue.

Josh Magsam: 0:50

Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of folks, when they consider support and its relationship to revenue, they they look for a way that support sort of has a direct line to day-to-day actions driving revenue. And in SaaS models, for example, that means retention and reversing churn and a lot of that, you know, that's applicable. But that doesn't always apply if you've got an e-commerce product or any number of different product lines. So I think there's a couple of avenues that are worth exploring. One is thinking about your support team's relationship to the product and the product feedback. A true voice of the customer program can come out of support. And I've seen that happen in a lot of great cases. I one of our programs, a partner here, I can talk about briefly. The manager just noticed that they were getting a lot of different types of feedback in their CSAT messages. And so she took it on herself to categorize that, create a coding system over a couple of weeks. Clearly, saw some groupings, you know, push that forward back to our partner contact. And their development team came back very quickly and said that it helped them fast track a number of massive initiatives that they were just kind of struggling to determine where customers are feeling pain. And they turned around and they said, Wow, the support team actually had this data, saw it coming in. It's also a good way to empower the support teams. A lot of frontline agents will tell you, hey, I know what the customers need. They're complaining about, you know, X, Y, and Z all day long. But you have to give some form to that. You have to put it into a system so you can codify it, understand the maybe pain point Y is actually more valuable than pain point X, and that's what we need to drive at first. A real voice of the customer program, that's a phrase that a lot of people tend to toss around, like, oh, we we you know, we like to listen to the voice of the customer. But if you don't have a program for it, it's not really going anywhere. It's just, you know, a few data points, maybe a couple of passionate snippets that surface in a meeting for conversation here and there. And a product manager or project manager isn't going to have a lot they can do with just a handful of anecdotes, right? You have to turn it into quantifiable data.

Charlotte Ward: 2:48

Voice of the uh voice of the customer often just means a few customer interviews, doesn't it? It doesn't it doesn't mean actually really collating a lot of these insights from across the organization. And of course, as you say, support is is part of the organization that talks a lot to your customers. If you're able to capture that, that's really powerful.

Josh Magsam: 3:06

Yeah, absolutely.

Charlotte Ward: 3:08

From from what you're saying, the kind of insights that you might gather there are uh you know directed towards product improvement or process or experience improvements, right? What what else could we do, do you think, around some of the data that comes out of those conversations with customers? Do you do you think that there is kind of knowledge we can capture there and make use of?

Josh Magsam: 3:28

Yeah, certainly. There's other avenues to this as well. But that is really understanding a true deflection strategy. So I can drill down into some of those feedback comments and say, hey, here's great product feedback, here's great CX feedback. This is something the product team can take back to the checkout process. They can take back to the website and rewrite some copy and update some things to clarify things. Um, but you'll also start to see a lot of customers reaching out to you for the same sorts of questions, concerns. And that becomes something you say, what if we could just direct them to answers, right? And I I still see a lot of places that um they haven't really built out a knowledge base yet. And that's a move that kind of mystifies me in this day and age. Um, I'll see a lot of organizations point to this list of FAQs, sometimes eloquently written, but you know, not entirely complete, other times perhaps a bit too comprehensive and and a wee bit murky along the way, right? You have a lot of people that end up taking a glance at these things, or they're not even mobile optimized. That's another major factor to consider. Customers looking for a solution and they want the easiest path to finding a solution, which they hope means that they can just run a quick search, maybe find an article in your knowledge base, go back and apply that, make the change, fix it. Uh, if that information isn't there, they have to contact your people, and they're going to be a little irritated about it anyway. So building out a knowledge base based on customer feedback, identifying the pain points that your team can solve with your comprehensive articles, video tutorials, animated explainers, any number of different tools is going to put solutions in people's hands the fastest. And that leaves your great and smart and well-trained team free to tackle higher value questions and issues and take on those escalations. Highly recommend tracking a deflection score as part of this. It's a great way to quantify this, identifying the number of contacts that you are deflecting or sort of bouncing away. It helps you scale a team. If you're sitting around thinking, how do I stop just figuring out how to add bodies to this team and train them and sort of sit on that cycle, optimizing your knowledge base and implementing a program for people to find their own answers and tracking it? Google Analytics is a great method if you're just doing it on the fly, but a lot of CRMs have built-in metrics and tracking that will get this for you. When you start turning around and figuring out how this is helping you scale, you're not necessarily saying, hey, I'm solving retention or I'm decreasing churn or I'm doing something that has an immediate line to revenue. What you are doing is future-proofing your support team's budget and making that more scalable. And that adds up quickly. If you think three years from now, I'm projecting my team of 20 needs to be a team of 60. If we keep on this growth path, and I've got management and everything else layered on top of that, that's a six, seven-figure cost, depending on where you're at. Um, if you implement a great deflection program and you can start biting into that, you can grow that team in a more manageable fashion, have them focus on higher value, higher risk cases, and see customers solving their own problems and feel happier for it.

Charlotte Ward: 6:41

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