78: Forecasting in Support with Greg Skirving

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 78 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is forecasting, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Greg Skirving. Nice to have you back again, Greg. Uh the topic for this week is forecasting. So I'd really love to talk about forecasting in support and what that means to you and how you do it.

Greg Skirving: 0:46

Absolutely. Hey Charlotte, how are you? Yeah, forecasting. Let me let me just start by saying uh it's uncanny how our business uh resembles the grocery store. You walk into the grocery store, there's six cashiers standing there doing nothing, and uh you go around, you do your shopping, and you go to checkout, and there's two working, and the lines are all the way to the back. I mean, at the end of the day, we really, really can't uh forecast uh accurately to uh to the place that we would really like to. What we really need to do is uh look at the things that we actually know. Obviously, we have uh historical trending. That's that's really the first thing that we need to look at. I think there's a couple of other things that uh uh I know that I look at. Um obviously the release cycle. So uh that depending on when your release cycle is, that can sway your your seasonal trending. So you have to be careful about that. And typically uh, you know, depending on adoption rates and uh, you know, you can you can get some information from uh from your data out of that couple of months, uh you'll start to see a spike in demand in in cases. So if you can do a good job of uh understanding that, you know, you can get into how you book your uh your time off your development days, really is the biggie. Obviously, you can't plan for uh for sick days. Also, uh what you'd want to look at is uh your team, the tenure of your team, uh what your overall headcount is, are you at full headcount? Uh that's that's gonna factor in.

Charlotte Ward: 2:18

Already the main thing that I'm taking away from this is that there are so many variables, aren't there? And that and that is just a huge part of the problem with forecasting. We we can pull as much data as we like about how many tickets we had this time last year, what the expertise of our team was this time last year, what the release cycle or what season we were in. There are those variables and yet so many more as well, not not least the the sort of the unknown. The forecast for growth within the organization or the product or the customer base is another factor that is is also somewhat nebulous, isn't it? I mean, people will attempt to put figures to all of those things and they all impact the work that we're trying to do with forecasting, and yet they're all uncertain in and of themselves, right?

Greg Skirving: 3:06

Yeah, absolutely. There's there's well, like I always say numbers are the uh the the questions, not the answers. Um so you have to dig deep and and figure them out. Obviously, uh selling is uh is a huge thing. New customers. New customers are typically more demanding when they start out. Also, uh your company's self uh self-service uh stance. Do you have a good robust knowledge base? And also I'll go back to the product. A newer product um has uh has uh typically more issues and uh and and more customer uh demand for support.

Charlotte Ward: 3:38

So more variables, yeah. Again, do you do you think that this makes forecasting almost inevitably impossible? Do you think it's something we should really just give up on? Um or do you think that it's worth trying to be as accurate as you can and accepting some variance and and some aspect, not quite a failure, but but you know, there is there is an element here that we might be wrong.

Greg Skirving: 4:04

Yeah, there's a there's a a uh uh a degree of error in all numbers, and when it comes to it's it's forecasting, it's the future, we we really don't know. So, like I say, we can look at as many variables, the products, the people, sales, release cycles, rigid historical trending, factor all of that in. I I know I built a capacity planning uh sheet basically, and uh I use uh sort of uh uh a high and low so I can actually adjust and you know at the end of the day, you can sort of stand back how many cases should we do we expect people to take and close in a day? And uh and are we close? You get her going, you know, ready, ready, fire aim, get her going, and uh and uh adjust uh adjust as you can. But i if if you think you can make it exact, um that's that's probably not gonna happen.

Charlotte Ward: 4:52

Aiming to be too exact about this is probably more stress than it's worth. I I love the idea really actually of just building in a high and low and and figuring out the the band that you're likely to fall in.

Greg Skirving: 5:03

Yeah, it's funny. I uh um I worked with uh in a previous role, we would come up with 3.4 people to handle this price. It's like, okay, so is that three or four? Because I can't hire a fourth of a person. So at the end of the day, we work in integers and uh, you know, we do our best.

Charlotte Ward: 5:20

Yeah, absolutely. Do do you over-resource or do you under-resource for that 3.4? Do you go for three or four?

Greg Skirving: 5:27

Well, sure. You uh you you always try and get the uh the extra resource. You'll need that extra resource to help with the uh the training and the mentoring of uh of newer folks uh when they take on new products.

Charlotte Ward: 5:40

Yeah, that's actually um something that I hadn't realized in my early days is that even the growth itself has has an overhead that we we often forget to factor in. We we get 3.4 and we think, right, somewhere around the time I've got three, I'll need to think about hiring a fourth. Um and and you assume in your in your certainly in my early days of leadership, I would assume, right, if I hire that fourth, then we're good to go. I'm over-resourced by 0.6, but actually I'm not because the lead time, particularly with a complex product, on bringing that fourth person up to speed. It's it's not even like you get uh a fraction of uh effectiveness for quite a while, actually. And what we often don't account for is the drain on the existing team of onboarding someone. So I think it's worth considering if you do have that 3.4 number, that around the time you tip anywhere above three, you're gonna have to plan slightly ahead of that, otherwise, you will be stretching a team. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash seventy-eight for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.