96: Process Improvement with Denise Twum

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 96 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is process improvement, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I would like to welcome to the podcast this week my very good friend Denise Twom. Denise, would you like to introduce yourself?

Denise Twum: 0:40

Sure. Hi everyone. I'm Denise. I work at Smug Mug and I'm the support process manager, which is a really boring title. I have been trying for three years to come up with a sexier one, but I haven't figured it out yet. So I'm open to suggestions. Please send them in to Charlotte and she will make sure I get them. But my role involves making sure that the support team has everything they need to do their work well. So this involves the tools that they use, the processes that we come up with to make sure that we're delivering world-class support and the relationship between the support team and the other teams to make sure that the whole company is delivering on what we say we want to do.

Charlotte Ward: 1:20

So, Denise, the topic for this week is support process improvement. And I know this is your particular Yeah, I knew you, yay. This is your particular skill and forte, right? So um I am waiting for some nuggets of wisdom to just come pouring forth. So give it to me.

Denise Twum: 1:40

I I hope I have some nuggets for you. I love process improvement. Um, I think support is one of those areas where oftentimes the company is just like, oh, we have customers, let's support them. But then there is the dot dot dot in between, right? So you start, okay, we're doing email support, and then you just email them. But if that if it was that easy, then everyone would have amazing CSAT scores, right? So um I I particularly enjoy trying to figure out what are the trends of the incoming support because usually you're gonna see different cases coming in in a cadence, right? So that's usually one of the first things I look at. How can we improve our support? When I use Zendesk, I really loved looking at the searches for the help center. You can see what is the most search term and which one has zero results or which one has the most results, all that good stuff. And I love doing that because then you can actually see the search might stay the same, but now their results, and so the corresponding number of tickets coming in for that particular case, you know, goes down. And that's always one of my joys seeing that tracking that and seeing that happen. Uh at my previous job, because it was an online publishing platform, we had a lot of copyright takedown cases because people may or may not know that you're not allowed to put up stuff that doesn't belong to you.

Charlotte Ward: 3:12

I'm sure they all really know.

Denise Twum: 3:13

I'm sure I mean sometimes people might buy a PDF of a of a thing and think that because they they purchased it, they can put it up online, which no, you can't. That process um it one it was one of the things that I really enjoyed improving because I tried to figure out where the case is coming from, what is what are we supposed to do, and it's their way to automate it. And we were very lucky uh to get a back-end engineer who helped us set it up. So basically taking the manual process, figuring out all of that, how long it took, and then automating that meant that the copyright process was just so much smoother, so much easier.

Charlotte Ward: 3:50

Joy, so much joy. Joy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy, automation. So on the automation front, I have something of a leading question for you, which is that in the in this overarching banner of process improvement, I know you're very data-driven. I know you're very data driven. Is all process improvement to you uh do you see it as increasing efficiency, or there are there other aspects to it?

Denise Twum: 4:24

No, it's not all about efficiency, it's also about joy. Joy, yeah, customer joy and um the support agents joy, right? Because there are some things that you have to do for work that don't necessarily make you excited um because there's so many steps in there. So is a task that needs to be done as part of your job description. So, how can I make it as painless as possible so that you're like, oh, look, I am clearing these tasks, you know, I am I am kicking not what is called knocking it out of the park and stuff? Yeah, it's not just about efficiency. I think the efficiency is definitely a big part, but also the joy, because often the tasks that you want to automate are the tasks that are that are very manual and they're just drudgery and boring, but you need to do that.

Charlotte Ward: 5:17

I think that's yeah, I think that's important actually, that maybe the efficiency and the joy go hand in hand because they go hand in hand.

Denise Twum: 5:23

Yeah, you get to do more, you get to do more. And for me, what it means is that for instance, if you're able to automate this copyright stuff, which um, to be honest, the customers who are filing the copyright takedowns are not your customers, right? In our case, they're they're not our customers. So that is taking a lot of time from us actually providing support to our customers who want to learn how to use a product. So it's the efficiency, but then it's freeing us, it's freeing up time for the for the uh support agents to actually do the work that we're hired for, which is support our customers, provide. Right.

Charlotte Ward: 5:59

So yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So you're you're as part of that efficiency drive, decreasing the drudgery, but but actually also freeing up important time where the joy is not necessarily directly related just to the fact the drudgery has been removed.

Denise Twum: 6:15

More free time, exactly, and to explore other avenues of improving our support, you know. The thing I love about process improvement is that I don't have to do all of it. When you free up the time, now your agents have time to think about well, how else can we do this better? And that is a little one gift. Yeah. That means that everyone wins.

Charlotte Ward: 6:41

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