252: The “Support Report” with Andrew Rios

Charlotte Ward 0:13
Hello, and welcome to episode 252 of the customer support leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte ward. Today, welcome Andrew Rios to talk about the support report.

I’d like to welcome to the podcast today Andrew Rios. Andrew, lovely to have you join me for the first time and for one of the very early episodes in 2024. Thank you so much for coming along. First of all, would you like to introduce yourself?

Andrew Rios 0:47
Yeah, absolutely. And first, I want to just thank you, longtime listener, first time talker. So it’s an honour. Pleasure to be here really excited about this chat. i Yeah, I’m Andrew Rios, I go by Rios. Once people get to know me, and I’m a longtime CX leader. I’ve been fortunate to play all those positions on the CX team. And I’m a builder of future leaders in a very passionate believer in the customer experience. So thank you for having me.

Charlotte Ward 1:15
Oh, you’re most welcome. I love that a beaut, a builder of future leaders that that’s a Yeah, that’s great. That’s kind of you know, I love that it kind of gives me that kind of visual of like standing on the shoulders of the people who have gone before us, you know?

Andrew Rios 1:31
Easy, easier for them than it was for me. And that’s right. That’s Oh,

Charlotte Ward 1:35
absolutely. Absolutely. Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me. So we have had a little bit of a chat about what you’re going to talk about today. But would you take like to tell the listeners what we’re gonna talk about?

Andrew Rios 1:48
Yeah, absolutely. A passion topic of mine, besides people building is I’m a big believer in that support leaders, CX leaders, the power of a support report. Having a good concise support report that drives action tells a great story is built on data. And so

Charlotte Ward 2:07
so to be really clear, the support report, love it love a bit of alliteration can’t go wrong in my book. Now we’re already on a good footing. Explain to me and anyone else who who isn’t really sure, obviously, this is kind of your term for this thing. What is the support report?

Andrew Rios 2:27
You know, it, it’s a report that is nearly all factual, right. It’s one of the few that are in the organisation that are based on history and facts and truth of what’s going on. And it’s a report that answers the questions for support leaders and the business right to start the funnel is, how are we servicing our customers? Or clients or partners? And how are we servicing them? And the answer is that I’m not going into the numbers. First, I’m going into the story, right? And then, you know, answers that next question that, you know, we all want to know, which is, why did they contact us? What made that contact us? And then then you kind of start creating your categories at that point on based on kind of what the business needs, you know, what, what metrics, they’re looking at what key performance indicators we’re looking at. And then what I like to say, to kind of what makes a report more than just an Excel file with a bunch of bars and graphs and great colours is that why did they contact us? And what can we do about it in the future, right to make their experience easy, so they didn’t have to contact us, I think I use one of those phrases that I think we all use in the industry, which is, you know, the best support experience is no support experience, right? They they solved it on their own or it was self service, or we already we predicted it for them. So that’s what that support report gives you. And then it’s also the people aspect. And that’s the the other area that I’m really passionate about, which is it’s an area to highlight and celebrate your team, right in the work that’s going in behind that support report. So behind it is a bunch of humans that are doing a lot of work to create that data for you to give you those indicators. So that for me is what a support report is. And it will help you drive change in your business.

Charlotte Ward 4:18
Sounds awesome. And also what I love about this is I mean, you said some of my some of my favourite things there. You talked about data, you talked about facts, you talked about narrative and relating to the business. We will dive into all of those over the next over the next 1015 20 minutes or so. But I’ve what I really love about this, this conversation already sounds like a real natural successor to the conversation I had last week with Matt Dale where we talked about support data and how you get going. You know and I think that a lot of leaders when they step into support leadership or they’re getting this going in a startup like when they’re building from scratch for whatever reason. Getting go Going into the hard bit, but also actually knowing where you’re going with this data. And that’s kind of that sounds like what we’re going to talk about tonight. And the biggest thing I took away from my conversation with Matt, last week was really, you have to get started, you can’t wait, you just have to get off the ground with something. I’m going to guess that the support report doesn’t roll out of week one in your first week of support leadership as a complete document. And you have to get started, right?

Andrew Rios 5:25
Absolutely. It’s never too late to get started. And then that’s where I encouraged, you know, people leaders in you know, to use the word leader to maybe it’s the person that’s responsible for putting all the data together, the programme manager is doing that the data analyst is doing that, you know, and you just got to start, I think, in a previous life, when I was, you know, building a support team from scratch, it was, Zendesk is here, right? We don’t, we don’t know how to set it up yet. We’re still figuring out what the categories are configuring it. Remember, we want all this data. And then as you go in as a leader, you’re like, Okay, I know, eventually, I’m gonna need, you know, these six indicators handle time, wait time, response time, how many touches? But right away? What do I need to know? And in that world, it was, it kind of goes back to my first questions. I like to keep it simple, which is who contacted us, right? And why did they contact us write it? Let’s start small, right? Progress over perfection, just starting small entering those questions. So I always share kind of the story of that first report that rolled off, the first week of contacts was an email alias that said, Here’s how many calls we took. And here’s how many with pre sales because the product was just going just launching. So that was the bulk of volume. And we know that as leaders, but we got to be ready to start funnelling it. And then here’s how many instals we got. And, okay, here’s how many are calling for administrative or, and then there’s the spam calls we’ve got, and the marketing calls have died. And then it just progressed over time. And as I shared the story, and I’m like, three years later, you know, moved from email. And it became a PowerPoint slide, and became a couple of PowerPoint slides. And all of a sudden, we started migrating to Google. And finally, we were at the point, you know, resource wise, experience wise, knowledge wise, it was the time where we just leveraged the Zendesk Explorer for everything that had happened. But the key was, is continuing to build that data in the right order, as best you can. So that when that report comes out, there’s more automation and going back and let me copy this, let me copy that we know how to answer the questions. Right?

Charlotte Ward 7:33
Yeah, yeah. And I think I think there’s, you know, I love it, it was just an email, you’ve got to start, you’ve got to start, right. And sometimes you just gotta take what data you have and figure out, does it give you any answers to anything? Right, that’s the quickest way to get started, isn’t it? And and then the next thing is what what are the? What are the questions that I most urgently want to know the answers to? I think that’s like, that’s the natural success. So like, that’s when you’re really building but it any any support, lead, or new support, first support person in organisation, as you say, whatever, whatever it is, could look today at the landscape, and find some data points and make an email so that you can get started. And there’s your support report. But it develops, as you say, so you’re adding more data, you’re asking more questions. I mean, you talked then about, you know, evolving it. And I found this quite interesting, actually, you talked about evolving it through PowerPoint, and Google doc first and then into Zendesk. But Sanjay is gonna give you also some of the data that you talked about, at the top of the top of our discussion here, you you went on to talk about people and everything else. So so how does it evolve in all of the forms? And what how are you building it out?

Andrew Rios 8:51
Absolutely. So it was a, I love how you brought the people into it, because that’s where I’m going to start with it. Because when the first one went out, it was me are humbled serving here, email, let’s go as the team that’s now learning the product, learning the experience, learning how to categorise that. So we know what to categorise are coming and sharing that with me, right, the right answer, okay. Now we know, when we get the call on this installation, and it’s from this region, this is the information we’re going to want to capture. And the business wants to know because they were the experts, right? And I was learning from them. So then as you progress, you, you empower and give the ownership to people to take it over, they can do that better than you. So by the time we involving 234 months down the road, it was time to scale the team and there was an individual that was ready to step into take responsibility for, you know, five hours of the week out where they start putting the data together. And then the challenge was like and I always say Never miss an opportunity to enhance to keep just building a little bit compound to those goodnesses. Right. And I said, Hey, it’d be great if we had just one PowerPoint slide that was broken up and I kind of gave an idea Let’s talk about the product. And then what’s really important now is the volume. That’s all. And then the product team wants to know about why they contacted us for the installation that was out of the scope of the installation. So let’s make an area for that. And what I was doing was saying, Now, that’s the product feedback. So we’re starting to show more numbers. But I also want to highlight the human that was behind it, building that, right. So it’s like, now you send it out, right? Let me step out, I don’t have to be there extra step extra person, you send it out now, then when you get to the end, the report was because I love it, but the Zendesk part up was, okay, well, now we got all this data here, we got to tell the story, why don’t we tell the still story of the people that are in the story. So in the UK, let’s celebrate a promotion, let’s celebrate the person that found an opportunity for improvement in the product. And that opportunity was now incorporated in the product. Learning to see last contacts on that feature, because it’s on now. Right? And so that that was really important to me. So, yeah,

Charlotte Ward 11:06
yeah, I love that. And I love when you can show the effort and then show the outcomes, you know, because, uh, you know, I mean, its outcomes are what’s important. But I think particularly as an individual contributor, it can feel a bit like, it’s the effort, that’s the important thing. And I think what you’re doing when you’re publicly tying those two things together, in any forum, and I do this, sometimes just with Slack messages to our kind of company, all hands channel, you know, somebody did this and look at the outcome, right? And it’s just, it begins to help your team understand that, if they can tell their own narratives in that way. And as you said, like you get out of the way of it of it. Once they, once they kind of get it, it’s great to watch isn’t it’s great to watch, you know, and I love nothing more than being able to say, this person took this problem, ran with it for six months produce the data had the conversations, here’s the before graph, here’s the after graph, and you know, whatever direction whether you want that graph to go up or down, look at the impact they’ve had, right, you know, and in this case, obviously, it was like it was a down that we wanted, and it was six months of like, really tall columns, and then practically flatlined to almost zero. And it’s like, that’s what that one person did. And, and it was a collaboration, but they kicked it off. They had the idea. They followed it through. And you know, that that and you know, you highlight all aspects of that not just not just the idea, not just the effort, but the collaboration and, and the outcome as well. It’s important, isn’t it? I think to help your team think like that.

Andrew Rios 12:47
Absolutely. And then for us, there’s that added layer that I that I always tend to use, which is there’s cost behind that. Right? And what we’re doing as leaders, we’re communicating with our stakeholders and our, to our peers. And we want to be able to be able to say, Well, you see in the report, right, where that went down. That’s how much it saved us in cost. Do you see when we didn’t resolve it? That’s how much it costs us. And I what I always like to say when I challenge the team is building their report is I share that why with them. I said, the report isn’t the place where we’re gonna throw a bunch of numbers around and kind of do one of those. It’s where we highlight and tell the story, right with facts and data. And then those who are watching it, because we know our audit watching it, reading it, consuming it. We know our audience, we know what they’re taking away. Right? The product leaders get to say, oh, yeah, we did that great collaboration. CFO might say, Oh, that’s great. We’re seeing 10% Less instal calls. Okay, good. Now we can model that for the future. And I think that’s even not even more important, sorry. But that’s another important outcome that comes from that report. And like he mentioned earlier, you’re not going to start there right away. But as a leader going in, I always like to say this, you got to know your data. Right. So just start simple, and eventually get there. And also what the report says the way he talked about, you know, the knowledge and sharing that with the company and celebrating everyone who has been part of it, is it also shows how long it takes to do things. Right, you know, we have open, we’ve been investigating it, we’ve taken the ownership. There’s how long it takes, here’s the average. It also highlights, hey, when we don’t have an answer, I’m waving the flag for help. Right partner with me, help me help me grow, help me understand or, and this is really important for support teams, as well, I really believe is that it helps them understand business decisions, hey, we’re not going to fix that. Or we’re not going to implement that feature. We’re not going to make that change. Here’s why. And the data backs them. Here’s an app so to Yeah, that’s, that’s what the facts are, right? Yeah,

Charlotte Ward 15:03
absolutely, absolutely. And it’s important to have that narrative, isn’t it, I mean, it’s important to do more in your support report than just put the numbers out there. And whether those numbers are time, you know, time or, you know, efficacy or ticket numbers or, or even dollars, and I’m a big advocate for getting as much as you can down to $1. Because nothing looks better to the rest of the business, particularly finance than dollars, obviously, but, but the human stories behind it, or, you know, as we said, all of the effort, and everything is important, but, but there are ways to relate to other parts of the business that that aren’t so dollar focused. And I think if you can have that kind of ability to all of all of this connectivity that you’re talking about to the business really helps support, move more centrally to the business, I think, and I think it’s a rare business where support is at the centre, I think it’s it’s, at least as a department, I think the most successful businesses have the customer at the centre. And, and therefore, you know, support is a big constituent part of that in law, but in a lot of business, but we’re not the only customer facing team, we just happen to probably be the most most communicative, I reckon, but, but, but it helps pull us to the centre, doesn’t it?

Andrew Rios 16:23
It absolutely does. And, and sometimes, sometimes we have to lean ourselves into the senator pushed ourselves into this. And, and in those cases, this is where the report helps, right? It helps drive opportunities where an example is, you know, something needs to be resolved, business wise, it’s just not going to so but the business has now changed, whether it’s going to market change, reduction in force change whether whatever that might be a crisis is happening. Now, it’s a time as the leader to say, well, we might not have as this is coming from an experience I experienced, we might not have as many technicians in the field, waiting for support. If we just reduce the one in four calls that I’ve been seeing the last six months, move that into the development cycle earlier. Right. Yeah, that’s one word. You’re basically saying, we just want to fix this earlier. We want to have it. Now’s the time. Let’s fix it. Now. Everybody understands, and then you can show that. So yeah,

Charlotte Ward 17:27
yeah, I think you’re absolutely right leaning in and have it and being armed, when you lean in with your support report gives you the confidence to be a little bit pushy. But also to, you know, speak the language of the business. And as you say, it’s really important to recognise when business strategy changes, business focus changes what the goals are this month compared to last month, often in startups this week, compared to last week. You know, and I’m, frankly, to take advantage of them. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, but, but in if there is anything you can do as a good league leader, it is to leverage the things that you have at your disposal that help you achieve your goals and your team’s goals, as well as the company achieve their goals. And so if you find that alignment, and strategically this week, you ask for one thing, and next week, you ask for something else, it’s as long as it aligns with the business goals. It’s it’s win win for everyone, right? Because you have that you have the data, you have the language, you have the whole story, to say why this should be done or why this needs to happen, or why this helps X, Y, or Z, that goal. And that allows you to lean in and be part of the conversation.

Andrew Rios 18:49
Absolutely. And I always say just speak with the facts. And you know, what are the facts? Let me show you my report. What do we mean, when we say my report, let me elaborate. What are we going to do about them? And an example, you know, that I lived was, you know, when we did go through reduction in force, we I had to make a decision saying okay, well, the math doesn’t work. So I’m gonna have to take a change my, my service level agreement for email for this business unit. And this is why and I just really ended my report. And it was able to have conversations that sometimes it’s challenging as a leader, a support leader, specifically telling someone No, right, I gotta slow down, but being able to sit there and say, I wish there was another answer. I’m open to anything else that one wants to, but here’s what I’m gonna do. And I always say it that way too. Instead of saying, No, I can’t do that anymore. It’s like, here’s what I’m going to do, you know, used to be this fool now it’s going to be this and yeah, until the data changes or I’m sorry. I think that that makes it everybody you know, I can’t I want to say a no brainer, but aren’t make make it work. You can’t make the math work. Right. So you That’s for the report comes in, you’ll see things, and you got to just keep reporting auditing going well, the time, the time will come, or it may not come. But either way, I’m prepared for that conversation. That time

Charlotte Ward 20:11
I love this, I love this is a thread I have to pull out because I’m big on preparation. And you, you know, I mean, a colleague that I, a colleague of mine puts it this way, one way to stay out of the spotlight is to get ahead of the spotlight. But, but I always say like, you can have all of the ideas. And particularly once you have a level of experience, which I’m going to say that you and I have.

I agree, I’ve been in this game a while you know, that you kind of, you get a muscle memory for what you need to do and what you need to know. And but the time might not be right. And I think the important thing is to do it anyway, at least produced the artefacts and that might mean evolving your support report in ways which today aren’t necessarily going to be useful. But you’ll be ready when they are useful. So document the ideas that you have for changes, pull together the data, the narratives, and keep it in a back burner. Keep it in a few slides that aren’t part of the slideshow. Yeah, you know, but start prepping because you will get to it, the day that strategy changes, and you’re ready to hook into it. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? Like so? Oh, actually, when I’ve been thinking about that for a while, there’s nothing I like saying, Well,

Andrew Rios 21:36
I’ve been waiting to chat with you about this, this is awesome. And, you know, that’s what that’s what happens, right? Real, real life thing, sometimes we are in support, and we’re asked to do something. And we might say, when we don’t when we’re asked to do something, and we’re not, we know what’s going to add, it’s gonna change numbers, it’s gonna change the experience, someone’s going to be impacted, right? But you have to let it go sometimes capture it, prepare for it. And in one situation in a previous chapter I, I let the team know. And it was like, well, trust me, someone from x organisation is going to come back and complain about what’s happening here. And, and and in the natural organisations like we are living in and it’s going to be a support problem. I’m sure it is. But it’s not one that we created. So when it’s when that time comes, it will we will be ready to say, yes, we’d love to get it back, get it provide a better support experience. We just need a little bit more training on the product that we just took on. Can you help us with that nap? And I always like to say this on the sidebar was someone’s like, now do you have the time to help us? And they’re like, Well, it’s a fire. And I’m like, Well, you did it earlier. But instead, we had to wait for the data to show. And then I can say what are the facts? What do they mean? What are we going to do about it? And what I love about support leaders, you know, folks like you and I say we know it, and we have to just have that well, okay, no problem. Well, we’ll talk again in two weeks, six weeks, a few months, whatnot, and let the team trust us. But when those days come, it is a good day. And we got to celebrate them. And that’s why I go back to the team. And then I like to use that example in our support report, to again, celebrate it to say look at the collaboration that we’ve done as a team and company, but the people behind the scenes in the crevices of the notebook go. And that guy’s a pretty Latina. Pretty, pretty humble at what they do. Yeah, customer, right.

Charlotte Ward 23:40
Yeah, yeah. But for me, it’s, you know, I love building like documenting the ideas, getting the data together as best I can without it being a burden for no reason, you know, but but just knowing that the day somebody in product says, asked me a question about something I can say, well, actually, I’ve been tracking Yeah, I’ve been tracking that for six months, or, or, you know, CSAT like just nosedives one month. Yeah, it’s these particular ticket types that have been popping up the last few months and we’ve been tracking them you know, I love that moment of just like we can, we’re armed and we’re ready to go. And as you say, like, you know, people will come to you to talk about stuff and it’s just it’s just great to kind of get it out there when when it’s needed rather than shoving it down people’s throats when it doesn’t mean anything to them. Right. So So I think for me part of building the support report is knowing knowing how to evolve it and you can get ahead of the game like in private almost, or in the inside the team, but just but just drip feed the rest at the right moments, involve it from that email to whatever it becomes and I’m guessing your support report is quite quite a piece of work now. What what form does it typically take? Now I’m sure, I’m sure it’s not four lines in an email anymore.

Andrew Rios 25:05
Usually, it is the graphs again, but it starts with the story. So it’s a PDF, right? I can make it. So there, but it’s interactive. So it’s self serving. That’s my goal at the end is one report, you can go to any section you want. If you just want to see the metrics and the numbers, and in the product type categories and the resolution types, we’ll need to see that if you want to see issues, bugs, I had to use the issues, then I will tell you the top five, but click this link. So you could go share JIRA board. Because I believe in self serving everybody in the company, we got the same access, and there’s no secret. There should never be surprises. That’s mine. And then, but it’s always starts with the people first. And whenever I work with the teams and people about this, it’s they’re always in shock when the first slide comes out of the first PDF is like, oh, there’s not even a chart or a data. No, it’s actually just what happened this week, right? Because everything else is in a flow, and you want to tell that story all the way down. But it evolves, again, it totally evolves. And usually what I like it to get to at the end is the most work that should go in after hitting compose is now what’s the story? Right?

Charlotte Ward 26:19
Here’s brilliant, I love that. Yeah, you’ve just got to write some bullet points or you know, yeah, a couple of a couple of narratives in key areas. Like this graph really changed from last week, I probably better put a little text bakit box here to explain it. Right. There’s there’s a few things. But yeah, boom, you click a button. And most of it’s done. That’s living the dream, isn’t it? So? So? I mean, it sounds overwhelming. I, you know, I have built a my equivalent, I call it the support overview over time, it’s very similar to your support report. Mine is all on, you know, a few, a few slides. Very few slides, actually. And yours is a is a polished PowerPoint. How? How can how can people get to the polished PowerPoint stage? Yeah,

Andrew Rios 27:05
you know what? That’s a great, great question. I’m actually coming soon, I’m getting ready to share out a one pager collaborating with another peer of mine on a very simple framework, that is, follow these 1012 prompts, start with that, that will get to the story. And then go from there. Right, but never too late to start. I hate to say the word template, but a nice little worksheet template flow guide. Right? Somebody else says, Hey, go in this order, answer these questions. Here’s a couple examples. And then pause and answer the question. But I always like to say what does it mean? What does it mean to Bill and CFO, Julie and product, you know, Teresa and sales? We know what is it? Then what does it mean to Charlotte and account activation? What does it mean to our peers? You know what I mean? And, and go from there, because I and this is why it’s so important. It’s maybe even a nice bow there is all the decisions that are made in the company, are manifested in support. So we have that opportunity to come back and celebrate them, and also share with the business that hey, maybe we want to reconsider this or think about this, or here’s another area to focus on. Yeah,

Charlotte Ward 28:24
yeah. So a template, a guide, a few key questions to get people off the ground. It sounds amazing. I’m looking forward to saying that when it comes out, will you please share it with me and I will make sure that when the podcast goes out, as I’m sure our listeners are aware that there is a webpage, if you’re not, the address will be at the end of this episode. That I’ll add it to like after you after you’re finished, like the podcast episode, go out the webpage or go out but I will come back and update that that landing page for this episode. And I’ll link through to it for you. Would you do that for me? Absolutely.

Andrew Rios 29:03
Mike, I want I want to make it easy for everybody. And hopefully this gets people started or even gets a refresh. So you could count on that count on me. That

Charlotte Ward 29:11
sounds awesome. I love that I can count on you. Lovely. Could I please count on you to come back and have another conversation another time? Oh,

Andrew Rios 29:20
I’d be honoured I’d be honoured I kind of said first time I’m excited. You know longtime listener. I don’t. I don’t want to put you on the spot. embarrass you a little bit. But I remember the first time I met you in Las Vegas to one of the support driven expos couple years ago. I was like, Oh my God. But you Charlotte. I listened to your podcast. It was looking at me like he’s a big fan of yours. So it’s awesome to be here. It’s

Charlotte Ward 29:44
so weird. I mean, this is a super niche podcast and I and it’s a it’s a thing I love doing but it is a bit weird. When people come up and they know me. It’s still weird. I’m tiny bit famous in a tiny small way but it’s still weird. To me out, but I appreciate that you did that. And I appreciate you coming on today. Thank you so much. And please come back. I’d love you to love to have another chat another time.

Andrew Rios 30:10
I will thank you so much for having me. Have a great one and do good everyone.

Charlotte Ward 30:18
That’s it for today. Go to customer support leaders.com forward slash 252 for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.

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