151: Year in Review: Podcast Journey Part 1

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and fifty one of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I begin a year in review. One year and four days ago, as I sit here speaking to you now, I hit record on the first ever recording session of this podcast with a gentleman called Ash Rhodes. Ash, who I'd met a couple of years before at a support-driven conference, graciously agreed to be my guinea pig guest in in my first recording session, and in that session we recorded two or maybe three topics for the first few weeks of the podcast as it launched in 2020. Ash went on to become a very good friend and indeed a regular guest on the podcast. He returned, like so many of my guests, to record several episodes this year and take part in several panels and record a fireside. I've loved having the opportunity to speak so regularly and on so many varied topics to so many great leaders in support and customer success and customer experience this year. But what I want to talk about a little this week is where it all began, some of the things I've learned, both how to make a podcast and about how to lead support, and about how to be a better manager, be a better human being, even from all these great guests. And and I want to round out what has been a trying, exciting, full and challenging year with a week or two of reflection and then some looking forward. So first things first, where did it all begin? I first started thinking about a podcast in April 2019. I went to a customer experience expo in London and I thought I might get the opportunity to speak to lots of interesting people. Interesting people talking about the industry I love and thrive in. I wanted to ri record and share all that I'd learned, but how? Conversations and interviews seemed the way to go. They were a fast way not only to gather information and opinion, but also to give others the opportunity to hear it direct from the source, as it were. So as I explored what I might do with some recordings, a podcast seemed the way to go. I went shopping. The first thing I hit upon was a little clip-on mic for my iPhone, super easy to use, and I keep it knocking around in the bottom of any bag that I have with me really. Um I bought a battery case mic for my phone so that it ran all day, and off I went to London. Um but there was a problem that at that time I got so caught up in the day and in the conversations that and actually in the sheer scale of the event that I didn't once take that mic out of my bag and record a conversation. Part of the problem was that while I'd had all these intentions, I kind of lacked focus. I was making great connections and having lots of interesting conversations, but I definitely didn't really find a cohesive thread, and at that time I wasn't really confident enough just to record conversations without that focus. All I really got was a bunch of swag, some literature and some introductions. I did manage to reconnect with a lot of folks after the event, and in the follow-up, I learned infinitely more than I did on that day. Life took over for a few months and thoughts of the podcast receded as I focused on other parts of my business as it was then I was consulting. And during the course of that summer I built Customer Support Leaders.com and I started doing text interviews with some people who I'd come to know really quite well. And those text interviews have been quite popular, but not everyone has time or access to text interviews in the course of a normal day. One media format doesn't suit all. And once I had got more comfortable interviewing anyway, it seemed a good time to play with how I delivered those interviews. And that returned me to the podcast idea. I'm an avid podcast listener myself, and um I knew what I liked, and I wanted to create a podcast that modelled all of the formats that I felt were most valuable and most consumable and most accessible. And so that was the aim. I knew I wanted to interview lots of different people. They'd all be in customer support leadership one way or another, they'd be manager or director or VP, head of support, and eventually and quite quickly that would extend into customer experience, customer success, and all sorts of other related fields. There were lots of things they didn't have in common though. They would be from different industries, from different organizations, use different technologies, different tools, have different challenges, have different mindsets and approaches and different values, and different opinions on all sorts of topics, and that was what I wanted to explore. I wanted to explore what all these people had in common and what they didn't have in common. And I wanted to be really focused. The best thing to focus on, it seemed to me, was how different people approached the same challenge, how different people approach the same topic or think about the same thing. And that was when I decided I needed multiple people to talk in a very focused and short-form manner, and that was when I hit on the idea of the original form of this podcast, which was very short conversations on a single topic, with five people speaking to them broadcast over the course of a week. And so I threw out a Google form and invited people to vote on topics that they'd like to hear these leaders discuss with me. And for a long time that was what drove the conversations that I recorded. I recorded conversations that I knew people wanted to hear simply because they were the topics that people voted on the most. But as the year went on, my guests brought their own topics. Life this year created so many topics as well for me. And my guests have been extremely generous both with their time and their transparency and their their trust in me to uh do the best I can to present the the real their real truth to the world. And that's what I hope to continue to do. If you listen back to those early conversations, the first topic was one that I just feel comes up so often in customer support, empathy. And my very first guest was somebody who I admired a great deal for her transparency and her candour when it comes to talking about her personal experiences uh in this industry. Uh Jenny had just moved house when I recorded that conversation with her at the end of last year, ready to broadcast on the 6th of January 2020. And you can tell she's just moved house. Her her space had no soft furnishings in it whatever. She talked to me from this almost empty room with hardwood floors and bare-painted walls, and and I was a little reluctant to make that my first broadcast because that recording, if you go back and listen to episode one, is so echoey. And I am happy to say that I have slowly over the course of this year improved the general sound quality of this podcast, but but nonetheless, the content of that first recording was so important to me, and I wanted to put it out there despite the quality. So, to rewind a little, as I got to November last year, I was keeping an eye on the Black Friday sales on Amazon and up popped this really good mic. I invested in a blue snowball, partly if I'm honest, because I admired its aesthetic, but but it is a good microphone, and I took the sale price as an omen that I needed to get properly focused and start recording these conversations. And for me, the the new year was just an obvious launch point. So between the end of November and the start of the new year, I recorded about three or four weeks' worth of conversations. It was quite intense and I learned a lot and uh how to conduct those conversations, how to keep my guests on track. Um, it was a long, long learned lesson for me, a long, hard one lesson for me was the time limit that I wanted to stick to. I for many, many months stuck to a seven-minute format, and and I left myself with a lot of editing work, I'll be honest. But nonetheless, I really like the format, and that's still my favourite format, aside from all my other favourite formats, as I'm sure you'll you'll know if you listen to the podcast regularly. And here we are with another format. This just me talking to a microphone for a few minutes. I'm going to take you over a little bit of a journey this week as I talk a bit more about the evolution of the podcast and some of the things I've learned, pick out some of my favourite moments, and as we reach the end of 2020 to help me look forward to 2021.