169: Slack Support with Chris Jewitt

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 169 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is Slack support, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today Chris Jewitt. Chris, it's lovely to have you join me for the first time. We've known each other for a couple of years, but perhaps for the benefit of our listeners, would you like to introduce yourself?

Chris Jewitt: 0:44

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for inviting me. I'm Chris. I'm a customer success manager at Klaus, and I've been working at Klaus for about nearly two years now. It's flown by. By customer success at Klaus, we talk about more than just success. I'm talking about customer support and leading people through their trial and then also beyond. We kind of see that as one thing to build customer relationships. So that's what I do at Klaus.

Charlotte Ward: 1:12

Lovely. Thank you so much. I I love that uh expanded definition of success, by the way. I see that um increasingly adopted, I think that the lines are being blurred between success and support and onboarding and everything. It's becoming a much more holistic customer relationship, I think. And success is still sort of the thing that it's called, but it's so much more. So uh yeah, yeah. I'm I yeah, exactly.

Chris Jewitt: 1:38

It was it we we kind of wanted to eliminate this problem that so many companies had and that we've had in the past as well, which is customers being handed around, being passed off onto different people, building new relationships on scratch every every time something changes, and also things getting lost and people not knowing where them where their responsibilities lie and where they stop, you know, all of that. We were able to kind of uh get rid of that problem.

Charlotte Ward: 2:04

Yeah, yeah, that's nice. It's particularly suited to a sort of B2B environment as well, I think. Um which I think is um is also true of the topic that we're here to talk about today. I think particularly suited to B2B environment, as I've come to learn this week already, um, is the uh the use of Slack as a support channel. And um, and that is why I lured you here today to talk to me, is because I know that you have done this at Klaus and you have quite a uh you've had quite a story with providing support through Slack, haven't you?

Chris Jewitt: 2:38

Yeah, that's right. Uh we well, we used to provide support via Slack to some of our earliest customers and largest customers, and then we stopped uh because it wasn't working for us. So I guess that's what we're here to talk about today. Like, why did we stop providing support and what did we continue doing with Slack? I can definitely share that with you.

Charlotte Ward: 3:01

That'd be great. That'd be great. Well, maybe we start at the beginning then. So you said you provided support early on through Slack to some of those early customers. What did that look like and why did you make that decision early on?

Chris Jewitt: 3:14

Well, we managed that relationship, the whole relationship via Slack, as far as I know. This was before I joined Klaus. Uh, when Klaus was just, you know, our founders and a few developers, very small team, and we had one or two customers. So, our first customer, for example, we managed everything through Slack because we didn't have a support team or success managers or anything. Uh, and that works early on, doesn't it? You know, people just ping us and then we chat there. But as time went on, it became difficult, it became frustrating for both us, the success managers, when we joined, and for the customer as well. Uh, because it doesn't have Slack doesn't quite have the inbuilt capability to keep the conversation going. Uh, so for example, what we found is uh that people were I also I have a really bad, I can't concentrate on anything on anything. I'm a typical millennial, my mind's all over the place. So I would be someone would ask me a question, a technical support question, I'd be answering them, and then I'd see, oh, shiny or a cat picture, and I'd go away. And then their question would just be waiting there. It doesn't have the inbuilt kind of notifications and pings and that awful noise that intercom makes uh to remind you to go back there. So we often found you know the conversation was going and then it stopped. Uh so that was one of the first issues that kind of saw that uh yeah, conversations weren't flowing properly.

Charlotte Ward: 4:39

So almost a lack of workflow, like a really obvious workflow. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Jewitt: 4:42

I mean, we didn't do it. We I'm sure there's many other things we could have done uh to provide support better for Slack, but uh we were just using it in the basic way. Um sometimes some of our customers would ping us all the time. Every time they answered, they would ping us and then I would get the notification and go there. But sometimes they didn't, and then it'd be waiting overnight. So I was they were frustrated, I was frustrated that we weren't having it, wasn't the best experience for anybody.

Charlotte Ward: 5:10

And were they telling you this? Were customers reporting to you that they weren't hearing back or that they were feeling frustrated with that?

Chris Jewitt: 5:17

Yeah, a few people did. Yeah, they said, you know, well, I'd already kind of seen it happening, we we saw it happening, but then somebody said to us, you know, it is a bit frustrating, like we were chatting and then and then the conversation just ended, and I had to wait another 12 hours, and you know, uh we wanted to avoid that kind of thing altogether. Uh as much as I as I like having our customers in Slack, which I'll talk about our relationship today, what we do with Slack today. Uh I just found that it wasn't it just didn't work for us in terms of customer support. What it also doesn't have is it's hard to track things because Slack, we all know that things get buried in Slack, don't they? Uh it's hard to track issues, um things get lost, and that's what was happening. We saw that, customers saw that.

Charlotte Ward: 6:03

Yeah, yeah. So I'd love for you to tell me next a little bit about how you moved away from Slack and the decisions that you made. You've moved to intercom, right? I I kind of I'm interested in that transition. Um, but also like as a little mini retrospective opportunity, is do you do you think knowing now if you if you knew then what you knew now, what you know now about providing support through Slack, do you think that there would have been a way you could have maintained it? I mean, I know there I know there are tools out there. I've been speaking to people this week who produce tools to provide support through Slack. Is it something that if you had had that capability, whether it was in within Slack or through a third party, is that something you might have I guess what I'm guessing at in a very what I'm getting at in a very roundabout way is do you think that providing support through Slack, if you have, if you can fill some of those operational gaps that you were just talking about, is a good channel? Is it does provide different value from other channels? Maybe that's the question I'm asking if I'm honest.

Chris Jewitt: 7:12

I think it depends on on your situation. How many customers do you have? If you have 20 large customers, then I I think yes, probably. Uh and I think it would be quite impressive for customers to have that, to have support so close, you know, through Slack, through a tool that so many people use and are used to using. But for us, no, because at the beginning we just used Slack and then we started using uh we started using Drift, actually, Drift and Slack together. Then we moved to Intercom and Slack and we kept them both parallel. Uh, and what we wanted to do was our customer base kept growing and growing and growing. We've grown a lot in the last two years. Um, what we wanted to do was provide really quick support, the most responsive support there is. And that's what we're still trying to do now, and I think we're doing quite well at. And Slack doesn't work for that. It just didn't work for that. It really relies on maybe with some other tools, maybe it does, but it really relies on uh people being really vigilant in the team of Slack and also customers using it in a way which allows us to respond quickly, as in pinging us by name. Um and we just found yeah, as a company grew, more customers, more team members, keeping it's hard enough to keep up with Slack as it is, keeping up with your customers in there as well.

Charlotte Ward: 8:27

It's a lot of a lot of like extra load. Uh and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Jewitt: 8:31

So if I I think the answer for me to that question is that if uh there were other tools that we could have used, I still would say no. Because the situation that we have now is working.

Charlotte Ward: 8:44

Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. So tell me about how you evolved this then. You see you you said you you went via drift um if if eventually to intercom and slack. So tell me about like the the decision points on that journey.

Chris Jewitt: 8:58

Yeah, so we were doing uh we moved to intercom for a variety of reasons. Uh, because the team that we have, we're all very uh used to it, is one of the reasons that we like intercom and it works for what we need. But we were still providing customer support to some large customers, early customers, customers that um are very active in beta testing and things like that, and we have a good relationship with uh some of them that might be listening, some of them from support-driven we have in our Slack. Um, and don't get me wrong, we love talking to them in Slack, of course we do. But what we were seeing is yeah, some of the things people were getting better support in intercom than they were in Slack. So we thought, why are we still doing this then? Because we want we by having support in Slack, we want it to be closer to customers, we want it to be more reactive, but the opposite happened. And the customers that were going through Slack, uh through Intercom, sorry, were getting better support. So we discussed with a few customers. Some customers came to us and said it's not really working out. So we said, okay, let's change how we do this. We'll keep her in Slack, and we still have some of our largest customers in Slack and some of the new ones as well. But let's use this for discussion as in best practices. Uh it some issues that you're having which aren't technical, things that need ironing out, because with that, you can have people from outside support in there. So we have Valentina, our empress of product, as she goes by. Uh, we have sometimes our CTO in there, we have some developers in there, we have CEO in there. So you have more access to those people to talk about things other than technical issues. So we said to people, let's keep that. We love speaking to you there, but technical issues, let's go to intercom. Why? Because we have a one-minute first response time in intercom. That's what we aim for, and we achieved that last year. Our first response time for the whole of 2020 was one minute and 20 seconds.

Charlotte Ward: 10:45

Wow.

Chris Jewitt: 10:46

So we didn't quite achieve it, but we were still happy with that.

Charlotte Ward: 10:49

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Jewitt: 10:49

Uh, we had uh 97.5 CSAT as well, and that was only brought down by a child in December that somehow got onto our website and started chats with us all the time. I don't know. I think he was looking for Klaus the Christmas film, maybe, and he gave us loads of negative feedback. So it would have been better if it wasn't for this kid.

Charlotte Ward: 11:09

Oh no.

Chris Jewitt: 11:10

Um, so yeah, it was just working out intercom. So he said that to people let's go through intercom for technical issues. We can connect, we can tag the conversations in there, we can connect GitHub issues. It's just perfect for that. We did.

Charlotte Ward: 11:23

And you're um you you very quickly rolled off a couple of stats there. Like you have very easy access to them through through that sort of tooling, right? And I guess that's also that's also what you were missing before you were saying was missing in Slack. Um the other the the the thing then uh which is interesting here is that you're able to maintain more of what I would consider the success side of that relationship in Slack, everything you talked about there, like best practices, access to product, access to wider parts of the organization, actually on both sides, right? I think feet for you and at Klaus and maybe a bigger footprint into client organizations as well. Um do you find that you have to do um is there is there a manual overhead in managing the expectations around what happens in Slack versus what happens in intercom? Do you have to redirect clients all the time to intercom, or do you make that leap for them if they start if if the conversation migrates into technical support?

Chris Jewitt: 12:27

Uh I think for the first few months we did have some people who missed the memo, you know. So with some some customers, we had maybe 20 people in the Slack channel, and some people might not have checked it for a while. Uh so people will come with a technical issue, and I would it it did require some effort. In the beginning, I was kind of answering saying, I'll I'll solve this here right now, but next time can you go to intercom? But that's kind of fizzled out, that isn't really happening anymore. Um and it's I don't really if the conversation starts with kind of a success conversation and moves into something technical, I don't then ask them to go to intercom. There's no point splitting that once we're on it. And it's usually an isolated conversation as well that I can focus on. But generally it's quite rare. But uh it seems to that transition works pretty quickly and people understand the best thing to do now.

Charlotte Ward: 13:17

Do you have you uh expanded your use of Slack to other customers since those early days? Is it now practice that you have and maintain success conversations in Slack for even new customers?

Chris Jewitt: 13:30

Yeah, we do. Yes. But it's easier with them because we we we define the expectations from the beginning and say, you know, if you send us a message here, we always try to respond quickly, but we don't have an SLA here. We will get to it when we can. Sometimes it might be a customer that we have in in America, in the in the US. Uh but the question I need to bring Valentina into that, our head of product, but she's in Spain. So there's a time zone difference as well. But in Intercom, that's covered, right? Um but it's much easier because they understand what the expectations are from the very beginning. We don't have to change uh what the customers can expect. So we're still doing it, yeah. And it's still working nicely. One other thing that it's very good for is for the product team. Uh if they want to ask a question, if they want to ask someone if they want to beta test, for example, uh, they can just go in there and they see a list of our customers and they can just go in and uh ask them if they want to if they want to help out. So it's good for that.

Charlotte Ward: 14:27

That's nice, yeah. Yeah, and and getting that direct feedback going between customers and product is is just super important, isn't it? Like giving easy access to product for from a customer's perspective too, actually.

Chris Jewitt: 14:39

Yeah. In in my previous jobs, it's always been a problem that sync between product and and customer support. Um, but with like it does give some of our largest customers a straight channel to the product team and it generally uh everyone in the company knows a bit about what our customers are saying, not just the support team. That information doesn't get stuck there.

Charlotte Ward: 15:00

That makes total sense. That makes total sense. Um, and I think that is a uh just thinking more generally about support, uh you said there about that relationship to product. It it's one that's really worth investing in. And um I think direct access to the product team is one way of doing that. Support can support can make or break that relationship between product and customer, can't they? Support is support is either the barrier or the conduit. Um, so if you if you're lucky enough to have perfected that relationship, then maybe you don't need quite such high touch between customer and product directly. But on the other hand, that's never ever going to hurt your business, is it? Having that direct line either.

Chris Jewitt: 15:43

We put a lot of focus on it. I mean, there's a lot of customers that always just go through Inscom, go through our chat. Uh there's other things we do to keep the product uh team in sync, which is a bit of another topic. But whilst we're there, uh might as well just mention that yeah, they have that direct line to those customers that are in Slack. But then we have a weekly meeting, product and CX Sync to talk about what people uh are coming to us with. We're tagging our conversations with the most common themes and problems and questions um and report on that every month. Uh I think I think they're I think Valentina also has access to Intercom if she needs, so we can tag her there as well, mention her there if needed. Uh and also working through GitHub, we're adding enhancement requests, feature requests in GitHub and connecting them to tickets so they can see how many times that's done. And you know, the usual things. But we I think even without Slack, that we we manage to keep synced between the product and it's super important as well because we're we're half remote. All of the customer support team and all of the product team are remote workers, even before COVID.

Charlotte Ward: 16:48

Yeah, yeah. So it just helps reduce that distance, that ver that virtual physical distance between them, between you all is uh as as many bridges as you can give that is is super important. Thank you so much for joining me today, Chris. I think that's been a really interesting perspective in uh from a from the front lines of using using Slack for support in the early days and what does work and what didn't work for you. Thanks so much.

Chris Jewitt: 17:12

Thank you. I hope it was helpful to people listening.

Charlotte Ward: 17:18

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