178: You’re the Host with Craig Stoss

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and seventy-eight of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today I welcome Craig Stoss as the host of the show. Hello, and at this point, I'd normally say welcome to the podcast to my very good friend Craig Stoss, but that is not how it plays out in these episodes. Craig, you're the host today. Hello.

Craig Stoss: 0:46

Hello. Thanks. Uh uh well, I guess I'll say thanks for having me, but also uh thanks for being here.

Charlotte Ward: 0:53

Thanks for having me.

Craig Stoss: 0:56

Uh yeah, uh, I'll steal your microphone today. Uh something that I'm always passionate about is just how support fits into an organization. You know, often we're we're seen as kind of this post-sale, do their own thing, support the customer's department. And that's one thing that I just don't think fits into modern day support paradigms. We we need to act cross-functionally. We need to interact with sales and marketing and uh product and and customer success and probably implementation and training and all sorts of different teams, um, knowledge management. I mean, the list could go on. And so, what I thought I would talk about today with you is is support collaboration and how you see support fitting into a cross-functional collaborative organization. So maybe we'll start with that is is what do you think the most important collaborations are for a support team within a company?

Charlotte Ward: 1:55

Oh, um I well, you know, a little depends on what the organization is producing, I suppose, right? But for me, from a technical point of view, uh it would almost always be primarily with product. I think that's just the single best investment you can make in terms of like how you communicate with any other part of the organization, how you how efficient those communications are and how effective they are. Um and um I don't think it's necessarily that obvious when you think of how customer support might otherwise sit probably alongside other parts of a services organization, say, or a success organization. Um it's it's very clearly like a highly non-commercial relationship between support and product, but I think that that does actually make it relatively easy to operationalize and relatively easy to find alignment in.

Craig Stoss: 2:59

Yeah, that's true. I I think that it starts off as a non-commercial relationship. I I'm curious though, if it has to be. I mean, there's support has such insight into the types of problems that that exist within the product, the the types of minor concerns and major ones that exist. Um, maybe, maybe but whether they be bugs or whether they just be UI type things or feature set type things. Do you do you think there's an element of product seeing support as a proper feeding organization for requirements into the future of the product?

Charlotte Ward: 3:34

Well, that's the pipe dream, isn't it? Right. I I think that's the that's the ideal. Um and I know it's something that I've tried to implement everywhere I've been is like, let's just make this as as uh as smooth a transition from customer to product as possible, from mouth of the customer into roadmap of product, I mean, there, you know. Um and yeah, I mean, I I think that um anything we can do to enable that is is all to the good. And I think that in doing that, you you in a I I want to say inadvertently, but that's not really the point. That's very, very far from the point, actually. Um, but almost inadvertently, it's it's a it's an intentional byproduct of a great relationship there, that you build a custom a product that your customers want, and therefore that your prospects want as well.

Craig Stoss: 4:30

I I think that's absolutely true. Um beyond product, do you think that's also true with the way support is sold to customers or the way support is handled, for example, when when there needs to be a handoff between a success or implementation team to solve a technical problem?

Charlotte Ward: 4:51

Well, I know that certainly in B2B, the way that support is sold is very different from the way it's sold in inverted quotes in in B2C, you know, or sort of more at the SMB level, perhaps. Um I had a conversation with somebody who we who joined our organization as an account exec just recently. Um, everyone who joins the organization gets an intro to all of the business functions. So they sit down with the head of every business function. And uh this account exec said, uh, you know, what would you what would you like me to do when I go out selling to customers? I said, just don't sell support that we don't offer, just sell what we actually do.

Craig Stoss: 5:43

It seems like such a simple rule, right?

Charlotte Ward: 5:45

It's just don't sell shit. No, can't swear on my own podcast. Just don't sell stuff we don't do. Like it's just such a basic request. But but yeah, I think that that's the fear of every support organization, isn't it? That that we're gonna be left with clients who have inflated expectations.

Craig Stoss: 6:12

And I think we've all support leaders have all experienced something like that, right? And and I'm wondering if is that partly because we don't tend to collaborate enough, we don't share what we do enough, we don't you know, we don't share what the product does. We're not involved sooner in the sales process for B2B, clearly, for B2C, it might it might be vastly different here. But I wonder if that's a function of this separation that we've built between the sales team and and the support team.

Charlotte Ward: 6:43

I think it, I think it definitely is. And I would go a stage further and to and say that it's also a function of not being the any not not being a driving force in that relationship. It's not it's not even a separation. It's like you can be very communicative with someone and still be largely the recipient of what they produce, um, even if you have a great relationship with your sales team. But actually to be um, you know, to be a strong half in that relationship, I think, I think requires support leaders and customer officers to define what it is. And this is what we've done um where I am now at Snowplow. Define what it is and what it means to deliver the service that you are delivering, or the service andor the service that you want to deliver. Define it and stand by it. Of course, make it saleable, otherwise that defeats the point somewhat. But but I think define it and stand by it. And um, you know, I I think this does obviously it's not just the uh it's not just on the um shoulders of a humble head of support like myself. This is something that does require buy-in and sponsorship and leadership um throughout the senior leadership in any organization, right? But if if you have a strong definition of what the services are that you offer through any part of that customer organization, support or success or professional services if you're doing that, um you have something you can stand by. It's it is effectively in black and white, you know. Uh and I think then it's very clear, it's very you can you can produce collateral to sell from that. You can there is no ambiguity around what X, Y, or Z means in terms of the scope of what you do and how you deliver it. Um, and then it's easy to sell as well because salesmen aren't out there just making stuff up. And I think, frankly, you know, I think the the the sales guys I've spoken to, by and large, uh thankful for this because support is such a black box, quite often. You know, they know that they when they finish with the sale, that's who customers are by and large going to speak to next, but they don't really understand what that means and what we do unless we tell them.

Craig Stoss: 9:07

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I want to touch on you said buy-in. I I recently had a really interesting conversation with another support leader that talked a lot about uh crisis management. And and it was in the in this the theme of uh support needs to permeate all your departments such that if there is a crisis, you know, more people are enabled to speak to current statuses or or be able to direct uh customer calls or inquiries uh correctly. Because you know, it could be a salesperson on the phone where where something is is happening, or it could be a success person or an implementation person. Heck, it could be your front desk, you know, staff that that are getting these phone calls. Um so but that requires a big amount of buy-in because someone needs to buy into the fact that everyone should always be there to serve the customer. Do you think that's reasonable? Do you think it's reasonable to assume that that there's some level of being able to support customers even when you're not in a support department?

Charlotte Ward: 10:13

I think so. I I think everyone should know how to help a customer that lands on their desk, right? Whether it's the the physical or metaphorical reception desk or whether it's you know lands on the desk of a CEO somewhere and anywhere in between. I think that um it is part of support leadership's role to ensure that they enable anyone in the organization to help the customer find solutions. Um, and you know, and I again, I mean, there's so much variance, but to me at a bare minimum, that means giving everyone in your organization the phone number. Right. And I think uh I yeah, I think, you know, and then I I think as far as you want to take that right up to all hands support, you know. But I I've kind of written about this before when um I have I strongly believe that the customer who comes to you is your customer and that you are responsible, you are responsible for getting them the solution. You might not actually provide and work through the solution for them, but you're responsible for getting them to a solution. Um I it's very, very controllable entirely within the support team, but in the wider organization, I think it is our role to enable that as much as we can. When um and I learned this in a when I was 15. Lot of years ago. I wasn't gonna say that. I tell you what, Craig, it was more than four years ago. Um when I was 15, I had a Saturday job at the local supermarket, we'd call it here in the UK, like a big store, you know, typical kind of big store, lots of like fruit at the front, bakery at the back, pharmacist, all like 20 aisles in between of groceries. And uh I went to work there every Saturday and I was onboarded in inverted quotes over the course of a couple of shifts, learning how learning how to use the checkout and everything. Um but even back then, all those more than four years ago, they um they uh they said to me, Um, you're young, there's gonna be a lot of questions asked for it from you, asked of you in this shop that you do not know the answers to. Um customers are gonna walk up to you because you're wearing the uniform and they're gonna ask you, does asparagus go with gravy? I I don't know. I don't know why. This this was England in in more than four years ago, so it was entirely it was an entirely different world, I can tell you that. And and I was young, I'd never cooked asparagus with gravy, how would I know? Right. Um, but what this um lovely old older checkout woman trainer said to me at the time was you won't know all the answers, but what you can do is take the customer to the place where they can get the answers and stay with them and learn. And and and I she physically demonstrated to me how to do it. We had this kind of whole scenario. She was a pretend customer, she would walk in the shop, ask me a question, and I would have to walk with her across this pretend shop kind of training floor to somebody else waiting at the other end who was another member of staff, and they would be able to answer the asparagus engravy question, and I would stand there and listen, you know, and and the point the the point that was being very, very um actively demonstrated to me was that uh that customer is my customer at that moment. I'm helping them, even if I don't have the answer. And this is a really long story, but but for the fact that I think it very capably demonstrates that I think you can you can with the right expectations and and the right enablement.

Craig Stoss: 14:24

Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 14:25

No, I mean those kind of behaviors across the organization, right?

Craig Stoss: 14:29

I I completely agree, right? I think that I have a very much the same mindset that that you have to take ownership over a problem. And you know, you as exactly you said, you might not be the person to solve, actually provide the answer, but be there to find out uh how to guide the customer to the right place. Um you know, I had a scenario, you know, where support itself wasn't very collaborative. And by that, uh it was a job many years ago where uh a bug bounty bug bounty us, a you know, white hat hacker, had found a serious defect in our product, a security defect. And they tried to email us. Well, they we had no email address and support. They tried to phone us. Well, you needed to type in a customer number before you could get to support. And of course, this was not a customer. Um, and eventually this person emailed the CEO of the company because the CEO's email was publicly available, and basically said, I found this massive bug. Um, I want to tell you, I want to do the right thing, and there's no way for me to do it. And and the CEO kind of sent an email to all the leadership and said, I don't care what you do, but figure out how to make this work. And uh I feel like that's a great example of where support sometimes blindsides themselves and says, Well, you know, we want to do very fancy IVR routing of tickets, but by doing so, we're blocking out an entire segment of potential customers or or potentially even customers to you know who don't have access to whatever that number might be or whatever it is. Um so how how do you balance that type of thing when it comes to um being there for for everyone who wants to talk to you? Um because you probably are the right entry point, but again, you're not going to solve this this massive critical defect that comes to you, but but you are the logical entry point. Where's the balance there from a support perspective?

Charlotte Ward: 16:27

Yeah, that's a really hard one to answer, isn't it? I think, you know, I the the reason I think that is hard to answer is because I think we we do have to provide some guardrails to support because otherwise, how will we? I I I I like I do not know how people who provide like social support to the whole world ever, ever do capacity planning. In my mind, it in my I mean that to me, it must be like witchcraft. Um I don't understand it and I'll be upfront about that. But I I think in my world, I have to provide some guardrails about who and what and how we provide support. Um, because otherwise I can't resource it properly. Um, but I think I think that there is a uh I think that there is a big piece here about maybe about um having specific types and specific channels available to those customers who are paying you or who have, for one reason or another, have the right to a certain level of access or to a certain level of expertise or whatever. But I I think that there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? I think that you can provide support and it doesn't all have to come through your support at email address or through your portal. Um, and it neither actually does it all have to come through your support team. And I've seen companies have great success in like allowing customers to provide support to each other, obviously, a lot of community building and things like that. Um, or providing different levels of support as we've talked about before. You know, you have some people who are skilled in a certain way to provide a level of support through social, and then you have more skill via different channels. The thing, the thing that I'm always nervous about when you start segmenting like that, um, and also by its very nature, therefore, ring fencing part of support, is avoiding the perception that the customer has come through to the wrong person in inverted quotes when they try and contact you, because I don't think it's the customer's job to know how they should contact you. And and I don't know if I have the answer to that yet, except to say that I would avoid anything that when you respond to those customers suggests that they have done something wrong.

Craig Stoss: 18:51

Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 18:52

Um yeah, so you know, so when that customer comes in, I'm sorry, you've come through on support at uh because uh, but this is only available for this class customer. Can I direct you to and just send them away elsewhere with their tail between their legs? I don't think that's the right way to go about it.

Craig Stoss: 19:10

I mean, I have a class example of that. I worked at a company that had the same name, uh, the software software company that had the same name as a t-shirt company. And so we would always get emails to our support line about missing t-shirt shipments and misprinted t-shirts. And and we uh we actually ended up because of that exact thing, not wanting just to tell the customer you're wrong. We actually had a macro in place to say, you know, we are not a t-shirt company. Here is the URL you're looking for, here's the email address, the phone number. Like we actually maintained a macro to direct the the customers appropriately for for supporting a different product. Um there you you touched on a couple things that align to external collaboration. So you talk about so social media, which not often is in support, it's it's Sometimes an external department. I would throw into the loop there, you know, any sort of outsourcing or BPO companies you deal with for your support services. Maybe what could you talk a little bit about collaboration with that to make sure that all of those teams are aligned to the support mission and are working together?

Charlotte Ward: 20:20

I think, again, I don't have a great deal of exposure to social support. So I'll be up front there. But I think, like, if I was to try and answer this briefly, um across all of those relationships, all of those types of external providers of support to our own client base, I think it just has to come back to that definition again, right? I think it has to just come back to a very clear understanding of what it is your service means to your customers. And if you have that clearly defined and what value it brings to your customers and how you deliver it and how you expect those external providers to deliver it, I think if you have all of that very well defined, I think that enables the relationship.

Craig Stoss: 21:10

So yeah, so yes, setting up that uh that vision and that alignment is is critical. Maybe, maybe we'll end on how what's your brief advice to all our listeners here on how to build those relationships and make sure that all the stuff we just talked about, the collaboration, works.

Charlotte Ward: 21:30

I think it would be it would center around, I think, three things. What one would be the definition that we just talked about, so I won't harp on about that too much again. Secondly, I would say that it's uh it's very much working those relationships in two directions, considering every single one of those relationships to be a loop. You know, that this isn't just you pushing stuff out or it it's it's finding ways that you can give and receive, and from their perspective, therefore, they are giving and receiving, and and it it becomes this just kind of um positively charged loop of communication and collaboration. And and the very final thing I would say is to dedicate time to it, don't just expect it to happen, and don't just expect it to happen on the basis of one email. Um, I would dedicate time both in terms of like expected uh mature, like expected time to mature these relationships, but but actually also just invest time in the day, in the week to build and continue to iterate on the the mechanics and the quality and the operationalization of those relationships. And I think I think it's all three of those things that I think can speak to any of the relationships we've talked about.

Craig Stoss: 23:00

That's that's all insightful as always. Great conversation. Thanks. Uh thanks for allowing me to steal your microphone.

Charlotte Ward: 23:07

Thank you so much for having me, Craig. It's so odd. Thanks for coming. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one seven eight for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.