180: Fireside with Valentina Thoerner

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and eighty of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today I welcome Valentina Turner for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Valentina Turner. Valentina or Val, as your friends call you, and I hope I can I can count myself among them. Maybe, if not already, then by the end of this conversation, well. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to have you. I've been trying to get you on this for a long time now, but um I know who you are, but maybe for the benefit of our listeners, you could introduce yourself.

Valentina Thoerner: 1:00

Um yeah, I'm Valentina Val for friends and anyone who talks to me in any capacity, actually. Um I work as head of product at Klaus, which is a conversation review platform for support teams. And before that, I actually led support teams at Automatic, which is the maker of WordPress.com. So I am now in a product position, but I still work for a customer support tool. And I'm actually very proud about my customer success background because I think it gives me a lot of insights that traditionally product managers might not have under their belt.

Charlotte Ward: 1:39

Totally. I couldn't agree more, which is why I'm very excited that you came to me with this topic suggestion for a fireside, which is that relationship between support or the customer experience side of the business and the product. Um, and I can think of a few people more qualified to comment on both sides of this relationship. So so um maybe maybe we start with back in the day, back in support, what were your what were what challenges did you begin to identify when you were working on the support side of this?

Valentina Thoerner: 2:14

So on the support time side, everything always seems very urgent because basically you have lots of people screaming at you who want a solution ASAP, which basically means yesterday and not as soon as possible. And from a from a support side, you would open up these GitHub issues, and then nothing happens, and then you ping, and then nothing happens, and you feel ignored, and it's just very frustrating because you don't really know what like what is actually happening with the the things that you're submitting. Like, where do the recommendations go? What like whenever somebody has a great idea and you pass that along, does anything happen with this? And then a new product launch comes out or like a new release, and you didn't know what was going to happen, and suddenly you have to scramble to figure out what this new UX is actually about, because there seems to be like to be flowing a lot of information into one direction and not the right information in the other direction. And while I was still in product, uh still in customer success, I didn't really understand that product teams actually work in a slower cycle than customer support teams because they also talk to customers, but they usually talk to customers who are using the product who don't have like a fire burning in their kitchen, but who like can sit down and calmly talk about how this feature would be really beneficial. Then you go a 45-minute interview. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 3:56

I hear you, I hear you. Um, and you know, I think I think I mean my experience completely echoes that. I think that idea that we send stuff into product, it and if you're lucky, that's fairly systematic. And if you're not, it's frankly, let's call it somewhat chaotic and ad hoc in in a lot of organizations, right? But I think what you talked about there about what comes out of product is an interesting one because I think there's so many levels of that, and you touched on a few of them. There is, I think, obviously and very directly, the direct feedback that you can or might eventually be able to give to the customer who requested, or the set of customers who particularly requested something or particularly had a need. Um, then there's the output from the product team that I think is just let's call it for like uh that's let's just say it's for increasing the appreciation of the input. So it's kind of it's some sense, it's and this is a little bit a this is a little bit like jelly-like. I can't quite like yeah, it's we hear you validation. That's what it is, isn't it? It's validation that what you're doing actually is having an impact. At the third level, I think there's like knowledge, actually, just just actual direct kind of knowledge of what's in the pipe in terms of product, and then even more elevated from a knowledge front is the training aspect and what's actually like what's actually actionable for support out of that, right?

Valentina Thoerner: 5:32

And what goes through all of these is expectation management.

Charlotte Ward: 5:36

Very true, very true.

Valentina Thoerner: 5:38

So in the end, like it all comes down to being a good communicator, and I think that's not something that you only need in customer support or customer success. Like, product teams can also product teams can learn a lot about how to communicate from from customer support teams because the customer support teams, like they are absolute experts and dealing with complicated people. Very true. And like framing things so that the other part who might not have the same knowledge understands them, make putting in clear expectations like we have looked at this. Thank you very much for your feedback. This is something that we are going to look at in the next, I don't know, quarter or maybe never, because look what you've uh the idea that you have is amazing, but actually it's a really, really weird edge case. But here are some resources that might help you to actually like work around. And these are all things that you learn in customer support, but that as a customer support agents agent would be really nice if you also got that treatment from other parts of the company.

Charlotte Ward: 6:44

Yeah.

Valentina Thoerner: 6:44

So if the product team tells you, hey, thank you for that feedback that we got from the customers, maybe asks for more feedback, like, do you know more cases, or do you know a company that has these specific uh circumstances that we maybe can trial a solution for this with and like bringing them into the whole uh product process and being very clear look, we have heard this, but we are working on it, but actually, this will take us three months. Because uh very often when product says I'm working on this, customer support hears this will be out next week. That's very true.

Charlotte Ward: 7:21

Um, and as you said, this is very completely different cycle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Valentina Thoerner: 7:26

And actually, when product says this will be out next week, that actually means it will be out in three weeks from now because next week we are testing and then we realize there's something else wrong, so we actually have to go back to those things.

Charlotte Ward: 7:40

Yeah. Um oh, that's absolutely right. The timing expectations are completely different. Um, and you know, one thing you said there, which struck me, is it is something that I think I've expressed about I don't think I've talked about this really on the podcast, but certainly it's something that I've expressed in organizations that I've worked in. And that is how like the support relationship with the customer is echoed further into the organization and how actually how actually what you have is customers are the customers of support, but support are the customers of other teams, right? So really, yeah, so really it's all you could pretty much lift that same set of processes around setting those expectations, like as like SLAs. I I love internal SLAs. I love knowing that when I send something, I'm gonna get an answer or a response or whatever back. And this is the mechanism that is gonna be used, and this is the time frame I can expect, and this is the kind of cycle that it follows, right?

Valentina Thoerner: 8:44

And the answer can very well be look, we're not going to act on this, or this will take a month, or this is on the roadmap, but at the moment it's more like 2023-ish, but like some kind of answer. Like, what is the most toxic thing ever? And that in all kinds of communication is just ignoring that somebody has said something. Because then it's like, did they not read me? Are they ignoring me? Do they hate me? And then in a remote environment, like people get very creative in thinking about why they're being ignored.

Charlotte Ward: 9:18

Oh, sure, don't we all? Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, no, I hear you. And the um, and just the as you said before, like the the clear setting of expectations is like a very, very big part of that being able to communicate things and and like understanding the differences. Um I don't think I've had anyone explain to me quite so clearly, even though I kind of know it at some level, like the just the the speed differential. I think that's such a big part of this because even now, I mean, in every organization I've ever worked in, but but even now, after all these years, Val, after all these years, I still think product are you saying it's gonna be three months before you do this thing?

Valentina Thoerner: 10:09

Yep, yep. That's actually that's something that I really had to adjust to. Like between when you made the move. Yeah, exactly. It's just slow, like it's not it, it's not like that they are working less or that we are doing less things, it's just like there's not one ticket, one answer, 10 minutes next ticket. It's like it takes time. And if you want to like because we don't want to ship something with like 10,000 bucks, I mean there will be bugs in there because there always are, but we want to keep those like my illusions, come on. We want to keep those as limit, like as limited as possible, and uh if possible, catch them before they actually release to customers. So all this takes time because even if we say, okay, this takes, I don't know, four weeks to code, and then goes then it goes into quality assurance, and then they find stuff, they always find stuff, which means it goes back, which means that it takes another two weeks, and that's just the normal rhythm of product development. And I think there uh product teams tend to uh not deliver on how much they can actually proactively communicate because it's one thing to communicate there is a feature coming out next week, which is already great because it allows the customer support team to actually get up to speed before the thing is actually in the customer's hand. But what would be really nice is to have a clear roadmap that is communicated consistently and constantly to everyone. So at Klaus, for example, we now uh like every month, every uh four to six weeks, I present the roadmap to everyone. Like we do in our company all hands. And that way it's a very interesting thing because of course the roadmap is not set in stone, it's actually a very active thing, and cards move around, and features that we were thought would be done next will actually be done after this thing, because we suddenly signed a new client, and now this is more important, and all of these things, because I'm the one who moves the stuff around on the roadmap. Of course, I know why this is now more important than the, but I cannot expect anyone else to know all that. So, like once a month or every two months, actually bringing everyone together and say, hey, this is the current roadmap. And as you can see from last time, we thought this would come out in Q2, but honestly, I don't think this will happen because we signed this client and they actually need this before they can actually roll this out to the entire organization, which means that we have now moved this to Q3 and be like very, very transparent about the things that are currently happening that you expect to be happening next, and that you don't have a crystal ball. Like, I don't know, like I can more or less imagine whom we are going to sign next because very often the sales cycles are also very long. And I'm really happy that our sales department also informs about me who is in the pipeline and what their expectations are, so that actually, because I'm I mean, product is like in the middle of everything, we are not even at the beginning of the of the story, so it's basically sales product customer support, but like by bringing all this information together and making sure that everybody actually gets an active reminder about what we are talking about and what we are working on every four to six weeks, and then it is one of our like it's a top-level document in our knowledge. And like if you don't remember, you go into the roadmap, it's updated every two weeks, so you can see if something swapped around. So you could also proactively go in there and be like, oh, this feature that I thought would be coming out in March has just been moved to May. And then sometimes people will then ping me or or go with in GitHub themselves to see what is happening there. But like the easier, the more accessible the information is, the more you lower actually the stress level of the people who rely on that information.

Charlotte Ward: 14:09

Yeah, for sure. Um, people are more forgiving then as well, aren't they? Because it's less of a black box, as you said. I think that um everything you just described about having accessibility to the information, even if the information changes, I think it's just great because, as you said, the stress level's low. And if the information does change in such a way that it impacts that particular team and for support, that probably means a particular customer or set of customers. Um it enables your support team, A, to understand and still feel informed and valued, but B to but B to convey that in the right way to customers. And and I think that that um that flexing in the roadmap, it's I mean, I guess this varies a little uh product to product, but it's probably unlikely to be huge significant sea changes.

Valentina Thoerner: 15:09

Oh no, no, we are not we're not going to pivot to another pro product. Exactly. It's usually a change in like which feature comes first on timing, exactly. And usually there is a good reason for it. And in my experience, the more candid and the more open I am about the reasoning why things change, the easier it is for the customer support team to actually do something with that information. And what I've also done is that I have actively helped to phrase how things can be communicated with customers.

Charlotte Ward: 15:38

Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. Um, and and you know, I think that everything that um helps customer support with the right messaging and with you know with the right uh with the right either uh exactness of knowledge or the right kind of level of vagueness of knowledge as well that they that they make that they make available to customers. Um I think just allows them to build a certain level of trust with customer as well. So so I I think then um the last question I have for you really, and I this isn't a one-sentence answer, or maybe it is, maybe you have all the answers. But but my last question, or or the last thing I'd like to explore perhaps is just how systematic you feel this needs to be in either either or both directions, like how much process do we need? How formal do you think we need to be?

Valentina Thoerner: 16:41

I'm a huge fan of if not processes, at least touch points. So because if you don't have either, you end up spending three months without talking to each other. And not because you didn't want to talk to each other, but because there was always something different coming up, and so you never ended up talking with them. So um at Klaus we have a weekly, we call it product CX Sync, where we just the product team gets together with the customer support team, and then we are like, okay, this is what in case you didn't see it in the demo meeting, these are the things that are coming up. Is there anything that you would like to share with us? And sometimes we just talk about the weather or like we laugh a lot a lot in that meeting, like we commiserate over the fact that Lillian continues to be hostage in Brazil because they've canceled all flights to Europe. Like we talk a lot about like personal stuff, but it is a set half an hour every single week that if there is anything on fire that they know that have they have my full attention in that meeting to help them figure out or help us figure out what we can do to mitigate the the situation. And even though like it's a little bit like one-in-ones, if you don't talk in every one and one about like super community, yeah, things, yeah. But if something comes up, there is this weekly one-in-one, and you know that this is the hour where your uh like your boss or your employee actually will be there with their whole attention to actually talk about this. And I think product and customer support also need this like touch point where it's like, okay, there is something that I would like to talk about, there is an idea, there is a problem, there is this customer that has asked for this thing, and I don't really know what to answer. Like, just to have at least one touch point every week. And this is like this is like the most lightweight process that we have said. We then have like no, it's not really internal SLAs. If I call it like that, like I probably would get pushback, but we do answer all of the GitHub issues in a reasonable amount of time, yeah, just to kind of show that somebody has seen them.

Charlotte Ward: 19:06

Which is a which is again about trust, but I guess also this is about scalability, right? Yeah. With just knowing that you've got a time where everybody's gonna be paying that attention, I guess there'll come a point where you'll need to do more.

Valentina Thoerner: 19:24

Yeah, plus at Klaus, of course, we use Klaus. So, and we actually do all hands reviews. So every single person at Klaus has to review 10 tickets of our own support agents every month.

Charlotte Ward: 19:39

Right, right.

Valentina Thoerner: 19:40

This means everybody is using the product, everybody knows how the product works, everybody gets exposure both to the product. It's very interesting how like small tweaks that drive me crazy when uh someone of the from the dev team actually does their reviews and then they disappear. Because I'm not the only one. Who was driven crazy by that. So, like, and really everybody, like whether you're HR or marketing or engineering, it doesn't matter. I want everybody to understand what we are actually like what our value proposition is. Plus, if everybody reads at minimum 10 customer conversations every month, the connection between company and customer is so much closer because everybody sees what is happening on the customer support side. And very often we have like comments in uh uh in our Slack where it's like, wow, you handled that amazing from somebody who like usually has no connection whatever with with customer support, which of course is also like a nice appreciation practice for the customer support team.

Charlotte Ward: 20:47

Yeah, yeah.

Valentina Thoerner: 20:48

Because they don't feel like they are like this extra part that's like somewhere there keeping the customers quiet. No, no, they are like they are an integral, integral part of how we work as a company, and everybody knows what they are doing in their day-to-day, which I think is not the the it's not something that happens in most companies. Like if you ask somebody in HR or in marketing, what do you think other customer support people doing every day? They're probably like, I don't know, like answer customer questions. Yeah, kind of, yeah, but like it's more than that.

Charlotte Ward: 21:19

Yeah, and and I think I think I I completely hear you, and I think that um, like far from this being a marketing pitch for Klaus, I think that I think you know, we just implemented Klausware in my day job right now at Snowplow. So we we implemented Klaus, I guess we've been running with it a month, six weeks, something like that. Um, I was aware of it before, but this is the first time I've I've had the opportunity to properly use it. Um, and even though we're early in that journey, one thing that my team are already expressing is like how useful it is, and just even even the team that are doing the support are kind of getting in there and reviewing each other's conversations and getting visibility to conversations which of which they were only a part or had or had no um input into, and how even reviewing conversations that they had a part in like has given them a wider and and kind of they've they've revisited it, revisited something they worked on a couple of weeks ago, and it's reminded them of that piece of knowledge or that way that thing was approached or whatever, and they're finding that useful. And the other thing I will say about Klaus is that we're just recreating our um support engineer onboarding program from from scratch, and one of the things I'm very keen to do is get Klaus in there very early because of that visibility it gives you.

Valentina Thoerner: 22:45

Yeah, yeah, the fact that you can review tickets that are already closed is really great because usually the skinny system doesn't give you that, does it? No, no, it you always you only see tickets that still require an answer. So, like if your answer was good, you will never know because you don't know whether they didn't answer because they gave up or because they know they didn't answer because the answer was correct. Like there's a 50-50 chance. Yeah, so of course, and you could you can do that like before we implemented CloudSet Automatic, I did this with all the CSAT tickets manually with a spreadsheet and ZenDesk. It is possible, like you don't need clouds, it just makes the process much easier.

Charlotte Ward: 23:27

And it's so accessible across the organization, so yeah, exactly.

Valentina Thoerner: 23:31

Yeah, and for us, it was like uh I could not explain to marketing or or or to HR or to legal how they have to use intercom to find the right conversations to review to learn what the customer support team is doing. Yeah, it's way easier. It's like click here, go in, use this filter, and there you go. See the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. And like I know that you there are different ways you can solve this. I want the company to know what customer support does. Like at Automatic, for example, everybody does every year one week of customer support rotation. So they actually work in customer support for a week, which is also a very powerful way because that way people actually have a skin in the game because they have to talk to the customers. The downside here is that this puts extra pressure on the buddy or on the customer support team because they now also have to take care of this person who I mean, our products change so much in one year. Like, just because somebody last year did a support rotation doesn't mean that they can answer any questions this year. And like that means that they are like in a little, I mean they can help with the easier stuff, but when it gets complicated, they are almost like a liability.

Charlotte Ward: 24:45

And that in Klaus, we kind of I won't tell them you said that.

Valentina Thoerner: 24:51

Like the the thing is you can just have them the exposure to all the tickets in the world, yes, yeah. And do this every week or every month or whatever. I mean, 10 reviews per month. That's like half an hour over a month.

Charlotte Ward: 25:05

Yeah, because it's super fasting, Klaus, as well, as we all know, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Um, right.

Valentina Thoerner: 25:12

But I'm so lucky that I was that I managed to go into a product that like basically goes back to my passion for customer support. Like I'm super in love with our cat.

Charlotte Ward: 25:24

Well, what a nice place to end this discussion about how in love with uh you are with your career transition from customer to product. So uh in charge of customers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much, Val. Uh, it's been an absolute pleasure to chat with you and meander through a couple of things that started with product customer and ended in your love affair with your new rock.

Valentina Thoerner: 25:50

Thank you very much for the great questions. This was a very lovely conversation.

Charlotte Ward: 25:54

No worries, thank you so much for coming. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one eight zero for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.