241: Fireside with Andrew Ou

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello, and welcome to episode two hundred and forty-one of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Andrew Ooh for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today. For the first time, Andrew Ooh. Andrew, lovely to have you join me. Thank you for reaching out to talk about um what's an interesting topic from my point of view. And I know we had a bit of a pre-chat a couple of weeks ago on this and uh explored some ideas that I was just keen to kind of get on recording rather than have a whole interesting conversation two weeks ago just between the two of us. So I'm looking forward to deep diving on some detail in you it uh with you in a minute. But um, first of all, for the benefit of our listeners who have never met you before, would you like to introduce yourself?

Andrew Ou: 1:08

Yeah, uh yeah, um thanks everyone. And nice to meet you, Charlotte, Charlotte. Um, my name is Andrew, and I'm a user experience strategist based out of Vancouver. And I help tech companies increase revenue and profit by decreasing their cost of support.

Charlotte Ward: 1:22

Nice, nice. Cost of support is something that gets mentioned on this podcast quite a lot. So I'm looking forward to this. Uh I know we talked about this in brief, but but um this is this is really interesting because it's specifically from the user experience angle. You know, I've often talked about cost of support in terms of scalability, in terms of uh, you know, how we can deflect tickets, for instance, and things like that, but purely like everything being in the agency of the support team. And I think this is super interesting because we expanded this a little bit last time we spoke. And I I want, as I said before, I wanted to stop and and record that instead. So tell me a bit more about then what it is you've come to talk to talk about today.

Andrew Ou: 2:04

Yeah. So, you know, I find that there's a really sort of interesting intersection between um user experience and customer support. Um, you know, what I come to realize and uh happened a while ago, you know, I'll tell you the story behind this, but um the reason, you know, why like there's an interesting intersection is because when the customer experience is bad, it makes the the customer have to contact support. Um, and then that you know depends that sort of impacts the cost of support. And you know, the um I'll give you like a story I gave you, you know, last week, and just for the lessness here. Um a couple of months ago, you know, I was using my banking application and this was with you know, like this global bank. Um, and I was trying to send money. So what happened was I was entering my my information, my details, and things like that, and then I hit send. Um, what happened was I got this error message that said, you know, we can't process your transaction right now in error code one, two, three, four, five. Right. And I was like, you know, what what is this? Right? What's going on? Uh because the messaging wasn't clear, um, I had to call in, right? And and you know, that that that whole interaction was just not pleasant. Like it took me like 30 minutes to to wait and another 30 minutes to speak with the agent, and the agent, you know, wasn't familiar with that issue. So overall, it took you know an hour to for for this thing to get it resolved. Uh now here's the thing, like he told me afterwards that the reason I couldn't send my uh you know, send money was because I had reached my transfer limit, right? That was a thing. Now, if they had put some effort into that messaging, right, it would have you know eliminated this issue entirely, right? And you imagine, you know, a big corporate company like that. Um, you know, if they got like 2,000 customer support agents running a day, and if this is just even like 1% or even less than that, you know, that can quickly add up and you know, just just that whole thing can cost even a small problem like that, easily like $50,000 per year.

Charlotte Ward: 4:05

Right.

Andrew Ou: 4:06

And so, you know, it hit me, right? Like um, I I think I think I really want to sort of challenge, you know, some of the thinking when it comes to customer support, because I think, you know, a lot of companies when they think um of having a support team, they're always thinking how they want the users to engage with them and then serve them by providing support. But one of the things I I think about and what I want to challenge is, you know, if a user has to contact you at any point in the journey, one thing it means that it's already uh they're already confused at some about something and they've already got a decrease in experience at that moment. Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 4:43

Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, I think it's an analogy I've drawn before, and I think I must admit, I probably mentioned this a couple of weeks ago when we spoke as well, which is is that um, you know, often think of support as the breakdown truck, right? It's it's kind of yeah, you you'll always praise a really, really competent, friendly, empathetic breakdown truck driver, mechanic guy, but but or girl. But but on the other hand, wouldn't it be nicer if your car just didn't break down?

Andrew Ou: 5:14

Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 5:14

Yeah.

Andrew Ou: 5:15

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, um, I'm sure that you know there's a lot of Google searches on, you know, how do you reduce your cost of support? And they all talk about like different things like you know, adding software, um, using software, uh, doing more team training and things like that. Um, it's all it's all you know focused on that aspect. But I think I think what you know they fail to think is is really like thinking from the customer experience angle, like why did that problem come up in the first place? Instead of you know the problem coming up and then you're solving it with support uh and you have to repeat the several times, you know, whenever that problem comes up. And you know, that cost just adds up over time. Um, but if they had taken the time to just look at the root of the problem and why that's happening, right? It's gonna solve a lot of things and you get a lot of benefits from that improvement, improvement, not just you know, the improvement in experience, but also if you eliminate that problem entirely, you're gonna save yourself a lot of trouble, you know, going downstream, all the training, all the procedures and documentation that's required to solve that problem for your support team as well.

Charlotte Ward: 6:21

Yeah, that down that downstream word is the kicker, isn't it? Because um we we we solve so much in support, like at the the very end of that that stream is is when the customer, and the most costly part of that is when the customer has to interact with you in person, spend time with a support agent or engineer. And that that's the super costly end of that stream. I mean, what we often try and do in support is is sort of exercises in ticket deflection, which is kind of how can we manage and make this more scalable by preventing that very costly in-person uh transaction, for want of a better way of putting it, that time spent in person. You know, can we can we provide better knowledge to our customers? Can we, you know, get a chatbot in place that will answer some of our questions for us? All these things are acts of what we call ticket deflection, which is the customer has a problem, but can we solve it without them actually kind of getting to us? Um, but this is even further upstream than that, isn't it? This is really deep, like deeply upstream ticket prevention in the first place. It's like prevent the customer from even from even being unhappy.

Andrew Ou: 7:32

Yeah, and I think one of the challenges, you know, as the organization gets bigger, uh communication becomes a challenge. And so you have customer service um departments focusing on all these ticket issues, and then you have the product team, you know, doing all these fixes and things like that. And the kind of communication just gets more difficult, and then these teams stop talking to each other and you know they don't know what each other's sort of building. Um and then you know, there's no communication between product and and support. So then um support is having all a bunch of issues and then they're just solving it on their own. Um, whereas you know, if the teams work together, uh support can, you know, let's say, you know, find one of their you know top, I don't know, top three or most common issues, and then bring that to the table to the support team, uh, to the product team. And then they can find a way to you know work this in and gradually reduce the support too. I think that's a that's a strategy that you know every company should consider.

Charlotte Ward: 8:28

Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. Um what has been your um I mean, in terms of you you've been you've been consulting in this field a little while, right? But what are some of the big successes that you've seen in in improving that relationship? And is there have you got like a particular example where something that was really problematic? I'm I'm really asking you to trawl the archives here, something that was really problematic that had a huge impact.

Andrew Ou: 8:56

Yeah. Um, well, I'll give you one example. So um this was with a um a startup, and the way they were they were doing things was you believe it or not, um, you know, you know how a lot of startups um they tend to build first and then consider design later because they want to get to the market quick. Um, they don't they think they don't have time to invest in design, so they build something and it's not optimal. Um, and then they have to rely on support to to you know get the users through to help them out. And you know, so what you know when I came to help tech company, what happened was they have been relying on support to onboard the customer for the whole time, right? Imagine one one-to-one service, like one customer um support agent onboarding a user, and it took about 20 minutes, right? So imagine, you know, if they have like a hundred users, you know, a week, right? That's that's huge, even even though a hundred isn't a very big number to onboard that uh you know what happened was we you know we we work the cost out, right? Um and this was a startup in sort of like the the middle phases, um beginning to middle phases. And um I think you know, just implementing, finding out where the costs are and how we can onboard the user without relying on support. Um and then working, designing that journey and testing it, and then you know, working on a small piece at a time and and then and then um implementing it and then releasing it, right? That actually you know decreased their um their the support substantially for the onboarding by about 70%. Um yeah, and then you know afterwards it's just the ongoing of iterations and so forth to make sure we really decrease that number even more, and then we can move on to further things.

Charlotte Ward: 10:44

Yeah, yeah. Uh it can have such a huge impact, can't it? And and and the smallest thing, I mean, something like that that is more about, I mean, customer onboarding can be terribly simple or can be terribly complex, and a lot depends on the platform, right? Uh but but I mean, if you're reducing something from 20 minutes down to a minute or two or even no human interaction at all, and customers, it's just self-drive onboarding, then that's amazing. I I have um I have an experience which uh which just completely at the other end. Um just it's such the small it's it's so much the smallest change that was made in a product, but had a few had a huge impact. There was a um there was a screen in in a product that my team was supporting where going back a bit, but um it was it was a place where you could put comma separated entries. And in theory, what that did was send a string to the support team where they they literally could take that set that comma separated list of domains and do something with it, and it would it should just be one action. And because it was comma separated, it would be one action for the support team. But the UI wasn't great and didn't make it clear that you that you could put comma separated list in here. Um and there was a button that was like right, add these things. Um and uh and it was it was it was misunderstood in because it wasn't clear you could put a comma separated list, it was misunderstood on more than one occasion. And customers will put one domain near time and click add, another domain and click add, and each of these ads would be a new support ticket. Oh no. We had customers putting in like 15 of these things in one go, but one at a time. You might you might as well put like individual letters in a mailbox instead of like instead of a bulk send, you know. Uh and it took like one piece of product feedback that said, you know what? If we could just make it front and center very clear that this is a a conversation separated list, and maybe like even drive behaviors that that encourage really encourage customers to do that. Um so it's like re reword, you know, reword that button, make this like a list of fields that you could add another every time you hit add, it was like an a new empty box, you know, and things like that rather than right. It's just about driving certain behaviors and and suddenly you've got one ticket instead of 15, right?

Andrew Ou: 13:19

But yeah, and I I bet that makes a huge difference.

Charlotte Ward: 13:22

It really does, yeah.

Andrew Ou: 13:24

Yeah, and it it is, you know, it is a lot of it is the little things too. I mean, a lot of companies are always big focused on building the big features, but you know, sometimes there's a there's a bunch of these little things that you can look at, and they actually make a big difference, like you mentioned, right? Um, and it comes back to, you know, you know, what I mentioned when I was using the banking app. Um, imagine if that problem, like it was a very, very minor problem, but if that had, you know, um frequently happened to the the cost would just simply add up. Um and it's it's not even just about the cost. I mean, I mean, someone can think, yeah, we got enough customer service agents, we can handle this, but you know, that's not the way to go about it, right? Because like I said, you know, when a user has to contact you for support, they've already there they've already got decrease in satisfaction, right? And when you actually you know improve these, um when you actually look into these issues and you reduce the support costs, you actually get a lot of benefits. Um you actually you know increase the revenue and profit because if they're if they're happy with your product, there's a chance that they'll likely be willing to convert even more. Um and also when you eliminate all these problems, you altogether start building a better product, right? That relies on less support over time. Because you know, coming back to what I said a couple of weeks ago, right? I mean, um, have you ever had to contact Google for support?

Charlotte Ward: 14:45

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I and I I think that's like the um that's the holy grail in some respects, isn't it? That you want customers to be able to self-serve their own solutions. And uh I think that um what occurred to me about your example, your banking example, was instead of error one, two, three, four, five, here's a phone number, wouldn't it be nice if it actually said, Hey Andrew, you've hit your transfer limit, but didn't even stop there. Like, never mind just at the basic level of getting a like natural, like a plain English, plain language, like error message, error in inverted quotes, but but you know, maybe a button that says, Would you like to increase it or would you like to do this? And like enabling them to self-sell self-solve the problem or get around their challenge or make the right request that isn't you going to a technical support engineer at the bank saying, I've got this error and no one knows knows what it means. But instead you're talking to a person who already knows that you want to do something with your transfer limits. I mean it's quite a different experience as well, isn't it, for you?

Andrew Ou: 15:54

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, and and it is, it is, you know, in the in the in this particular example, it is the the messaging that makes a difference. Um but I think a lot of these um are to do with that because you know if the design clearly communicates uh what these issues are, it can already you know alleviate a lot of the potential things that can happen.

Charlotte Ward: 16:19

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um and I think um, you know, there are so many different things and so many different ways to tackle this. And I I know that you've got something that you want to uh share with our listeners, right?

Andrew Ou: 16:32

Yeah. Um, well, you know, I'll I'll give you sort of like a quick step-by-step on how you can, you know, look into this whole issue and what you can do to actually achieve that, right? And achieving means like um taking a look at your cost of support, where things are happening, and then and then finding a way to sort of improve it and then also improve a lot of things. So, I mean, first thing you want to do is you want to look at, you know, talk to your support team. Um, I don't know if you use if you if you're using some softwares um and they have really good tracking, they can help you sort of identify what your most frequent issues are. Um, if not, it'd be a good idea to just speak to you know customer support agents and and ask them, you know, what are the top five or top 10 issues that they see most common, right? And then once you have that, you can sort of work out like what's the impact of this negative experience. Um, how much is it costing you per year? Um, how much is it then to sort of then like you know, the solution, like how much effort is it to sort of implement, right? There's a lot of like low-hanging fruits that you can grab from just this, you know, this sort of a small assessment, right? Some of them could be like little in little changes and little improvements that will help you, you know, buy a whole var or a whole bunch. Um then you know you can sort of pick pick these out and then you know start working towards a solution, right? That's when you'll need to get into the design and then test it with your with your users and see how that plays out. But most of the time, if you know if you do it right, you can actually you know solve a lot of those problems. Um and then yeah, like usually, you know, if you have done things right, uh you would actually eliminate like the majority of those issues that happen. And then after that point, it's just a matter of iterating it further and further until you reduce it to where it's almost negle negligible. And the important thing though, I I think I really want to stress, you know, is instead of having that mentality where you know a user has a problem and then you're there to fix it, I think you want to train your team and and really with a philosophy that, you know, if a user is having this issue or many users are having this issue, the same issues, instead of just giving them a solution, think about how you can um prevent it from happening in the future and do that for everything that you encounter, right? So if a user is having this issue, instead of just saying, yeah, great, I fixed it, think about like why did this happen? What caused it to happen? Uh, how you how can you you know prevent this from happening in the future? And you know, having that that um that principle in mind, I think is really going to be useful for the long run.

Charlotte Ward: 19:08

Yeah, it's almost post-morteming, isn't it, on everything that you perceive might be uh a recurring problem. Like, I mean, you could you could post mortem every single question, but more practically speaking, you certainly want to hit your most frequent ones, as you said at the start. Yeah. Yeah. I I recall, I recall, I can't like shamefully can't remember the numbers, but I recall um a very, very similar thing um with Expedia, I think it was a while back, who sold, they saved millions of dollars, I believe, um, by getting customers just to reconfirm their email address at a certain stage in the process because they discovered that their customer service team was getting a huge number of phone calls where customers would phone up and say, I would like a copy of my itinerary, please, my travel itinerary. The days when people could actually travel. And um, and uh customers were phoning to get a copy of their itinerary because they hadn't received it by email, because the system at some point captured their email address only once, and enough customers were mistyping their email address that it was never confirmed, and so these itineraries were going off into black holes, and customers were having to call in. All they did was add a confirmation step later in the process of the email address, and they massively reduced the incoming calls. It was amazing. It was millions of dollars, if I recall correctly. Wow. Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's a substantial number. Yeah, yeah. Um, and I think I think that sort of post-mortem thing, like the ask why, why is this a problem rather than just accepting it? I think that's uh I think that's really key. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I completely interrupted you then. It just put me very much in mind of that. No worries, yeah. Um so so so what next then? What what what else is there um that uh we should be like what what would you say our listeners should take away from this?

Andrew Ou: 21:10

Yeah, um I think I think you know, you know, from a from a user experience perspective, right? The thing that the the reason why these top tech companies like like Google, Apple, Microsoft, um Airbnb, the reason why they're so successful and they're always you know leading the competition is because they invest heavily in their UX teams. And it's not just about profits or or adding more, you know, uh more employees and things like that, but they're competing on experience, right? Competing on beating the competitors with a better experience. And a lot of people, I think, underestimate that, right? I think, I think, you know, um you user experience design when they think about it, is just like I think a lot of the misconception is making these screens and making mock-ups and things like that. But the bigger picture is is really like the experience and the matters, right? So in this case, you know, what we've been talking about now in the in um is that you know, when you build a better experience, um, it eliminates the the support, but actually not just that, it you know benefits uh you in a lot of different ways. Um and then these ways, you know, your your your users are your customers. They are the ones who pay you. So if you build an amazing product, they can't help but you know make be loyal to you. And in the same way, right? If you build a bad product, they're gonna leave you for someone else. Um yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 22:35

Yeah, yeah. Um I think I think it is, I think it is super interesting when you think about the really big tech companies, you know, the Googles of this world, because I wouldn't even know how to get hold of if there was if there is a Google support team out there, I would love, and I'm sure everyone else on the planet in theory would love to get their phone number, but um we just don't need it. And and I know you said that earlier, but I think that I think that that is kind of, you know, I I'm of a certain generation where companies had websites and there was an about us and there was a a link there that said for support, please call this number, you know, and uh it's you just don't see it for these companies that get it right, they just don't need that's why their support phone numbers, if there is such a thing, are so hard to find because they don't need it and you don't need it. And you know, I'm my father, bless him, will be saying to me till the you know, he leaves this mortal coil that I couldn't find their phone number. I had to dig 12 like links down to get somebody's phone number, but you don't actually need it anymore. And uh yeah, I think it's uh I I think those are the companies that are getting it right, sure, for sure.

Andrew Ou: 23:48

Yeah, yeah. And and you know, I think that's sort of the the the um what do you call what are you saying? The the golden standard you want to aim for. Um, you know, if you ever get to the point where you don't need support, uh I think that's a pretty good place.

Charlotte Ward: 24:04

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. Um, so um it's been an absolute pleasure having you join me today, Andrew. Um, I know that you have something that you want to share with our listeners. Do you want to just tell us about that?

Andrew Ou: 24:18

Yeah, I've got like um a super quick, you know, eight-page mini guide on five ways UX can help your SaaS company increase revenue and profitability. And reducing support is one of those ways, but I mentioned sort of five ways in that um in that sort of mini guide. Uh and you can download it on my website, it's www.andrewou.com slash guide. And uh Charlotte, you'll be posting this uh a link to this, won't you?

Charlotte Ward: 24:44

Yes, yeah. So I will I'll include a link to that. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I'll include a link to that in the show notes for this episode. Absolutely. Um and I'm assuming that uh we can find out more about you on that website too.

Andrew Ou: 24:56

Yeah, absolutely.

Charlotte Ward: 24:58

Cool, cool. Look forward to that. I will definitely share that in the show notes. Thank you for joining me today. It's been a pleasure to have you. Come back and talk about product uh and user experience some more another time, won't you?

Andrew Ou: 25:10

Yeah, great. Yeah, absolutely. And it's been, you know, it's been a really fun conversation with you too, Charlotte.

Charlotte Ward: 25:20

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