251: Support Data with Matt Dale

Charlotte Ward: 0:00

And then Hello and welcome to episode 251 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, please welcome Matt Dale to talk about support data. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Matt Dale. Matt, lovely to have you back so soon into the new year. Thank you for joining me on the panel recently. And uh we're here this time to talk about support, which is the promise of this podcast, right? Welcome back.

Matt Dale: 0:46

Good to be here, Charlotte. Always fun to hang out with you and uh, you know, talk about support.

Charlotte Ward: 0:51

Awesome. Um, so you had a topic in mind today, didn't you? Uh, which was kind of data related, right?

Matt Dale: 0:58

It's something that's kind of near and dear to my heart. Um, I'm uh as you know, I've been consulting over the last year. Um, and one of my companies that I'm working with is an e-commerce company. And so we just got done with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays and all that fun stuff. And it really made me reflect on the importance of data, um, what we do with it, and all that kind of fun stuff. So I thought it would be fun today to have a little conversation about that, hopefully valuable for us as we converse and also for the audience too.

Charlotte Ward: 1:25

Yeah, yeah. It's a it's a topic that's near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons. One, I love support data. Two, I love data. Three, I work for a data company as a day job. Uh, and uh I love not just generating data, but finding the insights that only data can give you, you know, and I and I think that support produces so much data, even a pretty ordinary invert. I mean, no support team obviously is ordinary, but even a pretty kind of cookie-cutter support environment. Again, none of those exist. But even in those environments, they produce a lot of data, right? Um, but but I guess, you know, we can we can be really intentional about what we create, we can be intentional about what we're looking for in there, because it it exists. We're generating it all the time, right?

Matt Dale: 2:12

Yeah, and I think I think the fact that we're generating it is fine, but I think it's it's really what are we gonna do with that? Are we are we generating it and organizing it in the right way and structuring it? Uh I remember a conversation we had at a conference where you talked about data and structured data and and keeping things organized like that. Um, and I think that's just collecting it isn't good, isn't it isn't worth anything. It's it's what are you gonna do about it, right? And you hear companies say, well, we're a data-driven company or we're a data informed decision-making process. And and I I think in many cases that's an aspirational value rather than, hey, this is who we are actually and what we do. And I think our job, as I like to think about it in in support, is that we're the voice of the customer to the company and we're the voice of the company to the customer. And I think as we talk about what what is the customer's feeling, all that information that we have, we need to put it in a format that others in our organization can actually do something about it and and make it so that it's relevant in the context of of what we're talking about, make it translated into the language that matters for that particular person. Yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 3:18

Go ahead, then no, I was just gonna touch on exactly that. Yeah, it's super important that it's understandable by the rest of the business, isn't it? There is there is zero point in producing a a bunch of data points that have support-specific acronyms tied to them that that only you understand the deep contextual relationship between. Like you've got to simplify and you've got to translate for the business.

Matt Dale: 3:40

Well, I had one um quarterly business review with our leadership team uh a few years ago. And uh the CEO, there were some challenges, but the CEO was basically like, Look, I don't have time to go deep on this stuff. My my my experience is is uh an inch deep and a mile wide. Like, help me understand what I need to know here so we can make the right decisions. And the the perspective that was shared there was in the context, I was like, oh man, like I'm I'm frustrated by this. I've prepared this really great meal for you, all this information for you to digest and do something with. And it didn't meet the needs of that particular audience in that particular way. And so I think again, kind of being aware of how we're coming across, be aware that the things that matter to us aren't necessarily the things that are gonna matter to someone else unless we unless we prepare it in a way that ties it into what matters to them and and just leaving that data kind of, you know, oh, well, this is this is what this is what matters, like it's not it's not good enough to do that. Also, I think a big challenge that we have with support is that it's easy to take the things that we collect and keep them in isolation. So instead of saying, hey, let's let's tie this in with the data from our CRM or let's tie this in with the data from our usage that our that our product development team has. Yes. Um, or or if we're in e-commerce, let's tie this in with our sales and and and put these things in context. It's one thing like in e-commerce to say, well, we've had, you know, 30 people that have returned an item that was broken in shipment. If we don't tie that to, hey, we shipped 300 items or we shipped three million items, like those that that number doesn't matter without that context, and it may be a really big problem. Or it may be, hey, that's just a small percentage of what's actually going on out there, and that's really unacceptable for the business. And so again, being able to kind of think about that in the context of what's going on with the business is really important.

Charlotte Ward: 5:23

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The context is is a big part, and and knowing when to switch between, you know, representing that number one way or another is a big part of uh the translation that we just talked about. I I think you know, your your note of like, is 30 acceptable or not is a really interesting one because it might not be acceptable, you know, but but but as a low percentage, it might be. Well, what are the actual numbers and what what are what does this represent in terms of what we're trying to achieve as a business is super important. Uh, the other thing I would say is that sometimes this is this is like really back to basics, just think in terms of sometimes representing any number to the business, you have to pick the right way to do it. Um, you know, your 30 hours or your 0.1% can be read very different ways. Um, one metric that I like to make quite a lot of use of is a sort of um let's say it's a slightly uh customized version of customer occupancy, which is a traditional call center metric, but I use it because of um my team do such varied work, I have to be able to identify certain buckets and certain buckets kind of I consider to be customer work or not, essentially. It's a really good measure of how scalable and how healthy a team is. Um, whether you're in, you know, e-commerce shoe returns, which is always my go-to kind of simple support environment, um, or or a deeply complex managed service such as I'm leading now. Um but I represent customer occupancy most of the time as a percent. And, you know, I talk to the business about this 70 to 80% window is ideal, that gives us bandwidth for this, you know, functional development, personal improvement, team meetings, etc. We did once hit 96%, and I just put it on a chart as 96%. It was about a week later when I finally realized that's an hour and a half per support engineer where they're not with customers. And actually, that's a much more compelling number, saying one and a half hours where they're not dealing with customers, by the time they've done their one-to-one and a team meeting, that's it. There's no time for anything else. That's much more compelling. And so I think being able to talk to the business in the in, you know, using the right representation of those numbers is part of that translation. And and it makes it easier to hook into other parts of the business as well, as well, which I think is an important part of what you're saying.

Matt Dale: 7:47

Yeah, we we did uh at the e-commerce company, um, looking back at our Black Friday Cyber Monday this year compared to last year, um, we had the the sales numbers, we had the number of tickets that came in. One of the things that we were really focused on leading up to that though is how do we how do we reduce the volume that's coming in? Like on the support team, I like to joke, you know, we don't create the tickets, we solve them. And and I know you and I may have a different opinion that, because sometimes teams actually like I create a ticket on behalf of a customer. But what I mean by that is really we often don't have the the ability to to fix the root cause. You know, we're not the ones that actually building the product, we're not the ones that are actually, you know, my case in the warehouse fulfilling the product. Though we're relying on other teams to make business decisions, and and the culmination of all those business decisions is felt very acutely by our teams on the front lines. Any any bad decisions up upstream will cause problems with our team right now, and any good decisions will result in positive things. And so one of the things that we were looking at this Black Friday, Cyber Monday was not just how many sales, how many tickets, how quickly did we solve it, but we really really said, hey, how many, how many sales does it take to create a ticket, right? Like how many customers can we interact with before we have to create a ticket? And so last year, as we looked at that, we were we were dealing with about three and a half orders result in one ticket, which we have a high-touch product, there's some complexities, you know, your situation may vary, but but this year, as we went through that, over Friday through Tuesday, um, we went we went to 5.75 um orders per ticket. So that was a really big increase in our our team's ability, uh our company's ability rather, or our custom we made it easy for customers to to take advantage of the sales that we had. We had we had a really great, you know, the sales were way up, but our team was able to get a similar volume that we saw last year because we put a lot of work in up front and yeah, and the numbers that in the story that we were telling with that data really said, hey, are these levers that we're pulling, are they making a difference or not? And in this case, they really were. Um, and and again, that tells that story like we're talking about. How do you how do you look at the right thing, put it in the right context so that that the the people you're trying to talk to, in my case, the other members of the leadership team, you know, hey, great job marketing, great job fulfillment. We did what we needed to do, and that and that helped our customers.

Charlotte Ward: 10:03

You you said something really key there for me, which is that you put the work in up front. No, none of this happens, right, uh on the day you need it. And I I think that um that busy times of year are just the worst time, right? To try and answer questions that you should have answered, been able to answer before, right? I I think that's that's uh it's work in data collection, which is something I know we talked about at that conference you're mentioning, but but um data collection, data creation, thinking about what you are going to need, what you expect to be able to action from it and getting that all done ahead of the curve is I mean, that's that's a commitment, isn't it?

Matt Dale: 10:44

It's almost the dream too, because I think for me the worst feeling is hey, we got through our busy cycle and someone asks me a question, and I go, crap, like I didn't structure the data collection in that way, or I didn't think about answering that question. Had I done so, I might have been able to add a field as we're as we're going through the tickets, or add a resolution or contact reason, or or a tag that would have been helpful so that we could lasso those tickets and and then quantify them without having to do it by hand. And so so yeah, I think it's really important, you know, as we for those new leaders out here in in this new support role, I haven't done this before. Um, you you really want to think through how did how what what are we trying to collect? What are the questions that other teams could be asking? Because we're a great source for that, that the data that exists. What are they gonna want to know and how are we gonna want to kind of um collect that and and and relate that data to other things? Are there unique identifiers that we need to have in place? You know, how are we gonna say, you know, counting unique tickets or how are we gonna tie this into sessions in our product and things like that? And um yeah, so I think I think there's a a lot of work up front thinking about how do we, what do we want? And and and before we get to that busy season, you know, how are we gonna collect that? How are we gonna structure things? And I think the other aspect of that is really once we've done the work, once we've gone through that busy season, having a moment to reflect. Um my my leaders and I sat down uh at the e-commerce, you know, a week into it and went, okay, what went well? What do we need to tweak? What do we need to fix? And then as a as a company, uh company leadership sat down and and we brought the findings from our different teams and said, okay, here's what we want to do for next year, because you know, some of the stuff we can make a change tomorrow and and change how we're collecting it. Other stuff, it doesn't even show up until we're in that busy cycle. And so the odds of us remembering this, you know, nine months from now as we're preparing for the next one. Um that that's just not going to happen as easily as if we think about it right now, think about what we want to change and kind of go from there.

Charlotte Ward: 12:35

Yeah, yeah. And and I think, you know, you you mentioned something which is a big data point support, which is tags. And I mean, I we could do an episode on tags, and I say that with confidence because I've done at least six episodes on tagging in this podcast in the previous 240-something episodes. We've we've covered it quite a few times, and there's a lot of strong opinions out there about tags. Um but I think that the the point you made, which is an interesting one, which is making sure we're able to answer those, make making sure that we're structured enough in our approach to generating that data, whether it's tags or anything else, um, ahead of time, so that we can answer the questions that other teams are going to ask us, either before that big event or after that big event. And uh, you know, being prepped on either side is is is a win is a win, none, you know, in no two ways about it. But but um I guess my question to you, um, without making this a whole episode about tagging, is how do you know what they're going to ask? How do you know what data other teams need? And and and obviously, um, with reference to tagging, that this is pretty clear, like what what we're hoping for. We're hoping for some tag suggestions or or something, right? But how how do you know?

Matt Dale: 13:55

I think there's quite a lot of variability with tags. Obviously, you've had several conversations on the on the podcast about that. Um I think there's there's a couple things that I would do sort of out of the box. You know, again, as a consultant, I come in and I help a lot of different businesses. Um, and one of the first places I start with is and and and this is more ticket fields than tags because we can control the data that's coming in if we if we have drop-down fields with pre-selectable options. But I like to kind of think of it either two or three-axis method. Um, why did the customer, why are they contacting us? What was the what was the reason for contact? If you've got multiple products, a second, second you know, drop down would be what product are they using or what what area of the product are they in? And then the last one is resolution. Like, what do we need to do as a team to figure this out and to resolve the situation? In a software environment, it might be a bug, it might be shared knowledge that was available on the website, it was shared knowledge that wasn't available on the website, which may then lead us to say, hey, we should update the website or our knowledge base or something like that. But kind of thinking through what are the, like, why are our customers contacting us, what product, and then and then what do we do about it? Um so using that kind of as your your your framework, which I think is pretty universal, if you're not doing something kind of like this, um, you're not gonna be able to give that feedback to those product teams or or the the product developers or whatever it is, that's not gonna, that's not gonna be actionable for them because you're not segregating the data in the right way. Um on top of that, then I think really, really trying to understand what's going on with the business. So this time we had a tag in addition to those three axes in the in the fields, we had a specific tag that was for um the coupon code that our customers were trying to apply um in the in the sale. And it was cool because we would we would apply a business rule that said if the if this if this word or or I think we had cyber, we had discount, we had there three or four words that we used, but it would add that tag to the ticket. And then we had a view that was set up so that it would pull all the tickets that had that tag into it. And we actually had our marketing team helping us out. There, there was a very specific question that some of our customers were having about placing the order, applying it to their subscription. And we were able to take a chunk of our tickets and have non, not highly trained support people deal with these fairly basic issues while we're in the middle of a crisis and and and answering some really in-depth stuff. So we were able to kind of skills-based routing, if you want to, if you want to call it that, but but utilize other members of the company to get us through a tight period where they weren't very busy. They'd already done all their marketing things and they were able to help place the orders. And so that was a case where a tag was super helpful. And then we went back and have looked at that and said, okay, how many, how many tickets did we really solve that had that tag? How effective were these resources that we pulled from this other team and kind of go from there? So I think being creative and thinking about the needs of the business or thinking about the needs of your team, how can I use this information to to lasso this group of tickets, this group of interactions, and then do something with it, whether that's in the moment, like we did, or whether that's after the fact, where we're saying, okay, this whole thing happened. Now, now what do we do? We're gonna have a post-mortem or we're gonna figure out how to prevent you know future occurrences, deal with the root cause and stuff like that. So understanding where you're gonna what you're gonna do with it will kind of dictate what sort of tags you want.

Charlotte Ward: 17:03

Yeah, yeah. I I'm with you. I think that I think ticket fields are are super powerful for particularly that point of triage. And and you add you add an interesting one, which I haven't really used before, which is the ultimate like high-level resolution descriptor. But but the way I approach tagging in inverted quotes with with those drop-downs, um, which are effectively tags by another name, right? But um I have the the idea of which I think you said why what you know, what is the reason, the contact reason. Um, I I would say job to be done. I have job to be done as my first level tag, and underneath that um the challenge. So whether it is a bug or a performance issue, etc., etc., etc. Um that's super powerful for product, and it's super powerful for us longer term, but I haven't been capturing a really high-level statement of the resolution yet. I might consider adding that. The the other thing that I think we often miss about this kind of um data capture uh this really high level, this kind of um descriptor of of what the customer's doing is that I think that we don't call that voice of the customer. To me, I think that is voice of the customer because the customer isn't always talking to us in an interview. And in fact, if that's the only voice of the customer that you have, is your your pre-selected, you know, four conversations a month with your favorite customers, then that's not voice of the customer. Um, but but I I do see that kind of moment of triage as a really important um metric for any voice of the customer program, too.

Matt Dale: 18:42

And I think I think you're right that it's something that we often miss. Uh I I've worked at many companies where it's you know, the product team, oh, we've got our voice of the customer initiative, and we're gonna call these people, we're gonna do this thing. And it's I think that can be a helpful exercise, but I also I've pushed back on that in some cases when I've when I've been there because it's like we're already talking to the customer quite a bit. We have this data, maybe it's unstructured or maybe we're collecting it in the wrong way, but we have uh just a wealth of data about the customer, about their interactions, about their frustration and their pain point. Why aren't we why aren't we using this? And in some cases, that's that's on us as support leaders. We're not making it accessible and starting those conversations with leaders on the product side or on the marketing side or wherever whatever team happens to need that information. In other cases, it's it's because the company is not really thinking about that as a useful type of data. And so again, being able to speak their language, tying what we have back to the things that matter to them in a proactive way can then help them go, oh, this is this truly is part of the voice of the customer initiative, and this is something that we want to focus on.

Charlotte Ward: 19:46

I I completely agree. And I think back to a question I asked you earlier, which is you know, how do you know what those teams are going to need? Ask them, right? Actually walk up to your product people and say, what could I tell you that you can actually action. What format is best? How do you want it structured? What do you want to see out of these tens or hundreds or thousands of tickets that I'm getting every day or week or month? Right. There, there's there it is all in there. And if you can find different ways of extracting it so that it's actionable as soon as possible by another team, that's really powerful.

Matt Dale: 20:23

I would say on that note too, I've done that at several companies and they're like, oh, I don't know. And if you get that response, that's not an uncommon response. Don't feel like you've done something wrong. Yeah. I think that's the point where then you say, okay, well, here, let me show you some of the things that I have. Here's what we're collecting. Here's why we're collecting it. Here's how this might tie into what you're looking to do. And I found that that as this as the follow-up to the conversation where you kind of get a little shut down, then they suddenly go, Oh, that's really interesting. Well, let's let's tie that back to this over here. And then and then you have a dialogue instead of instead of you going, Well, they didn't, they didn't want anything, so I'm not going to do anything. I would just say, no, you have the data, you know some of the stuff that you think they're going to want. And if and if there's an event too where it's like, hey, this is a it's a big sale or it's a we had an outage and there was frustration. We had a new product launch. Think about the kind of things that you would want if you were a product person or a marketing person in the in that situation. Provide them with something knowing that it's not going to meet their needs, but you're doing kind of meeting them in the middle, and that's going to spark a conversation, which then will help you push the organization uh to use the data that your team has in a much better way.

Charlotte Ward: 21:26

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It has to begin with that conversation. I couldn't agree more. And and you are often going to get, I'm not sure. I don't, what can we do? What, what, what do tags now what? You know, it's kind of like you might get that from people who don't know your CRM inside out, right? Your your ticketing system in inside out. Uh and yeah, just saying, well, this is what we could do. And and and producing something. Put a graph in front of them and ask if it's helpful, you know. Yeah.

Matt Dale: 21:51

Yeah. And oftentimes that I was in one of the QBR meetings and we had a one of the executives like, hey, I want to see, I want to see this particular data organized in this way. He was concerned with by product, the it was kind of like bucketing the types of requests that got solved in certain periods of time. And I had all that data, but I wasn't presenting it in that way. And that was something that for him was very powerful. And so he said, Can I see it this way? And so the next one we had, I said, you know, I reached out to him on Slack ahead of time. Is this what you're looking for? Oh, that's perfect. And it ended up being a report that we really utilized quite a bit as an organization moving forward. And it's not one that I would have thought of on my own. Um, but it because we had that conversation, because I opened it up and said, Well, here's what I have. Let's let's let's go deeper. What would make it make more sense? How can I, how can I tie this back to something that matters or or whatever? Um, and that really helped.

Charlotte Ward: 22:40

So yeah, and I and I think, I think, um, I think to that point of like you have all the data, but how you slice and dice, it's really, really important, but also not fixed in stone, you know. I I would uh my graphs change every few months, you know.

Matt Dale: 22:55

Yeah, and if you're not looking at it, both your graphs and what you're collecting, like you should be you should be actively reviewing your data internally as a support team and as and with your rest of your leadership and the company, and then using that to go, oh, we need to be collecting it this way, or hey, these things that we tracked that were really important last year, we fixed that root cause and now we're moving on to something else. It's okay for it to change. And in fact, it should if you're if you're really being healthy because the businesses needs change all the time.

Charlotte Ward: 23:22

All the time, all the time. People come and go, and and actually what what I found is that I I never throw away a visualization or something, you know, I never trash it completely. If it's not any extra effort to keep producing that data or that chart, I'll keep it in, you know, uh like way down on the tabs in a spreadsheet somewhere because I know I'm gonna need it at some point again. And you'd be surprised how often going back to a visualization actually is quite useful. Well, this is how we used to look at it, and now what I've done because we've excluded this, you know, you know, those kind of things, or or looking at looking at it by month now rather than blah blah. You know, do you know it kind of it it helps you, I think it builds confidence it, you know, in you and your data in the rest of the business. And it makes you um much more articulate about your own data, I think. And you should be, you should be not only familiar with your data, but articulate about it as well, because you have to be able to sell it, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for joining me today, Matt. What an interesting conversation. Data's always interesting to me. So come back and we can maybe we'll have another tagging conversation. Maybe we should.

Matt Dale: 24:29

I think we should. I mean, I I enjoyed data too, and I love our our conversation. So thanks so much for having me today and and starting off this new year um with the podcast. I'm super excited to see where things go this year.

Charlotte Ward: 24:43

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