Unlock the secrets to mastering technical support as we, Robert Cabral and I, guide you through the art of enlisting engineering support for complex inquiries. You'll discover how data-driven strategies can transform your support processes, leading to a drastic reduction in ticket escalations. Robert shares his expertise on creating a robust taxonomy for categorizing issues, ensuring clarity and efficiency in resolving them. We promise you'll leave with actionable insights into improving collaboration between support and engineering—essential knowledge for anyone navigating the SaaS landscape of platforms like DataCamp. Robert and I also delve into the power of empathy and continuous improvement in fostering a proactive support environment. By embedding support team members within engineering, we’ve not only improved communication but also decreased escalations from 40% to under 10%. Our conversation sheds light on the importance of strategic conversations, empathy-building, and securing engineering buy-in. Join us as we unravel the gradual journey of transforming support teams with small wins and iterative progress—your roadmap to a more efficient, less reactive customer service experience.
277: Reducing Escalations Through Strategic Engineering Partnerships; with Robert Cabral
About this episode
Transcript
Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to Episode 277 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward Today. Welcome Robert Cabral, to talk about enlisting the help of engineering in your support tickets. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, robert Cabral. Robert, it's lovely to have you guesting with me, coming on for a chat for the first time. Nice to meet you properly in this forum. I know we've had a couple of chats before we go into the recording today, but thank you for joining me and I'm very excited about today's topic. But first would you please introduce yourself for our listeners.
Robert Cabral: 0:57
Sure, well, thanks for having me, charlotte, pleasure to be here. My name is Robert, I'm from New York and I've been in the customer support industry for over a decade, leading teams for about 10 years as well, and the industry that I've primarily been in has been educational technology, but I've also worked in a few other industries, and lots of my career has been about optimizing processes, building teams, scaling teams and hoping to touch on that a little bit today.
Charlotte Ward: 1:29
Awesome, awesome, very cool, very cool. So we've had a couple of chats about topics, and I know we've got another one that we're thinking of lining up in the near future, I hope. But today we're talking about escalations, aren't we? By which we mean how we move a question or a problem from inside support to elsewhere in the business, and typically that would be engineering, right, sometimes product, but particularly engineering when we need, in this technical kind of support environment that you and I are in, when we need technical help from someone who knows the code from the inside, I guess would be the way I would put it.
Charlotte Ward: 2:05
Um, so let's talk about, uh, the landscape, because not everyone is going to have this kind of environment where they need to access those deeper skills. I mean typically for maybe a more b2c environment or,