37: Looking Beyond the Numbers with Natalie Ruhl

Charlotte Ward: 0:14

Hello and welcome to episode 37 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is Looking Beyond the Numbers. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back my very good friend Natalie Rule. I've kind of called this topic Looking Beyond the Numbers. So to me, it's intriguing, isn't it? Looking beyond the numbers. And by that I mean looking at the stories behind the numbers, looking at the stories that you're trying to tell, or looking at the stories that the numbers are telling you and how you interpret those and how you react to those and how you translate those.

Natalie Ruhl: 1:04

I guess to give a bit of context, the way that we work currently is in a very, very small setup. So we have millions of users, but we have a very small team. So the numbers for me really are oftentimes in the in the first place a way to kind of assess how are we doing volume versus people? What is the kind of like resource and and power that we currently have in order to like take on extra work or tackle that project that's been lying there for a while that never really found uh its way. But yeah, that that's kind of like what we look at first. If we look beyond the numbers, one thing that we have is a point person program, that's what it's called. That means that every agent in my team also is up to like a 30% part of a product team that kind of like deals with a certain topic. So that can be anything from like a transactions-based thing where you know we have someone that mostly looks after like transactional and and and checkout issues when they are working with that same kind of like department uh on the product side to kind of like talk about current issues, talk about things here or there. So when I look beyond the numbers, I also look at like how successful has this relationship been, you know, how is that how is that going? How um what kind of things have they been driving and and and how how has that kind of impacted the team, maybe even impacted the tickets? And how is that helping them to grow? How do you quantify that or can you quantify that? So there's different ways of quantifying that. So when some we have a like a framework that we use for kind of suggesting a project, it's it's a very basic kind of thing. You quickly stay like make a problem statement uh of what it is that you want to do, or and then you quickly outline why you think this is worth your time or like whoever else is involved's time, looking at like who would you need or what would you need in order to like tackle this? What do you think the impact is on this? And then that doesn't always mean oh, if we do this, then we'll get like so and so many thousand less tickets, or this is going to be massively impactful on CSAT, but it can often also um be a measurement on like how many people have clicked this article, how how do customers um interact with it and how do they like it? And so for me, as we are such a small team, giving people the opportunity to not always be stuck in their seat doing tickets, but also owning these relationships with with teams that work very differently um has been has been super super helpful. And for that, I don't really necessarily look so much at the numbers, but at the impact that someone is having. So we have a um retrospective, so to speak, with the person and with them uh in in their respective product team and the product managers on that side, and we kind of look at like how successful is this thing? What is what is it doing? Who is it helping? Is it answering the questions that product has? Is it answering the questions that um the customers have or that maybe the customer service team has? You know, these are not always things where I think there is an a really easy kind of like metric to be measured. Success for me in these cases also is like how did someone see this project through? How did they interact with like different stakeholders? Did they, you know, manage expectations of people well? Did they see it through to the end? Did they maybe also stop it halfway because it wasn't at all what we thought it would be? You know, were they reliable? So there's a lot for me about other kind of qualities, I want to say, in in like someone on my team as well, that I try to look at through these things. So I try and look beyond the pure ticket metrics and and these things in order to also understand what someone is about, because to me they can be as successful in having solved another problem that in line will mean a certain group of customers won't have a certain problem anymore or whatsoever. That to me is equally as successful as someone who smashes out 150 tickets an hour every day, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 5:59

What you were just saying there about the qualitative side, you know, um you kind of go through layers, don't you? You talk about obviously our first uh our first line of numbers is our ticket metrics and our CSAT and those things. But then in that extra time that you give your team members to go and explore some of those other projects, it's kind of tempting to still try and find data. Yeah, to still try and find metrics. That's our natural happy place, isn't it? Uh, in support, it's kind of I've got some numbers to prove this worked. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash thirty-seven for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.