72: Support Contributing to Revenue with Mo McKibbin

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 72 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is support contributing to revenue. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I would like to welcome to the podcast today for the first time, Mo McKibben. Mo, would you like to introduce yourself?

Mo McKibbin: 0:40

Yes, of course. My name is Mo McKibben as uh as introed, and um, I am currently head of customer experience at Wrightback and then formerly led an initiative called support-driven growth at Help Scout, which is a help desk software.

Charlotte Ward: 0:55

Thanks, Mo. Great pleasure to have you. And you've joined me on the perfect week for a topic that I know is very dear to your heart. Support contributing to revenue. I wonder if we can start at the beginning of that journey and thinking about where where do we begin?

Mo McKibbin: 1:10

You know, I hear time and time again about companies that want to invest in customer service, want to invest in customer experience, but nobody really knows what investment that takes. Um, so a statistic that I ran across recently that was really eye-opening was that 80% of companies believe that they deliver super customer experiences. And only 8% of customers think they receive super customer experiences. Wow.

Charlotte Ward: 1:49

So that so what's the difference? Like, like what I know the difference is 72%. I can do the math. But what does that mean? Is it that they're talking about a different thing?

Mo McKibbin: 2:03

I I do think that customers have a lot of really high demands. So I really break it down into seven different tenants. So I think of it as helpfulness. Do you actually solve their problem? Expertise, do you know what you're talking about? Efficiency, do you help people as quickly as they want to be helped? Accessibility, can you help people the way they want to be helped? Positivity, can you make the interaction as positive as possible? And proactivity, can you anticipate needs before they arise? Most people, when they think of what makes excellent customer support, they focus on positivity and efficiency. And that eliminates a lot of the other qualities that make a customer feel truly taken care of. And so I think that that's probably where the delivery gap lies. The problem is that all of these things take incredible investments in resources that companies do not allocate to customer support because the perception of customer support is that it is a cost center. But what is ironic about that is that when you treat customer support like a cost center, it becomes one. There's been statistics upon statistics of companies having like five times more revenue or better retention rates that invest in customer experience than the ones that don't. So those are the 8% that are delivering excellent customer experiences that get customers that stick around long term and spend a lot of money with them. And it all comes from investing in customer support.

Charlotte Ward: 3:42

If we think about how we persuade the people who hold purse strings to make that investment, it's still a journey you have to take people on, isn't it, internally?

Mo McKibbin: 3:52

It absolutely is. I was really, really lucky. Uh I had a I had a playground at Help Scout. We already had a customer-centric company. We had only like one little step to becoming a more revenue-connected support team, really experimenting with this idea of proactivity. The very first thing that you should probably do is create a customer journey. When I think about crafting a customer journey, like I think about answering three questions. What product touch points get my customers to buy? What engagement touch points lead customers to buy and or expand? And what customer segments are the most valuable? And how do they behave? This is the very origins of when we started uh connecting support to revenue. I'm manually tracked in a spreadsheet by looking up lists in HubSpot. So like I created this giant spreadsheet of all of the different channels that we have and ways that we engage with customers and measured how many customers were participating in those channels, how those channels correlated to a customer becoming a paying customer. And we found some like really crazy correlations. Like we have 70% of the customers that engage with us on chat became paying customers. So like, and it totally makes sense too when you think about it, because you're like, oh, this is somebody who it's like they have a problem and you're gonna fix it like right in the moment.

Charlotte Ward: 5:22

I think what's really interesting here is listening to you describe how this really was cobbled together in spreadsheet. Yes, you know. I think people kind of expect a magic bullet somehow to get going on that they expect the tools to be there, and there is no magic answer to this. Yes.

Mo McKibbin: 5:39

Essentially, once I cobbled that spreadsheet, then the resources started coming in. We had like a bump in our salaries, we saw a lift in the amount of resources that were allocated to the support team, but we started measuring the way we interacted with customers the exact same way sales measured their interactions that led to closing customers. And we actually ended up seeing like really positive correlations between support engagement and accounts not churning and also expanding. You know, many times when we measure support KPIs, we we think of them as happiness ratings and we think of them as response time, reply time. We don't look at engagement to retention. When you start drawing that line from there, which you might have to do manually, it's absolutely worth it because then suddenly the budget gets higher. Um, so even though it's it sucks, it's totally worth it in the end.

Charlotte Ward: 6:42

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