77: Forecasting in Support with Mike Redbord

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 77 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is forecasting, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Mike Redboard. So, Mike, the uh topic for this week is forecasting. We are very numbers driven and we know that there's a huge amount of data in a support team.

Mike Redbord: 0:44

So, this is a topic that oddly is sort of close to my heart because I think one of the most valuable functions that the ultimate leader of support can serve is to both benefit their team and their customers by like kind of solving, quote unquote, solving the math problem that is forecasting. When you don't solve it, bad things happen. You run really long queue times and your customers are upset and your team's upset and your boss is upset too. When you maybe solve it in the opposite direction, you have people sitting around on their hands and there's not enough work to go around, and that's also bad, right? So kind of finding that really fine grain uh of balance in the forecast and the budget and then resourcing and aligning it all is actually really, really important to team health and to customer health. The way to think about this at its core is it's sort of an economics problem. It's just supply and demand. Your customers have a certain amount of demand for help, and you have a certain amount of supply of help you can get. I think one of the keys for support leaders in here to get this right and serve their team and serve their customers is to understand that supply and demand equation in a really, really quantified way. And this is going to involve a spreadsheet. This is going to involve a little bit of math, and you're going to have to do it in order to serve everybody better.

Charlotte Ward: 1:50

So, in terms of that spreadsheet, then it's something that I see come up quite often is people go looking for a spreadsheet that they can lift from another support organization and use. How specific to the business do you think that spreadsheet needs to be?

Mike Redbord: 2:05

I think that the first version of this, like baby's first, you know, forecasting, budgeting, or resourcing spreadsheet, uh is 101. Yeah, 101 is like not that specific. In a given month or quarter or week, you've got, you know, number of customers that you're gonna have. And that should come from your finance team or your sales team. It's a good opportunity to have a conversation with those guys about their forecast. This month, we're gonna have X number of customers. And then you can look at your own numbers and say, on average, how often do our customers need help? How often do they contact us? And then for each case that you get, how long does that take on average? Look at your team and say, all right, how many cases actually get done in a day? And kind of back it out from the reality, just kind of look at the behaviors that are happening on the team and ease your way into it and say, oh, it takes us 35 minutes to do a case. Whatever the number is, is what it is. That's your reality. So, okay, we've got 500 customers. Each contact you, you know, 2.5 times a month, then they each case is going to take a certain amount of time. Great. Now you have a supply number on one side of this equation that is measured in you know minutes. That's how much your customers actually want from you. Your job is to give your customers what they need, right? And then think about how many actual working hours you have that your team can really push towards your customers.

Charlotte Ward: 3:16

I think I think it's really interesting there that the way you calculate the demand is based on reality, right? And that's important.

Mike Redbord: 3:24

Yeah, and I think that number of how long, you know, how many minutes it takes us to do a case, that's a number that a lot of people care about because it has a huge influence on this whole math problem, right? If you take five percent less time to do a case, then you need five percent less people, right? Or you can serve five percent more customers. Like it's a lot of leverage in there. And I think when support leaders look at that number, they tend to get embarrassed. The emotion is, oh my gosh, like I can do a ticket faster or something like that. And they they feel they feel an element of shame or oh, I should performance manage my team better. When finance people look at that number, they get excited. They say, Oh, if we can make it less, wouldn't that be useful? And so there's a there's a really interesting handshake here between support and finance where the support folks can say, okay, if we had this tool or if we improved our knowledge base, we could actually drive that number down. And it enables a support person to make a deal with the finance person. And that deal can involve new tools, new technology, uh, sometimes even new hires. It's a really cool dynamic.

Charlotte Ward: 4:24

Uh you just brought back so much past embarrassments over how long tickets actually take to solve. We both have a long tenure in support. We both know that no two tickets are equal. I've worked in organizations on the front line as an agent myself. I've had 20 plus tickets a day, and then I've done one ticket a day in a different organization. So no two tickets are created equal. And particularly in one company I was with, where there was a lot of acquisitions and a lot of different products were brought together. It's a very, very difficult conversation. And I remember where tickets were taking more than a day, and you know, another arm of the support team were solving 10 plus a day or whatever. And it's there is that cringe that you feel, that embarrassment that you feel, particularly in bigger organizations, to say actually it does take us this long. Yeah, that trade-off you have to make between being realistic about the numbers and but being and being honest, but actually standing your ground as well and saying it it genuinely takes this long.

Mike Redbord: 5:22

I remember that first conversation I had about that number with my CEO. It was a revelation for him. He was like, Are you wait a minute? It takes like 40 minutes to do one of these things? He's like, Well, when I call our support team, it gets done in like five minutes. I'm like, you're the CEO, you know, like, and you also, you know, you don't maybe have the most complicated issues sometimes. I do think something you said is really critical then for support leaders to stand their ground on it and not let the knowledge that it could be better sabotage their own success in terms of standing up for their team and their customer and saying, no, this is reality and we've studied it empirically and we're gonna make it better, but just this is where we are. And I think that's really, really important, all the way up to the CEO. And actually, the more the CEO knows how long it takes to do a ticket, the more the CEO will be like, we gotta have fewer tickets. What do these product people do all day? Right. And then the last point that I'll add is you put that model together. Uh, what you need to do is you need to now get on the treadmill of running this thing. And every week or every month, you need to take a look. How accurate was it? Right. And the answer will probably be not very accurate at the beginning because something changed. And then you start to edit the model, and over time it becomes a tool that uh you know you start to know really well, and it gets really, really accurate after a couple of years. But the thing is, it takes time and you need to start that process as early as possible.

Charlotte Ward: 6:41

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