Identifying Customer Centricity Across Companies

If I asked you how you support your customer, you are likely to respond with a list of channels: Email, Chat, Phone etc. In this presentation I argue those are just tools to be used appropriately. As support professionals we need to Support our customers, contextually where they are, using the medium they prefer.

This presentation takes you across 3 companies of different profiles outlining how they do (or do not do) customer centric support and gives food for thought on your you can achieve the same outcomes.

Transcript

2. What is Customer Centricity in Support? Supporting your Customer contextually where they are using the medium they prefer
3. Many Approaches • None • Self-help • Embedded Support • Predictive Analytics • Guided Products, Prompts, Errors etc. • Proactive Support
4. Company 1 • ~6000 employees • ~600 in Support across ~5 product lines • Highly Technical Product • B2B • On-Prem, some SaaS, IoT
5. Company 1 - Being Proactive • "Samurai" Tool ◦ Slices up customer logging/configuration files to find patterns ◦ Don't just analyze 1 issue, look for common known issues • Predicting Escalated Tickets ◦ Identified 20 key indicators that correlate to a ticket being escalated ◦ Use that information to flag tickets to reps that may need more TLC
6. Company 2 • 120 Employees • 10 in Support • B2B and B2C • SaaS • Freemium Product and Enterprise Solution • Mostly Non-technical Product
7. Company 2 - Providing Useful Content • Knowledge Centered Support ◦ 90% attachment rate ◦ Video walkthroughs on 30% of written content • And not much else…. ◦ Why?
8. Company 3 • 90 Employees • 7 in Support • GovTech • SaaS • Completely Non-technical
9. Company 3 - Customer Experience is #1 • Proactive Ticket Deflection ◦ Top 20 known cases where customer may not be successful fully automated ◦ Proactively reached out via Zendesk API ◦ 98% in reduction in calls of that type • Knowledge Centered Support ◦ 70% attachment rate • Guides Everywhere ◦ In product guidance • Data analytics ◦ Used tooling to capture information about what users were doing
10. How to seek out Customer Centricity • Interview questions: ◦ How do you support your customers? ◦ How free are your support agents to make decisions that benefit the customer? ◦ What cross-functional relationships/meetings exist today to drive customer centric initiatives? ◦ Is any part of your product roadmap dedicated to internal improvement projects? • Internal Actions ◦ Get management buy-in for these initiatives ◦ Must be driven cross-functionally ◦ Progress, not perfection ◦ Where are your customers? ◦ What data do you have? ◦ Most valuable low hanging fruit
11. Questions & Discussion