Customer-centric Businesses Need Support Ops By: Craig Stoss

01 Support Ops The Value of Support Operations Examples How are these applied in practice? Customer Needs How do we meet them? 02 03

CUSTOMER NEEDS 01 How do we know what they are?

No content

1. Customers don’t always know what they want

1. Customers don’t always know what they want 2. But they do know what the struggle with

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER NEEDS IS VITAL TO PROVIDE QUALITY CX But how do we do this if they don’t know what they want?

Use the Customer as the Signal Instead of asking them what they want, infer it from what they tell already do or say

SUPPORT OPERATIONS 02 The team that uses Support Data to improve other teams

- Mathew Patterson, HelpScout “The Support Operations team is responsible for helping a company’s support team be more productive, work more effectively, and deliver better service to their customers. The primary job ... is to create an environment for the support team in which they can do their best work and not be distracted or delayed by problems with tooling, processes, or logistics. … Support Operations team works with … the support team themselves, customer service leaders, and senior company management.”

- Mathew Patterson, HelpScout - Edited by Craig Stoss “The Support Operations team is responsible for helping a company’s support team be more productive, work more effectively, and deliver better service to their customers. The primary job ... is to create an environment for the support team in which they can do their best work and not be distracted or delayed by problems with tooling, processes, or logistics. … Support Operations team works with … the support team themselves, customer service leaders, and senior company management.”

Value of Support Ops Internal ● Providing higher context ● Frictionless support ● Better products ● Increased automation and proactivity External ● Guide customers ● Help them before they even know they need it ● Offer customized experiences ● Increase NPS Customer Support is a Value Center and Support Operations unleashes that value

Service ● Support Channels ● First Response ● Handle Time ● CSAT ● Categorization Value ● Proactive ● Preventative ● Real-time ● Supportability ● Coaching ● Trending Service vs Value

Adding Context

Spread the Value

Support Ops in Practice 03 Driving value with your existing data and processes

Support Operations Tooling

Start with Low Investment Who? ○ Career path for a Senior Agent ○ Existing Leader ○ In-house data team When? ○ Now! What? ○ Select one or more Support Ops use cases ○ Research and recommend improvements ○ Execute Change ○ Measure Impact Why? ○ To realize the ROI of a Support Ops Initiative

The Data to Improve is Likely Already Available In SaaS and IoT especially, data is abundant, but not utilized

Questions to Answer Today ○ What widget causes the most support contacts? ○ What factors correlate to ticket escalation? ○ Which performance factors do your customers value most from your service? ○ What in your tech stack integrates to improve your support value? ○ What ticket types costs the most to support? ○ Where are your customer, or your support agents, wasting clicks?

Basic First Steps 1. Research ○ Does the data it exist today? ○ Who owns the data? ○ Interview/Shadow (Customers or Agents) 2. Gather ○ Google Sheets ○ Looker 3. Cross reference ○ Customer size/age/spend/vertical ○ Product area ○ Cost or Impact 4. Analyze, trend, and explain 5. Recommend change

A Couple Notes ● Support Ops isn’t only about data ● As you scale, tools can take over much of the manual actions ● Don’t get caught up in the title: ○ Support Operations is any task that improves your company using support data

Customer Centric Businesses Require Dedicated People to Improving Support Value Across the Business Those Dedicated People are Support Operations

@Craig Stoss Contact Me @StossInSupport https://www.linkedin.com/in/cstoss/ https://Stoss.ca cstoss@gmail.com