Beyond the Queue: Inside Customer Support

Jordan Pedraza, VP of Global Support at Handshake, talks about how to improve DEI in customer support organizations and how support leaders can be more inclusive. She shares the amazing work she's been doing on this front at Handshake over the last 5 years, including specific tactics she's implemented across hiring, onboarding, career development, policy, and customer experience.

Mo McKibbin, Head of Customer Success at Moxion, explains the concept of high-velocity customer success and how the right mix of human-led and and digital-led processes can help CX teams offer a more personalized experience with fewer resources.

Neil Smith, Senior Director of Support at Iterable, shares how he's built an effective, efficient, and inclusive interview process that helps him hire a lot of amazing people, fast.

Ben Gardner, Director of Support at Drift, shares his 5-step process for expanding support from a 9-5 model to a 24/7, “follow the sun” model.

Pam Dodrill, Vice President of Customer Support and Success at Zapier, dives into the four tenants that help her team stay weird and authentic at work and how that helps them maintain a high CSAT, high employee engagement scores, and low attrition rates.

Antonio King, Head of Support at Veho, shares how he's scaling the shipping company's rapidly-growing support team through a combination of aggressive hiring and establishing key support functions and operations. In this episode, Antonio discusses how he finds and hires great people at scale, which support operations he's focusing on first, and how he approaches everything with transparency.

Ashley Sachs, Director of Support and Success at Whereby, shares how she balances agent growth with relentless productivity. With a little inspiration from Ted Lasso, Ashley reveals how she manages that delicate balance, how she helps agents discover their “spark,” and how a culture of growth empowers her team to crush their KPIs.

Tony Won, Head of Customer Experience at TruPlay Games, shares what he thinks support leaders often get wrong about agent training - and how to fix it. Tony has worked in the video game industry for over a decade, doing everything from UI/UX design and music composition to leading customer support and experience teams (including building a few from scratch). In this week's episode, Tony shares his best tips and tricks for how to set actionable goals and KPIs, how to teach for actual learning instead of teaching to a test, and how to better involve your agents in the creation of training materials.

David Kohl, Director of Support at Shopify, shares how he and his team use deep customer understanding to drive merchant growth. In his 25+ years working in customer support (with a brief foray into sales), David has supported many different types of customers, in several different industries. Everything from highly technical customers at Hewlett Packard to small business merchants at Shopify. In that time, he's learned a thing or two about how to deeply understand customers and adapt support operations to fit their specific needs (at scale). In this episode, David shares: 1. The first three things he does to deeply understand customers when he starts in a new role 2. How he adapts support operations to fit the needs of different customer types 3. How he motivates his team 4. How he measures his team's performance (and how those metrics change depending on the customer type)

Angela Raiford, Director of Community Happiness at Patreon, talks about how she uses data and segmentation to support over 7 million users (across B2B and B2C) — with a 50-person team. Patreon was one of the first companies in the rapidly growing creator membership space. As a support leader there for over 6 years, Angela has pioneered several innovative strategies for: 1. Supporting a diverse user base (creators, fans of those creators, and other patrons) 2. Using data to efficiently deploy team resources between B2B and B2C customers In this episode, Angela shares how she identifies the different support needs of Patreon's B2B and B2C customers, segments her team to better serve each group, and monitors and manages the performance of her agents.

James Baldwin, Director of User Success and Support at Change.org, talks about how he handles unpredictable spikes in ticket volume. James has a ton of experience with this topic because Change.org's ticket volume is largely tied to world events, which means he can't always predict when spikes will happen, how big they'll be, or how long they'll last. In this episode, James shares how he plans ahead for these spikes, what's included in the plan, and how he keeps his team motivated and energized when ticket volume skyrockets.

Eric Broulette, Director of Global Support at WP Engine, shares his best practices for building and maintaining a relationship between the customer support and product teams. Eric credits this strong relationship at WP Engine as one of the key reasons his team's support interactions decreased by 5% last year, despite the company's customer base growing by 20%. And this year, his team is on pace to decrease volume even more. In this episode, Eric shares how he builds a great relationship with product, why that collaboration is so important, and what data his team uses to act as the voice of their customers.

Abby Armada, Customer Support Manager at Flickr, shares why she thinks support leaders should hire agents with unconventional resumes. Abby's team is full of unconventional support heroes, including former teachers, a bank teller, photographers, retail workers, a geologist, and more. Even Abby herself comes from a TV and film costume design background. In this episode, Abby shares how this diversity has turned Flickr's support team into a powerhouse, what unconventional resumes she looks for when she hires, and how she develops each agent into a support rockstar.

Kenji Hayward, Head of Customer Support at Front, shares his step-by-step process for getting customer support a seat at the “adults table.” In this episode, Kenji talks about how to identify your company's version of the “adults table,” why it's important for support to be a part of those high-level conversations, and proactive ways to make sure support is a valued (and well-resourced) partner.

Tom Ronen, Head of Customer Success at monday.com, shares why customer support is the best place to launch or pivot your career in the tech/SaaS space. He talks about which support skills are most transferable to other tech roles, how support professionals can sharpen those skills on the job, and why CX leaders should encourage their agents to diversify their skills - even if it means they leave support.

Stacy Justino, Director of Customer Happiness at Wistia, shares her 5-step process for launching support for a new feature or product. After 10+ years in customer support and many product launches, Stacy's got it down to a science.

Matt Dale, Vice President of Customer Support at Illuminate Education, regularly loans his support agents to other departments during the company's slow season. In this episode, Matt shares how the cross-training benefits employees, customers, and the company as a whole.

Joelle Waksman, Head of CX at Biteable (and formerly of Calendly and Stella Connect), shares how she fosters a fun work environment, motivates her team with healthy competition, and creates clear career pathways for her agents.

In this episode, Oleg Krasnov, Head of Support Excellence at Miro, talks about what support excellence is, how he designed and advocated for this new role, and how it's streamlining Miro's support process during a critical time of rapid growth.

In this episode, Matt Gilston, the director of customer support at SevenRooms, talks about how he uses his teaching degree and youth sports coaching experience to lead an all-star support team and empower his agents to coach SevenRooms customers as product experts.

What do you do when ticket volume skyrockets from 2,000 to 12,000 nearly overnight? In this episode, Susana de Sousa, Senior Manager of Customer Support at Loom, shares how she and her six-person support team responded to Loom's massive growth last year. Hint: It involves radical transparency, empathy, and strategic hiring.

Josh LaMarche, Director of Customer Support at Gong, is a rare breed of support leader. He's worked in the field for 20+ years, while avoiding burnout and maintaining a passion for celebrating his team and customers. In this episode, Josh shares his advice for up-and-coming support leaders, along with his secrets to building a healthy culture and getting off on the right foot at a new company (especially during COVID).

Welcome to Beyond the Queue, a brand new podcast by Stonly that looks at the human side of customer support leadership.