Elevate Support Podcast

We're back with Val Liberty from Balsamic, talking about having interactions with hard customers. You know...those people you can never please. One way to combat the burnout of dealing with terrible customers over and over, Balsamiq has created a culture of trust and boundaries in their employees to empower them even in the worst of circumstances. It's worth a listen just to hear how they de-escalate and diffuse and send people off with a smile.

Sarah has a great conversation with Stephanie Lundberg from Abstract about the opportunities in the customer experience world. There are helpful insights about growth from support to product. Stephanie shares her own experience exploring the two paths of support, the leadership, and technical side, and speaks of the importance of all teams working together in a company.

Sarah sits down with Carter Gibson, an internal community manager at Google. They discuss what a community manager does, the importance of a strong community in a company, and fostering a strong culture. The two have a wonderful conversation about cultivating a strong community with consistency and transparency at the largest tech company in the world.

Sarah speaks with Mike from Trello about having difficult conversations with customers. The two chat about the fine line between customer advocacy and company loyalty. Mike provides insight on dealing with pushback, building up trust with customers and your team, and understanding the importance of team policies, especially with larger teams.

Sarah sits down to talk with Lance Conzett from Uber. The two discuss customer support as a great resource to learn how the customers interact with a company's product and services and how that translates to working in all departments. Lance shares excellent stories from going through a massive merger that Uber went through in 2020.

Sarah speaks with Matt Patterson from Help Scout about making customer support better for not only the customer but also for the support specialists. Matt and Sarah discuss customer-centric mindsets for companies and their products. The two share thoughts on building the right team with effective recruiting and avoiding the pitfalls of building a team.

Sarah speaks with Natalie from Plaid about personal and professional growth, going from an independent contributor to a manager. Natalie is building a consumer-facing team at a new company and shares some insights on the trajectory of building a career in support, looking to future projects at a company, and the importance of knowing your team and their goals.

You know Wistia, right? We love Wistia. They haven't even paid us to say this, in fact WE pay THEM to be friends. That kind of raving loyalty from customers comes from having a healthy relationship with those customers, and we all know healthy relationships have firm boundaries. But what does that look like? What does it mean to set boundaries for customer support? What's that weird sound, by the way? Yeah, sorry, audio quirks are weird in this episode, but it's a great conversation you can use to set your own boundaries for your own CX teams.

We can't tell you how needed this talk with Val from Balsamiq was. Uplifting, funny, positive, empathetic - all those things we all need in one big conversation about life, careers in CX, and bad customers. We had so much to say it turned into a 2-part episode! Let's start with talking about finding your peace at work, even if you hate it.

What is customer success? I have no idea. Too many companies use the term for too many things, and most of them are doing it wrong. Our dear friend Rick at Linode is actually doing it right by defining clearly the structure of customer success for their team and refining it to better serve their customers. Sounds easy, right? Hmmmmm, is it?

How are you doing? What's going on in your world? Do you need to talk about it? Are you out of toilet paper yet, and can you believe that's a valid question? Ryan Klausner can't believe it either, but his varied career in customer support over the years has lent him all the wisdom and experience needed to help guide people through times of weird crisis. We're so glad he's such a supportive part of our community and that he has really embodied those peer-to-peer leadership goals we've built the Elevate community on.

This is a tale of 80's body swapping comedies, and also a good reminder that most of us use humor as a crutch when we are going through the most difficult of times. Colin has cabin fever and Sarah has an anxiety attack, and here we are just talking about it on the internet.

Remember our good friend, Josh Ramsey? You've probably seen him on stage a few times at Elevate, and maybe you joined him as he lead our group meditation? If you need a bit of a brain rest, Josh is your guy. Lean in while he talks about managing with compassion, our responsibility to our IC's, and how to get invested in people's personal lives without being creepy.

Deep breaths, y'all. What a time to be alive. Don't you wish you had a mentor or coach who you could vent to and process with? That's why we invited Jen Dary on to talk about what managers can be doing to help their teams through troubling times. We just love Jen Dary. We know you will, too. Be sure to check out her One-On-One packs (https://shop.beplucky.com/) and her workshops and training courses for new managers at BePlucky.com.

We did not expect the world to catch on fire in March, 2020, but here we are. This episode is all about working from home, you know, what people are talking a lot about these days. But there's also info about our new professional membership association, launching May 2020!

Being a manager takes skills, but managing a customer support or experience team requires a whole other world of skills that it's very hard to find training on. Lindsay Konsko of Nerdwallet is the expert at managing people-focused teams, and she joined us to share some of that elusive wisdom about building a great management structure that we're all so eager to hear. You can check out more of her writing on support management (and even hire her to consult!) over at http://lindsaycanhelp.com.

Today we're hanging out with Antonio King, a superstar in the world of e-commerce customer experience. He agrees with our long-standing belief that CSAT is dead, but what's going to replace it? What should we be measuring instead? Let's find out, together.

First things first - Skype updated and everything is ruined. Colin and Sarah riff a bit on why you shouldn't sneak up on your customers with goofy child-like updates, then they're joined by Heroku's Senior Manager of Technical Support, the one and only Jon McCartie. Jon has a lot of experience building sustainable remote teams and he'll be speaking more about what makes teams grow, thrive, or fail at our spring support summit in Philadelphia!

Spoiler alert: Episode 9 was recorded right after 4th of July, which is why we are annoyed with having a holiday on a Tuesday. Today we're chatting with our old friend, Linode's Rick Myers! Linode offers cloud hosting for Linux, which is super brainy and way above our pay grade. Rick runs their support team, and he shared a lot of insight into their hiring process, what it's like doing support for a highly technical customer, and he gave us a breakdown of their newly minted internal training program for their customer support team. Rick is a past Elevate Summit speaker, and he's promised to join us again for our spring event in 2018. HE PROMISED!

This week we're joined by one of our past (and future!) Elevate Summit speakers, Ben MacAskill of SmugMug. Ben tells his story of going from researching cancer cures in a bio lab to handling support for a growing, bootstrapped startup. We also talk a lot about hiring, and how company culture influences team dynamics, and the pros and cons of running an entirely remote support team. We were so excited to catch up with Ben that you'll hear four voices this episode (Ben, Mike from Trello, Colin from Pingboard, and Sarah from CoSupport), and high fives to our editor Jonathan for splicing out all the overtalk! PS, the episodes of Reply All that Ben references are Episodes 71 & 77!

Today Colin and Sarah are chatting with the awesome Eric Broulette of Hudl fame! We're obsessed with Hudl's story of massive bootstrapped growth, and Eric shared a lot of behind the scenes of their bustling Lincoln, Nebraska operation. Keep listening to the end to hear the astonishing support volume Hudl support handles daily - you might need a Zantac (or a sheet cake).

Sarah sits down with Derek Homann to talk about his career in support, growing teams at massive scale, and what made him decide to start his own support-focused product, Median! Check out the newly launched Median at HelloMedian.com, and come see Derek speak about building a new chat tool at Elevate Denver, October 6 & 7!

This episode is full of big life decisions as Lee Matos of Gitlab joins us for an important conversation about his future: Bicycle or car? Or Car-cyle???? We also get into talking about being a support manager, and growing a team of leaders, what skills you need to gather to become a successful manager, and what makes a good one-on-one review. Plus, we get a peek into the world of Gitlab, where almost every company decision is made public (woah!) and collaboration between departments is taken to a whole new level. Plus, lots and lots of Beyonce. Check out Lee's famous Beyonce talk on the Elevate Summit website now!

This week we're hanging with Suneet from Help Scout, one of our favorite support companies (and favorite people!). We jump right into talking about the bliss of remote working, choosing the right company to work for, our worst jobs ever, and why Mike didn't make it as a Bennigan's host. We also chat about creating awesome content for support pros, and what it's been like for Suneet as he's jumped into the world of customer support.

This episode, Sarah and Mike are joined by Nora West from Guru! Support teams are often the group best informed about customers' opinions and desires for your product, but many support teams struggle with how to effectively convey that information to other teams in the company. If you don't have a form of All Hands Support going, how can you make sure your engineering team knows how annoying that latest bug is? How can you make sure the design team knows just how distracting the font change was? Nora's got lots to share about how Guru tackled this and how they represent their customers to the entire team!

This episode, we're joined by Ben McCormack from FullStory! As support pros, are you addicted to the queue? Ben says you just might be. The same way you can get addicted to other things, your brain responds to the queue and you get a dopamine hit for completing that queue, but this can lead you to focus on the wrong things. Listen to hear Ben's suggestions for breaking that addiction and how to re-focus your efforts in the right place!

A quick chat about some of the great talks at our recent Philadelphia event. Hosted by Mike from Trello, Colin from Pingboard, and Sarah from CoSupport.