Support Heroes by Kaizo

In this episode, Dutta summarizes what has been happening in the customer service industry, how you can go about setting expectations with your customers, and how businesses can leverage data to upscale the quality of their customer support services.

In this episode, Dominik Blattner — Chief Product and Tech Officer at Kaizo tells about his road towards founding Kaizo and leveraging gamification to help customer success heroes upscale their performance. With solid start-up experience up his sleeve, Dominik spotted a new market opportunity and set out to build a product that would meet the needs of his target customers. Enjoy listening to this one!

In this episode, John Riordan - Director of Support at Shopify translates his lessons from almost 20 years of remote work experience, 15 of which were spent in remote customer service. Shopify being a fully remote company has enabled John to fully exercise his expertise in remote customer service excellence. Following are some common remote work myths dispelled by John and his top tips for support staff getting it right. Enjoy!

In this episode, Zoe Koven - Senior Director of Innovation & Customer Advocacy at Zendesk, offers her advice and guidance on change management in customer service. In order to improve any department, change must take place. Managing that change successfully and coming to a result that's better for the customer is always beneficial to support departments. Following are key steps to take when improving customer service through change. Happy listening!

In this episode, Darren Chait - Co-Founder and COO of Hugo, shares how video support and proactive tech skyrocketed their CSAT. Learn how the team implemented Zoom calls and pre-recorded instructional videos to create meaningful customer interactions. Also, discover the tech that enables Hugo to provide automatic proactive support to users. This episode is truly a masterclass in creating customer delight in a cost-efficient way.

In this conversation, Virag Pohl - Customer Care Agent at simplesurance, shares some customer service best practices she learned while working in the insurance industry. Motivating customers through lengthy processes and explaining complicated terms and conditions are normal practices for simplesurance. As such, agents like Virag can teach us a lot about effectively communicating with customers and guiding agents through evolving processes. Enjoy!

In this episode, Matt Dale- VP of Support at Illuminate Education, Inc. and Jaala Seifipour- Head Of Support at 'nuffsaid, provide advice and best practices to support departments acquiring a new team (acquirers) and those being acquired (acquirees). During his time at Illuminate Education, Matt Dale managed the acquisition of 7 support departments. Jaala experienced being acquired as a support leader during her time at GitPrime. Happy listening!

In this episode, Lilith Antunovic - Customer Experience Manager at Rentman, shares her lessons learned from introducing a support ticket classification or ticket tagging system. Here you can find some pointers on how to get started, best practices to improve a ticket classification or tagging system and some of the benefits of doing so.

In this episode, Petra Hageman- former Head of Customer Service at tripaneer, Chelsea Baker- Senior Manager of Customer Support and Onboarding at Trakstar and Stephanie Wohl- Head of Support at Channable share their best practices from more than 4 decades of combined experience. The conversation is filled with actionable advice on hiring, culture, management structure, communication and much more. Enjoy!

In this episode, Perran Facey - Director of Customer Support at MURAL, provides his top tips on support management with a particular focus on the use and communication of KPIs. Perran is a Mathematics graduate from Queen Mary University London and a seasoned support manager with over a decade of experience working in the support industry. As such, he's the perfect candidate to identify the common pitfalls associate with managing through data and elaborates on how to avoid them. Happy Listening!

In this episode, Brianne Adams, Melissa Hughes and Bob Miley- customer support representatives from Fetch Package (Fetch), explore how to create a supportive and productive customer service culture. Find specific and actionable tips on how to build an environment that promotes improvement, and increases the productivity and longevity of customer support staff. Happy listening!

In this episode, Peter Voor de Wind- a Customer Success Consultant at Zendesk, former Global Customer Service Manager at Swapfiets and Benedikt Dormann- Head of Customer Experience at Jimdo, former Director of Global Customer Service at N26, discuss how and why companies get customer service strategy right and wrong. The conversation touches on the value of customer service to businesses today, how to communicate and measure that value of customer service internally, and why the value of great service is often missed. This episode is invaluable to any support leader wanting to better leverage their department to benefit their parent company as a whole. Enjoy!

In this episode, Rui Chaves- Director of Customer Experience at Deel formally of Facebook, Uber and Dashlane, provides an in-depth look at customer service outsourcing. Having started his career in an outsourcing firm and established multiple outsourcing programs at Facebook, Rui is the perfect person to separate the myths about outsourcing from the facts. Rui also shares his insights on why to outsource and how to get the most out of an outsourcing relationship. Happy listening!

In this episode, Katalin Fritz- Chief Customer Officer at Marley Spoon, shares her lessons learned from a storied career in customer support. Establishing shares service centres from scratch, leading some of Amazon's world-leading customer service teams and now growing with a customer-centric approach to service at Marley Spoon. This episode provides rich strategic advice as well as actionable insights regarding how to actually become a customer-centric organisation. Happy listening!

In this episode, Jaya Sardjoe- a customer support associate at Zevij-Necomij B.V., shares her experiences and lessons from her first two years working in customer support. At Zevij-Necomij, a dutch wholesale company, she's been guided and advised on how to succeed as an agent. She now shares these actionable and effective tips with us. Enjoy!

In this episode, Susana de Sousa- Senior Manager of Customer Support at Loom, elaborates on the lessons she learned while working in customer experience at Airbnb. She shares the philosophies that allowed her and the team at Loom to conquer the insane challenges presented by meteoric pandemic growth. All the while giving an honest and humble look at the trials associated with providing great support today. Enjoy!

In this episode, Mara Vicente - Vice President of Customer Support at Pipedrive, shares insights from her wealth of experience working in customer support. Touching on everything from international management and team culture to company strategy and the power of old-fashioned hard work. This is the perfect episode to continue developing your managerial skills as a modern customer support leader.

Our first Agent of the Month episode of Support Heroes by Kaizo featured Nadezhda (Hope) Zubova from Miro. During the episode, Hope explores what motivates her as an agent. Showing how supporting agents personally and operationally improves their well-being and therefore deparemental performance. Happy listening!

In this episode, Nick Chong- Head of Global Support & Services at Zoom, explains why he believes support is the best place to develop the skills required to be a successful senior manager, VP or executive officer. Nick provides a detailed description of how he and his department invite agents to develop themselves and their careers at Zoom. Finally, he encourages all Support Heroes to take great pride in our industry and work. An inspirational must-listen for all of us!

In this episode, Dorien de Vreede- Head of Customer Support at bloomon, outlines the playbook she developed scaling a support team from 0 to 70+ agents in just a year at Catawiki, which she now applies to great success at the blossoming florist scale-up: bloomon. Dorien offers actionable, thoughtful advice that's useful to support staff at all levels, tailor-made to allow support departments to scale with grace and speed. Happy listening!

In this episode, Pam Dodrill- Vice President of Customer Support and Success at Zapier, shares top tier strategies developed from decades of support management, now applied in one of the world's leading SaaS companies. Pam elaborates on many facets of support strategy, contrasting common practices to those she and Zapier believe to be optimal.

In this episode, Brittany Ferguson- Senior Manager of Customer Support at Brio Systems, Inc and a manager new to remote teamwork, exchanges lessons learned with our first returning guest, Charlotte Ward- Head of Support at Snowplow and long-time remote manager. Tune in for details on remote management, teamwork, training, culture building, communication, documentation and much more on this topical episode of Support Heroes by Kaizo. Our solo episode with Charlotte is a great prequel or followup to this discussion. Visit snowplowanalytics.com & getbrio.com for more info. Happy listening!

In this episode, Aprill Allen- a Knowledge Management Consultant & General Partner of Tractor Ventures, and Damian Reed- Customer Success & Support Manager at Teamgage share their experience building and applying knowledge management in support. Both having experience in enterprise organisations as well as startups, the Aussie duo compare and contrast knowledge management in small and large organisations, and share lessons learned from both perspectives. Tune in for actionable advice to benefit employee engagement, customer satisfaction, ticket volume and much more. Enjoy!

In this episode, Chelsea Baker recounts the lessons she learned about support leadership over years of experience at Applied Training Systems, Inc and Recruiterbox. She opens up about the evolution of her confidence as a manager and elaborates on how her management style was formed by her experiences both before and after the pandemic. Tune in to hear Chelsea's advise for aspiring support leaders everywhere. Happy listening!

In this episode, Charlotte Ward chronicles her transformation from being a shy technical support agent to becoming a vocal leader of a distributed team as Head of Support at Snowplow. At the tail-end of the show, Charlotte shares some top tips on remote management/teamwork developed from years managing and working in distributed teams. Visit snowplowanalytics.com for more info. We hope you enjoy this giggly and informative episode!

In this episode, Kaitlin Pettersen- Senior Director of Customer Support at Intercom, elaborates on how the pandemic shifted customer interactions to the digital space, and how this has impacted support. She presents Intercom's thesis of conversational support being the way forward and offers some insights on how this can be successfully implemented.

Matt Dale is VP of Customer Support at Illuminate Education- an educational software company operating in the US. During the episode, Matt outlines the evolution of the processes that allow his department to service 12 separate products simultaneously. As a result of the steep agent learning curve and extreme seasonality of their business, Matt has focused on keeping his department active and finding new ways to apply agents' skills during down season. Finally, Matt touches on how his number 2's grew from agents to directors and how their career path can be replicated. Happy listening!

Raúl Garreta is the Co-Founder & CEO at MonkeyLearn- a startup that applies Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to analyse text and empower support departments. Within the episode, we explore how support is being transformed by AI tools; how these tools are not a threat human agents but a tool to make their lives better; and how the insights that AI & Machine Learning can uncover from ticket data could blow static measures like NPS out of the water and place support as the centre-piece of customer research. We hope you enjoy this techy-twist to support!

Magdalena Primo is Customer Support Supervisor at ID90 Travel- a travel platform specifically for airline employees. In this episode, we speak about the needs of agents and agent care. Magdalena chronicles her past experiences as an agent at an outsourcing firm and contrasts the lack of fulfilment she felt then to her happy home of 8 years- ID90 Travel. As well as sharing her lessons from the frontline, Maggie shares how care is at the forefront of her management style and the culture of ID90 travel, and how this pays dividends for her and her team.

The final episode of the year. The second non-interview episode and a retrospective on a tough year filled with new challenges. Based on industry feedback and conversations looking back on the year, we take a look at key challenges we faced together. We recount some lessons learned from our piers who joined us on the show and provide some medically-sound advice on how we can fare better in 2021. Hold your heads high. We made it to the end. Enjoy.

This is one of two non-interview episodes to round out the year. In this episode, we present some resources that we found useful and interesting during 2020. We hope you enjoy this brief look into the Customer Support content that we consume at Kaizo, and find these resources as helpful as we do. Check out the post on Kaizo's LinkedIn page for full details, credit and links. Happy Holidays!

Sue (Kirk) Morris is Vice President of Customer Success and Support at GitHub- the world's largest open-source community for software development. If you've heard of it, then you know, if you haven't, this tool helped build most of the apps & programmes you use on a daily basis. Sue champions interdepartmental customer-centricity, during this episode, she gives a unique look into how this was successfully applied in one of the most prolific software companies around today. Having her roots in Vodafone and Microsoft, Sue provides some of the highest level insights on the podcast to date. Plus, she's British, so how could this one not be a delight...Enjoy!

Stephanie Wohl is Head of Support at Channable- an incredibly exciting and fast-growing startup out of the Netherlands. Channable has created an innovative solution providing automated feed management and PPC ads, which has been incredibly well-received in the market. During this conversation, Stephanie shares the unique challenges she and her team face supporting a deeply complex tool like Channable and doing so simultaneously for many industries, in multiple languages. Frank, funny and humble, Stephanie is a young role model for any aspiring support manager or team lead. From us to you, enjoy!

Queen Joseph is a Customer Success & Support Ops Consultant working with startups in California. Queen offers her unique insights from 5+ years of experience building support operations from scratch as well as setting up fledgeling operations for their future growth. Breaking this process into easily-understood phases Queen offers a step-by-step guide to ensure successful scaling in any context. If you want to know how to improve your operations, this is the episode for you! Happy listening.

Oleg Krasnov is a Customer Experience Advisor and Head of Customer Support at Miro- an online visual collaboration platform for distributed teams. Already a budding software darling, Miro saw an explosion of growth due to Covid, with ticket flows tripling or more. In this episode, Oleg shares how he managed to deal with this quantum leap in Miro's user base by relying on his extensive experience in Support recruitment and management. Oleg offers his knowledge freely, openly and honestly applying his lessons learned to real cases from his career. If you want to know how to manage in crunch time, this is the episode for you! Happy listening.

Jan Brenneke is Chief Supply Officer at Talixo- an exciting startup targeting the business transport market. In this episode, Jan offers his expertise in the application of analytics in the context of Customer Service and it's intersection with management science. Jan's thoughtful awareness of the bigger picture, and the integration of social science in his application of incentive schemes and productive programmes within his department is truly impressive and unique. Welcome, to episode four!

Petra Hageman was formally Head of Customer Service at Tripaneer and was also part of the workforce management team at booking.com overseeing 2000+ agents. During the episode, Petra shares her tips for managing people, improving oneself and making the best use of one's time. Petra provides actionable advice at every turn backed by more than two decades of experience in customer support and workforce management. If you want to skill-up in any aspect of customer support, this episode is a doozy. Enjoy!

Heidi Elhawary is Head of User Support at trivago- of one, if not the most, well-known hotel meta-search platform. Heidi rose quickly through the ranks in her department and in less than half a decade total in the Support industry, now finds herself in a senior position at a hugely successful B2C company. With her agent days still fresh in her mind, Heidi shares insights into how she made this possible and how you can emulate this yourself. Be you an agent or manager, Customer Support is a career you can be proud of- so hold your heads high, Support Heroes. Welcome to episode two!

Benedikt Dormann is Director of Global Customer Service at N26 Group- one of the fastest-growing banks in the world. He cites his genuine curiosity in humanity and open-minded approach to leadership as being the key ingredients to his success in Customer Support. In this episode, Benedikt shares his tips and best practices from a multidecade career of successfully managing multinational Support programs across Europe. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Support Heroes by Kaizo. We hope you enjoy!