Secrets to Customer Support Success
With John Kelly and Jessica Voss from SupportLogic
Show Notes
John Kelly is the Chief Revenue Officer at SupportLogic, while Jessica Voss is responsible for Enterprise Sales.
They have over 50 years’ experience between them in the tech side of contact centres and support services, and keep abreast of the latest trends. They know exactly what technology is needed to reduce escalations, customer churn, operational expenses, and lift customer satisfaction.
Today, they share their secrets to customer support success.
You'll Learn:
How to predict escalations and prevent them ahead of time (02:43).
The goldmine of information you have sitting in your contact centres, which is probably going untapped (04:33).
How to optimally prioritise the order in which tickets and cases are handled (08:21).
A nightmare example of what can happen when you leave it up to agents to escalate support cases (08:57).
How escalation prediction can reduce escalations and customer churn, while improving CSAT, NPS and employee retention (13:00).
How to get a far more accurate gauge of customer satisfaction, when your CSAT survey response rate is probably 15% or less (16:40).
Why customer satisfaction is dead (19:34).
Get your free ‘support whisperer’ shirt from Jessica, by emailing her at jessica@supportlogic.com
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, and I'm the founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership Accelerator enables sales managers to lead a high performing team in 90 days, by mastering the 5 habits of exceptional sales leaders.
I'm fortunate today to be joined by John Kelly and Jessica Voss from SupportLogic. John is the Chief Revenue Officer there, while Jessica is responsible for Enterprise Sales.
So Jessica and John, welcome along. Great to have you here.
John Kelly (00:35)
Glad to be here, Blair, thanks.
Jessica Voss (00:37)
I'm very excited, Blair.
Blair Stevenson (00:45)
Okay. John, let's start with you. Tell us a bit about yourself, a bit about your background.
John Kelly (00:50)
Wow. Where to begin. Let's put it this way. 25 year tech industry veteran, and it was my backup plan. So I tried to play a sport, try to play it professionally. That didn't go too well. So tech was the fallback, but many, many years ago I started in the support business doing break fix.
Worked for a company called Oracle when it was quite small, and helped build their services and support organization. And then over a period of time, I went into a couple of small companies, helped start a couple of them, take them to market, grow them, launch them, IPOs, so forth.
Went back to Oracle, ran the worldwide services and support organization for the company, gosh, 15 years ago, it's starting to date myself. Same thing at SAP, et cetera.
So I look at myself as a serial services and support person, who believes in the customer and making sure that the customer is successful. That simple. I love it.
Blair Stevenson (01:50)
Brilliant, brilliant. Jessica, how about for you?
Jessica Voss (01:55)
Yeah, so I'm an oldie, but a goodie in the contact center, customer support, customer success world. So I've been in that realm about 20 years, both on the sales side, consulting side.
I've really helped in my career - the majority of the time - companies on their customer experience side of the house, look for the right tech stack and really evaluate what's going on, what should be in place. Technology is evolving so fast. It's kind of chaotic. So that's kind of where I shine the most.
Blair Stevenson (02:29)
Cool, fantastic. So SupportLogic positions itself as, I'll read this, 'The first proactive support experience platform'. So what's the problem that you're solving?
John Kelly (02:43)
Great question, of course. And I would start with, if I had the product and was using SupportLogic all those years ago, I would have a full head of hair.
And the bottom line is this; support experience, and the support business is critical to the revenue for every company out there. And companies can only really grow and protect their revenues if they - in my mind - understand and can act on unbiased, unfiltered customer signals from all of their service interactions.
So how do we get the voice of customer coming out? So SupportLogic has a support experience platform that is basically providing visibility into escalations, predicting and preventing those ahead of time, amongst many, many other things.
But the bottom line is this; we're listening to the voice of customer, and we're exposing it to the support teams, the success teams, to the account management teams, to engineering, and allowing them to act. It goes beyond just metadata. It's not metadata.
It's just not, "Hey, what was the date of creation of a case or a ticket?" What's the escalation level? How is the customer feeling? What are they experiencing? What are their sentiments? And then what do you do with those? So in a nutshell, kind of Nostradamus in a box.
Blair Stevenson (04:16)
So one of the things I notice is that customers are reporting that escalations are reducing, customer churn is reducing, operational expenses are reducing as a result of using SupportLogic. So I'm just wondering, how are you achieving that?
Jessica Voss (04:33)
So I'd kick it off with traditionally, customer service, customer support, it's not new, it's not a new department. It's been around forever. And really it's always been about being reactive, firefighting, "Oh a customer escalation. How do I deal with that?", involving different departments. And really it is unnerving. I mean, look at John's head.
And really, because of technology, and really because of AI, machine learning, NLP technology, it's really a way to transform from being reactive to proactive, like your previous question. And every support center is trying to figure out, "Well, how do I be proactive with the tech stack that I have, with the CRM or ticketing platform that I have?”, when it's kind of hard to understand all that data. It's about big data.
And as cases are coming in, it's like, "Okay, ready, set, go. Let's see how fast I can answer that case." But what's not being examined is the goldmine of information in those cases that can help set the tone for improving customer experience, reaching business objectives and really stopping firefighting.
John Kelly (05:57)
Blair, let me just kind of double click on that. Just a tad. So we're again talking about extracting that voice of the customer. So the metadata is telling us things, the cases open, how long has it been open? What's its severity level? What's the impact on the business, et cetera. And as the support experience begins, there's a dialogue that begins taking place. Here's our response, how did the client respond back to that, et cetera.
You've got data silos, you've got disorganization, you've got different teams touching the client. So SupportLogic is looking at that. So with AI. Lots of TLAs here, right? Let's just throw out three letter acronyms. But with natural language processing, let me go through and scan the dialogue. And again, expose beyond meta how the client is experiencing the support experience, what's happening.
And again, are they frustrated? Are they upset? Are they upset with the product? Are they upset with the delays in your response times? All of these things are signals that you can't just extract from the field that's a dropdown list. And so how are we doing this? We percolate that up and we say, "Hey, this case, this ticket, this client has a strong likelihood to escalate. You may want to look at this ticket now."
And so we're seeing customers straight out of the box, with the vanilla machine learning models that we have - NLP based, everything else - getting 40, 50, 60% accuracy, right out of the gates with escalation prediction. And I can get in front of the problem.
Blair Stevenson (07:38)
So is that based on modelling of previous interactions?
John Kelly (07:42)
Great question. So two things, first of all, we have our standard out of the box ML, NLP based models. And they're based on years and years of our experience working with a large cross section of tech companies, et cetera. So we dial that in.
Over a period of time when we deploy the product, it begins learning based on your historical data. So we'll ingest the last year, two years, whatever you've got, we'll look at that history and say, "These types of cases came in. Here was the dialogue, they escalated. If I see that pattern again, it might be a good idea to take things proactively."
And Blair, what's cool about this is not just the escalation prediction. One of the unanticipated benefits, from my perspective, is backlog management. All of us are in the business of working with clients over and over and over again.
And rarely do you get to a point where you get to go home at night and close out every other ticket. You come in the next morning, there's usually a backlog. Which ones do I work first? So this gets down to almost fire prevention. Where there's smoke, there's fire. We can see the smoke.
Jessica Voss (08:57)
I want to bring up a couple of points too, especially on customer escalations. We're all customers of companies. We've all had interactions, submitted support cases, and really most support centers are set up to where they leave it up to the agent to initiate an escalation.
Well, one of my testimonies is I will never do business with a large healthcare insurance provider here in America, because of my experience. I submitted a case on something that needed to be resolved. Long story short, over the course of three months, I talked to 15 different agents, different ones that had no idea my previous interactions. I was infuriated in my responses with lots of exclamation marks. And "Why do I have to send the same information back? Can you help me please? Please, someone help me."
And long story short, it never got resolved. And what happens to the mindset of customers is if a manager would have proactively interjected in my case workflow and said, "Jessica, I see you're unhappy. Things aren't getting resolved. Let me jump in and let me help get this resolved for you, and get this to you ASAP."
If a manager would have said that to me, once again, the mindset is I'm talking to someone with authority. So it immediately diffuses my emotion of being angry and frustrated, because I'm thinking "She's going to get this done." I would've been happy if it got resolved, and I would've stayed a customer, they would have saved me instead of churning.
So there's two aspects to just that flow that I explained; preventing customer escalation and preventing a customer churning, and getting ahead and being proactive. So I think that's key to any service and support center.
Blair Stevenson (10:52)
Absolutely, absolutely. So what you're saying is, if that company had had SupportLogic, your case would have been flagged. It would have been escalated, real time and you wouldn't have churned.
Jessica Voss (11:06)
Yeah. If you think about it, I'm just some little minion in their deck of customers. Imagine companies that do B2B support and they have large VIP premier customers, they want to make sure they're servicing. That could be 20, 25% of a customer's revenue. They're very, very important.
So just to keep track of that, even, you know, it's almost like having a Fitbit for support. Getting immediate alerts when your VIP customer sends in a case. You need to know, and if they give you a call.
Blair Stevenson (11:40)
Yeah. Okay. So there's a massive stack of advantages. What are some of the others that spring to mind for you?
John Kelly (11:51)
Without question, Blair, when I was running these support organizations, my book of business, so to speak, my install base was in the billions of dollars. And many of my products, I kind of phoned my customer. They didn't have the ability to easily migrate away from my solution because of the large capital investment in time and effort, first of all, to get there and use it. And then second, of course, to swap out and select a different product.
So if you think about just churn reduction, if you're talking about an ability to take it down by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 points, the impact of properly servicing your customers, getting in front of it and becoming more proactive versus reactive in aggregate, not just this case, but here's the account health and sentiment. And beginning to align support with success, with account management, which often can be in three different leadership hierarchy branches, and not necessarily align. That's the magic.
So you've got escalation prediction and reduction. You've got the ability to reduce churn and have a financial immediate and large financial impact to the business. Improvement in CSAT and NPS scores, a reduction in time to resolve. Think about this. We're looking at these types of cases, we're looking at voice, we know where the cases went to and when it finally was resolved and by whom. Now you're talking about case assignment and case routing.
So we're talking about, also, internally improving the, quote, 'customer experience' for your team members. So the support engineers, the customer success managers actually have an opportunity to work on things that they're more likely to be successfully capable of closing and helping. So you're reducing employee churn.
There's all sorts of hard and soft, direct, and indirect benefits that come from using a platform like this. Beyond meta. It's beyond meta. You've got to look at how they're feeling.
Blair Stevenson (14:11)
It's almost like you've got voice of customer for everyone, as opposed to a very, very small segment.
John Kelly (14:17)
You can roll that up. But Blair, I say - and our marketing says - unbiased customer, voice of customer, customer signals, I would take consistently biased the same way by everyone, either way.
And what I mean by that is this; if we looked out the window today and there were three clouds in the sky, do you Blair say it's a beautiful sunny day, and do I describe it as a cloudy day? Both are correct. What's the real situation?
All I know is I want to make sure that when I hear it as a leader, or an executive or someone responsible for providing to the bottom line, a good experience for customers, I just need to make sure that when I hear it from you or hear from the other person, it's the same. So I can determine if there's a problem or not.
So we talk about unbiased voice of customer, and yes, you can roll it up in aggregate and go across teams, products, people, industries, segments, regions. You can see, I smile about this. It's fun.
Blair Stevenson (15:24)
It's, I was going to say world changing, but it's not changing the world. But it's certainly changing the way support is done.
John Kelly (15:31)
Game-changing. Also, support experience. Think about, it's like 80, 90% of the revenue for most of the major companies out there. If you're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue or more, you're living off your install base first and foremost.
Protect the dollar you've got. Protect it. Then if possible, through great customer experiences, grow it. And at the same time, add. So protect, retain, expand.
Jessica Voss (16:07)
Yeah. I wanted to add two more points too. One is around CSAT scores and NPS scores. So most of the time support centers, they send out surveys in whatever channel interaction they are engaging in with the customer, and the average response rate is sub 15%. That's one-five percent. So they're basing their customer satisfaction on a very, very small number.
Blair Stevenson (16:37)
I'm working with a client right now, they've got 6% of people responding.
Jessica Voss (16:40)
Yeah. 6%. So especially if management and executive level are graded by reaching KPIs and CSAT is truing up that number.
So if you're a CSAT score right now is 85%, and you use SupportLogic where we're looking at the VOC of a hundred percent of your cases, we're going to true that up and give you a real time vision of, "Okay, well, you're really at 83%. So let's look at how we can improve that." Or in some instances it may be way better, might be 93%. And those executives would be like, "Okay, wow. Yeah, that's amazing for us." So it's very, very important to actually be measuring customer satisfaction 100% of the time. So that's one area.
Second area that sometimes people don't talk about is product management. So what happens in a normal reactive customer support center, there's delays on the product management team when they hear about issues or feature requests. Or maybe this upgrade needs, you know, an additional patch. There's usually a delay. They never truly have real time analytics and data on what's going on with their product.
So imagine using our platform, and you can immediately swarm in a product team to hop on this case or give them insights on certain products that they have in stack. So it's very, very valuable to also the product management team.
Blair Stevenson (18:12)
Cool. Thank you. I'll come back to you in a minute, Jessica, because I know you've got something to raffle off. But before I do, John, any last comments that you want to make in terms of SupportLogic? You mentioned some examples of improvements. Just wondering about if you think about customer churn, reduction of average time to resolution and so on, any percentage improvements that you've seen across clients?
John Kelly (18:45)
Sure. Without mentioning client names, out of respect for that, and there's plenty of collateral online, you can look at our website, et cetera, but we're seeing 62% reduction in case review time in less than three months, 32% reduction in customer escalations with another client in less than three months, we're seeing 25% reduction in customer churn in less than three months. And the list goes on.
Now, those numbers are not mine. These are coming from the client themselves. They're looping back to us and saying, "This is the business impact." And we're seeing time to resolve, you're seeing by association - like Jessica was just talking about - CSAT improvements.
I would almost argue that CSAT is dead. Because you're getting such a small population that responds back. It's usually the squeaky wheel, the happy or the real unhappy. Not in the middle. So you have two different things. So all of this is happening.
I just kind of look at this and go, if you want to bring to the table to your company the next thing. If you want to continue to do your daily job, but also lead by example, these are the types of - I would say our product. You absolutely should look at it. Of course, I'm going to say that. But you want to be looking for companies like us. And SupportLogic is one I think you definitely want to look at.
Blair Stevenson (20:20)
Yeah. Cool. Thank you. And if people want to find out more, where can they go?
John Kelly (20:26)
Well obviously to our website. So www.supportlogic.com. Lots of places there. We have a very strong customer advisory board and community. So if you just kind of poke around and just search for our name, you're going to see a lot of industry veterans and leaders at multiple other companies that are on our advisory board that will speak freely about our products.
If for some reason you're able to say, "Hey, this company is using our product", talk to the leader of support. They're a good spot to go. Lots of different ways to find us.
Blair Stevenson (20:59)
Yeah. Thank you very much, John. Jessica, you've got a giveaway.
Jessica Voss (21:04)
Yeah. So if you've noticed our shirts, it's called a 'support whisperer'. It's very, very hot in the support realm. So we are giving away shirts. So please reach out to me jessica@supportlogic.com and get yourself a shirt. Because you want to be a support whisperer, right?
Blair Stevenson (21:27)
Awesome. Thank you very much, Jessica. Appreciate that. And thank you very much, John.
John Kelly (21:32)
You bet. Blair.
Jessica Voss (21:33)
Thank you so much, Blair.
Blair Stevenson (21:36)
For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with John or Jessica on LinkedIn, you'll also find a link to their LinkedIn profiles in the description too.
And if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn, you'll find a link to my profile there as well. Well, that's it from us today. Have productive week.