Ep. 37 Road to Remote Customer Service Excellence with Shopify’s Director of Support

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!