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.