- Hey there Dan Martell here,
serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
how to rock (drumroll) your customer support process.
Be sure to stay to the end
because I'm going to share with you
an exclusive worksheet that's gonna allow you to audit
how you're doing on different levels of service,
understand the strategies available to you to upgrade those,
and then build an action plan to help you move that forward.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
Customer support is probably one
of my favourite things to talk about.
Here's why I believe,
as I scaled multiple seven figure companies
in the SaaS space, Software as a Service.
Even my last company, my venture-backed company, Clarity,
I personally did support for two years.
Here's the reason why,
is as a software guy, as a product guy,
I've realised that most of the opportunity
sits inside of your support tickets.
The opportunity to learn from your customers,
to guide product strategy,
to understand marketing channels and hooks
and people talking about growth hacks.
I think the gold mine of any question
you have about your business
lies inside of your support tickets.
And most CEOs and founders quickly,
it's like the first thing they delegate
to somebody else, and they never review them.
So I'm not saying you have to do support,
but be sure to dive into those tickets on a monthly basis,
and scan them because there's so much insights.
But what I want to share with you today
is how I was able to scale me doing that for two years,
and really always being involved in support,
to make sure that I've created
the best customer experience.
Because obviously you could see
it could create a bottleneck.
But instead we are recognised
as having some of the best support in the industry.
And today I have the privilege
of coaching some of the smartest founders
implement these strategies to create support processes,
allowed them to scale their customer experience
within their own company.
So these are, for me, the five key strategies
that you need to build world-class customer support.
Number one, Customer Outcomes.
So if you think of your customers that are reaching out
for whatever issues they're having,
often it's either gonna be,
you know, obviously a technical issue
that something's supposed to be working,
it's not working the way it express.
Or they're trying to get an outcome.
And what I discovered is for most companies,
there's probably three to five primary
kind of states or outcomes or goals
they wanna achieve with your solution,
that they're running into roadblocks.
So what I would suggest is you sit down with the team
and map out those outcomes,
so that you can then build playbooks
to ensure that you get customers
to receive that value a lot faster.
At the end of the day, I call it core value.
When somebody comes into your solution,
your product, you've got literally days, if not less,
ideally in the first time user experience,
to get them to achieve an outcome with your solution
if you want the chance to earn their business long-term.
If you're not mapping out their outcomes
and you're not building a process
to really guide them through achieving that core value,
then you're gonna run into churn and retention issues,
or even just lack of what's called expansion revenue.
People buy more product
because they're succeeding with your solution.
So number one, map those primary outcomes.
What do you think customers
ideally are trying to get as an end state,
and what would be the steps
that they would follow to get that?
Number two, Support Support.
It sounds funny, but the way I think about it
is we need to build a training process
to support our support team.
Meaning that, too often we're changing our products,
we're enhancing flows, we're tweaking settings,
and many time we forget to tell our frontline support team,
and then they've gotta deal with the repercussions.
So what I like to implement is a cadence,
a rhythm of training so that we have a place,
maybe every two weeks,
where we can add things that have changed in our products,
tweaks to the way we're thinking of our solution,
anything that needs to be communicated
to frontline support people.
And also just core training.
Like every support team member
should have different tiers of seniority and experience,
and it should be based on
their understanding of how the product works.
And allow them to have a training track,
we wanna support the support team,
so that they can upgrade their skills
and be more aware of the lower level details
of how your product works,
so they can support a broader audience of your customers
in a faster way possible.
So building out a repeatable process for training your team,
supporting the support team,
making sure they understand how escalation works,
making sure they understand how customers
are using those core outcomes
they're trying to achieve with your solution.
That's how we ensure we have the best support team
possible for our customers.
Number three, Flow Escalation.
So what that means is,
it doesn't matter what kind of business you are.
You have kind of tier one level support requests.
These are things that are configuration settings,
just unawareness, they missed something,
they didn't read the whole instructions,
whatever, tier one.
Tier two is a little bit more involved, right,
where something should be working but it's not.
And maybe it's the way the product is designed.
But the support person just doesn't know
how to configure it properly
based on what the client's asking, that's tier two.
Tier three for me is known issues, bugs, challenges,
something that can be replicated
but it just doesn't make sense and we need to escalate.
So we have tier one, two and three.
And it needs to be very clear to your support team
how those challenges or issues or tickets
are escalated into each tier.
This is the critical step that's usually missed
to create something world-class,
is on a daily basis you need to have somebody accountable
on your team, could be one person across all tiers.
But somebody daily needs to review the number of tickets
in those support queues, those different tiers,
and make sure they're being moved forward.
Here's why, I discovered building software companies
for 20 years is that most of the engineers,
especially like your support engineers,
they're busy doing things, they kinda cherry pick.
They wanna do the things that are interesting to them,
and they put off
kind of like the annoying, frustrating customers.
And I get it, no customer is frustrating,
we love all our customers equally,
that's usually not the case.
And we need to make sure, as a leader,
that our support team has accountability,
and on a daily basis, it's a must.
So tiers of one, two, three.
Frontline, middle, kinda more challenging,
and then obviously deeper technical,
trying to figure out this is core issues.
And then having somebody accountable daily
to make sure each one of those tickets
are moving forward and not left behind.
Number four, Measure the Metrics.
So customer support
is probably one of the easiest outside of marketing
to really measure how things are performing.
So if you haven't looked at some of these core metrics,
the top ones are typically time to first response,
average time to open tickets,
and I would say customer satisfaction
or kind of like an NPS score.
You can Google the different mechanisms to report on that,
but if you're using a support software,
I guarantee they have this as part
of the reporting in their dashboard.
And what I would recommend is every week
as part of your leadership team
you're reviewing those key metrics,
you're setting some targets and some goals
and you're making sure you're monitoring
against those goals,
so that you can get better and faster.
Support, like any other area of the business, is an engine,
you're trying to make it increase throughput,
and having the data points to understand how you are today,
the baseline, so you can improve it,
is critical to creating a great customer support experience.
Number five, Productize the Knowledge Base.
So, if you currently have support tickets coming in,
you're probably starting to see patterns,
repeatable things that people ask for.
Here's what I've discovered is the fastest way
for you to get more bandwidth,
and this is what I was world-class at, two things.
One, documenting and backfilling the lessons learned
from a support point of view
that I was interacting with clients on,
so that I could put those in the knowledge base.
That's the public-facing directory
of kind of like how-to questions that come up.
And then the second thing is using automation and snippets.
So if you haven't looked at like a hotkey snippet tool,
there's different ones for Mac and Windows machines.
I'll let you Google kind of what's the current flavour
of the week, this week for this tool.
But just like shortcut snippets, text expander-type tools,
it allows support teams,
and you can create like pre-canned response, et cetera,
to just quickly respond, high-quality,
engaged, personalised templates to support the customer.
But my big thing is, this is what's hilarious,
is when I work with clients to scale their businesses,
again, customer success being a core area
and support within customer success,
I ask to see their artefacts,
the tools they've created to support their support team.
And what happens is often those tools,
internally, are what should be put externally.
They are the checklist, the reference guides,
the training, that if they would just flip it
a little bit and put those resources public,
they would allow their customers to self-serve.
Most companies today, this is some research
that I found online,
that most companies, 85%, would prefer to self-serve.
Because usually it's like 10:30 at night
and they're dealing with an issue
and they just wanna figure out the solution,
emailing support makes no sense,
scheduling a call makes no sense.
So using the tools like video screen capturing software.
If you're not doing that, that's just crazy.
So like being able to record your screens,
share that as an audio and video message to your customers,
encouraging them to send things back to you,
keep it under three minutes.
You have to give some cues,
if not you'll get 25 minute narratives
of their support issues.
But having that rich interaction,
grabbing those things, putting them public
so your customers can self-serve, and really productizing.
Think of your knowledge base like a product,
like an asset that you invest in, that you plan for,
that you coordinate with the product team
to make sure that they give you heads-up
on releases and milestones
so that you can get the knowledge base articles
ready to go.
To me, that is just a core.
That's when I know a company's really bangin',
on a customer support level,
is when I check their knowledge base
and I can tell it's being updated,
it's frequent, it's relevant,
the taxonomy's really well designed.
That's when I know somebody's looking at that as a product.
So quick recap, five strategies
to rock your customer support process.
Number one, focus on customer outcomes.
Number two, support support the team training, et cetera.
Flow escalation, having those three tiers.
Measure your metrics so you know how well you're doing,
how to get better.
And five, productize the knowledge base,
take those internal tools and put 'em out to the world.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I wanna share with you an exclusive resource
called the Customer Support Upgrader.
In it is just a simple one page worksheet,
but it's got a list of really cool things.
Number one, it's got kinda the core areas of support,
everything from the knowledge base to your calls
to your email systems, et cetera,
allow you to essentially rank on those dimensions.
And then I'm gonna give you a list of key strategies
that you can use to get even more bandwidth
to help you prioritise the next three upgrades
that you can implement in your customer support team
to take it to the next level.
And you can use that worksheet every quarter
to keep upgrading and enhancing your service,
the quality, the experience to your customer.
That's my gift to you.
You can click the link below to get access to that.
And if you like this video be sure to smash the Like button,
subscribe to my channel.
And if there's anybody you think this video can serve
that you care about,
feel free to share it with them directly.
As per usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
(rhythmic warble)