Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience.
Table Service is presented by Tavolo Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Rachel Wu is a customer support leader known for her deep knowledge of premier support programs. Currently serving as senior Manager, Technical support at Iterable.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Rachel.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Rachel is a sought after thought leader on driving value for customers and companies alike through improved support offerings. Rachel lives in San Francisco with her fiance and corgi and outside of work likes to spend time walking in parks and going to bass EDM music shows. Rachel, welcome to the table.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Hi Jordan. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here and thanks for this opportunity. It's a wonderful Friday.
Just looking forward to chatting with you.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think this could be a great conversation. We have not really broached this topic in this season, so I'm, I'm excited to dig into this and share this with our listeners. That said, for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, would love to hear a little bit about you. Let's hear the story for sure.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Hi everyone. Just like Jordan said, my name is Rachel Wu. I'm a senior manager of technical support at Iterable. What I like to share about myself is my career path which has been anything but linear. So for anybody who's kind of like worried about that a bit, don't, because it can be wild. So I started off my career with a computer science degree as a front end web developer and then found out that I didn't like talking to computers 40 hours a week. And so I did a complete 180 and had an opportunity to do retail sales at Sephora. So I was at the cash register and then I sold skincare and that was so fun. I was like, oh that, that's great. I. But I wanted to go back into an office and so I went back into tech in tech sales as an enterprise sdr.
And then I realized that I didn't like Talking to people 40 hours a week. So I had an incredible opportunity within my own company to transition into the support team, which I then found was the perfect marriage of talking to computers and people in a 40 hour week. And so here I am. I've been here ever since and it's been really fun. I've learned a lot and you know, started off as a frontline agent, became a premier agent myself, and now I lead the team and the program.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for sharing that It's. It's certainly not a linear path, but it's interesting. As I talk to a lot of folks through this podcast and just other networking opportunities, I find more and more people that live in this big customer experience umbrella. Who. That's the story. Like I had. I had one guest on earlier this year. I can't remember if his episode has come out yet or not, but he started in something with finance, completely unrelated, whole different world, and then found his way into contact center work and loves it and has been doing that for 15 or 20 years. So it's a. It's an interesting path to get here, but it's always fun to bring people into the tent who have such varied experience because it makes us all better.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And the coolest thing about customer experience is that so many different backgrounds really do make that experience richer. And there are so many things you can take from those interesting backgrounds that make you a great support agent, leader, CX expert, thought leader, things like that.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: And really quickly, something that we think about on our support team when we hire is we think about star or stars. It's like skills acquired through alternative routes.
So you don't have to have been a support agent in your career in the past to be a good support agent. Like, you can have all those skills to, to have empathy, to teach if you were a teacher, if you were in service, like food service, and we have people who were in law and so many different things. So the, the person in finance that is so cool, you're probably know so many different things that you can enrich your team with.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And especially people like that in terms of parts of the business that is support folks. And I've. I've been in support my entire career. This is where I've lived. We're often siloed from parts of the organization like finance and marketing and sales, often. So to have people that come in from those places and help us really break down those silos, I think is a really critical piece of the work that we do.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: And it's fun talking to other people.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, you mentioned in your introduction just about the work that you've done and ultimately working as a premier sport agent at Iterable and now leading that team. And that's the topic of our conversation today. So let's dive in there. Let's think a little bit about B2B Premier support versus elevated support and just a philosophy around this. This is how you and I met. We had a conversation because I had multiple folks tell me oh, if you're thinking about this at your company, Rachel's who you need to talk to. So we were able to connect and, and learned a significant amount and excited to implement those things. So let's, let's dig in and talk about that philosophy a little bit.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Sure thing. So Premier support I think is interesting because a lot of people talk about it, right? Like you were talking to other people and they introduced you to me and it's like, it's definitely something that people think about but I, I haven't seen it implemented very often.
So what is it? It's, it's, it's not rare, it's not unusual, but it is not common.
And so I would, that's, I'm here to talk about it and I want to talk about it because I want to talk to more people who have these programs, want to build these programs and see like what people do. Because I think Elevated Premium, Elite Premier support really is going to be different depending on the business that you, you have. Like, you know, B2B support is going to be wildly different from B2C support. Should you even offer B2C premium support, things like that. But the philosophy behind it is as, as it sounds, Premier Elevated Premium, it is going to be a different support experience that you can pay for to receive something. So like White Glove service. It's sort of like, I think I use this analogy a little bit ago but like you're a platinum member at like a hotel or something like that. Like you are going to get, you're in this tier and then you're in this year knowing that you're going to get a different experience, different services. So like you have your own check in lane, you have your own concierge, you have access to things that are maybe are prioritized before other people. But it's, it's, it's something that is provided to you that you, that you want, you know. So what's, what I think is interesting is although it exists, it's, I know people want it, I know customers want this, but I know at the same time there it's not easy for a business to set up. So you know, one of the conversation points is like what is what gets in the way of folks not being able to implement premium support?
And that was something I wanted to pick your brain on today as well. Like you know, when we talked about it a little bit ago, like what was successful in your discussions, what wasn't successful? So that's kind of, I think where this conversation is, is going to go.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And I think that's a great place to have that piece of the conversation. I think for me, the.
The challenge was I could go and think through different ways we could build that experience. But I think that the issue that gets in the way is complexity. So our setup is rather complex. Our customers are rather complex and how we serve them. Each implementation is different.
Each way we serve customers is different. And so there were some. Some aspects that, as we had those conversations and I presented the idea to the. To the wider team of, like, yeah, that could make sense, and we could do that. But the path to get there also seems a little bit weird because we've got all these customers that are already in this way. They're used to this thing. Their contract's not up for a couple of years, so how do we begin to do that? And then I also think there's a workforce element, which I think we'll get to in that piece. It can be complicated to do this with a very small headcount. So what does it look like to build that factor? And I think those were the two things that kept us from running straight to a program like that, even though I think as we talked through it, we all saw the value. We all see what we could do and how we could develop that better service. But the complexity and then resourcing, I think, are the two things that, for us, caused us to just say, let's reexamine this later on.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: I'd love to, like, know more about what those complexities were, because the first thing that I thought of when you were saying, when you were talking about that was like, well, maybe your current offerings are already overpowered, you know, and that's something that we're running into, not with, like, the. We were running into that. One of our tiers of support is where, you know, the.
If you have, like, your tiers of support, there's always a bell curve of folks like purchasing that and being in that. So our, like, middle tier most people are on that makes a lot of sense. It's financially and offerings are right in the middle. But it was like, there's a lot of people in the middle. And, like, why. And so we were kind of working through that as well. So, yeah, I'd love to know more about the complexities that you ran into.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Sure, absolutely. So the. The challenge that we ran into is we. We work in a bit of a weird market at actual. In that we. We serve ultimately where we are a B company. We serve healthcare systems, staffing agencies, that work with clinicians of all varieties, but we also offer support to the clinicians that are using the system. So while our buyer and some of our users are the admins at the hospitals credentialing specialists, those types of people, on the other side, we also have the clinicians. So we have this weird B2B2C kind of support experience.
And so a lot of what we've thought about is how do we make the experience for the clinicians that come through as white glove as we possibly can, first and foremost, let's make sure that the product is so great that they get in, they do the thing they need to do, and they get out, and they don't have to log back in for two more years until their next round of reappointments or information that they need to update. But for those who have a challenge with that, so we do encounter a good number of clinicians who, they're in an older population, and so they've been used to paper applications for this stuff for their entire life, and now they're being asked to log into a system and do work, or they've had an assistant in their practice that has done this for them for their entire career, and now they're being asked to do it themselves. And so a number of those clinicians do need kind of white glove service. They need somebody to get on the phone and walk them through different steps of this to answer questions and make sure they.
They follow the path correctly. And that can take a lot of time. So for my very, very small but mighty team, if you happen to get on one of those phone calls, you could be on the phone for an hour and a half or two hours. And so figuring out how to make that, potentially even an offering to say, hey, for our business customers, you can buy a package of a hundred of these every six months. You know, where if you've got very, like, let's say you've got a VIP clinician, you want to make sure that their experience is just fabulous. So those were the things we were thinking through the challenge I think we ran into, and maybe this is one that, that we can dig into is our customers are already used to us doing that, so how do we go back to them and say the next round of contracts, hey, this is changing.
Here's the experience.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Now, I think that is so cool that you thought all of this through already. Like, it sounds like you, you know your customers really well. And I think, I think that's like step one, being able to design tiers in general and just design such a great support experience is like, how do people want help? And how do people like, how can you provide that? And I think, you know, another thing we'll talk about is like, it goes into like designing kind of what premium support would look like. And so I think diving into the, the idea of what to do when folks are already used to things and also the resourcing, it's, it's always going to be hard. Any sort of changes you're ever going to make is going to, is going to be a challenge for folks. I can say that one thing that we did do was roll it out slowly so it's, it's definitely really hard to be like. And boom, here's the new thing. Everyone get used to it. The thing we did that at Iterable when we made a big change, a big pricing change was hey everybody, all customers, this is the change we're going to make.
You have a grace period of an entire renewal cycle.
And, and so therefore we relied on like the, the success managers, the account managers to be like, to, to continually like to have that conversation with them to sort of remind them like, hey everyone, like hey, hey customer. Hey friend. Like, this is the change that we're implementing. This is a business change. And just as a reminder, your next renewal, we're going to have to talk about this new pricing.
And so that's what's one thing you could do is like, it's, it's. I think it's especially if like depending on the length of your renewals, most of them are a year. If they're multi year, it gives people like a nice grace period to get used to things. But of course it's like, it's still, you're still going to get some folks just like kind of, kind of kick in and there's always going to be some negotiations in between.
But another thing I thought about too, in terms of like before even doing that, like I know resourcing was an issue. A thought I had was like, you know, you could test it just using like either a new account, a new customer that you have, or with like one you have a really good relationship with that maybe already has like these VIP clinicians that you want to work with and get data from. Because you already mentioned there's like people who you, you're going to be on the phone possibly forever and that's, that's okay. But you, you do need that data. So it's like, then you, you get that amount of data for like a renewal half a Contract and see is this, is this viable? Like, should we put a gap on it? Like, yes, they get this many calls, but like, should it only be like 2 hours long? Like it's kind of a lot. And then that way you can like have one person try that out. Like maybe someone who is interested, interested in trying something new or prefers working with people in this capacity. That's just what I was thinking, what I'm thinking about and that's like different ways you can design the support tier that fits your business.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: So thinking just kind of on that, that topic of design. Let's say a company is just broaching this topic and thinking, what do we want to do? How should they think about going and designing that program?
[00:14:51] Speaker B: So how it came about at Iterable was that someone, I forget who. I know we have our. My leader and then the leader of CS because that Iterable support reports into customer success.
I think they already had experience with knowing that Premier Sport exists.
So they were like, okay, here's the, here's the tier. Let's see if anybody buys and someone did and they're like, okay, great, so someone's going to take it. Let's go ahead and do it. So I think we're already thinking about the topic. I feel like you already know that there is an appetite for it. And so, you know, follow that, follow the nose. Like maybe there is somebody that you can like talk to, like a customer, do like a small focus group, like an interview of like, what are you, what are you looking for? Did you have this kind of experience, experience with a past vendor and just kind of gather more information on what it would look like for, for your support team for your company and, and things like that. And I think that's a good way to start off. Like there's two ways you can do it. One, it's like, what do we think the customer needs? And the other is like, okay, us as a business, what can we do? Like, maybe we already have these things set in place, like how can we make it better?
So maybe it's like more coverage hours. You already have that. Okay, Maybe it's like sla. Yeah, SLA is like within reason, right?
Like it could be. I know you mentioned you have phone, but maybe like others who don't have phone, maybe you start offering phone just kind of. So that's like those two places you can start looking at, on what would work for, for you all and then mapping out that program for folks that.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Have, that have thought about this and then make the Choice not to. I mean, we talked about, from, from my experience, it was the complexity of the situation and then resourcing. Have you heard other things from folks thinking about doing this, about why they, they choose to either say, nah, never mind, we're never doing this, or let's put a pin in it and come back to it, you know, next quarter, next year.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah. If anyone listening to this wants to talk about it, please do. Because I feel like I don't have too many people to talk to, but I have heard a lot of like, let's put a pin in it. Like, this sounds great, but we, I think it was like resourcing. Like, how do we.
Do we hire someone new for this? Or how do we take our existing team and kind of move them into this new team or this new tier, this new bucket? Like, how do we kind of like siphon off these, like team hours for that or the resources for that? I think it was also, I might have, I don't know if I'm making this up at this point, but like, trying to convince leadership that these are good things that we want to do?
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: I, I'm not sure about maybe did I make that up? I'm not sure. But like, I would love to hear more too. And so this is also me trying to convince people like, it's. It's worth it. Like it. Try it. If you, especially if people are, People are going to pay for it. People are willing. Are going to pay for it. People are willing to pay for it. It's a matter of just designing what that experience would look like and, and then testing it out.
And I know a lot of teams are running lean. Oh, the support runs lean. A lot of companies right now are running very lean. But you know, it's worth a, worth a test.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: In your experience then at Iterable launching this program and now becoming a formal thing that you are leading, what do you hear from customers in terms that they're using this offering about it? What's the feedback you get for it?
[00:18:14] Speaker B: Quick clarification. By the time I led the team, it was already. So my manager was one who created the program first and then I've now took over it and ran with it and grew it.
You know, it's. People must like it because we went from, I swear to you, like eight accounts and then now four years later we're at 180 accounts and some are on trials thinking about upgrading to premiere. And a lot of the comments are like, a lot of time saving, like, they love it. So it's like they, they save time they're working with the way we've designed it, our premier support iterable is that the customer works with a named premier agent. So their main point of contact for support is this person and that person is a senior agent. So they are more tenured, we expect more from them and expect them to be able to work more closely with their customers in their book of business.
So it saves so much time because the person I'm working with already knows who I am. They already know my team, they know my business. Like if I want to talk to them about an issue or something that happened last week or something we talked about in our last like meeting or saying they already know what I'm talking about and I don't have to repeat myself.
And then since you're kind of working one on one with this, you're already in contact with someone on support, you usually get to share information, troubleshoot faster or you get to escalate a little faster. Like you're, you're able to share more information quickly.
And we also offer a Slack channel or an Ms. Teams team in order to work with your premier agents. So they love that. A place to be able to talk to someone. Like their whole team being able to talk to someone. And they just, sometimes they just also love their person. They're like, this person's amazing. Like they, they really understand me, they understand our issues. Like I feel like they just, they get it.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: And just love that there's like a cohesive. Like, and when they have a premier agent, they're not just working with their, you know, their success manager, they're also working with like another person. It just feels like there's this cohesive team supporting them in using our platform and being successful in what they're using our platform for.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: In terms of the things that are happening that that agent is responsible for. I mean certainly ticket comes in, you're responsible for managing that. What other aspects are they handling? Are they having weekly meetings with this customer? Are they engaging with them outside of those tactical tackle support tickets coming in?
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So first and foremost, every agent is a support agent. So they get a ticket. They, you know, work through that ticket troubleshoot, do whatever is needed. There's a, there's a LinkedIn article I read that put everything into words. They said that like every, like, you know, white glove service agent wears like four hats. The first is the support agent, the second is like a concierge. You know, hey, I have the, you got, you gave me this Question. I'm actually not the right person to answer this, but I know who is. Let me bring that person in and get you in the right direction. An advocate. So, like, escalation advocate. So I always talk about ownership with my team. So, like, you know, just because you escalate this to Tier 2, just because you escalate this to Engineering, yes, it is now assigned to them, but you need to make sure that there's still movement. Like, you want to be the one who knows the most about this ticket for your customers, that you can speak to it whenever. Mm, I forgot the. The last word. The last, like, name for the habit they were. But yes, our agents do join in on meetings, recurring meetings, especially for our most strategic accounts. Or maybe the most active ones. Maybe ones that are just finishing implementation or onboarding and need a little extra love and. And kind of hand holding. And just like, you're gonna be fine after implementation's over. You're. You're fine. I'm here.
You know, they. They do spend time with customers that way. I always encourage my agents to go on site whenever they can. Whenever they're a success team, a success manager is organizing an on site. I always encourage them to. To have the agent come along as well. Because if they're working with someone every day, it's great to meet them in person. And then with that same vein, I am asking my team to do things. I call them customer engagements. One day I'll find a better name for it. But it's a way to be able to engage with the customer in a way that' they can't get on a lower tier of support.
Like, I mean, like, you mentioned, like, getting on weekly calls at workshops.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Or maybe like, office hours. Like, hey, hey, team. Or like, hey, person. I heard you're new. I heard you have, like, a lot of questions, like, why don't we just get on call and just kind of bang through all these, like, FAQs and get through these FAQs? Or like, hey, like, I know you wanted to create this. This journey. You've already created it, but it's. It's like you're not really sure how we want it to go. And it's like, just before, like, we want to loop in an essay or something. Like, okay, yeah, let's. Let's kind of talk through, like, organize all of your journeys. Like, do you have another one that already does the same thing that I remember seeing you do last week? Like, maybe we can combine them somehow.
It does get a little extra. We're not trying to let you leave necessarily the support bubble, but the bubble of responsibility expands a lot more because you work more deeply with a customer. And maybe we do kind of go into the a different team's world a little bit sometimes. Like there's one. We can always figure out where the line is to draw. And I'm happy to help. I do that as a manager. But also it allows agents to. To also work on things that they like to do.
[00:23:50] Speaker A: One last question kind of tied into that before we move to, to wrap up the conversation. What's the Obviously knowing there could be a dozen different versions of this, but what's the Persona of someone who does well in this role?
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Generally someone who would be really successful in a role that works more deeply with customers is someone who really enjoys building relationships.
They really enjoy like working with someone and getting to know them and their business very well. And someone who really enjoys like that problem solving, puzzle solving, issue.
They like problem solving because usually the customers who also want premier support have more complex use cases. And so being able to. To work with someone just once isn't enough to understand how complex that thing is. So being able to be like, hey, I remember this problem. Let's. Let's keep going.
Either like let's continue fleshing this out or like this has been going on too long. Let's solve this once and for all.
I. I find those folks like really successful. So someone not only do you enjoy like more technical challenges, but you also really want to be a good. You. You enjoy people. You enjoy working with the same people and getting to know them really well.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: When, when I was an agent it was. It was actually over Covid so I, I was sad that we couldn't do on sites during that time. I would have loved to just fly over and be like I remember your name. I see your face on slack all the time. It's so amazing to see you for real.
So someone who is very. Who enjoys customer facing, being in the customer space and being the face of the, of the brand for the customer as well.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: From a support perspective, I think that's helpful. Of course, as we even discussed this tenant of customer experience we live in, people from all different walks and backgrounds and experiences can be successful here. It's just interesting to hear typically what is the most common successful person in that role.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Another thing I find that makes folks successful successful is like really open communication, maybe even over communicating sometimes because it's sort of like another analogy I like to use for my team and like onboarding is like, say you're in a. You're in a doctor's office and someone, you. Someone's going into surgery. Like, the support agent isn't the one performing the surgery. They're also not like necessarily the front desk admin person, but they are the one that's sort of in between the operating room and the person waiting. The thing going into surgery is the issue that the customer is very worried about. So being able to kind of go back and forth to be like, hey, here's an update. Here's what's going on. This was the last thing that happened. And customers don't want to just know, like, they're still working on it. It's like, what are you working on? Like, how, like, being able to communicate and just making sure people know what's going on. And everybody's looped in. The right people are looped in. The right information is being shared. That is also.
That also is very, like, make someone successful.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Of course, yeah, we're, we're. We're not. We're not saving lives, but we're certainly saving time and effort.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Sanity. Saving sanity.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Very true, very true. That sounds like a good, good bass EDM band that somebody could put together. Saving sanity. There you go.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: Oh, that's good. Make it an emo man, too.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: There you go. There you go. Perfect. Well, hey, as we wrap up this conversation, we'd love to just hear any closing thoughts you have that you'd like to share, whether it's related to something we've talked about or something else you'd like our listeners to know.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: I think my, my thoughts on this is, you know, as someone who is using today to really promote the Premier support, like anything like that, it is really fun. Customers like it, customers want it. I believe in. I was talking about the renewal rate on, like, presentation I did, and it's like 97 to 90% of customers who have Premier support renew. And I believe that's excluding Churn. So if you're churning, you're gonna have no choice.
But for those who have the choice, 97, 98% of folks do renew.
So, you know, if you are able to provide this experience for, for customers, people, they like it, they're willing to pay for it. And, and customers, really, especially if, if you're a large, if you're a complex platform, they really enjoy that partnership. They really appreciate partnership. And I think nowadays, or how it's. I don't know about nowadays, but when you are working with a vendor, you're not necessarily working with a vendor, you're working with a partner and customers really enjoy that. I really enjoy that when I'm working with like a, a vendor or a partner. It's great to have a partnership rather than like, I'm just, I'm just supporting you so.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Well, thank, thanks for sharing that. I think that again, that why I was so excited to have this, this conversation with you on this topic is because I know how passionate you are about it and so you're a great advocate for it. Now, if any of our listeners wanted to get in touch with you to hear about your work at Iterable or to learn more about Premier Support or talk about another CX topic would be the best way to get in touch with you.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah, LinkedIn. Yeah, find me on LinkedIn and give, send a message. Give a few business days so that I can like sign in and look every so often.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: But that's, that's the main way to reach me. Otherwise, if you're part of the Support Driven Slack channel, you can send me a message that way as well. And that's also a great place for discussion. Support Driven is a wonderful community for, for support folks and the like. So you can find me in there as well.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Wonderful. Well, we'll make sure to include those in the show notes, links to your LinkedIn and then also to Support Driven. Again folks, we've talked about Support Driven and Elevate CX and CX Accelerator. These are great groups to be part of if you are working in this world or interested in this world of customer experience and customer support. Rachel, thanks again for joining us here at the Table.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Jordan. This was so fun. I loved your questions. It's been, this is a. Hopefully this was very fruitful as well. It's been really fun just to chat with you.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Yeah, you as well. Thanks again for joining us.
Thanks for listening to the Table Service podcast. You can learn more about today's guest in the show notes below.
Table Service is presented by Tavalo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
