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 Tavilo Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Dan Allen is a passionate support leader with over 15 years of experience across a wide range of industries. An advocate for the value of the support organization, Dan has spent his career empowering support teams to deliver incredible results and he's excited for what the future holds for support in AI. Oh, and you might just hear his adorable French bulldog snoring in the background. Dan, welcome to the table.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Hey Jordan, great to be here.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: For those listeners who may not be familiar with you, I'd love if you could share just a little bit about your background experience. Let's hear the story.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
I mean, I started in customer service kind of first job out of school at like 1516.
Really quickly caught the bug in a call centre environment and then just couldn't get away from it. Ironically, I went to uni to study animal science with the vision of one day being a vet and actually didn't continue down that path. I went back into customer service, customer support, and since that point I've worked in call centers, work from home environments, everything from omnichannel, dealing with, ironically colonic irrigation through to E commerce. You name it, I've been there.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Well, thanks for sharing that. I know in some of our previous conversations we've talked about tools as well and we'd love to hear just a little bit about the types of support tools that you've got a lot of familiarity and expertise with.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's two kind of giants in the industry that I have a lot of experience with and to different extents, love them. Both Zendesk and Intercom.
I actually have done some freelancing work with both of them, hence our previous conversations and how we met each other. Setting up systems and setting up support teams for success and delivering a great customer experience is something I've got a real passion for. I think trying to take what was historically a very monotonous, droning type team that dealt with very repeatable tasks that was typically seen as quite boring and turning it into something that's market leading is something I've got a real passion for. So I think both Intercom and Zendesk, for different reasons are two tools that I love for that and that's why I've worked with them. But a lot of other tools as well, things like AI tools in house, tools, even working with systems Like Amazon Connect kind of customer service tools or for those OGs in I think especially UK call center type customer service callscripter have worked with that a hell of a lot as well. So yeah, lots of different systems, sure, absolutely.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: Well, that's a perfect segue into I think a lot of our conversation today. The big item for Zendesk admins, Intercom admins, support leaders that are using these tools, agents that are using these tools, is how AI is getting incorporated into these. We've seen Zendesk launch tools for this, we've seen Intercom launch fin and now Fin too. So I'd love to spend some time just talking about support and what it looks like from a perspective of just having humans doing support versus I with humans or AI versus humans. Let's hope it never comes to AI versus humans in any other sphere other than just here in our software. But just thinking about that, we'd love to talk about those topics. So first thing, can you talk just a little bit about where you see the value of humans over machines in this sphere that you and I work in?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. And I think it's a really good time to start thinking about this because unfortunately, even though you've said hopefully we don't get to the point where it's AI versus humans, I think we've probably all heard of some really high profile customers, companies even, that are in the process or have gone through the process of ditching their entire support team into favor of AI. And that for me is scary.
Our industry has been built on using humans to have conversations with other humans because we are able to empathize, because we can reason, because we can listen to people and we can react to that. I think AI is fantastic and it can do a lot of stuff repeatable or even now beyond repeatable. It can go into more complex things and it can complete actions.
There are certain conversations that need to have a human as part of it. We need to, as humans, we enjoy speaking to other humans, regardless of how we do that. Human interaction I think is something that we will never lose, we will never lose a passion for and we will always need. And I think in customer service, having humans deliver that rather than a robot is what now is differentiating you from the rest of your competitors.
We're going down a path where we are adapting more and more and more AI, which I think is necessary. And I think, honestly I think it is the future to some extent, but it needs to be paired with humans, in my view. I don't think back to your Point of humans or humans with AI or humans versus AI, I think it is firmly in the middle that we need to have AI to make us more efficient, to make our processes work better, to deliver a better experience to customers by a result of being more efficient. But I think we absolutely need humans to be empathetic, to be sympathetic, and to communicate with you how you want to be communicated with. We've all been down that rabbit hole of speaking to a bot or an AI agent where you just get so frustrated with it and it really, really annoys me. And every time I see companies that are like, hey, we bought an AI bot and a week later we've launched it out to our customers and it's handling 100% of our volume. And it just makes me cringe because I just imagine the decrease in customer experience that their customers are receiving because they're now not able to speak to a human being.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Absolutely. In terms of.
As we think about this, you know, where. Where might there be some. We've talked about maybe a few of these points already, but where might there be some really great value in harnessing AI alongside the work that. That humans are doing versus looking for all the ways that we could completely replace humans with AI?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: I work with a lot of companies that are looking at that particular question, and I think different industries can look at this in a different way. If you were to look at, say, a technology industry, AI is a fantastic opportunity to start triaging queries before they reach a human. Why have your human team waste time asking questions to a customer that you could get a robot to ask, like, what device are you troubleshooting? Have you tried doing this? What web page are you on? Are you on the latest version? That kind of stuff. Triage the query, gather that information and provide that to your team so that your team pick up that query and they go, boom, this is done, this is done, this is done. I now know where to go and I'm going to deliver an exemplary service to the person I'm speaking to.
Equally, if you look at another example, take E commerce. I think there are definitely times in E commerce where AI can do exactly what a human would do without an impact on a customer experience. Let's say I've placed an order and I think, oh, no, I don't want that. I've clicked place order when I shouldn't have placed it within 20 minutes of placing the order before it's gone through to any other systems to get it dispatched or anything like that. AI is absolutely able to go and Cancel that order and it's an instant service. Right. This is something that customers want. I want an answer now. Cancel it before someone does something with that. Fantastic example for AI. And why would you have a human do that?
[00:08:23] Speaker A: I think it also increases the ability to do that round the clock. I mean, you know, we both worked in customer support for years. We know what it's like to work on desks where you're on for hours and hours and hours. And it's late shifts and early mornings and for some folks it's the middle of the night. And so what does it look like in those things? And this is a great opportunity then to say, hey, we can actually stabilize our support teams, hours and lives and balance here while using AI to support these after hour activities, just like you just mentioned.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: So my employers from when I was 15 are now probably, if they are watching this, they're going to be recoiling.
My night shifts working in a contact center, I spent either laid back on my chair partially asleep or watching a film or doing whatever because contact was very low. Like you were there as a just in case. And that's a really expensive resource to have to have someone sitting there watching movies and paying them to watch movies.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Awesome opportunity to have AI able to, like I said earlier, at least triage queries outside of hours. I'm not saying AI necessarily needs to do absolutely every single thing that your human team can do, but it's giving some level of availability to your customers all hours of the day.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: And there are some things. Sure. That I can do. But I think yes, you're right.
Why pay for a 24,7 resource anymore when you can have AI handle at least part of your resourcing for a lower cost that either delivers the same level of experience to your customers or nearly the same level of experience thinking.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: About just AI and sport in general. What, what do you think the future holds? Do you see any significant changes to our sector and the say two to five years where these tools are concerned?
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I see that the next two to five years and beyond is going to be a hugely exciting time for us.
We have seen you mentioned Intercom's fin earlier. If we look at the job I'm in now, I started here kind of nearly two and a half, just over two and a half years ago. And initially this was the first time I'd worked with Intercom and I didn't like Intercom and anyone from Intercom that's watching this now, I'm very sorry. I say the same thing to My account manager all the time. I didn't like it and I had some very honest, frank conversations with them and I said, look, this is more. More a sales or lead management tool than it is a customer service tool.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: And the reason I bring this example up is because in only two and a half years, their whole product is completely different. It is nothing like it was two and a half years ago. And they're now, in my opinion, one of, if not the, leading customer service platforms in the world, and probably again, in my view, the best customer service AI bot in the world with Fin too.
If we're able to do things like Intercom have done in such a short period of time across the industry, I think our industry is going to be unrecognisable.
I'm hugely excited for that. I don't know if anyone else has seen and I'm just looking over to my second screen now to make sure I get the words right. I don't know if anyone else has seen this coming up on their LinkedIn all the time, but I keep seeing this meme that says, I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. That for me, really resonates strongly in our sector because AI can do all of that repetitive stuff. It can do all of the boring stuff.
We're humans, we are intellectual beings. We enjoy problem solving. We enjoy speaking to people. That's why we work in support and customer service.
Why bother wasting money and time and energy and resource in doing all of this stuff that all of us will admit? This is really boring. Sure, I love it when II does something that I can't be bothered to do and then I'm left to do the really meaty things that get my juices flowing. And at the end of that, I can go, do you know what? That customer had a great experience. Or even better, when a customer doesn't necessarily fill out a CSAT survey, they send an email back. Like someone in my team the other day, Claire, we didn't get a CSAT survey response from this customer. They emailed and said, like Craig, great experience. Claire, I loved speaking to you. I loved it. That is why humans are so powerful. That is why it's great to have humans delivering customer support and service. This is why I think things are going to be so exciting over the next few years. We are going to have tools that are going to take away the pressures or the boring parts of people's jobs. And it's going to allow you to do those more interesting things.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: I'm going to use Intercom as another example. I think Intercom have led the way with AI in our industry and we are already seeing new roles come into our industry as a result of them. One of the ones that interests me the most is AI Conversation designer.
Who would have thought that we would have conversation designers two, three years ago? Now it's a real job. There are real people at Intercom that are doing this job, all thanks to AI.
When we had the whole OpenAI thing explode into the world and everyone was worried, AI is going to take my job away. AI is going to do my job. No jobs are going to be left for me. I'm going to have to change my career. And now we're in an era where people are doing jobs as a result of an introduction of AI. I think it's so cool and I think we're going to see a lot more of that come out into the industry.
So I think, yes. In summary, what do the next few years have? Much more interesting stuff for our human beings in our teams to do a much better level of service to customers because our human team members are being used much more effectively.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: And huge and exciting career opportunities for people that didn't even know existed are going to come up. And we don't know what some of those are going to be yet.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Sure. I think that is one of the greatest things that could come from this is support team members. I mean, we've experienced this. Not a lot of people stay in support. There's a pretty large percentage of folks who cut their teeth in support and then they go do account management, they go do software engineering, they go do sales, whatever it may be. And I love. One of my things that I love to do is to take folks who are starting in their career, instill in them and support a passion for the customer, and then spin them out to do whatever they want to do and they take that passion with them. So they're building stuff that customers love, they're selling stuff that customers love. They're managing their accounts. Really thinking about that customer passion. But now, how incredible will it be to take support team members who truly are the front line dealing with customers? They are the experts on the customers in strong companies. Now they get an opportunity to go build this new thing. The best person to go build those conversations is the person who's been having that conversation for the last 10 years and can build it in a way that's just getting to be an incredible experience for our customers.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I totally, totally agree. I think I quite often liken customer service and customer support to a revolving door.
And I think it's such a good in with a company for you to get into somewhere that you're interested in. By getting into customer service, customer support, just the whole kind of area by nature of the work that you do, you quite often have more system access than anyone else in the business because you need to access more things to service customers. You have a much broader range of knowledge across a wider area of the business than often teams that are kind of siloed and they only have their area of knowledge.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: And what that does is it gives you a really, really cool and a really powerful platform to not just get in with that company, but to look at things and go, I want to take a side step or I want to take a diagonal step or I want to go this way or that way or it's a great opportunity to step upwards, sidewards, roundwards. Whichever way you want to put this, AI kind of takes that to another level. Like you say, you are the ones that know exactly what customers are saying so you can design those conversations.
You are the ones that know what customers are saying so you can build data that is empowered by AI equally. There are other tools now in customer support that are sitting within supportsremit that never used to sit within support. I think if I were to look a few years ago, help centers would quite often, and don't get me wrong, they are still sometimes sat. There would be sat with teams like product marketing. And now I know a lot of support teams, my support team included, that are responsible for the help center. It provides an opportunity to go into things like content writing or product marketing or that kind of stuff to say I want to go into that as a career rather than sitting where I am. Even though I just want to make it really, really, really clear. There are huge career, huge career possibilities in support itself. You don't have to move out to other, other areas of the business.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: And that's the thing I try to instill in folks is, you know, learn this value, learn this passion for customers. And there is a wide road here that you can follow in this world. If you want to move to something else, that's great. We'll. We'll get you there. But there really are so many incredible opportunities inside of support success. This, we can continue to move and grow people and I think change a lot of the perception about what Customer support is and what customer support does.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Agreed. Agreed.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Well, pivoting to a topic that I know you and I are both very passionate about, and particularly that's the cross functional feedback loop and where support should sit in the experience of a company building, improving, et cetera, the tools and experiences they have for customers. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that topic.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Yeah, it's something I am really passionate about and like we said earlier, support is a team that will quite often sit in between a bunch of other teams and we are a team that will naturally work cross functionally with a lot of other teams. I think if I look at my current team and teams that I've been responsible for in the past, we've worked very closely with product, with product marketing, with finance, with customer success.
All of these teams are teams that aren't necessarily speaking to customers in the same or similar ways than support are.
And for that reason, I think support is really valuable in giving different insights, different data points and creating feedback loops into that team or wider across the business that bring light on things that they might otherwise not have known.
If I were to take for instance, some of the data that support gets, we're looking at things like contact reasons, contact reason tracking. And if your support team data is set up really well, you don't just get that first level tracking of this is what customers contact us about. You get sub level tracking and sub, sub level tracking, or even more if you want, and you can then go to your product team, for instance, and say customers are contacting about.
It's driven by this, which is being caused by a bug. And the impact of that is this, and this is causing an impact on customers and internal teams. The possibilities are endless. I think support plays a really key role in that whole journey because we don't just have the data from those conversations, we also are able to give that anecdotal feedback cross functionally to say not only is there data, here's some feeling going back to the first point that I made of humans being important in support because of that emotional kind of reasoning, that empathy, that sympathy, that all of those emotions and feelings that only a human can deliver, we're also able to give that as context against data and give data meaning, which quite often product teams, for instance, aren't able to do. And they will look at a problem and they don't necessarily understand what is the impact on that customer. Or they might understand the impact on the customer, but they might not understand the emotional impact or the frustration that that causes I think if I look at an example from from a while ago, product team is able to look at rage clicking, which I love that phrase. I think that phrase is amazing. Sure rage clicking means one thing to a customer, to a product team, but it means a completely different thing to a support team. Yes, rage clicking can be something that is easily brushed under the rug by a product team. The page got, I don't know, stuck or it took a while to load. The support team can see actually that customer's got really angry, that customer has now gone elsewhere or that customer has raised a complaint. That complaint has now been escalated to the CS team who have now escalated that to the finance team who are now having to issue a credit back to the customer. That's kind of that next level of feedback that isn't necessarily fed through to product and is hugely useful in prioritising bug fixes or prioritising future developments or adding things and removing things from the roadmap.
Support quite often gets overlooked in these areas and you're just looked at as just support. Support are just there to answer customers. And I think if you can't tell already, I'm really passionate about this and I think support really are the unsung heroes of a lot of organizations and we have the ability to impact and the data to impact and the want to impact on tons of different things across the business. For both the business and and for me really key is the customer experience.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: I love speaking this over and over just how much value there is from support and that support is not just a cost center. It's not just a place where a company spends money because it has to. It is a place where incredible value and impact can come for the business of course, but most importantly for the customer experience. And the companies that we see that do this really well have figured out that key thing. If we empower our support team, they are going to do amazing things for our company and our reputation and our brand. And the more we can help folks see that, I think all the better.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Agreed. I think there's also things if I were to look at say a startup, you're still finding your go to market, you're still finding your product market fit and the sooner you do that the better. And we've already mentioned a lot of things that support can feed into that of maybe this isn't right because of customer experience a or that kind of stuff. But linking back with another thing that we discussed earlier of extra or new responsibilities that are now sitting in with support that never did. If I take the example of Help Center, I'm able to look at what are customers actually reaching out to their self service tools to try and get answers to. And Help center is a really good example of that. Or even your AI bot. Going back to the very first question, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they're speaking to a human being. Any of the tools that you're supporting team are responsible for will provide you some level of data and all of that data is useful for feeding back into product teams to say, well, they might not be contacting us as a team, but we've had a bunch of people go out to our Help center looking at the page to say that they can't log in. As a really mundane example, that's a really early indication that something is wrong. Let's try and get on top of this before we end up with being completely inundated into the support team which will inherently will inundate the product team because we're raising a whole load of bug tickets, right? Your JIRA is going to explode because we can see this coming. Let's get on top of it early.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Well Dan, as we wrap up this conversation, I love that little bow we put on top there of thinking about, you know, how all of this can feed back into that first part of the conversation we had around AI and customer support, but grounding everything and what is that human experience both to deliver and then for our customers experience. As we wrap up the conversation, any, any closing thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners?
[00:25:30] Speaker B: I think the closing thought for me is AI is amazing. I think it's going to be a huge already is a huge disruptor of our market.
I would say yes, absolutely use AI and I think everyone should use AI to some extent. But be really, really purposeful in the reason and your choice of AI that you select. Because you may not know it immediately, it will have impact on your customers, both positive and negative. And I think it needs to be a very careful and purposeful decision.
I think my last closing thought is if you haven't already recognized your support team within the last week, two weeks, month, six months, recognize your team now because they truly are the unsung heroes of your organization. Organization and they do a lot more than you realize.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Very true, very true. Well, thanks for those thoughts. How can folks connect with you if they want to hear more from you, learn more about the work you're doing? What's the best way for them to do that?
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. More than happy to connect on LinkedIn. Jordan and I met each other on the Support Driven community, so feel free. If you're not already in there, join the Support Driven community and you'll find me in there.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, we'll definitely link your LinkedIn and then actually the link there to Support Driven as well in the notes below so folks can have quick, easy access there. Well Dan, thanks so much for joining us here at the Table today. Appreciate your time and this conversation.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: Jordan, 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.
