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 Tableau Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Neal Travis serves as the head of Customer experience at the Academy to Innovate HR and is also the founder of Growth Support. Beginning his work at AIHR in 2019, he seen the organization grow from 8 to 100 employees. Starting with everything customer Neil has scaled support, customer enablement and community alongside the business. Neal, welcome to the table.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Excited to be here.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: So for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, would love to hear a little bit about your story. What brought you to where you are now and what are the things you're passionate about related to customer experience?
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. A bit of a weird one.
I got into traditional, what I would say is like actual full, meaty customer support and really the depth of it only about five years ago. Before that I came from a retail. I was actually doing sales training and running kiosks. So very, very different background. But I found that a lot of things have weirdly applied. Yeah, but about five years ago I moved from San Diego in the States where I'm originally from, to the Netherlands. I moved from my wife's in that state. I was like, okay, well we'll figure out a job, let's go. Looked for anything English speaking and I was very, very grateful and lucky to find AIHR where, yeah, I've been able to, as I said, like go from 8 people to 100, really just work on everything. I mean, you see it when you're eight people, you get all the hats and work on all the different things and dive into it. So it was a really great exposure there. What I would say I don't have in my bio is about two, three years ago, I was feeling quite lonely in that sense, working in the support industry and really trying to find a way. And there I started joining a lot of communities together, really trying to branch out and reach the other people and peers that I have within the industry. And that really set me on the path to make me extremely passionate about growing and developing with the others around me.
And my main passion right now is giving back a bit of taking the experience that I've gained over that period and trying to give others the resources that I didn't have when I started growing and getting that exposure. So that's what I'm passionate about right now.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, I can, I can definitely say as A support leader further on in my career. Now, if I had had some of the resources I know we're even going to talk about in this conversation a little bit earlier on, it would have been a great thing for me, would have been a great thing for my team and for the company that I was working with and the customers that I was working with. So really excited to talk about these concepts and these resources that we can hopefully help some support leaders get a head start where, where we didn't necessarily have that. Well, let's, let's hop into the discussion. So one of the things that we had talked about is thinking about what it looks like starting a support organization by yourself. You are number one. You are the one building it. What does that look like? Talk through that with me a little bit.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: I started from Gmail inbox, so it was, here's your login. We just want you to help customers. Just go talk to them, see what they need, really help them out, make sure they have the best experience possible.
And when you, when you're really starting out in that small of an organization, a lot of times what you do there is very different from the things that you do when you really start to grow. Because one of the biggest things that came up from like the differences that I think about is when I was there, we were helping people in Gmail was just had. Just having those conversations was the most important thing. Taking care of them was also the most important thing. And it always is. But at the same time there it was like, okay, we'll do anything and everything, make sure you have the best experience. That means there's like no policies. We're really bending over backwards to make sure that every, every super custom solutions, this kind of thing. And as you start to grow, you obviously start to solidify more structure and start to build those things out. But starting as a group of one, it's just kind of tackle everything. Good luck. Here you go.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Sure. Absolutely.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Like, if I had one thing that I wish I would have done, then it would have just one, document my processes a little bit more even though I was just a single person. Number two, start measuring sooner.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: One of the things I, I know I struggled with in, in seasons of being very early in a support org, coming into a support organization as the first support manager for that organization, helping team members that have actually been doing the work for a little bit longer obviously than I'd been there. One of the challenges that I, I feel like I faced was helping them understand how to go from the mindset you Just described of going to do anything that our customers ask us to do. We're going to bend over backwards to make sure whatever happens works. Had a conversation with somebody who worked at Zappos years ago and he was talking about how if a customer reached out and asked them to order a pizza, they'd order the pizza for the customer. Like, we give discounts, we give credits with very little questions asked. How do you think organizations can begin to help move teams when it is time past that moment and deal with those types of challenges into scaling the organization, optimizing what the organization does while still delivering an incredible experience?
[00:05:21] Speaker B: I think for that one, one of the big things that we really started to do was when we started not being able to really understand or had problems when we were thinking of, okay, I'm a support person of one. I know everything that's going on with customers. I can talk to them all the time. I know X customer had this issue a couple of months ago. They come back, I remember that person. I can help them, no problem. But as soon as you start to see any sort of transferable knowledge come into play, somebody else needs to help this customer. It's not just me anymore there. You really need to start thinking of how does that customer get the same experience if they work with me versus if they work with the person next to me? And can that person next to me also understand that depth of knowledge? And I think that's, that's a bit where the balance is. Like, you can have two people working in Gmail. Sure. Are you measuring a lot? No. Are you doing a lot? Yeah. You're doing a lot of manual work. But at that point, I think when there's transferable knowledge is when it really becomes important to say, okay, when this situation happens, this is how we're going to deal with it. And then we deal with it in the same way. And then you start to build things out and build that flexible flexibility into things where you didn't necessarily need that before, but now there's another person, you need to start doing that. So I think that's the earliest point that you, you would need to.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thinking about tooling for these things. We talked about being, you know, early on, you're likely living in a Gmail inbox. When should organizations start to think about what it looks like to actually invest in a tool that's built for sport?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Early, please. I think it really needs to warrant, like if you have specific volumes of customers. Right. I think it really depends on if you are a industry organization. Type who your actual customer segments are, etc. But as soon as you have the questions coming from the business in any sort of standpoint that you're like, well, I don't know, I would really need to look into that. And you can't pull that information because you have no sort of measurements.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: That's a bit of a problem. If you want to be able to really clearly say this is what our customers are saying, this is what they're working on, this is how we handle them at any point, then you need some capability to at least tag conversations, like bare minimum tight conversations in the most rudimentary way. Like if you can start collecting and measuring some of that product feedback, great, awesome. If you can get some numbers behind it and some qualitative data behind it, even better.
Especially early on, you're starting to push towards crafting the product in the first place. If you're a SaaS company or something like that, that early stage customer feedback is extremely important.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: And if you don't have a way to collect that information or do anything there, then yeah, you need something.
I think the other part of it really became visibility. Like we just didn't know how many customers we were helping because it was just, oh yeah, we had this many emails. We think visibility is super important in that sense. I think again, having any one additional person, great. If you need multiple people managing conversations, try to get them in one place. And typically CRM, support, service desk, help desk, something like that, to be able to help something lightweight. I know there's a lot of integrations into Gmail and things like that, but that's just only one use case.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah, I know. You know, obviously there's the Zendesks and the Intercoms of the world that especially for startups, there's lots of opportunity and options for affordable solutions early on. So those could be great. But you're right, there's so many plugins we could utilize with Gmail as well. There's opportunity there for a, for a pretty small support team to do that. I'd be curious your thoughts on thinking in that early stage before we move into like what it looks like to then start to really scale support operations past, you know, member 1, 2, 3. What does it look like to help the support organization get space at the table with leadership and build influence early on in the organization? Instead of what I tend to find years down the road starting to figure out, we need to get some more influence at the table and it just takes a massive effort. How could we Start that earlier in the process.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Build relationships.
Number one, Absolutely. At the beginning, like especially in the beginning of an organization when it's quite small. Thinking back to my experience, 8, 10, 11, 12 people, typically, they're really easy to access. They're really, really easy to be able to talk to, to be able to reach, to have those conversations, to actually be able to help. Number two, if you do start measuring early, being able to go to the product organization and say, hey, hey, hey, hey. This is really what our users want. This is really what they want to build. Starting to build in those feedback loops from customers and getting that information and building that customer centricity really starts to help create that. Okay, yeah, yeah, we want to build in this direction. What are customers saying this time so we can actually like kind of do it at the same time. You want to build those relationships, you want to provide those customer insights. The last thing that I would say is really start focusing on trying to solve those organization goals early. One of the things that I really, really focus on, what are the direction we're building in? What are we doing? What can, what can support get in hands on to do? What can we actually like, get to be able to help and help move things forward? What are the biggest challenges that we have upcoming and how can our organization's activities support that? I think beginning those conversations as early on as possible will get your foot in the door to get that seat for sure.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Thanks for that. I think that's a key element, especially for young support agents who may be the first person on the desk. You're very, very likely not hir manager level somebody to come in and do the job first. So how do we better empower young support agents, young support leaders to begin thinking about that? So I think that's a great thought on how do we begin to build that influence and respect early on in the process?
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you're, if you're an experienced support leader coming into a new organization as well, I think it really applies that speaking to hygiene metrics, like really operational metrics of this is how quickly we help customers is how many they're doing. If you're somebody who has experience really building it, those things, they don't necessarily always translate to that business value that it takes to get that seat at the table.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: One of the things that I really tried to encourage people to do is take that consultative approach and then tell those stories of how their teams impact the actual problems of the organization rather than just those operational hygiene things. Like there's many Other things that you can do. It's really important for you as a leader to know, find out what's most important to the business to know and then translate those things amongst each other.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: I think that's a very fair point. I think a lot of us have fallen into that challenge of getting into a new role. And it's like, well, I can talk about our response time, I can talk about our, you know, closure rates, I can talk about what, our reopen rates. All those things are great and they're important. But if that's all you can talk about six months in, that starts to become a challenge for the organization. So I think that's a very fair point. Kind of shifting a little further now into what it looks like to really scale support operations. So, you know, we've had the 1, 2, 3, 4 employees, you've got some leads, you maybe have a manager in the team is growing, the organization is growing, business is growing. What does it look like to really start thinking about how to scale the organization?
[00:12:43] Speaker B: I would probably say always have a one to many mindsets like building that or keeping at the top of the mind. Like, okay, what is this going to look like when we have like 10,000 customers? That's a lot of customers in that sense, when it comes down to it. But how do you start thinking in the future tense of like, how can we help 30% more customers with what we have and starting to build out a structured foundation for, okay, this is what we need in terms of capabilities really practically from my standpoint, it comes down to three things. How good are your knowledge practices? How can you keep operational, conversational quality and the standard of excellence maintained on a consistent level? And what's the betterment of the data that you're collecting from it? And can you actually improve that and raise customer insights back into the organization?
I think getting this structure in place, and there's a lot of things underneath that, of course, but really thinking about how do we help more customers with the resources that we have and being able to keep that one to many.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Mindsets, what do you think about, as an organization is growing in this way, what onboarding should look like for say, a new support agent coming in? How can we best ensure those programs meet the needs of that agent and of the company?
[00:13:53] Speaker B: My first, first hire that I had as a support agent when I was growing the team so it was just me and then it was going to be me plus one because I was taking on a new management role. I needed to essentially backfill myself and the support agents, our onboarding was like sitting next to each other at the same desk for the week and just doing everything together. I didn't have any processes in place, I didn't have anything really documented. Well, if I look back at it, one of the first things that I would do is even if you're in that position yourself, document your processes and make it clearly accessible. So that, I mean the ideal goal of documentation is somebody can walk in and do the job right, like read the thing and do it.
But yeah, I think that it should be structured. So what I do now with my teams, now that we've had quite a bit of growth within the organization and the teams, everybody is set up with a very clear 30, 60, 90 day plan. For our support agents specifically, we've condensed that a little bit because we've realized that 90 days is a bit more compressed so we have clear milestones. So in your first week this is the end goals and what you're looking to accomplish. And these are all the things that you need to do to get there in the first 30 days. The same. These are the big main objectives and outcomes that you should be hitting at 30 days. And these are all the things that we need to do to get there and then out to 60 days. So we have a one week, 30, 60 and really structuring these clear milestones. And one of the really important things that I try to keep in mind is then not everybody will learn in the same way.
So we try to keep some variety in terms of we have enablement sessions, of course we'll go through all the topics conceptually but really kind of changing that format. So first date we want to make sure you're really getting set up for success. Really making sure that all your accounts are set up, you have access to everything, everything practically HR wise is all taken care of and it's all good. And then after that it's usually we're going to go through something in the morning. We're going to then do an enablement session mid morning or so. Then we have really some self exploration so they can kind of absorb and take that reflective knowledge in. But then also just having time to get hands on and just be able to start doing it. I know that our enablements, when I was at retail for example, my onboarding was hey, a week before you start, just go do these like eight hours of self learning courses and get all set up. I had some conversations with people around remote onboarding and different kinds of things. I work in an office, a hybrid Environment. I'm in my office today.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: But when it comes to remote onboarding, I think there's a couple of things that really work. One, trying to get the ease of use of knowledge and systems and navigation, navigating things in the environment as well as possible so that they can focus on the job and not all the practical things around it. Number two, buddy system always works. Really being able to set somebody up with a buddy that they know that they have as a resource to be able to help answer any, any of those questions. Maybe it's practically, maybe it's functionally something like that.
And then keeping consistent, like just continually being able to help and say, how do you feel that you're progressing and you're doing. I know that those are more conceptual.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: Things, but sure, absolutely. Curious your thoughts on, say, for a team that's already established and we're bringing in a new support manager, we're bringing in somebody to backfill someone who's left, or we're bringing in the first time we've brought in a support manager for a younger organization. What would be your advice to somebody stepping into that role in terms of onboarding knowledge for them to have ability to do the job? Be curious to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: There are so many resources and really good resources on this exact topic. So I would love to just, hey, go, go here, go there.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: But at the same time, I think it's a very different perspective coming into building a team versus coming into an existing team.
I haven't personally gone into an existing team from the experience that I have yet. So I can't directly speak to, hey, this is what I did. I can only speak to. This is what I would do.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: If I were to go into an existing team today, the first things that I would want to do is really spend time understanding the agent's perspective of the experience, really spending time with the team on one side of it. So that's one track that I would have. Really spend time. Just really get in depth. What are the biggest things as a team that you're facing as issues or problems or friction points? And what are the biggest opportunities that you think that we have?
Just because your agents are on the front line, they speak with customers every single day. They generally have a really good understanding of what are. What's going on. Number one, obviously you're coming into an existing team, you want to understand the team. At the same time, you're coming in as a manager, as a leader, and you want to start getting that strategic business Value realized. Really want to also be able to understand the organization goals, outcomes, the direction that they're heading in so that we can start to piece together that business vision strategy and the agent opportunities and experience that they're bringing in. And how can we actually bridge that gap and have those teams meet? I really want to evaluate the current state of things.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: So what's the team saying? What's the business saying? And also just do my own research in terms of like metrics wise, performance wise, how are we actually performing? And do those perspectives and stories that the agents and business are telling, do they actually, are they validated through the actual story that the data tells and the things that we see? So in that sense, that would be the first thing that I would really want to do, understand those things. And then I would think about, okay, these are in the first 90 days or 100 days probably what I would do then is really think about what are a couple of different levels of wins that I want to get. Quick wins, 100%. What can we do to really start improving things that maybe have been festering wounds for a while that are easy lift, easy approval kind of things Like I want to get impact realized quickly so we can start saying hey, we're here, we're making improvements, we're working towards these things. These are working at the same time I want to start doing that stakeholder management cross functionally to say hey, how can we start building those relationships for those, those long term things that you really need a lot of buy in for? How can we start working towards getting the actual mindset that we need to get those things in? So that's at least the way that I would look at it.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: One more conversation topic for us. You've recently written about a three domains framework and I'd love for you to spend some time talking about this. Certainly we'll share the resource in the show notes as well for our listeners that are interested but would love to hear from you just a little bit about that framework.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Yeah, just some context of where it came from. It's a culmination of everything from the past few years and the things that we've built to now. I need to really show my team what are the focuses because one of the things that I found was my team really wants to grow, they really want to develop, but one of the things that they find difficulty is knowing where they can take ownership to be able to like you know, hey, we're building support. We want to also help build support. We want to be able to do that? What can we actually do? What does it actually look like?
And so I started really thinking about, okay, like what does support actually fully mean? And what are the things that we need to really have fully covered as a team to support the organization, our growth and really think about that and, and documents that they can very visibly see? These are all the opportunities and these are the things that we have to work on that fit within our, within our scope.
It came down to three things on which I already mentioned. One, your knowledge practices. Like how well do we leverage the information and knowledge that we have available to us to better help our customers and also inform our teams within knowledge and that kind of area of expertise that you use. In terms of knowledge practices, there's there's two things. One, self service experience. What is the knowledge that your teams can use to give to customers and how can customers actually access the information themselves? Do they have the information that they need, where they need it and can they get it self service themselves? Does it actually fully work? Two, internally, do reps and agents have the ability to get the knowledge they need to best help customers in the best way possible? Is it easily accessible? Is it readable? Can they actually get the information that they need and also just know what's coming down the pipeline? Like, it's like, it's the worst when you have like a customer that tells you a new product feature that you didn't even know about was released. So like how well is your team informed and can get that information? So one, external internal knowledge practices are extremely important. There are always opportunities for reps and agents to be able to take on development opportunities there also training, like when it comes to knowledge practices, it's also just knowledge and depth of the team themselves. So are you actually working to upskill them and build their knowledge that they have as well? The, that's one domain which is knowledge. The second domain would be quality. So how do we actually take and leverage that knowledge and turn it into really quality experience? Essentially, how do we become informed to create a better quality experience? There's three things under quality, there's always three things.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: On communication quality, how well are we maintaining our standard of excellence in conversations? Can we just have really great conversations between customers and reps? And how do we maintain that? One is that actual qa, is that consistency and conversational review? How do we maintain that across different channels? Number two, operating quality. I think it's extremely important. Like if you, if your customer's like, yeah, this thing looks shiny and then internally everything is like we have to click so many buttons to make that happen. We have to really like do some really heavy lifting to make sure those things work. Operating quality is extremely important. Are you actually setting up your systems and your processes to function smoothly? If your team has to deal with incidents every two days, you're not going to have a very good experience for agents or customers in that sense. So you really need to set up your operations operating quality for success and then really also taking time to coach your teams and be able to have those conversations around the actual enablement side of it. Like, yes, you can train and build competencies in the team. Do you actually translate that into can they use it and can we continue to coach them on that knowledge and develop it as well? So training and enablement I think cuts across both that knowledge and quality aspect and it's an extremely thing important thing to keep top of mind.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: At the same time you can have really great knowledge practices and you can have really good quality conversations. But if you're not measuring anything, how are you delivering impact?
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Sure. Right.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: How are you actually know if you're successful or can make improvements or not? So I think that that third domain and that that opportunity would be data. Like what's the level of data that you have and can you utilize that to transform those interactions into insights that you can actually make improvements to the product and to the team zones? A couple of things under that would be metrics and measures. How do you actually set up your organization to create those metrics or that balanced scorecard to where you can show this is what support is doing. One, those hygiene and operational metrics, two, how those metrics connect to those business outcomes there as well.
And the most important when it comes to data and information would be customer insights like how well can you actually show this is what customers are saying and this is what customers need and deliver that to the organization. So it comes down to how well you leverage knowledge to turn it into really quality experiences that you can learn from and continue to develop those practices so it becomes a cycle of improvement and being able to develop that.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks for walking us through those. I think those are really valuable for any level of leadership to think through with support organization. Now as we kind of wrap up the conversation, I'd love to take just a moment or two here for any closing thoughts you may have for our listeners. Any anything key that maybe we haven't talked about that you'd like to share.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: It's messy.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: It's a journey. Like if you're Going to be scaling support. Like the things that you build early will not last. Be ready to tear them down and build something new over it. Like it is a bit of a mindset to be able to, yeah, I built that thing. It's lasted forever. Like let's keep it because I built it so long ago. Sure. You need to break, build and rebuild quite a lot in that sense and also just be able to adjust to those needs of the organization, like building those relationships. Being able to understand the things I build today, we're going to pull them down and go from there. One, yeah, that's a journey, right? It takes a lot to keep up with it. At the same time, one of the things that I've really found is one of the things that I've been trying to do over the past couple of years is how do I like I'm building. I really love building. I really love taking on all the process and all that stuff. Sometimes when you start to go from doing everything yourself to building your team, it can be really hard to let go of a lot of those things that you really like doing and building because you're like, yeah, I built our self service experience, I've done it, I've built it, I've built our taxonomy, I built all this. And then your team is now supposed to be responsible for that. And you're like, yeah, I've built. I want to do this thing. You got to let them run, you got to let them, let them also have the opportunity to do the same.
So in that sense, like it's messy. Be ready to break down what you've built and build it again. And at the same time, when you do go to build it again, think about how your team can do it and instead of you needing to be the one, give the opportunity away to somebody for them to develop the skills that you've also been able to develop. Like that's what it comes down to, I think.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Sure. Hey, thanks for sharing that. I think, I think that's a great, great close to the conversation. Now if somebody wanted to reach you, learn more about you, about the academy to innovate or about growth support, how would they best go about doing that?
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Well one LinkedIn, I'm super active there, so if that's your preferred method, awesome. I'm also in most of the customer communities like Elevate CX Support Driven. I'm also in Write the Docs. So a lot of these communities as well, most mostly Slack communities there. You can also reach me via email if you go to growthsupport IO and any of those places is great.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, we'll make sure to link those down in the show notes below to make it easy for our listeners to to reach you if they have interest there. But Neil, thank you so much for joining us here at the Table.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: 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.
