Support Insights Podcast | CX & Customer Support Podcast by SentiSum (SentiSum)

 This week, Sharad and I had the pleasure of chatting to John Ernsberger, the co-founder of Stella Connect (an contact centre industry SaaS platform that just sold to Medallia!)

The interview was short but high value, we covered topics like:

• How to motivate employees in the contact centre, one of the toughest work environments.
• What John has seen change in contact centres during the pandemic
• How contact centres are responding to their employees working from home with a new tech stack, transformed communication and digital learning & development.
• How the volume and type of tickets taken by contact centres have changed in the past few months.
• Why there might need to be a fundamental shift in the characteristics of the contact centre workforce.
• How the way contact centres extract and use customer feedback has changed during the pandemic.
• How you can get more information to frontline staff to ensure you have efficient training and QA, operational metrics, and employee feedback loops.

Phew, we covered a lot in that time. Safe to say this episode was thought-provoking and packed with insight.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

Join the support insights community - https://sentisum.com/resources/community 

In today's episode we talk to Craig Stoss, Senior Operations Manager at PartnerHero, about all the opportunities companies have to make their customer experiences effortless. 

Long hold times? Messy knowledge centres? Unintuitive chat-bots? 

All these things cause friction to the customer and, let's face it, if you're a frustrated customer you're unlikely to stick around for too long if there's an easier option. 

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community - https://sentisum.com/resources/community   

In today's episode we talk to Phil Thompson, Customer Support Director at Roofr, about how to promote healthy feedback within your support team. Whether that's manager to direct, peer to peer, or direct to manager - and the knock on effect this has for the team and the wider business.

We'll cover what healthy feedback is (and isn't), how to promote a good feedback culture in a remote business, and how sharing feedback openly can promote collaboration, cohesive strategies and confidence.  

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Today we’re focusing on one of the most important topics in customer service: your team.

Customer service is known for being tough work and the agents themselves are on the frontline dealing with the brunt of unhappy customers, and many see it as a short term job opportunity.

In that environment, your internal culture goes a long way toward creating a happy environment where employees want to stay for the long term. If we’re going to change the narrative around customer service as a strong career opportunity, we need to start by empowering agents with the right tools and authority to do a great job and deliver a great customer experience.

This is an extra special episode because we’re hearing short clips from 6 different customer service leaders, taken from our backlog of episodes. 

It’s telling that so many of our guests have talked about the importance of empowerment, and in this episode, we’ll hear all about why it’s important and what you can do to better empower your agents today.

Who are the guests?

• Heidi El Hawary, Student Advisors Lead at CareerFoundry
• Oleg Krasnov, Head of Support Excellence at Miro
• Dimple Pattani, Head of Frontline Support at GoCardless
• Luis Pinto, Director of CX at Remote
• Charlotte Spain, Head of Customer at Buzzbike
• Alice Godfrey, Director at Bloomic

This week we interview Alice Godfrey, the founder of Bloomic.‍

Before founding Bloomic, Alice was Head of Support at the fast-growing health technology startup, Zava, where she lead four teams that serviced six countries.

While at Zava, she learned the best practice for overcoming the challenges of scaling a support team while your customer base is rapidly growing.

She's narrowed the core difficulties down to three:

1. Training: It's hard to hire and onboard lots of staff in a very short amount of time.
2. Leadership: It's likely that you once had just one customer support agent who now leads the team. That's a challenge for anyone, but especially so in customer support.
3. Policy: When you grow naturally, you forget to formalise it. To stop an overwhelm that impacts your customers, you need proper policy in place.

We deep dive these topics and much more, hearing stories from complex CS environments like healthcare, and Alice's tips for creating a happy customer and a happy customer service team.

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

Subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

In today's interview we sit down with the brilliant Aistė Sobutienė, the customer support director at Vinted.

Together, we tackle three of the most common myths in the customer service world:

1. The classic "the customer is always right".
2. All customers prefer dealing with a human, as opposed to a machine.
3. You always should exceed the customers expectations.

Aiste gifted us with a fresh perspective on these, with some ideas that may surprise you.

How to optimise your customer service

Adrian Swinscoe is a celebrated speaker, author (Read: Punk CX) and advisor in the customer service and experience industry.

In this week's podcast, we were lucky enough to catch up with Adrian about a customer service improvement project he recently advised on.

Adrian was approached by an agile, fast-growing company that wanted to make sure they were running an optimal customer service operation.

But, they weren't really sure how well they were doing.

We find out:

• Adrian's approach to assessing the company

• How he discovered some quick wins

• What changes were implemented to take their customer service to the next level.

We then dive into the future of customer and the technological changes you can expect.

Hello and welcome to the On Hold podcast, where we interview people with unique experiences and ask them to teach us how to create wonderful customer experiences.

This week’s guest is Annette Franz. She’s been working in this space since before the words “customer experience” were a part of common business language.

Annette has held senior CX & VoC positions at companies like Medallia, CustomerSat, and Confirmit, and now is the Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. In short: she knows the customer experience landscape like the back of her hand.

In this interview we discuss:

• Why has customer experience come into focus in recent years?
• What’s the difference between a touchpoint map and a customer journey map?
• Where do you start when doing a customer journey map?
• What techniques can you use to gather customer feedback?
• 6 steps to mapping the customer journey
• Common CX mistakes made in call centres
• NPS—is it any good?
• Why employee experience is important to customer experience

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Tony Adams, Product Manager at Supercell, about all things Player Experience in the gaming industry. With more than 10 years' experience in the gaming industry, Tony takes us through how the ways of working in PX completely challenge everything you thought you knew about CX best practices. We discuss how focusing on enabling players to get the support they need quickly without having to leave the game, means that traditional CS rules you find in other industries don't typically apply. Plus, hear Tony's advice on how others in the gaming industry can level up their PX, including the importance of being comfortable with change. Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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In this episode of Support Insights, we catch up with Fabrice Dowling the Global Head of Customer Care at HeliosX.

HeliosX is a group of healthcare brands (Dermatica, MedExpress, PharmacyLab) that run different business models and, as a result, have very different approaches to customer service.

Having seen exponential growth during the pandemic, Fabrice was tasked with organising and optimising a customer service department that spans the three brands.

Sounds complicated, right?

In the interview, Fabrice shares with us the challenges of setting up multi-brand support.

We cover the metrics, tones of voice, quality assurance, influencing leadership, and building a strong team culture.

There's a lot to learn in this episode for anyone interested in improving their CS division, especially those looking for a blueprint while their company acquires or expands service lines.

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

This week, we welcome Luis Pinto, Director of Customer Experience at Remote.com onto the show.

Remote has just raised a $150m Series B funding round and is growing exponentially. By the end of 2021, Luis alone will have added a further 60 customer success, customer service and CX professionals to his team.

In this episode, we deep dive into best practices for hiring, onboarding and retaining new team members. This is no easy task in normal times, but in a 100% remote company (like Remote.com) that's scaling quickly, the challenge is multiplied.

We'll hear all of Luis' learnings and how he's approaching the problem.

We cover:

• Interview skills and best practice
• Common mistakes managers make
• How to onboard new hires effectively (especially in a 100% remote company like Remote)
• Maintaining quality under pressure
• The keys to employee retention

Hope you enjoy the episode! If you do, subscribe to get weekly content like this in your inbox.

This week's guest is the incredible Lauren Cunningham, Senior Support Ops & Strategy Lead at Loom.

In Lauren's 2.5 years at Loom, the company went through a mind-blowing growth period—from 700,000 to 10,000,000 users.

For the customer support team that meant dramatically rising requests and issues to handle.

Over the period, Lauren and the Loom team used a number of tactics to reduce the percent of customers contact support from 4% to 1%.

For example:

• They built out a high-quality help centre, and viewership increased from 1 million per quarter to 3 million.
• Their web-app automation served 350,000 answers before tickets got created.
• Their chatbot reduced ticket volume by 15-20%.
• They used Loom's own product to deliver fast and personalised customer communications.
• They leveraged support insights to drive product improvements.

And, the best bit?

The Loom team prioritised customer experience, not ticket deflection, and their CSAT scores remained high.

In this episode, we also chatted about support insights and Loom's product-feedback loop.

So if you love customer insights like we do, listen until the end to hear how and why Loom shares support insights across the company.

"Bad CX is about what companies want. Mediocre CX is about what companies do. Really great CX is about how the company works."

This is one of my favourite quotes from this week's interview with Augie Ray, VP Analyst of CX at Gartner. 

So often, companies approach customer experience with a brand-centric focus. They ask questions like, 'how can this reduce costs?' or 'how can I build an experience that gets people to take notice of me so I can acquire them?' 

But this is marketing, not customer experience.

They're important questions, no doubt. But they should be secondary to, 'what is the impact on the customer?'

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights.

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Ben Gardner, VP of Customer Support at Drift, about the recent initiative they've introduced that's taking their customer contact strategy to new levels - their customer community.

Ben will be taking us through how Drift's customer community is allowing them to offer pro-active support that gets every department involved in customer centricity and knowledge sharing.

We'll be discussing what exactly makes up this customer community and the effects on retention and product adoption that Ben is hoping to see in the coming months as a result.

Plus, hear Ben's advice on how to unify different departments in your organization around the central goal of customer centricity, and how this will help your overall business goals in the long-run.

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - sentisum.com/resources/community

As we take a look back through the Support Insights Podcast episodes of 2022, we'll be taking learnings from many of our previous guests on how they structure teams, processes and reports to share VOC data in the best way.

We've taken clips from this year's episodes to highlight some of the best examples and advice on encouraging collaborative inter-department relationships.

Nick Moreton tells us how his team at Hotjar are using AI to implement customer feedback in the product roadmap. 

Valeria Kast from Printify talks about how encouraging non-customer facing teams to regularly spend time with support speaking to customers.

And we look back at the one central theme that unites all support leaders - a genuine love for customers, for experience and for their teams.  

Enjoy the episode, and be sure to check out previous episodes for more insights from our guests - sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

In this episode of the State of Customer Service podcast, we take a look at the link between customer support and product management.

With me, is MJ Marques who spent 5 years as a customer support representative before moving into product management in 2018.

We're also joined by SentiSum's own head of product, Kirsty Pinner. Who has built SentiSum's product to make customer support insight easy to access and leverage across businesses.

MJs move between careers make her uniquely qualified to answer one of the big questions this podcast episode answers: How can customer support professionals make the move into product?

Both MJ and Kirsty's background (building and working in tech for support teams) give them first-hand experience of the power of customer support voice of the customer data. So we deep dive into that and learn why product managers need to make better use of it as a channel of customer insight.

This episode discusses these key topics:

1. What is the link between product management and customer support?
2. What useful data can be found in customer support
3. Reasons why support agents and support ticket insights can be so powerful for product teams
4. How customer support teams can make their voice heard across the business
5. Why companies need to realise that customer support is the best training ground for almost any role
6. How to sell your skillset and transition from support to product—lots of practical advice.

Enjoy!

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

In this episode of the Support Insights podcast, we've caught up again with Cornelia Konstantyner, Head of CX at Organic Basics.

This week we're taking a look inside one of the most important global issues: climate change.

Thanks to Amazon's one-click culture, we've all come to expect one thing from eCommerce companies: super fast delivery, and super easy returns.

Brands chasing sales at all costs have optimised the purchase experience to encourage impulse, thoughtless purchases and immediate gratification.

But, with easy returns comes a hidden cost:

• It's predicted that Amazon alone, with their 50% share of the $600bn eCommerce industry, will represent 1% of US climate emissions by the end of 2021. That's predicted to rise to 15% by 2040.

• On average only 50% of clothes returned go back on sale.

• 5 billion lbs of returned goods go straight into landfills each year in the US.

• These are US statistics, but this is a global issue.

For a company like Organic Basics, which create climate-conscious clothing, the impact of one-click culture and free returns is top of mind.

Organic Basics is a certified B-Corp, which means profit is just one pillar of decision-making. The others are people and the planet.

The conversation this week centres on how brands can deliver great customer experiences while also caring about the planet. In particular, we look at the eCommerce returns process.

You'll learn:

• Why there is an issue with free and easy returns policies.
• What brands can do to make it easier for customers to care about the planet.
• The changes brands can make to reduce unnecessary returns from their customers.
• How you can start the conversation internally and start a movement to care about the planet.
• How data and analytics can be used to determine whether a return is worth it.
• What you can do as a consumer to reduce your climate impact.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

In this week's episode we speak to David Apple, CRO at Zingtree, about how you can harness tech to reduce your agent training time, and the benefits reduced training time can bring to both the agent and the wider business.

You'll hear about how David's own early experience in a call centre role, as well as his more recent positions at Typeform, Notion and now Zingtree have given some insightful perspective into how the traditional way of training your agents may no longer be the best way.

While every business does things differently, David and Bryony's own experiences of agent training being a long-winded process of trying to retain endless information, to only forget it all as soon as you go live on the phones, (or trying to fumble your way through a script), probably resonates with quite a few listeners.

As technology advances, the way we run all aspects of our businesses is evolving too, why not agent training? 

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

This week's podcast guest, Charlotte Spain, heads the 'rider happiness' team at Buzzbike.

In the past year, Charlotte and her team have grown customer service at the thriving startup into a mature, customer-obsessed function.

She's built an internal brand around customer service, championed the role as a long-term career, and placed the department at the strategic heart of the company where it influences marketing, operations and customer happiness.

In this episode, we look at best practice from Buzzbike so that you get inspired.

You'll find out:

1/ Why it's so important that Buzzbike calls customer service 'rider happiness'.

2/ Why great customer service and experience is part of Buzzbike's DNA.

3/ What steps you can take to build a customer-obsessed culture.

4/ How to remove the negative assumptions around customer service.

5/ Why hiring from hospitality is the winning formula for finding great customer service agents.

6/ Why the customer service team at Buzzbike is so involved with marketing messaging.

7/ How buzz bike identifies trending problems affecting their riders.

8/ How Buzzbike uses the negative lexicon approach by Danny Meyer

This week, we have another incredible guest, Ed Deason, the Head of Customer Service at Pret a Manger, the international sandwich & coffee shop chain with 500 retail stores.

Ed mainly worked in customer service & support in the travel industry for the past 13 years before moving to Pret in January 2020, right before the UK went into lockdown.

In this episode, we start off discussing the travel industry: the challenges facing holiday providers who don’t own all the touch points, why customer experience is so important in the holiday industry, and how to maintain an 85% response rate on customer surveys.

We then move onto Pret, which has had a crazy year this year. After building knowledge and experience for 30 years in high street retail, overnight Pret closed every store. They shifted from 100% in-store purchases to having no stores.

We learn how Pret responded, the impact on customer service, and how Pret quickly pivoted from customers coming to them, to meeting customers at their homes. 

We also get a hint of what projects are next for Pret and how they’ll continue to build experiences that fit their values and brand promise.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

This week, Dimple Pattani, the Head of Frontline Customer Support at GoCardless joins me to talk about team culture.

GoCardless has grown rapidly in the last few years, adding a ton of new people to the team and significantly increasing ticket volume.

In the episode, Dimple explains the elements of a strong team culture, the core values, ways of working and management styles that have allowed her team to be high performing and efficient as they scale up.

You'll learn:

• The GoCardless growth story
• What empowering agents really means
• What culture creates a high-performing team
• What team-building events GoCardless does

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community 

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Clemens Behrend, ex-Global Director of Customer Support at Bitpanda, about how he harnessed AI in his support department to share insights across teams and identify customer churn risk, and what he recommends for other businesses looking to do the same.

Having explored and implemented many different AI tools, Clemens talks us through how he has harnessed automation to identify and solve the most frustrating problems for both agents and customers, resulting in higher employee and customer satisfaction. 

Building a central dashboard allowed Clemens to share insights on customer sentiment, predict customer behaviours and monitor changes to Bitcoin price affecting customer happiness. 

Watch the episode to find out how you can utilise AI to share reports across departments, how to quantify AI insights into business goals, and how to make a business case to other stakeholders to make the investment in tools.

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community

In today's episode we talk to Matt Bell, Customer Care Team Lead at Too Good To Go, about how his team and the wider business are always on the lookout for opportunities to educate their customers - and Matt's previous experience as a high school teacher makes him a real expert on the topic.

We'll discuss how Too Good To Go use in-app prompts to tackle common queries, reducing contacts for easily rectified issues, how they drip feed education into auto replies and canned responses, and how having a team who truly live and breathe the company values means this all becomes second nature.

Matt also gives his advice on how other companies can work towards aligning themselves on their core values and educating customers (as well as how to keep your bananas fresher for longer)!

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Miro was growing 300% year-on-year already—and then the pandemic hit.

The rise of asynchronous work saw an explosion in the need for their product (a virtual whiteboard and collaboration tool), even from personas they'd never seen before.

In the CS team, that meant inbound tickets grew from 2,500 per month to 2,500 per week almost overnight.

And they were seeing new questions they didn't expect, from customer segments they'd rarely come across.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service podcast, we get a masterclass from Oleg Krasnov, Miro's Head of Customer Support during the pandemic hyper-growth period.

We find out what it's like to be a leader under pressure; to have 10,000 things on your backlog; and how to get through it with clear prioritisation, processes, analytics and systems,

Key points include:

1. The benefits of investing in support operations employees early on
2. Why you should map your customer journey, including your systems and processes.
3. Why support insights and the product-feedback loop are so critical as a company scales.

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Valeria Kast, Head of Merchant Support at Printify about how she's increased CSAT to 94% (and kept it there!) and drastically reduced first response times in support. 

Having joined Printify during the pandemic, Valeria has spent the last 2 years creating specialised support structures and hiring procedures that have sewn fantastic results.  

Valeria talks us through how her approach of specialised support teams has enabled a massive reduction in first response times from 24 hours to under 1 minutes on live chat, as well as response time reductions across the board on other channels. 

Watch the episode to find out the steps you can take to improve CSAT and reduce response times in your business.

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

This week, we’ve got an awesome guest: Nicholas Zeisler, who is the founder of Zeisler Consulting, a CX development consultancy that brings the theories of process improvement to customer experience. 

He’s also been there himself as the Director of Customer Experience at HP, where he built a customer experience team driven by analytics, setting up the whole company to take action on VoC insights.

We get Nicholas to share his advice and stories, covering these key topics:

• How do you build a customer-centric culture? Illustrated in classic consultant style with three Es: Enablement, Empowerment and Encouragement.
• How to sell customer experience projects internally, with examples from his background.
• And the methods you can take from the process improvement world to boost your companies customer experience.

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Shannon Johnson, Director of Customer Support at Sprout Social, about how Shannon's background in product operations gives her a unique perspective when it comes to sharing customer support insights with product teams.

Having started her career in customer support, Shannon's combined experience of product operations, support and a passion for tech, mean she has gained a really unique view of customers and the technology and processes that they need. 

Watch the episode to find out how Shannon attributes customer pain points to financial leverages to influence the product roadmap and encourage customer-centric strategies.

We'll also touch on the concept of using proactive support to increase revenue opportunities, retention and the overall success and growth of a support team and therefore the growth of the business.

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

Outsourcing is one of the secrets of scaling up.

As a startup with fast customer growth, you're likely to see rapidly rising demand in customer service, too.

You'll need to react fast through recruitment or innovation in order to maintain customer experience and prevent churn.

But, what if you can't meet that demand quick enough?

"If your workloads increases by 10x, but your customer service doesn't, you just mathematically can't meet customer demands.

So you're too slow. You're not available enough. Nobody likes having issues, but after [a customer has] committed a certain part of their wallet to using a product, and then you can't even reach those wonderful people who've had ruined your day, that's the worst, right?"

This is where outsourcing helps.

A great outsourcing partner can extend your coverage, bring you security and expertise, and drive efficiency through economies of scale.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service Podcast, we cover three core questions:

1. What are the benefits of outsourcing?
2. What are the risks of outsourcing?
3. How to make sure you choose the right outsourcing partner

To answer these questions, we're talking to Roman Siepelmeyer. Roman is the Head of Operational Excellence at GetYourGuide (who raised $484m from Softbank in 2019) and the ex-Head of Shared Service Center at Delivery Hero.

Roman has a lot of experience in designing and managing contact centers, including extensive experience in the outsourcing space, making him the perfect expert to chat to about this subject.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

In this week's episode, we spoke to Kristy and Rebecca, Customer Service Team Lead and Customer Insights Manager at Snug, about the amazing customer community Snug have built and how that feeds in to all areas of the business.

We'll hear about how Snug develop new colours, accessories, modular additions to existing products and more based on their customers' feedback to encourage an engaged community and an impressive customer return rate.

A brand that carries through every single channel, you'll hear about how Snug's genuine tone of voice allows agents to be themselves, build trust with the customers, and stay consistent whether you're looking at the website, social media or speaking to someone in support.

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Justin Rezende, Head of Support at Shopify Logistics about how he reduced reply times by over 90% at Deliverr and the specific method he uses to calculate actual transaction time on tickets. Justin will be taking us through the important role support touchpoints play in managing client experience, and how properly calculating optimal headcount can remove the guesswork in improving client relationships - as well as the negative impact an understaffed support structure can have. We'll also be discussing the acquisition of Deliverr by Shopify Logistics, and how staying aligned on the goal of making commerce accessible to businesses and delivering great experiences aided the transition. Plus, hear Justin's advice for anyone looking to take steps to reduce their own response times. Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Emma Chipperfield, Product Support Manager at Figma, about how she's been building out specialized teams within the support structure and the benefits of this approach. We discuss the specialized segments Emma's team is split into, how this helps to improve the support experience, and the impact this approach has had on SLAs and CSAT If you're looking to optimize the structure of your support team, Emma also takes us through her advice, including how it's never too early to specialize! Plus, hear about how Figma encourages all teams to participate in product discovery, and how they keep the unofficial value of "Play" alive throughout the organization.    

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

The podcast is back! 

In today's episode we introduce new host and Community Manager at SentiSum, Bryony Mulkern in a sit down with Co-Founder and CEO, Sharad Khandelwal. 

We discuss the motivations that brought Sharad to develop SentiSum and the different approaches we've seen towards customer support in our own journeys. 

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

This week on the podcast, I’m catching up with Svitlana Gaunt, the Customer Experience Operations Lead at Otrium.

Otrium is the fastest growing startup in the Netherlands and they raised $130m in March this year to accelerate the international expansion of their online fashion outlet marketplace.

In this episode, you’ll hear about how Svitlana and the Otrium team successfully set up a brand new outsourcing provider and ensured they delivered on Otrium’s expectations of premium quality customer service.

We get tips on motivating an outsourced team, instilling your culture even when you cant meet in person, and how best to communicate clear expectations.

If you listen through to the end you’ll get to hear a great definition of high-quality customer service and some tips on maintaining a customer-centric culture as you scale up.

If you enjoy the conversation, subscribe to our newsletter for more weekly actionable strategies from support and CX leaders.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get regular actionable content: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

This week on the State of Customer Service Podcast, we've got the incredible Teresa Anania.

Teresa is VP Global Customer Success at Zendesk.

Her role places her right at the heart of the customer service world. Every day Teresa and her team are focused on sharing best practice and problem-solving for customer service teams at the most successful global companies.

We got the answer to three core questions:

1. What are the top three trends facing customer support leaders right now?
2. What principles does Zendesk follow to deliver a great customer experience?
3. What are three ways Zendesk users can maximise ROI from Zendesk?
4. Bonus: Teresa's advice to those wanting to get to VP-level leadership

This is a rare opportunity to hear from someone who talks to and helps support teams from all over the world.

Join the support insights community here

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Nick Moreton, Director of Support at Hotjar, about how his team are working in unison with the Product team to create strategies that are centred around the voice of the customer. 

We'll talk about the challenges most businesses face in capturing unbiased customer feedback and implementing it in wider strategy decisions. 

Nick will also talk us through how his support team has been restructured to work closely with product, as well as how Hotjar are now using AI to analyse their customer support conversations and unlock in-depth customer sentiment insights they can act on.  

Hotjar's motivation is to not only be good at representing their customer voice, but to be incredible at it and have the best possible product feedback loop.  

Listen to the episode to understand some of the things you can do in your business to represent VOC in your wider business strategies, or head to our website to read the highlights.  

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Full guide and youtube video on the sentisum website

Hello SentiSum followers, readers and newcomers!

We teamed up with an industry expert to create a video guide for customer journey mapping.

That expert is Ed Deason, the current UK Head of Customer Service at British high street chain, Pret A Manger (find him on LinkedIn here).

He's got a ton of experience behind him running customer experience and service teams.

And, customer journey mapping was actually one of the first things he did in his career.

Together, we wanted to make a truly actionable guide that would help both customer journey mapping newbies AND senior CX professionals navigate the process.

I suggest watching the full video lesson first, and then referring back to this shorter 'summary' blog post for a refresher.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn.

(Follow us on LinkedIn for regular actionable content like this)

This week's interview could not have been more interesting.

We caught up with Megan Bowen, the Chief Customer Officer at one the fastest growing marketing agencies in the US, Refine Labs.

Megan joined the Refine Labs team just three months ago, and it's her first time being with such a small, startup-style team.

She's previously led customer experience projects at some leading technology companies: spending time between customer service and sales at ZocDoc, leading corporate accounts at GrubHub, taking up the reigns as COO at Managed by Q, and acting as VP of Customer Success at Platterz, covering success and support.

The customer experience at everywhere she's worked has been a mixture of technology and reality: whether it's tech & doctors, tech & food, or tech and office management. This means Megan has a rare insight into what it takes to create incredible customer experiences in the mixed reality world.

Topics covered included:

- How to help your team be successful, as well as your customers. Creating the right conditions for everyone to be happy and satisfied

- Helping your customers get real value, reducing churn

- Framing customer experience initiatives in terms of business results

- Creating win-win situations to benefit your customer and your business

- Investing in the empathy skills of your customer support agents

- How you can use the acronym LAAARing to coach your team to build communication skills

- Using call shadowing & asking questions to coach your team

- Being at GrubHub during their IPO

- How Megan merged the customer experience of 3 acquired companies into one experience at GrubHub. How did they choose what features to keep? How did they try to stop churn?

- How customer experience differs between corporate and consumer accounts

- Why GrubHub CX was so complex: how do you deliver food to 1000s of employees at the same time in the same building across 15 floors?

- Megan weighs in on the debate: NPS, is it really useful?

- Megan's thoughts on why qualitative feedback beats quantitative any day

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

Subscribe here: www.sentisum.com/resources/state-of-customer-service-podcast

This week's guest on the podcast is Sham Aziz, the current Head of Customer Service at Selfridges (the famous British department store).

Sham has 20 years of experience on the frontline of customer service. He's lead teams across companies like Natwest, Ocado, Net-A-Porter and Fab.com.

We caught up with Sham just as the UK is coming out of lockdown. The timing made it perfect to dive into Sham's experience of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted his work over the past year and what he thinks the future of customer service will look like.

For the first time in history, Selfridges closed their doors. Like much of the high street, they shifted their focus online, had to shift to remote work and hiring, and saw significant growth in customer contacts.

But, amidst this chaos, there is opportunity. Opportunity to make changes happen quickly and become an agile company again.

In this episode, we take a look at:

• The impact of the pandemic on operating models

• Importance of customer insights and how to get them listened to (we also wrote an eBook on this recently here).

• How should the profile of who you hire change?

• A discussion on whether customer service advisors should be sales trained

• Why there has been a shift in customer service careers outlook

• Sham's ideas for the future of customer service

Subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

In today's interview we caught up again with Aiste Sobutiene, customer support director at Vinted to discuss the incredible process they've built to encourage active, two-way communication between their product and customer service teams.

Through an innovative three step communication model, which you'll hear all about today, the Vinted team have made easier to make sure feedback is constant, everyone feels heard, and better product and user experience's are built.

There's so often a communication gap between those two teams, both of which ultimately want the same thing. In this episode, we hear a ton of best practices, tactics and techniques for bringing the teams together to provide the best customer experience possible.

Join the support insights community

In today's episode we talk to Zack Bryson, Head of Global Customer service at Awardco, about how he enables his team to proactively look for opportunities in their support conversations to solve customer issues on a wider scale. Encouraging open communication and idea sharing with his agents means they feel empowered to look for solutions to root causes and are always looking at issues through the eyes of the customer.

Zack believes wholeheartedly in hiring for his team based on genuine care and passion for good customer service, and that it's his job as a leader to encourage career progression for everyone on his team to anywhere in the business. 

We'll discuss how this approach has lead to Zack having an agent attrition rate of only 7%! As well as his tips on how other businesses can encourage strong relationships within their customer service teams. After all, if you take care of your agents, they'll take care of your customers. 

In this episode with Iman Safari of Interflora, we explore what it means to have a customer service DNA. We hear how to build one and how to reduce the dreaded "cost-centre thinking".

We answer these questions in the episode: What is a customer service culture? How does Iman get agents to live and breathe the culture? What does Iman say to his agents to convince them why a strong culture is important in customer service? How did Iman build a customer service culture at Interflora? Why don't senior management think customer service is central? Why is there a mismatch between CS leaders and C-suite Where does cost centre thinking originate? Why does it lead to bad customer service? Why average handle time and time between calls should not be an important KPI and why you should never tell your employees to rush. Why you should measure your team as a team, not as individuals, and why 'employee of the month' is an old way of thinking. How can you decrease average handle time in a way that’s positive for the customer? How important is technology for the customer service culture?

This week we have an incredible business leader, Graham Johnston, the Head of Omnichannel at Three, the British telecoms and internet service provider with over 10 million customers.

Graham’s an omnichannel expert, so we talk about what that is and the common challenges to a true omnichannel customer experience. We dig into some of the projects Graham has led at Three, Three Store Now (customer support calls being directed to in-store employees on a video chat) and Three Live (the launch of a live stream unboxing and events channel that pivoted over the pandemic to one-to-many customer support sessions.)

My favourite part was hearing about how Three approaches customer feedback in an omnichannel way and what the future is for uncovering customer insights from multiple channels.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations

Sharad, the founder of SentiSum, recently appeared on the Micro Advice podcast, hosted by James Buscaglio. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why SentiSum was created and the problem they solve

• How AI can be used in customer support to augment and optimize

• How SentiSum delivers a great customer experience to their own customers

• CX trends—are we seeing positive movement? 

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

In this episode of the Support Insights podcast, we caught up with Emma Sopadjieva, Head of CX Analytics at ServiceNow (ex-Eventbrite and Medallia).

Emma's role at ServiceNow is "90% influence, and 10% data"—a description that resonates, I bet, with everyone who works in customer experience.

In this episode, we dive into what it takes to drive customer experience improvements in a business. From aligning CX metrics with other departments KPIs to demonstrating a clear ROI of investing in CX, this episode is a masterclass on influencing customer-centric change at a large company.

You'll find out:

1. The best structure of a CX department for a customer-centric culture.

2. How to prove that your company should invest in customer experience.

3. Why NPS is useful, but the drivers of NPS are what's most interesting.

4. How Eventbrite leverages customer support conversations to drive product improvements.

5. Why you should invest in text and sentiment analytics tools to run real-time analytics projects that REALLY influence decisions.

6. Why democratising customer feedback is critical to successful customer-centricity.

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

In this episode of the Support Insights podcast, we caught up with Cornelia Konstantyner, Head of CX at the fast-growing sustainable fashion brand, Organic Basics.

The Organic Basics CX team have built a really cool customer service experience, leveraging automation to prioritise incoming requests based on CRM data, language and the customer's funnel depth.

Cornelia and her team built a complex set of rules that work together to reduce response time to conversations that need a quick response—creating a win-win for company and customer.

In this episode, you'll find out:

• How to choose which support conversations to prioritise to create a win-win situation for your customers.
• Why it matters if a customer is subscribed to the Organic Basics newsletter or not.
• How auto-prioritisation drives efficiency, cuts costs, and increases sales at Organic Basics.
• How auto-prioritisation has significantly improved the agent experience.
• What planning and collaboration was needed to get the process set up.

If you're keen to dig deeper into prioritisation, you can check out an article we wrote recently: how to properly prioritize customer support requests.

Make sure you come back next week, we'll hear from Cornelia again—this time on the subject of creating an environmentally conscious returns process. Subscribe to follow along.

This week's guest has a unique and exciting point of view on the world.

Sean worked his way up the ranks, straight out of college, to leading the eCommerce and customer experience team at Schuh.

Schuh isn't just any company. It's one of the UK's most beloved high street shoe retailers, now with over 130 stores and a reported turnover over of more than £230 million.

So, as he comes to the end of a 20-year tenure at Schuh, we knew we had to let Sean unload his learnings and teach us a thing or two about CX and eCommerce.

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer friction. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that are shared to any team, every day.

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Bronte Coyne, Global Senior Customer Experience Manager at Unity, about how Unity's support team has had to grow and evolve to support areas of huge growth over the last few years. 

Bronte started at Unity almost 8 years ago as an agent and has seen the team grow from just 4 to more than thirty. 

Find out how Bronte's team were able to adjust and adapt through an enormous 40% ticket increase in 2020, and a further 20% increase in 2021, while still striving to provide excellent experiences for their users. 

While adjusting to work from home during the pandemic was a struggle for most teams, coupling this with such a surge in growth meant a culture of support, trust and evolution was especially important for Bronte and her team. 

Watch the episode to hear Bronte's tips on how you can scale your support during periods of growth.

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community

In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Jeffery King and Travis Brace, Community Advocate and Customer Support Manager at Grindr, about how they've created a tagging taxonomy that allows them to quantify issues, keeping customer feedback relevant in wider department conversations.  

Travis takes us through the details of what their tagging structure now looks like after a huge revamp in 2022, with multiple layers of granularity allowing for both broad-level and more specific reporting.   

Jeffery explains how a customer-focused feedback culture can look in practice, with customer feedback being a driver, not an afterthought, for wider team strategies.  

Plus, hear some real life examples of how this approach has helped teams and customers at Grindr, as well as how other organizations can look to be more customer focused in their own set-ups.        

Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Karolina joined Revolut in 2016 when they had just 20-30 employees and had just set up their first dedicated customer support office.

Fast forward 4 years, Revolut has +1,500 employees and is one of Europes biggest success stories of the past decade.

At one point, they even hired 100 people in one day into the support team.

‍But, now Karolina has moved to MoonPay to head up the crypto-tech startup's customer support as they scale.

‍This interview was so exciting because not only did we get to hear stories from the warzone (AKA a startup in hypergrowth), but we also got to deep dive what best practice Karolina has learned while working in three fast-paced Fintech startups.

‍I found it most interesting how customer support and engineering team's worked so closely together. We got a rare understanding of how companies that work in an agile way incorporate customer feedback into their product, working very closely with customer service to uncover customer insights on each feature and process.

You'll learn:

- How to maintain good customer service despite the chaos

- How each team member was still selected to stringent requirements (despite 100 joining in one day)

- How each team member received promising career prospects

- Why Karolina loves the chaos and learning opportunities that a startup offers

- Scaling up product & customer support insight

- Staying on top of tons of new feature releases

- Why it's important in industries like FinTech to be quick, clear and communicative 

- Why a clear communication channel between support and product/ engineering is vital

- How product and support work together to create a great customer experience

- The number one lesson from working in three Fintech startups

- The one the that Karolina would do differently and change about the way things are done

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service Podcast, I caught up this week with Heidi El Hawary, Head of User Support at trivago, the global metasearch company in the travel, hotel, holiday industry.

In this episode, we cover:

• Customer service philosophy: empowering agents and putting the customer first
• The good tactics and the bad tactics used by customer support teams right now
• Why customer support insights are important
• How to leverage insights to build a customer-centric organisation
• How to prepare for the post-pandemic world

Join us on the SentiSum LinkedIn channel for short video clips from customer support leaders like Heidi every day.

In this episode of the State of Customer Service podcast, we chat to CX leader, Nate Brown.

He and his team at Officium Labs been working closely with a Fortune 10 gaming company to help build them a best-in-class customer service experience.

The goals of the project?

1/ By 2023, reach 80% customer satisfaction (30% baseline). They achieved 90% by 2021.

2/ Increase lifetime value by 15% by delivering customer support to MVP game players by 2023.

3/ Achieve 35% automation by 2023

The incredibly talented team at Officium Labs have been hard at work and have seen fast progress towards all of these goals—they've generated and protected upwards of $4m over the course of this project so far.

This episode will teach you all about their approach to the challenge and give you some customer service improvement takeaways to implement yourself.

P.s. If you're not already part of it, the CX Accelerator is a great Slack channel to join to meet others in the CX space.

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Thibaut Martin, CX expert, about his fantastic achievements as Head of CX at Otrium, and how organizations can turn the perception of CS from that of a cost centre to a value centre. Thibaut will be taking us through how in his 3 years at Otrium, he's been building out their support model to support business growth, while managing to reduce first response time significantly and maintaining an impressive Trustpilot score of 4.5*. We'll also be discussing how tying customer issues to revenue, with the help of SentiSum insights, can help generate buy-in from other departments and center their strategies around VOC, resulting in happier customers. Plus, hear Thibaut's advice on steps you can take to supercharge the powers in your customer support department, turning it into a true value centre for the wider business. Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Join the support insights community to stay up to date on new podcast episodes - https://sentisum.com/resources/community In today's episode of the Support Insights Podcast we talk to Svitlana Gaunt, Customer Support Excellence Team Lead at Miro, about how the CS excellence team are ensuring the customer is always represented across different areas of the business. Svitlana takes us through how the CS excellence team is structured to ensure that support is optimized and wider departments are always considering customer needs when developing initiatives. We'll also talk about Miro's consistently high CSAT score of 97, and what Svitlana attributes this to. Plus, hear Svitlana's advice for anyone looking to connect initiatives to put the customer at the centre of their own organizations, and her plans at Miro for 2023. Music: Savour The Moment by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Subscribe to our 'best stuff' newsletter: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights

This week, we welcome a customer of ours onto the show. This episode is with Joe Quinlivan, Head of Customer Care at Gousto.

Gousto has grown to household name status in the UK, serving 25 million recipe boxes to customers each quarter. During the 7 years Joe spent at Gousto, his team has built one of the most efficient, empowering customer care teams in existence—and they've won the European Contact Centre of the Year Awards two years running for it. 

In this episode, we learn:

• How Gousto automates 50% of customer contacts using a complex self-serve tech stack. 
• How Gousto has built a flexible, remote-working operating model that makes them resilient to fluctuating customer demands. 
• How Gousto's training, development and focus on agent engagement has helped them beat industry averages on eNPS. 
• How Gousto is deploying preventative fixes using data-analytics driven alerts.
• Why customer service insights are critical to creating win-win-win situations at Gousto.  

Enjoy the episode. Subscribe to this series and read more on the subject here: https://www.sentisum.com/resources/support-insights