The CX Files #26 - Chris Love

Is your support team drowning in tools?

In this episode of The CX Files, we sit down with Chris Love, Director of Business Operations at Run Pod. With a background spanning VMware to Frontier Airlines, Chris is an expert at scaling support operations without losing the human touch. He helped drive 200% revenue growth at Run Pod by focusing on scalable operational frameworks.

In this episode, we cover:
- The shocking cost of tool bloat (and how to fix it).
- The "Doorman vs. Doormat" analogy: How to balance AI automation with white-glove human service.
- Why most AI pilots fail because of bad documentation.
- The one question every Support Director needs to ask their frontline agents today.

If you are a CX leader trying to justify budget or streamline your operations, this conversation is for you.

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Save your team a dozen hours per month on the tedious part of getting rock-solid AI chat and search. Your whole org and customer base could be spending time on valuable core work. 550+ Helpfeel business customers saw a 50% reduction in tickets over their existing vendor and measured an average 2.5X return on investment.

Learn more: https://www.helpfeel.com/en/helpfeel-ai

#CX #AI #CustomerService #leadership #toolbloat

Transcript

0:27

Still pixelated really horribly. I'm on fiber, so I mean, I shouldn't have issues. If it's showing up on your side. Okay. Assuming that's the site it's being recorded on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Every couple seconds you stop and it's pretty blurry. Mm-hmm. Because you're trying to do something. Yeah, I don't have any other calls scheduled at the moment.'cause yeah, I mean, you're frozen right now. I mean, if you want to try it at like four o'clock my time, it's almost three now. Give it an hour. I, I, I don't know what you got going on the rest of the day, but I mean, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right, cool. No problem. Oh, that looks better. All right. Got louder too. Jesus. Okay, got everything before seven minutes and 30 seconds, and you're good. Thank you, Ben. Boy, so. I guess from the earlier part in my career, I, I did, I started off doing desktop support. So I'd run around, fix the computers and if they didn't work, I'd take 'em back to the tech lab. And then eventually I ran the tech lab where all the harder things to do or harder things to fix came and we wound up fixing those. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and then. They realized that I can talk to people. So they moved me into doing technical support, um, supporting products and services that the company made instead of hardware that somebody else made. Um, and then, you know, after getting my master's degree, I wound up building, running and leading those teams, um, for a number of different organizations across multiple industries, like, like you mentioned. Um, as far as. Issues that have come up across, across all of them. I mean, they're all solving problems and you need to understand that the people that you're talking to are people who have problems and working in support. It's not a, it's not a job where people call up and say, you know what? This is so awesome. And I just wanted to say thank you for being here and we love your product and everything works great. That never happens. I mean, you might get that throughout conversations, but it's not the first thing that comes outta somebody's mouth. It's like, this is broken. Help me fix this. Um, so, you know, there was a sign that I saw in, in a building somewhere that says, do you see the person with the problem or as a problem? And I think that kind of sums it up because, you know. You, you do support for so long, you get jaded and you have a, an odd sense of humor. It's usually pretty dark. Um, just like people, I mean, my brother works in medical and he is, his sense of humor is very dark. Um, so you get to. See both sides of that. I mean, yes, I'm here to help you solve your problem, but then, you know, after you do it for so long, you're like, you know, this is hour 12 of the day. I'm like, oh God, what do you want now? Um, stuff like that. So a lot of it is the perception of who's on the other end of the phone. I mean, your job is to help them fix their problem and. Get the most out of what they purchased. That's the job of support. Train them, educate them, be helpful. See them as a person that has an issue that you want to help them solve. And it doesn't matter what industry you're in, that's just how support works. Yeah. Wow. Uh, enraged. Enraged to ecstatic. Um, I've seen people come on the phone and they're really angry, and then you, you take the time to listen to them, let them vent, and while they're doing that, you're in there fixing the problem and you're, you're connected to their machine or, or whatever it's that you're doing. You're listening to them talk and you're fixing the thing. And then as you're fixing the thing, you hear something like, well, we're trying to get us to do this. Okay, well, either it does that or doesn't do that, or they don't know how to use it. So then you take an extra 30 seconds and say, let me explain this to you and how it should work and how it's supposed to work. And then it's, you're going above and beyond. I mean, according to what they might think is like, I had this problem, but now you're solving not only that problem, but you're teaching me how to use it. So I look like the hero. On my side. That's where it becomes, where you get the, uh, the ecstatic and the happy and, and all of that because they called with the problems like, this isn't working, but now they're getting off the phone, it's not working, and they know how to do something they didn't know how to do 30 minutes ago, and they can take it back to their team and say, look what we can do now. That we didn't know we could do 30 minutes ago. And then people are, I mean, they always, you know, you get the, you get the nice email back and say, Hey, thanks for the thing. Um, you know, you get the kudos and, you know, when people worked in cubes, you'd have 'em all listed out on your, on your, on your cube wall. And I, I'm dating myself a little bit, I think. But that's, that's, that's what we did. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, they do need to be celebrated more. Um, and you're right, they aren't. Um, I guess, you know, one of the things that pops in my head is because you hang up that call and your phone rings again and you're onto the next one, who are you gonna go tell? It's like, Hey, I just go save this person's day. They're like, cool. We all do that all day, you know? Yay. Um, when they, when they do take the time to send in a, um. A kudos or a thank you note or something like that. Then you know, maybe the manager sees it and they're like, oh, cool. Then you might get a little recognition. But it is a very thankless job. It just is. Um, and it's unfortunate because they are the face of the company to the customer and the face of the customer to the company. And I mean, there is no one else likely in the company who knows how the customers use the product as well as the people in support. Yeah, it's humbling. I've also heard the same about sales. Um, everybody should work sales for a little bit, but. Uh, that would be really hard for some people, like myself included. Um, but everyone should work support for a little bit, or at least shadow a support team so they know, one, what the, that person does and how that job works, but also what they deal with. And maybe, you know, I mean, I've been in places and it still happens today, no matter where I am. New product release, cool. Support teams will ask people to find out. The customer calls in and says, Hey, I've got this problem with this new thing in the program. They're like, what new thing? And that's a horrible look. And not only, not only a horrible look, but you're like, oh no, well I don't know how to fix it'cause I didn't know this existed. Um, so things like that are, are certainly. Big deals. And when you, if you're from the product team or the engineering team and you get in front or you have to sit with a support person, um, and you see these things and you're like, oh, we really should tell them what's coming down the pipeline here. Um, and you know, they're, we've implemented things like monthly trainings. Hey, these are the new features coming out, you know, in two weeks, in one week, or whatever. Here's how they work. Here's what they're gonna do. Here's. The documentation, delta documentation from where it is and what it's going to be. Being able to help, not only the support team with stuff like that, but it helps the whole customer experience as well as the everyone else. Um, you get less tickets because people are informed and they know what's coming up, and you get happier customers because the support team actually knows that this is a new thing. Hey, we're gonna fix this thing. And, and of course when there's a new product or a new feature. Yeah, there's likely to be questions and potentially problems with it. You know, we always said new features, new bugs. It's, it's not, it's not wrong. What CX does to core business results. Um, you can measure support and, and all types of CX in a number of ways. You know, NPS, you know, things like that. You've got your customer set score, your csat, or as we call it, you know, CSAT and dsat for dissatisfactory, um, uh, solutions. Um. But just by monitoring these things and the metrics that are in place for the organization, you can tie them to support all over the place. I mean, csat, dsat, NPS of course, kind of duh. I mean, those are part of, part of the support life. But when you look at other metrics like which part of the product has the most problems, or you look at, you know, when you drill down to how much. A support ticket costs and which, which, um, organization or like a, a cadre of organizations like the newly onboarded people have more questions. Or do they, you know, if you look at those types of things and break it down, and if you can always tie it back to money and time, then leadership gets it. They're like, oh wait, we're spending X amount of money because. We didn't put that in the documentation. Let, let's fix that right now. And you can, you know, when you, when you tend to show them the dollar signs, they tend to listen a little bit more or it, it hits home. And that's, that's one really good way. And then also it's just, it's good for morale and good for the company. When you say, Hey, this is coming. Let us tell you about it. Let us show you how it works so you can help our customers. I mean, 'cause it's all about. The customer. I mean, that's why we all have jobs, is because we're serving a customer of some sort. Um, and if you're not giving them the support that they feel they need, and you know, I always like to, you know, I think, I think it was HubSpot that had this to delight the customers. That's their, they want to delight the customer, not just fix their problem, but delight them. And it makes sense. I mean, if you give them, I. In ai in any industry, there are many competitors for the same space. And if you can differentiate yourself by taking an extra 30 seconds and saying, what other problems do you have? Let me help you with this thing. Let me show you how this works. And your competition doesn't do that. You're gonna win, assuming your products are comparable. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think they, they tie together. Um, the data obviously proves something, but you know, in statistics you can prove anything. Like, I think it does this, but if you look at it this way, it does it, uh, um, now I forgot the actual question. I'm sorry. Oh, yes, yes. Um, the gut feel versus the data. So the data is helpful to actually quantify something and, and, and pull something out. But I mean, just like I teach a lot of self-defense, that's, I have a very long history of, of teaching that type of stuff. And you, you're the hair on the back of your neck that stands up. It's there for a reason, that gut feel of like something's not right. It, it, it transfers over. I mean, it, it, it's there. Like I said, it's there for a reason. Um, so you can, might feel something, but then you, once you start looking into it, you're probably gonna need the metric to show how much it's like, yeah, I feel that this might be off, but, oh wow. I didn't realize it was. 30% or something like that. You can feel the things, but then in order to take it to to leadership, they're gonna go, well, you can't just feel it. I need to know. It's told me something concrete. Don't come in here with like, I think now what, here's, here's the data and yes it is. Um, and then you can also look at the data and go, oh, interesting.'cause there's so many ways to interpret the data. Um, you can go, all right, well, I, I didn't think about that, but okay. And then you kind of. Check your spidey senses or whatever it is that you want to call them to maybe fine tune them for later. Um, but, but they all, they both play the gut feel and the data, they, they both play together and they have to, otherwise you're gonna miss something I. Mm-hmm. There certainly is fear of AI and certainly in support. Um, there are many bots and things that you can create and implement that might take the place of someone who would be a chat agent. Um, but nothing actually ever takes place of the human. It just doesn't, I mean, the, a ai AI doesn't have the feel, and maybe in five, 10 years it might get that, but currently we've all used chat, GPT or Claude or whatever your, your tool of choices and you put in something and it's like, where did you get that answer? Like, I, I've had it. I've had a, when you were a doctor, I'm like, I've never been a doctor. Where'd you get that from? So it hallucinates and, and creates these weird things. Um, it does the same in support answers. I mean, I know we've been going through a couple tools currently in my, in my role and I'm reviewing the answers that they give and some of 'em are. Okay. That's pretty good. And others are like, where did that come from? Um, it'll pull outdated information and it'll, it'll, it'll combine things that wouldn't normally make sense. And it doesn't usually have the, the niceties that a person would, or it's so scripted that's like, this is just ai, it's like a phone tree. It's like, I hate those things. Just let me talk to a person. Yeah. Um. They're getting better. And you can certainly tweak and train and you know, but you gotta know how to do that. I mean, it's not just something that anyone can, can do and do well and quickly. Um, but there are tools that help with finding information and I, I, for me, yes, there are some things that can be answered quickly, like. If some were to log into the portal and say, Hey, I need help with this, and it goes, oh, you, maybe you mean this. And it's like, oh, well there's an article. Great. I will, it's, it's just pattern matching type stuff. Um, but then you get into other things where it's trying to be a human and it's, it's easy to tell. Um, and I think one of the questions you had had. Mentioned earlier was, um, and maybe I'm getting ahead of where you're going, but, uh, that's fine. Um, where is it going in the future? I think was, was that, was that part of what it was? Um, yeah. Um, I had the answer to that, that I wrote down for that, but I don't know where it went. Um, I think what I would like, like to see is where it's being proactive. In, you know, if you, you can tie these AI things into everything, um, we have it tied into so many different systems. But if you're looking for something or you're doing something in the platform, so you're, you're building whatever it is you're building and you're spending a lot of time on this screen. It could mean that you don't understand something or that something's not working right, and maybe it can pop up. It's like, Hey, I see you're, you're, you're stuck here. What do you need help with? Here's like some common things that people need when they're on the screen. You're like, oh, perfect. Thank you. So I don't have to go dig through the documentation or it, it, you're just. It can, not to be all big brothery, but it knows what you're doing on the website, on the, on the portal, in the platform. And it can go, Hey, you're here. This is what people do here, let me help you. Oh, I see you stuck and you need a, you need a piece of code. Good. Let, here's what people normally let me point you to the right place. Things like that would be super helpful. Um, and eventually it'll be more, it is getting pretty conversational now, but. If someone were to hand me a page of, of documents and says, you know, are these generated by some sort of chat model? And maybe you can pretty much tell most, most every time's, like, yep, that was just by, you know, the phrasing or, or the symbols it uses within the document. Um, but I'd like it to be more proactive and, and actually help people before they start asking for questions. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Sure. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it can be done on, on part of the customer journey for sure. I mean, like I said, new customers tend to have different questions than customers who've been around for a while. Um, and if you do a, a, a good onboarding, um, you provide 'em with the information they need upfront, um, which some places do really well and others not so much. It's like, here's your tool. Great. Good luck. Have fun. Um, and another is just like, no, you're gonna go through eight hours of training with us before we let you go and do your own thing. Um, you both, you tend to get different outcomes. Um, you can also break it down by what a customer spends. I mean, if you're spending more than X amount per month. Skip the, skip the bots. Talk to a person. Um, you know, you have premium models of support where you pay X amount per month for a different SLA you get, you know, you might not have only email and chat support. You might get phone support or, or whatever, or a dedicated person. If you're a super high spend client, you're probably gonna get a dedicated account manager or, or technical account person. Um, and that's where, you know. Maybe one or two shots a day. It's like, what's your question? Boom, here's the answer. And if that, this is not my answer, great. Then connect me to a person right away. Uh, so yeah, I, I think certainly with, with premium support models, it's not a super hard lift to do that. I mean, if you're in this tier, great. You get access to this thing, you know, paywall of some sort. There. It's mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we have some, some bots that team members have created that actually go through and pull information based on the customer account. So when someone submits a ticket, it's, it's, it's tied to a username or, or something. Uh, some sort of id, and that can go through and pull logs and it can look at, you know, the different, they might have. A couple different, um, consoles. They've got open and it can pull and say, here's the ones you might wanna be looking at. So you don't have to go find through and find the logs and log into all the stuff and try to find the account numbers. It's all there. And while it is sort of ai, I mean it's doing things behind your back. It's, it's not like thinking on its own, it's doing a certain set of things, but they're super helpful and it can save time and then it helps your, your humans. Be more prepared and have all the information right at their fingertips. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It, it's thousands. I mean, just a ticketing system alone is, is thousands. Per person, depending on the size of your team. Um, but yes, you can certainly, the tool per person or the per person, per tool cost is something certainly to look at. And then how much overlap there is between them. And it's, I'm in the middle of a, of a project to go through all the tools that we have, and we have 85 people in about 170 tools. So, I mean, we have a lot. We have a lot. Um, so it, it's. There's also some overlap in there and some things it's like, why do we even have this? I don't know. Because we do, if someone bought it and we have a contract, so yeah. Sure. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, first of all, you have to know your team. I mean, talk to them. Um, know what makes them tick. I mean, when I do one-on-ones with people, yeah, I talk about work, but I also talk about other stuff. Who are you? Because you're, everyone's a person. And the other 16, however many hours a day they get to spend outside of work. Um, and certainly if something's happening at home, it could impact your. Day-to-day work life, which also could impact your, your customers. Um, so talking to your, talking to your team, knowing what makes them tick, and then asking them simple questions like, how can we make your job easier? What makes your job better? What tools do you think we need because I don't do your job anymore. Um, so what do you see that if I could wave a magic wand and give you a thing, what would that thing be that makes your job easier? And when I, when I started thinking about this a couple years back, I thought, when did the last, when was the last time my boss ever asked me that? And I came up with zero. No one ever asked me, how do I help you do your job better? It's sit down, answer the phone, and give customers a good experience. Okay, cool. Right on. Um, but no one said, Hey, you know, if you had a different chair, if you, you know, had a tool that. That did something or just highlight a certain field in the, in the, in the ticket, it could make your job much easier, much faster. Um, you know, tool bloat and, and all these things. It usually, I've done these exercises a number of times and it comes down to a couple things, documentation process, and it's lack of, usually of these things. Um, lack of process, lack of documentation, um. People are siloed. They don't understand what I'm doing, um, the wrong tools because, you know, as a company grows, you might start out with this tool that's built for smaller companies and then you outgrow that tool, but no one thinks about replacing it.'cause the lift to replacing a tool that's embedded into your your stuff is not nothing. It, it, it's expensive. It takes time. People have to learn a new thing. But in the end, if it makes. The life of the support person or the account manager or whomever. Um, and certainly these tools have to talk. If, if I'm an account manager and I'm going on my QBR with a, with a customer, I wanna know how many support tickets they've got, how many they had, what their problems were, did they give good or bad, um, feedback to the, to the agents. Um, I want to know that stuff. And by integrating the tools, hopefully you can, you can tell that, um. I think I got away from the, the, the subject of the, we were talking about. Um, but where was I going? I don't even remember. Yep, yep, yep. Documentation process. Yep, yep. Those, yeah. And then people usually comes up too. Um, and it's u usually people are why people stay in a job. Like, why aren't you impressed? I love the people. Okay, cool. That's great that you like the people, the culture, things like that. Um, and it can help you do your job. It makes you feel comfortable. And, and if the, if the culture is horrible where you are, doesn't fit with what your thing is, you're not gonna have a good day. You're not gonna want to help the customers. Um, so yeah, so just, it's a simple thing. Ask them. They do the job, they know what's missing or there's too much of, or is a problem. And they will tell you if you ask them. Otherwise, it's the, well, if I complain to my manager, they're gonna see me as blah, blah, blah. It, it is not a complaint. It's more of a, Hey, this could help us do better. This could help me do my job better, which makes you look better. You know, it's, it's that type of a thing, and it, it isn't done enough. People don't ask. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Um, with more emphasis on the poll. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. PE people tend to do better when they feel like they have buy-in in the solution. Yeah. Instead of you directing me to do this thing, and I'm like, fine, I'll do it, whatever. Or like, Hey, I felt like I had a hand in creating this solution. Yeah, I'm gonna champion this and you know, then I'm gonna go tell other people about it and then, you know, this is how I solve that problem because of this cool thing that I came up with. Maybe you came up with it, maybe you didn't, but you know, you think you did and that gives you a sense of ownership for it. Yeah. I, when I work with support teams, I always want them to create articles. You've solved this problem once. It's gonna come up again and it will all the time. Um. Why not document it, solve it once. I mean, how many times you need to reinvent the wheel? I mean, just, you spent six hours doing this and the person overseas, after you close this ticket out, three days later, they're gonna get the same question. Now they're gonna go spend six hours on it when you could've documented it and they're like, oh, cool, here it is done. Five minutes. Um, so. Being able to document things and, and the solutions and the, the ticketing tools make it so easy. Now. It's like, create k kb article from this boop done. Enter a, a question that you're, you're gonna put it in there and, and there it is. Um, it, it becomes really important when you get the AI things in there because they don't know what's current and what's not, unless you tell it. And so you've got five articles on something for each different version. And if they're not labeled or it doesn't know, you're gonna get one of those five. And it may or may not be right and chances are it's not going to be right. And then you've got a mad customer on the other side, 'cause you just did this thing and I deleted my stuff. Whoops. Um, so creating the, creating the knowledge base, creating the articles. Is one thing, but then you have to actually maintain them because they do expire. Um, and it is, it can be a full-time job just depending on the size and the amount of documentation in your company. Um, an l and d person or a documentation specialist or whatever it is that you want to call it. Um, having someone in there to do that and, and go through the articles or even as simple as. An expiration date up there, check it in three months. I mean, we use Notion for a lot of stuff and you can put in there, check this article in in next quarter. Is it still valid? Did anything change? Do I need to get rid of it? All of these things are super helpful to create, you know, a good knowledge base because I mean, all you can stuff all the knowledge you want in there, but if no one can find it or if it comes up wrong, it's not doing anybody any good. No. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is there an actual, what's the actual question in there? Oh, okay. Okay. So. Explain it. Explain it again. Um, now that I understand where we're going with this, um, the doormat versus the doorman, they're not the same. Obviously you wouldn't treat a doormat like a doorman. That'd be weird for you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. How do I download my invoice? You know, things like that. Oh, here. It's allowing us to do more maybe with less. I mean, sure. I mean, we can close 800 tickets a week using. Ai and if we get 25% deflection to, or the, the AI thing takes up 25% of the tickets of those 800, great. Now those other 600 tickets can be solved by either fewer people or more in depth and more, more correctly. So you don't have someone going, oh God, I've got 600 tickets to get through and I'm just gonna blast through these things as quick as I can. I'm not gonna be nice to the car. I'm just gonna, here's answer. Done. Next answer. Um. You can have a human interaction because you get to a point where the humans are trying to beat the AI and you in speed, you're not going to those tho they're quick. Um, but you can beat it with humanness. Um, and being able to, to serve more people, um, with either fewer headcount or serve them better with better answers, or just get them what they need. Why would you not do that? So I think the, the tools and the people need to go hand in hand and if the tools can help the people be, the people being the support people, um, you're just arming them with something to help them do their jobs better. For sure. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I think all customers are important. I don't, I don't love the idea of. This customer is more important. Yes, they may spend more now, but you don't know what's gonna happen. No, I, I wasn't calling out on that. It was more of a, it happens throughout, throughout business. Like, well, this is a, this is a huge important customer for the moment until they're not, or until the customer that's spending $10 a month is now spending $10,000 a month because our support team showed them that we care and we can help them with their queries and we are there to. Help them get the most of their product. Now they're spending $10,000 a month. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You get a phone call, it's like, Hey, why don't you come work for this team? We're like, whoa. Okay. That's never happened to me though. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And find the thing that you're passionate about. I mean, I'm, I was passionate about solving problems. That's what I love to do. Um, I love to, to build things and fix things. I, I am a fixer. That's, you know, you put me in an organization, I will find the problems and I will get them fixed. Um, so find the thing you're passionate about. If it's fixing problems, if it's working with customers, if it's helping them be more educated. If you love the data part, you know. See if you can spend some time with those other teams and see what it's really like doing those jobs. I mean, some places allow you to spend a day or a couple hours a month working with another team just to, you know, like you were talking about earlier, having everybody spend some time in frontline support. Maybe you get some time to spend with the data team or with the the account executive team and find the thing that you really like doing because support. You see everything, you see the technical, you see the customer service side, you see the operations piece. I mean that I started my, my, my job or my career doing tech and then, and then support. And now I run operations. They're kind of the same in the fact that I solve problems, I solve different problems. I solve business problems now, um, but find the thing that you like. And then, and the other piece of that is ask questions. Up and down. If you don't understand something, if something doesn't make sense, if you're like, Hey, my team, I feel the morales though, I feel something isn't right. Ask them, what can I help you with to make your job better? It's a simple question, and they will have an answer because it's like, oh, I need this, or the, we have too many clicks in this, in this workflow to make this thing work. Just take out two clicks and you'd be surprised. Two clicks. Doesn't take much time, but it annoys the crap out of people. It's two extra things that I would not have to do 500 times a day, and it could be a simple workflow change. And that makes all the difference. And even if you're, you know, a frontline person, ask the other people what would make your life better. Because maybe you're all thinking the same thing and you go, Hey, can we get this fixed, please? Um, and then you can, you can mention it to your, to your supervisor, and then when they get it fixed, everyone wins. They get a happier team. You get happier customers, you make more money. Oh, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks Ben Thanks, Ben.