Customer Support Leaders
Customer Support Leaders
From The Archives: 40: Looking Beyond the Numbers with Mike Redbord
Mike Redbord, a seasoned veteran from HubSpot with over a decade of experience, joins us to unravel the mysteries of managing customer support beyond mere numbers. Discover why Michael believes that looking past the spreadsheets can uncover stories of exceptional customer service, and how these anecdotes can act as guiding beacons for your team. He shares valuable insights on balancing data-driven management with the art of storytelling, ensuring that as teams grow, the human element isn't lost amidst the metrics. Prepare to learn how maintaining simplicity in data allows room for the stories that truly highlight world-class customer service.
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation exploring the delicate dance between numbers and narratives in the realm of customer support. Michael dives into the significance of anecdotes in celebrating moments of outstanding customer interaction and how these stories can inspire and instruct within your teams. He passionately argues for keeping metrics simple, allowing the truly impactful stories to shine. Listen in as we discuss how to foster a culture that cherishes these narratives, providing the perfect blend of quantitative and qualitative insights to elevate your customer support strategy.
Hello and welcome to the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week is throwback week, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about five different topics from the archives. I would like to welcome to the podcast today Michael Redford. Mike, would you like to introduce yourself?
Mike Redbord:Yeah, absolutely Thrilled to be here. My name is Mike. I spent about 10 years at HubSpot building great customer relationships and eventually a support team and the success team. I've got a lot of experience in hiring and going international and scaling up big teams, so I'm thrilled to be here and share some of that knowledge today with everybody.
Charlotte Ward:So, mike, the topic for this week is looking beyond the numbers, so I'm interested in particularly what your relationship is with spreadsheets and dashboards beyond the standalone numbers. What is it you're actually trying to extract and where do you want those numbers to take you?
Mike Redbord:Yeah, I think this is actually a really, really interesting topic, especially for teams that are growing really quickly, because when you're small, I think you know what good looks like and you know when you have a customer in front of you or when a peer reviewers or you.
Mike Redbord:And you know when you have a customer in front of you or when a peer reviewers or you know a member of your team has a customer in front of them that they're just doing a fantastic job with and you can call that whatever you want delight or something and you can try to measure it in certain ways, whether it's NPS or CSAT or CES or something.
Mike Redbord:But you know when you see it.
Mike Redbord:I think as you get bigger, sometimes you tend to manage by numbers and you manage more of the spreadsheet, and that's a very natural thing.
Mike Redbord:But what that does as you build is it can sometimes bury those stories and bury what greatness can look like inside the little crevasses of that spreadsheet, and managers and leaders don't tend to see them. So the question then is how do you, while you build and while you add all these metrics, still continue to provide that world-class customer experience head off that next issue really be delightful and on tone and know who you're talking to, and I think that that is where the stories lie, and so I love it when teams can share those kind of stories and kind of stand those up as examples of the right way to do the work, those up as examples of the right way to do the work, and it's like, yes, sure, I did 20 cases today, but here's the one that is like the perfect case, because this is what happened with the customer, and in almost every case, it's the focus on the customer that will be the best possible story that you can tell.
Charlotte Ward:So you're looking really for anecdotes.
Mike Redbord:Yeah, and the trick is, when you're small, all of your conversations around those anecd anecdotes because every single customer matters so much and there's relatively fewer conversations. But as you get bigger, the conversation verges more toward what percentage of my quota did I hit today or this week? And the conversation shifts. And it's just so important not to lose the short game and the small ball and think about every customer actually matters. And how do we celebrate moments and tell stories? Because humans are really good storytellers and we like hearing stories and we tend to glom onto stories. How do we tell stories that we want people to emulate and we want to shine a light on and celebrate?
Charlotte Ward:How do you strike a balance between the data and the stories then, in terms of how you project that within the business or anywhere external to the support team? Who would understand both sides of that?
Mike Redbord:Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that the key to having the space, both mentally or in your monthly deck, that you use to summarize your performance of the month, the key is to actually keep the metrics really, really simple and thin. So there's some support teams that have these really sophisticated radar charts of average handle time, average response time and number of tickets and all these things, and there's nothing wrong with measuring all that. But if you make the conversation about all those data points, we only have so much room in our heads and stories. While they're really powerful, they take a fair amount of energy to digest. Keep the metrics and the conversation about the metrics as simple as you can.
Mike Redbord:Did you have the NPS that you wanted One number? And when you tell the story in metrics, keep it dead simple so you can spend a lot of time on the stories and then tell the stories really deeply and almost to the point of pageantry right, because you really want to have these things be the things people focus on and you never know as you tell the story what people will pick up on. When you tell the story of your great NPS, there's only one takeaway in there when you tell the human story of a customer that was really in a mess and how you know, somebody went above and beyond to get them out of it. There's all sorts of different things that different people will kind of attach themselves to and find kind of shiny objects and exciting stuff.
Charlotte Ward:I couldn't agree more, and actually one thing that I often say when I'm coaching supporting the business is you're absolutely right With a number. There's only one thing you can say, and a number is only in the wider business ever a broadcast. You're only ever pushing out a number and saying this is where we are now, this is where we are now, this is where we are now, whereas stories are naturally conversational and people will pick up on different things and other parts of the business can attach bits of the story to their measures of success as well, which I think is really key to not only building a greater understanding of what support is and the value that support brings, but actually how different parts of the business can relate to support, and I think that is in the stories, it's not in the numbers.
Mike Redbord:Yeah, and I just see small teams are so good at telling the stories and then, as you get bigger, there's this tendency to want to mechanize and operationalize support. Especially in support, it's pretty easy to mechanize it. There's numbers and you can wrap as many numbers as you want around the thing. Doing so really does tip the balance of focus away from that storytelling and prevents you from being as good as you once were. Because if you're going to just focus on all these metrics and stuff, it's going to pull you away to where you came from. That could be good, but that could also be dangerous if that doesn't create room for storytelling and for people to see themselves in it and everything you just said. It's a very interesting dynamic and balance as you grow.
Charlotte Ward:And once you start focusing on nothing but the numbers, then that's the only thing you're ever going to focus on. All you can do, then, is perform to the numbers.
Mike Redbord:Yeah, and when you perform to the numbers, you tend not to beat your numbers either, which is the devil in there. You know, if everyone's managing to X number of cases per day, you're not going to beat X, because the game becomes just do X.
Charlotte Ward:Even if then you do occasionally beat X okay, you've just.
Mike Redbord:All you've done is reset the bar. You've reset the bar and there's no incentive for beating X, really, because the machine's on it. But there's always an incentive for telling a great customer story because they're just lovely and people love hearing them and finding themselves in them and sharing them.
Charlotte Ward:That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaderscom forward. Slash 40 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.