Explore every episode of the podcast Customer Support Leaders
Dive into the complete episode list for Customer Support Leaders. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
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313: Build with AI and Bring the Team with You; with Italo Belandria
You can feel the ground shifting in customer support right now: AI is giving non-technical leaders the ability to build. I sit down with Italo Belandria, Head of Customers at Ringover, to unpack what that actually looks like day to day when you are responsible for customer success and customer support operations but you are not an engineer. We talk about moving beyond “AI writes emails” into AI-driven prototyping, where you create a working draft of a workflow and bring something real to product and engineering so they can make it scalable and secure.
Italo shares how he uses AI agents to speed up product testing and internal documentation by recording a quick walkthrough, generating structured notes, and then validating the output before sending it on. We also dig into a customer support analytics story where a client believed average ticket resolution was 28 days. By analysing every ticket event with an AI workflow, Italo uncovered the real cause: an automation that updated tickets long after they were solved, making the metrics look terrible. The result is a clearer customer narrative, stronger trust, and a repeatable internal tool for future account reviews.
Then we zoom out to the part most teams underestimate: change management. If one leader builds everything, everyone else can freeze. We talk psychological safety, getting teammates comfortable sharing rough prototypes, and why the next frontier is connecting all those mini tools into one coherent support operations ecosystem that shares data cleanly. If you care about AI in customer support, customer experience, and modern support leadership, this one will give you practical moves you can try immediately. Subscribe, share this with a support leader who is experimenting with AI, and leave a review telling us what you want to automate first.
You’re going to die, and pretending otherwise is a terrible project plan. Val Turner joins us with a blunt premise and then makes it surprisingly hopeful: if you accept the timeline, you can design better defaults for your family, your future self, and even your team at work.
We start with Val’s path from customer support into product leadership and the constant translation work it requires. Support urgency is real and immediate, while product urgency is scheduled and constrained. That gap breaks the customer feedback loop in countless companies, even the ones drowning in data. We dig into the human layer behind the process fixes: team “cultures” inside the same organisation, conflict management as a practiced skill, and why AI can push us toward avoidance instead of clarity.
Then we go where most workplace podcasts do not: death planning, digital legacy, and the practical mechanics that keep everything from falling apart. Val shares the idea of a physical “death binder” that spells out where to find critical information, how trusted people can access accounts when it matters, and why redundancy and regular updates are more important than perfection. We also talk about prioritising life goals while health, time zones, and family stages make them possible, plus how the same thinking improves documentation, delegation, and decision-making at work.
If you want a conversation that ties customer support leadership, product prioritisation, and real-life planning into one clear message, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs the nudge, and leave a review with the one goal you refuse to keep postponing.
“Escalate to engineering” sounds normal, but it quietly shapes how your whole company treats support. We challenge that default and replace it with a more accurate model: routing work to the right skill set, while keeping escalation for the moments that truly need higher priority and attention. Along the way, we explore how small language choices change ownership, expectations, and trust between customer support and engineering teams.
Alex Batchelor, founder and CEO of Pebble, shares what happens when support gets the same technical context engineers use: logs, error monitoring, product analytics, documentation, and code-level clues. We talk about turning customer signals into product improvements without getting trapped at either extreme of the spectrum: raw data with no story, or vivid anecdotes with no proof. The goal is practical support operations that reduce context switching, shorten time-to-resolution, and create feedback loops engineering can actually act on.
We also dig into proactive support and the future of AI in customer support. If your systems can detect an integration token expiring or a recurring error before a customer files a ticket, you can reach out first and create a genuinely delightful customer experience. And as automation handles the basics, we look at where humans add the most value: building the support system, solving the hardest technical tickets, and delivering consultative support that feels closer to a partnership than a transaction.
If you want tighter engineering collaboration, cleaner ticket routing, and a more scalable technical support model, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a support or engineering leader, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.
Chaos in customer support rarely starts as chaos. It starts as “organic” growth, a few heroic workarounds, a helpful engineer jumping into Zendesk, or a fast acquisition that bolts on a new product and a new team without a shared operating system. Then the outcomes get unpredictable: escalations drag, customers hear different answers, and everyone feels busy while nothing feels steady. We dig into how to bring cohesion back without killing the good parts that made the team successful in the first place.
Colin Flanigan joins me to unpack what he does in technical support leadership across B2B SaaS, including the messy reality of joining after rapid change. We talk about the first weeks on the job as a blend of journalist and analyst: running a genuine listening tour, collecting complaints as signals, building a friction map, and then validating the story with real support metrics. From there, we explore how to use proven frameworks (not rigid prescriptions), where bespoke work matters most (especially voice of the customer programs), and why many “technical” problems are actually broken communication systems across teams.
We also go deep on the human side of change management: how to earn trust even when people do not fully agree, how to recruit champions from the people who care most about specific pain points, and why early wins in the first 60 to 90 days matter. We finish with practical leadership tactics like disagree-and-commit, time-boxed experiments, not optimizing for edge cases, and setting clear boundaries between support, engineering, and product so goodwill does not turn into resentment.
If you want sharper support operations, stronger cross-functional alignment, and more predictable customer experience outcomes, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a support leader who is cleaning up chaos, and leave a review with the one boundary you wish your org would clarify.
Servant leadership gets talked about a lot, but it’s often treated like a vague “be nice to people” slogan. We take a sharper angle: servant leadership in customer support is competence plus care. That means knowing what you’re doing and genuinely caring about your team, then using both to remove obstacles so they can do their best work. Along the way, we explore why this approach applies not just to “the team” in the abstract, but to the day-to-day dynamic between you, each direct report, and the stakeholders around you.
We dig into what servant leaders actually look like at work: humble enough to admit what they don’t know, wise enough to set boundaries, and disciplined about not confusing compassion with complacency. We talk about the difference between being transparent and over-sharing, including the idea that a support leader sometimes has to protect the team from unnecessary stress while still keeping trust intact. We also unpack fairness and organisational justice, how favouritism can quietly poison a team, and how involving people in hiring and role design can prevent competition and build alignment.
If you’re new to management or moving from individual contributor to leader, this conversation gets practical fast. We cover the temptation to stay busy by “doing the work,” why early delegation matters, how to operate at the right level even when you still spend time in the queue, and how to say no in a way that validates feelings without dodging responsibility. Listen for concrete support leadership takeaways on stakeholder management, setting expectations, and leading with that rare mix of dignity and humility. If it resonates, subscribe, share with a fellow support leader, and leave a review.
Trust doesn’t magically appear because you got the title, and it definitely doesn’t return because you delivered one heroic win. When a customer support team has been burned by toxic management, constant escalations, broken processes, or a product that keeps letting customers down, “prove it” becomes the default setting. We dig into what it means to lead from that reality and how to rebuild credibility without trying to play therapist or pretending everything is fine.
Ash Rhodes returns to the Customer Support Leaders Podcast with a fixer’s view of customer experience leadership. We talk about why workplace trust starts lower than trust in everyday life, and how stress responses like fight, flight, fawn, and freeze can show up at work as silence, avoidance, hidden problems, or people checking out. From there, we get practical: earning trust through consistency, showing up every day, and making sure your advocacy is visible to the team that needs it most.
We also unpack a mistake many new support leaders make, quietly working behind the scenes while the team assumes nothing is changing. Spending time in the queue helps you truly understand the pain, but the real job is fixing the ecosystem: processes, staffing signals, cross-functional relationships, and feedback loops. Finally, we talk honestly about burnout, the mental load of support leadership, and why community spaces like Support Driven and therapy can be essential, not optional.
If you’ve ever stepped into a low-trust environment and wondered how to turn it around, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share it with a fellow support leader, and leave a review with the trust-building habit that has worked best for you.
AI can make customer support faster, cheaper, and more consistent, but it can also quietly destroy trust when it becomes a wall between customers and real help. Charlotte Ward sits down with customer experience expert Shep Hyken to get brutally clear on what never changes: customers want to be happy, they want you to take care of them, they want it to be easy, and when something breaks they want it fixed. The channel is secondary. The feeling is the product.
We unpack why Amazon is one of the few brands that can run an overwhelmingly digital service model without making customers feel abandoned, and what most companies get wrong when they use AI as contact deflection. Shep shares why the human touch is not going away, it is flipping into a competitive advantage that strengthens the digital experience. We also get into proactive communication that reduces anger (knowledge is power), why “silence kills trust”, and how to design escalation so customers do not have to repeat themselves.
You will also hear surprising research on support preferences across generations, what it means when Gen Z starts choosing the phone more often for real problems, and why “time to happiness” may be a better north star than average handle time. If you are building AI customer service, contact center automation, self-service, or omnichannel support, this conversation will help you keep speed without sacrificing the relationship.
Subscribe, share this with a CX leader on your team, and leave a review with the one place you think AI should never be the only option.
Great support can look “perfect” on paper and still fail the customer in real life. That tension is what we dig into with Carl Lenocker, a senior customer success executive, executive coach, and longtime support leader, as we unpack a simple idea with big consequences: outcomes over optics.
We get concrete about how traditional support KPIs like first contact resolution, time to answer, and fast ticket closure can quietly create the wrong behaviours. When the business rewards speed and box-checking, teams get pushed toward rushed calls, prematurely closed cases, and fewer relationship-building moments. Carl shares lessons from running global support at HP and why many of these pressures ultimately trace back to money, cost cutting, and the old “support as a cost center” story, especially during the outsourcing era.
From there, we look forward. We talk about AI in customer support as a way to handle simple issues quickly, and why the real opportunity is to reinvest human time into premium, consultative, relationship-driven support that prevents the next ticket and protects renewals. We also call out action faking, including performative QBRs, and Carl breaks down what actually matters in a customer business review: business objectives, progress, and risks, not 50-slide theatre.
If you lead support or you’re building a career in post-sale, you’ll leave with sharper language for executives, better internal alignment, and a clearer way to prove value beyond dashboards. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share this with a support leader who needs it, and leave a review with the metric you think your team should stop worshipping.
Support teams don’t usually fail because they “don’t care” or “aren’t working hard enough.” They fail because they scale on instinct, accumulate tribal knowledge, and measure whatever is easiest until the whole system starts to wobble. We sit down with Neal Travis, Head of Customer Experience and Operations at AIHR, to talk about measuring support maturity in a way that leads to real decisions, not a prettier dashboard. Neal shares how a small team can support a large customer base by getting ruthless about what support owns and how the work is designed.
We walk through Neal's support maturity framework built around three domains: knowledge, quality, and data and insights. On the knowledge side, we dig into self-service experience, internal knowledge management, and training that prepares the team for what’s coming next, not just onboarding. We also unpack why “supportability” is an outcome when documentation, enablement, and cross-team alignment are strong, and why customers learning changes before support does is always a red flag.
From there we move into quality, separating communication quality (standards, coaching, QA programmes, onboarding for great conversations) from operating quality (channels, capacity, coverage, incident management, and the reality of a messy support tech stack). Finally, we get practical about support metrics and measurement architecture: choosing the right metrics, understanding trade-offs like handle time vs after-call work, building reliable data infrastructure, and turning voice of the customer into action that closes the loop.
If you want a clear picture of where your support function is mature and where it’s fragile, this conversation gives you a map. Subscribe for more, share this with a support leader who’s trying to scale, and leave a review with the one domain you’re working on next.
Your one-on-ones shouldn’t feel like a weekly status treadmill where we do all the talking and our team does all the nodding. Charlotte Ward sits down with Greg Skirving to unpack a deceptively simple leadership shift: the reverse one-on-one, where the direct report leads with their perspective instead of waiting for the manager’s agenda.
Greg walks us through his practical structure a three-slide monthly check-in covering accomplishments, challenges, and what the person wants to improve next. We talk about why this works especially well in customer support and technical support environments that are drowning in metrics like tickets closed and MTTR, while so much real value goes uncounted: mentoring, onboarding, process fixes, cross-functional help, and customer moments that protect renewals. The goal isn’t more paperwork, it’s clearer thinking, better coaching, and a more honest view of impact.
We also dig into the change management piece: why the first few rounds can be awkward, how to coach ICs who dislike “talking about themselves,” and how presenting internally becomes a safe way to build communication and confidence that carries into customer calls, incident leadership, and even career moves into pre-sales, implementation, or project roles. By the end, we connect the dots to a simple career advantage: building an ongoing evidence file that makes self-evaluations and promotion conversations easier because the proof is already collected.
If you want one-on-ones that create growth and not just updates, listen now, then subscribe, share with a fellow support leader, and leave a review. What would you change about your one-on-ones first?
Mary Poppins is “practically perfect” and that makes her a surprisingly useful guide for modern customer support leadership. We (Charlotte Ward and Jason Yun, Head of Provider Success at Prax Health) use the film’s songs and characters to translate timeless ideas into practical support team lessons: hire for kindness and wit, stay close to the frontline, and remember that people at work still want to be seen, heard, and understood even when the market feels harsher than it did a few years ago.
We talk about advocacy and allyship through “Sister Suffragette”, and we confront the Mr Banks trap: getting rigid, comfortable, and oblivious while chaos quietly builds around you. From there we get extremely tactical with “A Spoonful of Sugar”, unpacking how support leaders deliver bad news, write appeasement emails, de escalate tense calls, and keep dignity intact for customers and agents. We also call out the gap between big vendor visions and what teams actually need day to day, including an honest take on AI in customer support and why hype rarely matches real budgets or proven outcomes.
Along the way, Bert becomes the model for a different kind of leadership voice: the storyteller who reframes, suggests alternatives, and helps people change without being shamed. We close with “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” and a simple north star for the future of customer success and customer support: let automation handle the boring clicks while humans lead with trust, relationship building, and product insight that actually improves the customer experience. If this made you rethink your own leadership style, subscribe, share the episode with a fellow support leader, and leave a review.
Most coaching goes wrong before the coaching conversation even starts. If we only review a tiny sample of calls, chats, or tickets, we end up “coaching the seventh hole” and missing the real issue that shows up earlier in the customer journey, like unclear expectation setting or a pattern that repeats across channels.
I’m joined by Rob Dwyer, Senior Technical Account Manager at Level AI and CX Executive in Residence, to unpack how AI can identify coaching opportunities without pretending to replace leadership. We use a surprisingly useful golf analogy to explain the core problem: agents are “playing” all day long, on different levels of difficulty, while supervisors are juggling escalations, PTO, reporting, and intraday chaos. In that reality, humans cannot reliably watch enough work to spot true patterns, but AI can, because pattern recognition is exactly what these models do well.
We also get practical about what “signals” can look like, including an omnichannel example where an agent sounds fantastic on the phone but struggles with written communication in email and ticket replies. That’s a hidden coaching gap unless you’re analysing conversations across voice and async work. Along the way, we talk about using AI to highlight strengths so recognition is specific, and how this can help newly promoted managers calibrate quickly between foundational coaching and skill refinement.
If you want coaching that feels fair, evidence-based, and actually improves customer experience, listen now, then subscribe, share this with a fellow support leader, and leave a review with the biggest coaching blind spot you see on your team.
Your calendar says “1:1s,” but your brain hears “context switching.” Charlotte Ward sits down with Reagan Helms, VP of Customer Experience at Planning Center, to unpack a practical way AI can make us better managers: a management assistant that strengthens one-on-ones without turning leadership into autopilot.
We get specific about how Reagan built his system and how it evolved, from separate AI chats per employee to a persistent copilot that can pull the right notes at the right time. We talk about the real-world plumbing behind “AI for managers” including Notion as a human-friendly interface, why Notion can be painful as a retrieval layer, when spreadsheets are the simplest high-performance backbone, and how a vector database can unlock faster search across qualitative coaching history. We also dig into meeting transcription, prompt refinement, and the discipline of verifying outputs so the manager stays responsible for the data and the decisions.
Then we zoom out to the leadership impact: fuller agendas, fewer forgotten commitments, and an “impartial mirror” that helps you sanity-check whether you communicated clearly or whether an annoying behaviour is actually your coaching taking root. We also tackle the trust side head-on, with boundaries and consent so AI support doesn’t drift into surveillance or creep your team out.
If you’re leading customer support, customer experience, or any growing team, hit play, share it with another manager, and subscribe for more. After you listen, leave a review and tell us: what would you want an AI management assistant to handle first?
A lot has changed since the start of the year and not just job titles and cities. Charlotte Ward sits down with returning guest Alec Maloney to take stock of what is actually happening inside modern customer support teams as AI, automation, and faster tooling collide with the day-to-day reality of customers, tickets, and people management.
We get practical about the new build vs buy trade-offs for AI in customer service. Alec shares what it looks like to evaluate vendor platforms and aim to shift a meaningful chunk of ticket volume to AI-assisted chat and email, while Charlotte explains why her instinct is often to build custom systems that fit the exact workflow. Along the way we talk Zendesk reporting, scripts generated with AI, and why “solve the problem in front of you” has become a useful operating principle for support operations and CX leadership.
Then we zoom out to the bigger changes: blurred boundaries between support, ops, and adjacent functions, the need for centralised knowledge (Notion, Confluence, knowledge bases) to make AI effective, and the weird new shape of career progression. Title compression and flatter orgs mean growth can feel like more scope and more influence rather than a clean promotion, which raises real questions about sustainability, delegation, and what different team members actually want from their careers.
If you lead customer support, CX, or support ops and you are trying to make AI useful without losing the human layer, this conversation will give you language, examples, and a few sharp edges to think about. Subscribe, share this with a fellow support leader, and leave a review with the one change you are seeing most in your own team.
AI can generate a clean looking knowledge article in seconds, but that speed comes with a trap: it makes bad knowledge easier to publish and easier to surface. Leslie O’Flahavan joins me to unpack a simple claim with big consequences for customer support leaders and knowledge management teams: AI won’t fix your knowledge quality problem, it will expose it.
We get practical about what AI can do well (drafting, simplifying language, reformatting for different audiences) and what it cannot do for you (understanding the real human reader who is stressed, new to the task, or missing context). Leslie explains why writing is more than editing and why relying only on revision can create “brain flab” as teams stop practising planning and organising. We also dig into a better way to judge content: stop asking users whether they like it and start asking whether they can complete the task with your self service help.
From there, we explore concrete tactics to make the reader real again: using daily ticket feedback as gold, building articles around customer questions, and designing knowledge base and FAQ structure that works for both humans and AI search. If you’re feeling AI fatigue, this conversation reframes the moment as an opportunity to do more meaningful knowledge gardening, not less.
Subscribe for more conversations on support leadership, AI in customer service, and knowledge base strategy, and if this helps, share it with a teammate and leave a quick review.
The office can be a productivity killer or a leadership advantage, and the difference usually comes down to one thing: whether we design the day or let the day design us. I’m joined by Andrew Rios to get real about returning to the office after years of remote work, and what it takes to make that shift sustainable for customer support leaders running busy teams.
We dig into the practical mechanics that decide whether office life works: owning your calendar from day one, carrying over non negotiables like school runs and family time, and factoring in commute time so your week doesn’t silently stretch. Andrew shares how he protects evenings over the long haul even in a role where outages and service interruptions can happen, and why it can take time to build the right rules of engagement.
Then we get into the hard part: getting work done when people can see you. We talk deep work blocks, the hidden cost of context switching, and how “Do you have a minute?” can derail an entire morning. Andrew explains how he sets office norms, sometimes even stepping into a coffee shop to recreate a remote focus setup, and how he turns walk up escalations into coaching moments that build team autonomy over time.
If you’re navigating return to office, hybrid work, or simply trying to protect focus and work life balance in a contact center or support environment, this one is packed with tactics you can use immediately. Subscribe for more practical customer support leadership conversations, share this with a leader who’s struggling with office interruptions, and leave a review with your best calendar boundary.
AI in customer support gets reduced to one tired idea: ship a chatbot and cut tickets. That mindset misses where the real leverage is. We sit down with Robert Cabral, Head of Customer Experience at Runway, to talk about “AI beyond the queue” and what it looks like when an AI-first company uses automation to scale service while protecting the customer relationship.
We get practical about the messy middle: migrating long-lived support reporting, pulling data from multiple sources, and turning scattered metrics into a clear weekly narrative that product and leadership can actually act on. Robert shares how AI helps teams find the story inside ticket data, platform usage, and escalations, and why reporting is only valuable when it drives a better customer experience, a better product roadmap, and a better day-to-day for the support team.
Then we move past talk and into action. We discuss chatbot foundations for product education, plus higher-impact automations that do real work, like refund handling with strict guardrails and human escalation when context is missing. We also explore how AI enables support teams to build internal tools and repeatable templates, even without traditional engineering backgrounds, and why that capability can become a career accelerator across CX, product, QA, and engineering.
We close on leadership: how to address the fear that AI will replace support roles, how to set customer-focused goals, and how to plan for different outcomes if AI resolves 90% of questions or falls short. If you care about customer support AI, CX automation, AI reporting, and building durable teams in a fast-changing landscape, you’ll want this one. Subscribe, share with a fellow support leader, and leave a review if it helps you rethink your AI roadmap.
Getting laid off can scramble more than your finances. It can shake your identity, your confidence, and the story you’ve been told about what “success” in customer support leadership is supposed to look like. That’s why this conversation with Jenny Dempsey hit so hard: she went from a clear leadership path in customer experience to two years of uncertainty, experimenting with consulting, and rebuilding from a place that felt anything but predictable.
We talk about the moment she realized a leadership title no longer matched her values. Jenny shares what it was like to apply for individual contributor roles with 20 years of experience, get judged as “overqualified,” and wrestle with the temptation to downplay her background just to get hired. We also unpack a healthier approach: owning the choice, leading without the org-chart label, and focusing on skills that actually create impact like clear communication, customer empathy, and making work easier for the team.
Then we zoom out to the unexpected parallel that ties it all together: her furniture flipping business. The product is different, but the customer journey is the same. Setting expectations, choosing the right channel, giving progress updates, and protecting trust when timelines are long. Charlotte puts it simply: silence kills trust. If you’re navigating layoffs, a career pivot, burnout, or a non-linear support career path, you’ll leave with practical mindset shifts and a better way to tell your story.
Subscribe for more real conversations about customer support careers, share this with a friend who’s rethinking their next move, and leave a review with the title you’re ready to stop chasing.
Customers are talking about you where your VOC program rarely looks and it’s shaping revenue, retention, and trust. Nate Brown joins me to introduce Fearless CX, a bold and practical way to lead customer experience in a time when fear is high, teams are tempted to retreat into silos, and “insular thinking” makes cross-functional work painfully slow.
We dig into what Fearless CX looks like inside the organization: leaders acting as a beacon, building trust through character and conviction, and creating psychological safety without drifting into comfort or inertia. The goal is healthy tension where people can challenge ideas, learn fast, and collaborate across the enterprise to produce a consistent customer experience outcome.
Then we get tactical about modern voice of customer strategy. Nate explains “wild sentiment” the unstructured feedback living on Reddit, YouTube, third-party communities, and public reviews. We talk about how AI search is changing customer support behavior, why customers often solve problems without ever contacting the brand, and how AI-enabled customer experience management platforms can finally harmonize structured and unstructured feedback into real themes, tags, and actionable insights.
If you want a customer experience strategy that survives uncertainty and actually earns trust, press play. Subscribe, share this with a CX or support leader, and leave a review, then tell me: where do you think your customers are shaping your brand story today?
AI is starting to take the queue. So what’s left for a customer support team once automation handles triage, repetitive questions, onboarding, and a big chunk of ticket volume? Ryan Klausner joins me to get specific about “life after AI” and why the future of support is bigger than faster replies. We talk about how human-first support can still thrive while using AI in customer service in a way that actually improves the customer experience.
We dig into the real shift: moving from reactive ticket handling to proactive support that prevents issues before they hit. That means treating support as a central intelligence function, using AI to surface friction in the customer journey, spotting trends early, and turning messy contact data into clear insights that product and marketing teams can act on. We also get honest about the cultural and coaching work required to help frontline teams become strategic operators, not just great responders.
Ryan shares what new roles and skills are emerging, from conversational analysis and prompt design to owning knowledge bases, self-service, and customer education. We also unpack trust, why “fake empathy” from bots can backfire, and how to build a better resolution path with smart escalation and truly white glove human help for complex scenarios. If you’re thinking about customer support careers, CX strategy, or AI driven customer experience, this one will sharpen your view of what’s next.
If this conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a support leader on your team, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway. What part of support would you automate first, and what would you protect for humans?
AI is already in your support queue, but the real question is what it’s doing to your career path. I’m joined by Hilary Dudek, Head of Customer Experience at Gamma, to get specific about how AI is reshaping customer support roles and why the “bots are coming for our jobs” narrative misses the most important part: new jobs are being created right now.
We dig into what AI chatbots are genuinely good at, like handling simple requests and searching your help center faster than any human can, and where they still struggle, especially around empathy, reassurance, and messy edge cases. We also talk about the shift away from chatbots masquerading as humans and toward clearer, more transparent bot experiences that set expectations and make handoffs to human support feel natural.
From there we go deep on the emerging roles: AI Support Engineer, support architect, and the growing need for people who can manage connectors across documentation, Slack, email, CRM, and data warehouses. We cover prompt engineering, knowledge management, routing and triage, hallucination risk, and why sensitive areas like billing and legal context still require careful human oversight. Hilary also shares a practical example of rapid experimentation: building a “support psychic” with AI that predicts likely follow-up questions and suggested responses from recent ticket patterns.
If you lead support operations, manage customer experience, or you’re on the frontline wondering how to stay relevant, this conversation is a roadmap for leaning in with confidence. Subscribe, share this with your team, and leave a review, then tell me: what AI-powered support role do you want to see next?
Growth rarely happens on a straight line, and neither should coaching. We sat down with Andrew Rios, Head of Customer Experience at Cityside Fiber, to explore how leaders can tailor their coaching as people mature—from fresh hires forming their professional identity to seasoned operators who navigate constraints with judgment and calm. Andrew draws on an unexpected source—coaching youth sports—to reveal practical tactics that translate directly to support leadership.
We start with the early-career stage, where strong opinions and limited exposure often collide. Andrew’s approach is simple and effective: observe first, set clear expectations, explain the why, and check for understanding without condescension. He shares how to model the behavior you want, turn feedback into co-created next steps, and transform “I’m right” energy into team-first outcomes. Along the way, we talk about relatable storytelling, sticky lessons, and the value of asking people to reflect back what they heard so alignment sticks beyond the meeting.
As the conversation moves to senior ICs and emerging leaders, we shift to the realities of budgets, staffing, and process limits. Here, coaching is less about task accuracy and more about decision quality, trade-offs, and influence without authority. Andrew explains how transparency builds trust, how to run adult reflection loops (“If you could do it again, what changes?”), and why change usually takes longer than a 90-day plan. We also dig into inheriting teams, decoding norms from past workplaces, and preventing message drift by re-anchoring the why at regular intervals—even with your top performers.
Throughout, vulnerability is the backbone. Andrew talks openly about owning mistakes on the field and at work, thanking the team for the save, and using those moments to strengthen culture. If you’re a support leader, manager, or senior IC looking to evolve your coaching playbook, this conversation offers concrete tools and a mindset shift: meet people where they are, coach for where they want to go, and resist coaching them where they don’t.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a fellow leader, and leave a quick review to help more people find these conversations.
What happens when AI automates the work that built your career story? We sit down with Lauren Eimers to trace a path from clinical counseling and genetics into customer support leadership and onward to clinical science liaison, then use that journey to unpack a bigger shift: the changing identity of support as AI handles the basics and reshapes teams, metrics, and roles.
Across this candid conversation, we question what “foundations” really mean. If bots resolve simple tickets in seconds, where do managers, directors, and VPs create value? We argue the center of gravity moves toward experience design: setting tone, training AI with the right knowledge, defining escalation paths, and architecting journeys that leave customers feeling seen and confident. That is where human strengths become strategy—storytelling that builds trust, empathy that defuses tense moments, and ethical judgment when answers affect health, money, or safety.
We also get practical about fear and planning. Instead of waiting for clarity, we model scenario thinking: inventory your durable skills, map them to AI-augmented roles like knowledge architecture, prompt strategy, and quality review, and use community to test and refine your plan. Expect a nonlinear path—more lily pads than highways—and treat each step as a chance to strengthen the human elements machines can’t replicate. The pace of change is fast, but the purpose endures: create support that feels simple, respectful, and human, even when the system behind it becomes radically new.
If this resonates, follow the show, share with a teammate, and leave a review telling us which human skill you plan to double down on next.
Hiring plans look clean on a roadmap until real candidates, real timelines, and real markets show up. We unpack a practical, humane approach to building a support team that can handle peak seasons without sacrificing quality: plan backwards from your busiest dates, define the role around outcomes, and keep a flexible grip on how you staff it.
Charlotte welcomes Matt Dale to dig into the details leaders wrestle with every year. We talk through working from your go-live date to set posting windows, ramp time, and notice periods, then pressure-test those assumptions against service level goals and budget. Matt shares hard-won lessons on when to hire cohorts for frontline coverage and when a so-called “unicorn” role should be split into two focused positions. We get candid about the risks of fear-based hiring, how to establish contingency plans before you need them, and why automation and AI rarely deliver instant headcount relief.
Interviews, we argue, are more first date than crystal ball. Consistent loops and clear rubrics matter, but so does accepting uncertainty and raising the bar for mutual fit. We highlight the power of candidate questions—what they ask reveals how they think—and offer specifics to encourage better two-way conversations. Along the way, you’ll hear strategies for aligning with finance on headcount versus service levels, using contractors to build foundations, and resetting a search when the market tells you your role is mis-scoped.
If you’re hiring for customer support or customer experience this year, this conversation gives you a framework to time your postings, avoid settling, and build a resilient team prepared for the real workload, not the wishful slide. Subscribe, share this with a fellow support leader, and leave a review with your top hiring tip—what’s the question you always ask to gauge fit?
What if a “ticket” isn’t a ticket at all, but an engagement where both sides own the outcome? We sit down with Greg Skirving to unpack how customer champions transform support from reactive break fix to a partnership that moves faster, learns faster, and pays off across the business.
Greg has lived every stage of the customer journey—sales, implementation, and support—so he brings a pragmatic lens to what works. We dig into the two traits that define a true champion—willingness and capability—and the concrete practices that build both: targeted training, version discipline, spare and hot-swappable parts, and clear runbooks. You’ll hear how Greg’s “Our Most Successful Customers Do This” handoff reframes expectations, sets troubleshooting ground rules early, and empowers customers to handle tier one and two issues confidently.
We also talk about the signals champions surface for customer success and product: emerging use cases, recurring failure modes, and real-world constraints that drive smarter roadmaps. Expect a candid look at metrics, too. When champions grow, ticket volume falls while complexity rises—TTR can increase even as overall outcomes improve. Learn how to tell that story to your leadership and why it matters in an AI-augmented queue.
If you want fewer how-to tickets, faster resolution on the hard stuff, and a stronger renewal story, this conversation is your playbook. Subscribe, share with your team, and leave a review with your best champion win or question—we’ll feature our favorites in a future episode.
Trust isn’t a slogan when failure has real consequences. Simone Secci joins Charlotte Ward to pull back the curtain on support operations in two intense arenas—concierge‑level luxury tourism and clinical psychology platforms—and find a shared blueprint: protect privacy, reduce friction, and design for reliability before anything else. From coordinating restaurant bookings across phone, SMS, WhatsApp, and email to safeguarding patient pathways where there’s no “fix it later,” the conversation drills into how we plan, measure, and communicate when the stakes are high.
We break down layered SLAs that go far beyond first response time, including vendor response targets and customer wait time, and show how each micro‑commitment ladders up to trust. You’ll hear how we centralize multi‑channel communications for quality review, why “fast” isn’t always smart in healthcare, and how scientific rigor steers product choices—down to naming a feature without triggering clinical confusion. When providers are serving vulnerable people and billionaires are operating on tight schedules, the common reality is that no one has time to give perfect reproduction steps. That puts the burden on support to replicate issues, bridge technical and domain language, and escalate with clean evidence.
What emerges is a practical playbook for high‑trust support: kill silos, share a language with your users, validate terminology, and align support, product, QA, and engineering around proactive reliability. We talk about onboarding that actually reduces effort, concise walkthroughs that save attention, and the humility to slow down early so sessions, trips, and outcomes don’t fail later. If you lead customer support, success, or product in any high‑stakes space, this deep dive will sharpen how you measure, message, and deliver.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review—what’s one place your team could slow down now to move faster later?
A quiet Tuesday turns into a leadership stress test. We share the playbook for extreme delegation—those moments when a key lieutenant leaves, the CEO secondments you into a new role, or a surprise launch forces you to hand off mission-critical work fast without dropping standards. Matt Dale joins Charlotte Ward to unpack how to keep people safe, outcomes clear, and momentum steady when the plan changes mid-flight.
We start with the groundwork that makes speed possible: knowing your people, tools, and data; modeling calm, context-rich communication; and showing your work so others can replicate decisions. From there, we move into the safety contract that empowers new owners—explicit boundaries, time-boxed expectations, clear escalation paths, and a promise of advocacy when scope creeps or politics intrude. It’s still your accountability, and staying close with tight check-ins preserves agency while preventing drift.
Then we tackle ruthless prioritization. You can’t hand over your entire mental map and hope for the same outcome. Strip to essentials: customer promises that won’t bend, survival metrics, and the smallest system that delivers them. Pause nice-to-haves, and make smart, short-term investments—like an AI co-pilot or tighter knowledge flows—that shrink ramp time and amplify output. Real stories bring it to life: navigating a six-month secondment during acquisitions, replacing a leader mid-crunch, and accelerating an AI rollout to support hiring and scale.
This conversation is for support and CX leaders who have earned the reputation for getting it done and want a cleaner, calmer way to do it when chaos hits. You’ll leave with scripts, structures, and mindset shifts that turn a blindsiding week into a clear plan with confident owners. If this helped, follow the show, share it with a teammate who’s under pressure, and leave a review with your best extreme delegation tip.
AI has crossed a threshold in customer support: it no longer just routes and records—it actually does the work. We sat down with Craig Stoss, solutions lead at Codif, to unpack what changes when agents and co-pilots resolve real cases, trigger refunds, detect spam, and personalize replies across channels. The core shift is mindset: once software handles tasks, you need to manage it like a teammate—measure output, audit quality, plan capacity, and set honest expectations about what AI should own versus when a human steps in.
We map the strengths and limits on both sides. AI excels at repeatable workflows, multilingual responses, classification, and fast data gathering across commerce and CRM tools. Humans shine in ambiguity, ethical judgment, and emotional connection. That split demands better metrics: evaluate AI on loop frequency, hallucination rate, accuracy, and handoff health; evaluate humans on sentiment impact, recovery, and resolution quality. We also tackle the messy middle: what counts as “containment,” how AI prework changes case counts and AHT, and why your SLAs must adapt as simple issues disappear and human queues get harder.
Transparency matters for trust and compliance. Customers behave differently when they know they’re speaking with a bot, so make disclosure sensible and escalation simple. Inside your org, put AI into workforce management like a 24/7 agent with forecasted volume, coverage targets, and per-workflow goals—think 90 percent for FAQs, 80 percent for refund screening, and a lower bar for complex warranties. Budgeting evolves too: tokens and compute join salaries, compounding micro-saves into real capacity. The upside is big: more interesting human roles, fewer transfers, and a path to merge support and success so one empowered person, augmented by AI, owns the outcome end to end.
If you care about scaling support without losing humanity—smarter metrics, cleaner handoffs, and a realistic plan for AI and people to thrive together—this conversation is your playbook. Subscribe, share with a support leader who needs it, and leave a review with the one metric you’d change first.
Superior customer experience isn’t a universal recipe—it’s a promise aligned to what your customers expect from you, in their moment, on their terms. We sit down with CX veteran Ty Givens to unpack why “good” is always relative and how teams can design for consistency without losing the human judgment that creates loyalty.
Ty shares the evolution from rigid scripts to flexible playbooks that teach thinking. We explore the 80/20 guardrails that keep quality high while giving agents room to zigzag across a process, adapt tone, and move at the customer’s pace. From fast, accurate answers in high-urgency scenarios to the warm, predictable greetings that define beloved brands, we examine how context shapes what “excellent” really looks like.
We also get practical about influence. Dashboards rarely win hearts in the boardroom; stories do. You’ll learn how to frame a single experience you want to change, pick the one metric that proves movement, and tie it to outcomes executives already value like CSAT, NPS, retention, and revenue. We cover how to connect first response time to satisfaction, how to separate policy pain from agent performance in CSAT reviews, and how to elevate support insights to product and engineering so fixes actually ship.
For leaders and frontline teams alike, this conversation is a roadmap: define expectations, empower judgment, and communicate impact with clarity. If you’ve been struggling to turn support data into action or to earn trust for your team’s recommendations, this is your playbook for telling better stories and creating better experiences. If this episode resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who leads support, and leave a quick review with the one metric that tells your best story.
Ready for a clean slate and a smarter way to build support in 2026? We kick off a fresh season with a rebuilt website, renewed energy, and a clear map of the big shifts reshaping our work: AI moving from side experiment to operational backbone, the leadership ladder compressing, and the customer journey turning truly dynamic. With Alec back on the mic, we share what sparked our collaboration, why the site overhaul mattered, and how we’re structuring episodes to turn complex trends into practical playbooks.
We dig into the AI arc we’ve watched up close: from generic tools to tailored systems grounded in product context and team workflows. That evolution changes how leaders think about risk, signal quality, and measurement. When each team builds its own AI-enabled flow, the data footprint becomes unique, and so must the metrics. We talk about moving beyond simple taxonomies and into cross-functional signals that reflect real value: reliability, effort reduction, resilience, and trust. It’s not about more dashboards; it’s about clearer decisions and better outcomes.
We also tackle the role overlap between support and customer success. Instead of strict handoffs, many teams are sharing tasks based on customer need, account complexity, and timing. The goal isn’t to blur expertise, but to surface the right context—recent incidents, account health, adoption goals—so the person in the room can help. That leads to our favorite battleground: journey mapping. Static maps that live on slides are fading. Dynamic journeys that adapt to signals are rising, supported by shared definitions, event-level visibility, and orchestration that changes course without creating chaos.
Expect returning guests, a few unfinished arcs finally wrapped, and plenty of new voices pushing us forward on AI maturity, metrics that matter, and the craft of leading modern support teams. If you’ve got a burning topic or a story worth sharing, head to customersupportleaders.com, scroll to the podcast page, and book a call. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review to help more leaders find the show.
Forget the glossy strategy deck. We’re digging into the real drivers of customer experience: the values people use to decide, the culture that shows up in daily behavior, and the incentives that shape how work actually gets done. With coach and consultant Conor Pendergrast, we unpack why a perfect plan won’t move the needle without the conditions that make good choices easy under pressure.
We start by drawing a clean line between objectives, strategy, and tactics—then flip the frame. Support is operational, reactive, and fluid, so the experience your customers feel depends less on long-range roadmaps and more on what your team is empowered to do in the moment. We explore how a tight set of actionable values can guide judgment when process hits the edge cases, why culture is simply the sum of visible behaviors, and how to spot “painted-on” culture that reads great but conflicts with what the metrics reward.
Then we get practical. We talk incentives that matter—protected time for knowledge creation, loops from customer pain to product fixes, KPIs that don’t punish improvement work, and recognition that matches how individuals like to be celebrated. We cover Goodhart’s law, double-loop thinking, and the operational rituals that keep teams learning: documenting confusing flows, aligning processes to ownership, and building capacity for continuous improvement. Expect candid examples, clear language, and tools you can use to align values, culture, and incentives so strategy becomes the way your team works, not a slide you forget by July.
If you want support that scales quality—fewer handoffs, clearer answers, and issues that don’t boomerang—start here. Subscribe, share with a fellow support leader, and leave a review to tell us which behavior you’ll reward first.
Ever faced a customer whose day went off the rails before they reached you? We dive into the emotional mechanics of difficult conversations and show how empathy, clear choices, and a partnership mindset can turn even the messiest moments into momentum. Charlotte sits down with customer and employee experience strategist Marc Haine to unpack a practical toolkit that works across hospitality, retail, government services, and B2B support.
We start with a simple truth: your first customer is your employee. When teams feel supported, they can stay calm under pressure and ask better questions that reveal what customers actually need, not just what they say they want. Marc shares a gripping hotel story that reframes conflict through safety, ownership, and forward-focused language. You’ll hear the exact phrases that de-escalate fast—“I realize how frustrating this is for you,” “In your place, I’d feel the same way,” and “Is it okay if we focus on next steps?”—along with respectful boundaries when calls turn abusive. Then we walk through a three-option framework that returns control to the customer, shifting them from victim to decision-maker.
We also tackle the quieter, colder B2B fury where reputations and revenue are on the line. The method holds: empathize, name the impact, and become a partner in the solution. Great service isn’t perfection; it’s recovery done right. By preparing employees with language, rehearsal, and permission to set boundaries, teams can guide customers from lizard brain to logic, from blame to progress. If you lead support, CX, or customer success, you’ll leave with a repeatable playbook to calm chaos and build trust that lasts.
If this episode helps, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review—what de-escalation line works best for you?
What if the fastest path to trustworthy AI starts with a better knowledge base?
David Kay is Principal at DB Kay & Associates, a consultancy focused on knowledge management and self-service for support. He was recognized as an Innovator by the Consortium for Service Innovation, and has been KCS v6 Certified as a Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) practitioner, coach, and trainer. He held leadership roles at an innovative knowledge management technology provider from early 1998 to the end of 2002, and has been granted five patents for his work in knowledge management technology. His current work leverages thirty-five years of experience in envisioning, developing, marketing, and rolling out technology to aid knowledge-intensive businesses. David is co-author of Collective Wisdom: Transforming Support with Knowledge, and instructor of Customer Service: Knowledge Management and Customer Service with AI and Machine Learning on LinkedIn Learning.
I sit down with David to test a bold claim: you don’t do AI to get a knowledge base—you build a knowledge base to get good AI. Together we unpack what customers and agents actually need from information: it must be findable, usable, and accurate. Generative tools already deliver speed and clarity, but accuracy is where the stakes rise, especially in complex, safety‑critical domains where a confident wrong answer can do real harm.
We explain hallucinations in plain language and why persuasive, well‑phrased but incorrect outputs are harder to spot than sloppy forum posts. Then we explore retrieval augmented generation, a practical way to ground answers in trusted sources and expose citations for verification. That’s where a governed knowledge base becomes essential. KCS offers a proven way to capture knowledge in the flow of work, use the customer’s words, and evolve articles through real‑world reuse—exactly the structured, current content an AI pipeline needs to stay reliable.
The conversation turns tactical: how to start or reboot your KB, which KCS practices matter most, and why teams see faster AI wins when they invest in knowledge quality first. We also dig into the elusive aha moment in troubleshooting. AI can summarize long case histories, but spotting the hypothesis that changes the outcome still leans on human meaning making. The exciting frontier is assistive AI that recognizes patterns across cases, nudges better questions, and shortens time to insight without sacrificing judgment.
If you’re being pitched quick fixes that “solve knowledge with AI,” this episode offers a saner roadmap: build a resilient knowledge base, ground your models with RAG, and keep humans in the loop for accuracy and nuance. Subscribe, share with your support and product teams, and leave a review telling us: are you building your KB to make your AI better?
Outages test more than systems—they test culture. We dig into what “calm under pressure” actually looks like, from the first hint of trouble to the final post‑incident review. Together with guest Kat Gaines of PagerDuty, we explore why support must be a core stakeholder, how trust and blamelessness turn heat into focus, and the small operational moves that make the next incident smoother than the last.
We start with the why: customers feel the wobble first, and support carries that weight. Clear roles, fast approvals for updates, and a cadence everyone understands protect users and the team. Kat shares how to make calm a measurable goal, not a motivational poster—think time‑boxed check‑ins, explicit ownership, and language that separates immediate action from root cause. We unpack retrospectives that actually change behavior, documenting principles so they hold during the toughest minutes, not just the easy ones.
We also talk about people. Training newcomers requires more than docs; it needs pairing, gentle course correction, and real reps in safe situations. The signal of maturity is when veterans guide first‑timers in the moment without chaos. Kat offers a powerful lens for jobseekers and leaders alike: watch a real incident to learn a company’s values. Healthy teams honor roles, communicate clearly, and iterate with intent. Finally, we map incident skills to career growth—cross‑functional coordination, high‑stakes comms, and judgment under pressure—showing how support pros earn visibility and create paths into leadership or adjacent teams.
If you want fewer escalations, faster updates, and a team that stays steady when it counts, this conversation gives you the frameworks and the human skills to build it. Subscribe, share with a teammate who handles the heat, and leave a review telling us the one change you’ll make before your next incident.
Sauce jokes aside, we get real about AI in customer support: why it’s tempting to chase the trend, how early demos can mislead, and what actually works once you bring models into day-to-day operations. Rob Dwyer joins us to unpack the difference between toy and tool, sharing lessons from building conversational analytics and automated QA across diverse industries.
We dig into the myth of “one model to rule them all” and get specific about task fit. Generative models shine at qualitative judgments like tone, professionalism, and focus in short, discrete interactions. They stumble with counting, sequence checks, and multi‑step logic—especially across long, technical threads. That gap matters when you’re grading complex troubleshooting or evaluating revenue potential. We talk about the demo effect, why a few promising outputs aren’t proof, and how to set up meaningful evaluations with enough data to avoid false confidence.
If your world is regulated or highly technical, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) becomes essential. Grounding model answers in a current, curated knowledge base cuts hallucinations and keeps responses aligned with policy. But RAG is only as good as your content ops, which means version control, ownership, and clear guardrails. We also challenge the monolith instinct: mega‑suites promise simplicity yet often deliver stitched‑together mediocrity. A best‑of‑breed stack with clean integrations and strong observability gives you better performance and control.
You’ll leave with a practical framing: good use cases (assisted QA for tone and policy, summarization, intent clustering), maybe use cases (autonomy on complex workflows), and “oh hell no” zones (high‑stakes decisions without grounding or oversight). The throughline is patience—define the problem, validate with real samples, measure cost per correct outcome, and keep humans in the loop where it counts. Subscribe for more clear-eyed conversations on building support that’s fast, human, and genuinely smarter with AI.
The alarms stop, but the real work is just getting started. Charlotte Ward and Kat Gaines pull back the curtain on what effective teams do after an incident is resolved—how to pause, learn, and communicate in a way that actually strengthens trust.
We explore why a short breather prevents knee‑jerk conclusions, how to balance pressure for instant answers with thoughtful analysis, and what belongs in a preliminary update versus a full review. Kat explains how to structure a live, blameless postmortem, why support must be in the room as a source of customer signal, and the right ownership model for running the review. You’ll hear a practical flow for the meeting—shared timeline, missed details, what’s been done, and what’s next—plus how to use Five Whys to move beyond “who messed up” and into “what systems allowed this.”
Communication takes center stage. We get specific about writing external reports that avoid clichés, match tone to impact, and clearly state what will change to prevent a repeat. We dig into accessible language for differently skilled audiences, personal follow‑ups for key accounts, and how to invite customer questions as a final step in closing the loop. The mantra running through it all: fix systems, not people. By treating incident reviews as a chance to improve detection, playbooks, tooling, and ownership, teams turn a rough day into durable resilience.
If you care about incident management, customer trust, and making your next outage less painful than the last, this conversation packs a complete framework you can put into practice. Subscribe, share with your on‑call crew, and leave a review to tell us your top rule for a great post‑incident report.
Ever wondered what distinguishes a true leader from the rest? Join me, Charlotte Ward, as I unlock the secrets of leadership potential within customer support teams alongside Meredith Malloy. Discover how to identify the "unicorns" among your team—those rare individuals who possess the natural empathy and connection skills that are foundational to effective leadership. Meredith sheds light on how these talents can transform into impactful leadership roles, enhancing both employee and customer satisfaction.
Meredith also offers invaluable guidance for those aspiring to lead, stressing the importance of proactive engagement and a genuine passion for growth. She emphasizes the need for continual learning and curiosity, advocating for leadership driven by authentic motivation rather than mere title or salary allure. Together, we explore the journey of nurturing future leaders, providing them with the necessary resources and support to thrive. Tune in to learn how spotting and cultivating leadership talent can bring about positive, far-reaching changes within your organization.
Unlock the secrets to mastering technical support as we, Robert Cabral and I, guide you through the art of enlisting engineering support for complex inquiries. You'll discover how data-driven strategies can transform your support processes, leading to a drastic reduction in ticket escalations. Robert shares his expertise on creating a robust taxonomy for categorizing issues, ensuring clarity and efficiency in resolving them. We promise you'll leave with actionable insights into improving collaboration between support and engineering—essential knowledge for anyone navigating the SaaS landscape of platforms like DataCamp.
Robert and I also delve into the power of empathy and continuous improvement in fostering a proactive support environment. By embedding support team members within engineering, we’ve not only improved communication but also decreased escalations from 40% to under 10%. Our conversation sheds light on the importance of strategic conversations, empathy-building, and securing engineering buy-in. Join us as we unravel the gradual journey of transforming support teams with small wins and iterative progress—your roadmap to a more efficient, less reactive customer service experience.
Unlock the secrets to building a standout customer support team by tuning into our captivating conversation with Alyssa Purcell, a seasoned manager from New York City. Alyssa brings her expertise to the table, offering strategies for crafting precise job descriptions that attract the right candidates. She shares the nuanced art of balancing skills assessment with cultural fit, and the importance of having a diverse interview panel featuring both leadership and peers for a comprehensive evaluation process. You'll leave understanding how to identify the strengths and qualities necessary for each role, paving the way for effective hiring.
Alyssa also unveils her unique approach to interviews, providing real-time feedback to candidates as a means of gauging their potential for growth. Her insights on coaching peers for interviews, maintaining consistency, and reducing unconscious bias with quality feedback are invaluable for anyone in a hiring position. Whether you're bringing in newcomers for entry-level roles or seeking seasoned professionals, Alyssa's proven strategies will equip you with the knowledge to enhance your hiring process and improve candidate outcomes. Listen and transform your approach to hiring in customer support.
Unlock the secrets to mastering incident management with our latest episode featuring the insightful Kat Gaines. Discover how to transform your customer support strategy by crafting effective incident communications and building strong interdepartmental relationships. Learn from Kat as she delves into the complexities of maintaining a unified communication strategy amidst a sea of different tools and remote work challenges. We'll walk you through the importance of clearly defined roles and well-documented processes, ensuring that your team's internal coordination translates into seamless external updates that keep your customers informed and confident.
Join us as we unravel the roles of incident commanders and customer liaisons, and explore how small businesses can evolve from an all-hands approach to more streamlined responses using tools like PagerDuty. We'll highlight the delicate art of balancing technical details with brand perception in customer communications, and how your customer-facing teams can lead the charge in crafting messages that resonate. With practical advice, such as utilizing system maps to bridge the gap between technical jargon and customer understanding, this episode promises to equip you with the knowledge to enhance your customer experience during incident management.
Kristina King returns to the spotlight, sharing her remarkable pivot from finance and teaching to becoming a technical support engineer, all without a formal CS degree. Kristina's narrative underscores the power of varied backgrounds in tech, illustrating her philosophy of hiring for culture "add" rather than culture "fit." She emphasizes the need to extend opportunities to those who might not traditionally find their way into tech, particularly through her role on hiring committees. Kristina's hiring philosophy is about finding those "weirdos" who bring a distinct passion and personality to the team, making the workplace not only diverse but vibrant.
This episode also highlights Kristina's innovative approach with a business support specialist internship aimed at non-traditional candidates, facilitated through a collaboration with WorkSource Oregon. Notable successes include interns like Dana, an Army vet and former bricklayer, who transitioned into valuable technical roles. This initiative highlights how skills like customer experience from the service sector can be effectively channeled into tech support positions. Join us as Kristina unpacks these transformative hiring strategies that are broadening the talent pool and reshaping tech support teams for the future.
Ever wondered how startups can access top-tier leadership without bringing on full-time executives? Brian Levine, joins me to share his journey and unpacks the innovative concept of fractional leadership in customer support.
Brian has been in tech support, in one capacity or another, for 15 years. He's been VP of Support at GitHub and Head of Support at Plaid, among others. These days he's the co-founder of Yetto, a help desk for modern support teams. Brian lives in Rome and drinks far too much coffee.
From his experiences at those industry giants like GitHub and Plaid to founding his own help desk company, Brian reveals how part-time expert guidance can be a game-changer for startups. Discover how companies can skillfully manage transitions and foster a robust support culture with the expertise of seasoned leaders even when they're not ready for a full-time role.
Curious about the impact of fractional leadership on early-stage companies? We tackle strategies for startups lacking a dedicated support head, where initial consulting can highlight system gaps and pave the way for longer-term partnerships. Brian discusses how identifying potential failures in support processes can compel businesses to seek further expert involvement, ultimately helping them scale successfully. Whether you're exploring support leadership careers or intrigued by the challenges and triumphs of being a founder in this space, this episode is packed with insights that promise both inspiration and actionable advice for navigating the dynamic world of customer support.
Discover the secrets of building a thriving career in the customer support industry as Matt Dale joins me to unravel the multitude of paths available for support team members. From nurturing the journey of an individual contributor to embracing leadership roles or exploring new arenas like QA and customer satisfaction, this episode promises to equip you with the insights to chart your career course. Matt shares an inspiring story of a team member's dream of becoming a developer and how the support culture facilitated their transition to QA, highlighting the importance of fostering a supportive environment for growth and transformation.
Join us as we tackle the challenges of retaining skilled individuals and nurturing talent, viewing support teams as a valuable "farm team" for the organization. Matt emphasizes the significance of open communication and personalized development plans during one-on-one sessions, providing listeners with actionable strategies to manage career trajectories effectively. Whether you're a leader seeking to retain talent or a professional aiming to grow within your support role, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights that you won't want to miss.
What happens when the adrenaline rush of an incident meets the need for effective communication? Join us as we chat with Kat Gaines, the leader of PagerDuty’s developer advocacy and community team, who brings her expertise to the table. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of how maintaining transparent communication not only soothes nerves during crises but also keeps customer expectations in check. Gain insights into how developing empathy between engineering teams and customers transforms the user experience, all while fulfilling our innate craving for solutions through timely updates.
Imagine engineers and customer support colliding in a world where Pokémon and bunnies serve as perfect analogies. Kat helps us explore this fascinating intersection, revealing the challenges engineers face in making their technical know-how understandable to the average person. Learn how empathetic customer support representatives become the unsung heroes, bridging this gap and ensuring that customer anxieties are kept at bay through consistent terminology and clear definitions. It’s a lesson in how collaboration between engineers and support teams ensures that even the most complex technical concepts can be translated into relatable terms, easing the often tense atmosphere of an incident.
We also unravel the intricacies of internal communication, stressing the importance of proactive practices that go beyond routine operations. From the use of codified channels and platforms to striking the right balance between internal transparency and external caution, we cover it all. Gain tips on fostering trust during incidents, creating templates for updates, and ensuring your team is equipped to handle external inquiries with confidence. Whether you're managing incidents or fine-tuning communication strategies, this episode promises to arm you with the tools you need for success.
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.
Discover how to master the delicate art of balancing automation with human interaction in customer support, as Corey Brown and Elliot Fox share their expert insights. Facing the pressure to adopt AI while keeping a personal touch can be challenging for businesses. This episode uncovers the potential pitfalls of over-relying on AI, such as generic responses, and emphasizes the importance of human intervention to ensure customer satisfaction. Listen as we explore how AI can serve as a co-pilot, boosting efficiency and enhancing customer experiences without sacrificing the essential human connection.
Join us as we dive into the practical application of AI in customer service, especially for high-volume, low-complexity tasks and round-the-clock availability. Corey and Elliot discuss the challenges AI faces in nuanced environments and highlight the benefits of data-driven insights like sentiment analysis. By examining both the strengths and limitations of AI, this episode offers a thoughtful approach to integrating technology in a way that elevates both customer satisfaction and team morale. Tune in to learn strategies that create win-win scenarios in the ever-evolving landscape of customer support.
Unlock the secrets behind the spreadsheets and discover the hidden complexities of customer support with me and my special guest Ash Rhodes. Ash brings his seasoned perspective on the pitfalls of reducing support staff to mere numbers, reminding us of the importance of understanding the real-time dedication required to resolve customer issues. Together, we explore the nuances of ticket handling and the dangers of setting unrealistic performance goals. Ash sheds light on the often-undocumented tasks like research and troubleshooting that contribute to the intricate web of support functions. This episode promises to transform how you view your support team and their invaluable human contributions.
Ash also introduces us to the intriguing concept of "social complexity" in the world of remote work. We discuss the critical role of team dynamics and the challenges of maintaining authentic, empathic communication in virtual environments. Learn why allowing time for social bonds to form can lead to a cohesive and productive team, and how unstructured moments of chatter are not just fluff but fundamental to effective collaboration. Whether you're a support leader or part of a remote team, these insights offer a fresh perspective on fostering a more human-centric and effective work environment.
Ever wondered how a support desk manager transforms the reputation of their team from the "black sheep" to a pivotal player in brand development and customer interaction? Join me, Charlotte Ward, as I sit down with Steve Tondé from PayShepherd, a Canadian fintech company, who shares his transformative leadership journey and the evolving role of support teams in today's tech-driven landscape. With the rise of SaaS, support teams are stepping into the spotlight, and Steve shares how engaging with critical departments like finance and product development can prioritize customer feedback and drive impactful change. Through his personal experiences, Steve offers valuable insights into the power of transparency and communication across teams, providing a treasure trove of advice for new leaders eager to understand their company and its stakeholders from the start.
Explore the intricate web of interdepartmental dynamics as Steve and I discuss the importance of understanding key performance indicators (KPIs) across different functions to foster successful collaboration. I recount a personal experience where misalignment with another department's KPIs led to a roadblock, highlighting the necessity of building honest relationships to bridge these gaps. We'll delve into the art of finding parallel goals for shared success and the value of stepping out of comfort zones to engage with colleagues across the organization. This episode is a humbling reminder that sometimes our priorities need reevaluation to align with broader organizational needs, underscoring the essential role of relationship-building in nurturing growth and improvement.
What if handling awkward workplace conversations could be less daunting and more compassionate? Join us as we sit down with Hilary Dudek from Gluco, who shares her expert strategies for navigating these challenging discussions with grace and empathy. With five years of tech support experience under her belt, Hilary emphasizes the importance of putting yourself in the other person's shoes and maintaining a balance between professionalism and warmth. She explains how intentional language and face-to-face communication, even via Zoom, can transform a difficult conversation into a constructive dialogue.
Listen to Hilary's heartfelt recounts of empathy, from shedding sympathy tears to offering team members the space they need to process difficult news. She candidly discusses her own struggles with maintaining a poker face and the emotional complexities of delivering tough feedback. Learn practical advice on allowing employees to revisit conversations after some time, providing a thoughtful approach to difficult workplace interactions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to master the art of compassionate communication in the workplace.
What makes a Customer Liaison Officer indispensable during incident management? Join us as we tap into the expertise of Kat Gaines, who shares her invaluable experience and detailed examples to illuminate the crucial responsibilities of this role. Discover how effectively bridging the communication gap between incident response teams and customer-facing staff can transform your incident response strategy. Kat delves into the art of aggregating customer-reported issues and managing internal expectations, revealing why sticking to standard processes just won't cut it during high-stress incidents.
Beyond the basics, we explore the nuanced tasks of real-time decision documentation and post-incident action auditing, essential for thorough reviews and continuous improvement. Kat also brings to light the often-overlooked mental health challenges in customer support roles, the pitfalls of heroism culture, and the necessity of setting clear boundaries to prevent burnout. Tune in for leadership strategies that foster a supportive and effective environment, catering to diverse work styles and ensuring your team remains resilient in the face of stress. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to incident management, this episode promises to enhance your understanding and capability in handling high-pressure situations.
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