Support Driven Leadership Summit 2023: Day 2 Notes

Notes from Day 2 of Support Driven Leadership Summit 2023 Oakland.

It’s Okay to Be Human: How to Lead with Humility and Accountability

Reagan Helms, Planning Center

there’s no one way to lead
Leadership cannot be taught. It can only be learned.
started as only support agent in planning center, moved to managing last 10 years
thought first 360 would go well
feedback: rather negative: arrogant, overly ambitious, inaccessible, won’t explain himself, won’t delegate, poor coach, more concerned with own success than others
all of these have one problem: me
can improvement
3 misconceptions about leadership
1: Leaders are not coaches; wanted to be MVP, didn’t want to be a coach. You start as an IC, thrive, then asked to manage to do the same thing, but that’s not
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
if performing at best, it’s still only 1 person. Need to help others and multiply.
How do you grow? Start with yourself. You are in control of yourself, and only yourself.
“only do what only you can do”: if you are holding on to things that others can do, only you can enable other people to be better at their job
let people fail. You don’t trust other people to do them well, but that’s probably how you got better, fail and learn from them.
let them succeed. When you empower other people, they need to be able to celebrate their own success. Put other people into the limelight.
Have fun in your new role
2: Leaders need to have all the answers.
Not backing down,
was afraid of being found out that don’t know what I’m doing
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.
How do you grow? Embrace imposter syndrome. Reminds you that you too are mortal and might now know what you’re doing. Put away the fear of being wrong.
3: I’ve arrived.
Spent many years trying to get there. I thought I was all that when I had just started.
You will never arrive as a leader. “Leadership is an ever-evolving position.”
How do you grow? Start with humility
never regretted: I’m sorry, please forgive me,
Build into yourself. However you ingest knowledge, that can speak to you when you’re having this problem. The more you do that, the more you’ll get feedback.
Be present. Your time is theirs, you’re the coach. Be engaged.
Collect feedback. The more open you make yourself, the more readily they’ll give feedback.
It doesn’t come easy, but it pays off

Crafting Award-Winning Narratives with Data

Emre Tekoglu, Zywave

award-winning
why? brand exposure, prestige, credibility, employee satisfaction
can differentiate from other companies, can be proud,
story telling: show the problem, business impact, what you did, use metrics/data
iteration is your new process
It is a year round process
do the things you can be proof of and tell the story in a compelling way
use it to rally your teams

Living a Life that Aligns with Your Values and Aspirations

Mari Parker, Boldr

was looking at what books consumed this year
all non-fiction, mostly about personal development
clear bodies of work: conscious leadership, all start with a relationship with yourself, what am I doing, how am I doing
great foundation: awareness
reflection, introspection
exercise in self-awareness: life wheel workbook
where there’s a gap?
what does success look like to you in this area? is there a persona or person that comes to mind for you?
intention to improve?
flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long
there are areas where it’s okay to be good enough
good at chasing the goal
if we pressure ourselves constantly, we will burn out
if we don’t make time for wellness, tend to get illness
“i am enough”
need to admit there are only a few options: stretch ourselves,
have a finite amount of resources. Decrease energy in one area to focus on another.
wealth in opportunities
hardest skill is to get the goalpost to stop moving
find an area where you think it’s enough and you can relax
area where you’ve made significant progress
we can do a better job of celebrating our successes
it’s important to bring meaning to your journey
when we share, it brings closure, meaning

Three Pillars of Effective Support Automation Using AI

Panel: Moderator: Dean Michols (Forethought), Panelists: Susana De Sousa, Lauren Cunningham (Loom), Kallen Bakas (Airbase)

depends on focus: examples: time to resolution, getting more info available to customers
leverage AI in triaging, auto-resolving, understanding handoff to agent
there’s a whole lifecycle: agent, feedback, issue of automation or overautomation
AI is supposed to augment the experience, not making it harder. If so, failing your customers
if technology is not evolving, falling behind as leaders
be proactive, prevent users from encountering frustrations
most people associate AI with deflection: important, but often the bar gets too low, often leads to a worse experience
don’t make your customers fail 2-3 times before getting to an agent
do A/B testing with data, partner with data team
often executive teams don’t understand everything that AI can do, don’t just focus on deflection, like agent assist
performance and time to value, so need to figure out what to measure to satisfy executives, while also making sure customer satisfaction doesn’t go down
agent assist allows feedback on how the AI is doing, then build for external use
performance, time to value, customer satisfaction
performance is what the customer does after using the chatbot. Track with data team. What produces the best outcome.
if the customer gets the value, they’ll keep coming back
takes time to do right
have to do foundational work for it to be effective
make training faster, onboard faster, suggest workflows, low hanging fruit
move from reactive to proactive support, marketing at the right time
figure out what customers are looking for, issues occurring
AI can help track trends happening in support, training and tools needed for the team
voice of customer to product/engineering
best experience is to never contact support
inspiration from non-support AI use: in-person chatbot for wayfinding
sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. If you have a number, what does it mean? what story is it telling or not?
can use AI to draft responses
can bring in external articles and not just internal
create paths in onboarding fit to learning style (video vs reading)
best possible support experience within the team and for customers

Lunch

The Five Finance Love Languages: How to Talk to Your CFO about Support

Kincy Clark

talking about the whole finance team
stereotypes: draconian policies, bean counters, number crunchers
actual job: there’s a lot of things that they do
finance/accounting may not get a lot of exposure to tech topics, may not have context and detail that you’ve built up
simplified: accounting if focused on past, finance is focused on future
IT, HR, and finance are the 3 teams that talk to everyone
if you can speak their language, it helps
finance controls the resources in the company
1: Affirming investment and value
describe yourself as an investment, not a cost
need resources to produce value, otherwise, something to reduce
signal your value: what measurable value are you producing for your org?
typically customer centric, but doesn’t touch on how that touches
goal should be create value for the org, and how is typically being customer centric
possible value drivers for support: generating revenue, product feedback, retaining customers, competitive advantage, upsell/cross-sell
Example mission “Learn from our customer so Bolt stakeholders can deliver better produces and services”
-ditch the term cost, define team’s value by aligning with company goals, draft mission statement that show how support investment drives that value, share it constantly
2: show me the metrics
shows how generating value
what it is doing, where it has been, where it may be heading, that something may be going wrong, when it reaches a target
so hard to understand because there are so many metrics
easy to measure these metrics, easy to understand
rarely tells the business value story, sometimes have the opposite effect
take your mission statement and figure how to measure value
may need more than one metric
may need data from other teams
metrics will be specific to your business
work with finance to define the metric
don’t define with operational metrics
design 1-2 metrics
3: gift of modeling and budgets
models to project
where do they get the numbers around support?
need to help them model, otherwise they will make it up
they don’t care about staffing model
focus on revenue model
1-2 variables is likely all you need
growth, staff, customer
include notes on what assumptions you’re making
budget is a communication tool
take the time to learn your budgeting purpose
ask for your budget
set up time with finance and accounting team to ask questions
budget challenges: company culture (be professionally persistent), accounting systems don’t always reflect organizational reality, organizational change
4: tell me more about gross margin
gross margin is a measure of overall business performance, ask your accounting team
informs pricing strategies, resource allocation, competitive analysis, investor interest
SaaS: support/success employees, hosting costs, production teams, third-party software/data, other direct employee costs
Support can live in a lot of places: COGS, sales/marketing, G&A (cost of running business), R&D (providing feedback to product, so costs associated with development)
find how support expenses are classified
understand your impact on the gross margin
don’t let the accountants tell you it’s black and white
5: acts pf revenue and efficiency
revenue ideas: line item (“maintenance” fee), charge more for support, retaining customers (be explicit, and align to revenue), cross-selling and upselling
efficiency: typically requires investment (time, money), don’t do more with less, there’s no such thing
key is to scale sub-linearly

Unlocking Leadership Potential: Strategies for Supporting New People Managers

Hilary Dudek

supporting new managers, it’s like people taking a cold plunge
four primary strategies: set expectations, get to know them, communicate frequently, provide resources
visualize, breathe, vocalize, connect
set expectations
- new role, create a job description, review it together
- new manager’s guide to you: compile insights into how you manage, include your communication style
- goal setting: set some short term SMART goals, OKRs, 30/60/90 days timeframe, might be based on business or team needs
Get to know them
- personality quizzes: Riso-Hudson Ennagram type Indicator, Myers-Briggs type indicator
- consider having a coach come in to help discover how everyone can work together
- energizing vs draining exercise: what energizes them at work? what drains them at work?
- 1:1s are precious: spend at least a quarter of your time getting to know each other, be present. Never a waste of time.
Communicate
- bi-directional feedback: be factual and curious, don’t be disingenuous (bad sandwiches), use “I” sentences, be open to hearing, genuinely listen, may get insights, feedback are opinions and they’re coloured, fall under different priority level
- coaching vs directing: difference between the two, coaching is more collaboration/guiding, each approach has a different impact
- communicate your approach: are you coaching or are you directing? what does your new manager need from you? may need to be more directive early on, or complex project with high risks
provide resources
- communities: Support Driven, Elevate CX, Know your team
- blogs and digests: First round review, PartnerHero, HelpScout
- training and templates: tool-specific, company-specific, templates (1:1, memo, PIPs, etc.)
Take the plunge: your new people managers are ready!

Metrics with a Purpose

Nick Cannariato, Yetto

your metrics have no purpose
what if some our best practices and industry standards are poisonous to us
“Those who believe that what you cannot quantify does not exist also believe that what you can quantify, does”. Tyranny of metrics by Aaron Hespel
flaw of support
know and deeply studied behaviour when numbers are used to measure people, support is breaking that guidance out of these studies
pick 5-6 metrics and live by the dashboards
known results from a series of decisions
rules that are known to
Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
meaning: stops looking at what’s good support, starts measuring numbers at individual level
why are we incentivizing people to not solve problems and decrease tickets?
Campbell’s law: the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
you cheat on the number, reflective
the problem isn’t cherry-picking. You’re being defined by a number and punished for things often not in your control.
how come no one raises the alarm?
Surrogation: is why. lose sight of the constructs and start to only look at the measures, see maximizing CSAT as the goal and strategize to do that
What do we do? want out of this cycle
start by changing who we emulate
we’re generating new features, we feed data into other teams
infra works similarly, when product ships, it ruins their lives
steal from them
SLI “metrics” service level indicator, SLO service level objective “goals” target value, SLA explicit or implicit contract with users that includes the consequences of meeting or missing the SLOs they contain
start with objectives: focus on your users’ realities and core needs, keep it simple, avoid absolutes, have as few as possible (2-4 SLOs), perfection can wait
you’re going to get this wrong, it’s harder to do this copying someone else
iterate on them a lot
these are about how things move through the system
Your goal is an error budget.
need to try new things
what you can’t measure: things like whether a documentation page prevented 10k tickets
Figure out how you’ll know: track fewer more meaningful indicators, distributions are better than averages, resist corruption
need to be a neutral number, measure everything, don’t curtail the number, otherwise you’ll know nothing
nuke your “leaderboards”: hide individualized data (creates a war between team members), customer only cares that they had a good experience, only the person themselves and the manager; team based data
prioritize celebrating team success not individual achievement
focus on team-based differentiated solutions, what are people’s skillsets
trust your professionals and push back on your leaders, educate them
support is very aware of customers and the problems

End of day 2

Takeaways

Retention and happiness of customers and employees especially through excellent planning in the midst of layoffs and budget cuts, AI implementation, etc.
Be empathetic and thoughtful. Plan and communicate.
AI can do a lot more than ticket deflection.
Understand how support is resourced/budgeted for. Figure out how to measure support’s value.
Think carefully about what you’re measuring.