CCOs: How to Drop the Victim Mentality to Earn Your Seat at the Table

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and we have a really interesting conversation today. I would say it’s one we don’t typically have in the customer support world or the CX world. We’re going to talk about how we drop our victim mentality to create success. What’s getting in our way? Why are we sabotaging ourselves in order to create success?

[00:00:19] Steve MacDonald: Today, we have Kel Kurekgi, the Director of Support at Zapier. That’s a huge role. We all know Zapier, and what I love about your background is that it’s diverse. You’ve been in customer experience for about 15 years. To start with, you came from the entertainment industry. You were writing scripts, had a TV show, and one of your scripts aired internationally for about 15 years. A lot of people would say that’s a lot of success. So how did you come over to this world?

[00:01:02] Kel Kurekgi: It was something I’ve been working towards for a long time, and it’s one of those things where you have this dream in the back of your mind. You go for it, and then when it’s done, you ask, “Is this it? Is this what I’ve been working towards?” The more I worked in media, the more I hated it. I just thought, “What am I doing here?” Then I realized there’s this other side of my life that I’ve been doing on the side. While trying to climb the ladder in media—because everyone knows media doesn’t pay well until you get to the top—I was doing customer service and sales work on the side. I was really good at it, and I enjoyed it.

[00:01:49] Kel Kurekgi: So I thought, “Why am I wasting my time on the media side?” Every now and then, I’d think about writing another script, but within 30 seconds I’d realize, “No, I’m not going to do that. I’ll take an angry customer call over writing another script.”

[00:02:03] Steve MacDonald: I think that makes all of us feel a lot better, right?

[00:02:05] Steve MacDonald: You gave up that high-profile life for what we’re all doing here. But what we’re going to talk about today is phenomenal. Now, one thing we didn’t talk about earlier is that you’ve not only spent years in customer experience but also in sales and project management.

[00:02:23] Steve MacDonald: There’s a huge sales component in customer support, right? Before we dive into the main topics, how do you see the similarities, and what can we learn from that?

[00:02:35] Kel Kurekgi: Yeah, there’s a bit of a taboo here. A lot of customer service or customer experience people sometimes look down on sales, and I get why. In many companies I’ve worked at, the salespeople will sell something, and someone will misinterpret what the product can or can’t do. Then support has to pick up the pieces because of that. The frustration often comes because sales teams get their commissions, while support teams are left dealing with the fallout.

[00:03:02] Kel Kurekgi: But the reality is the two teams, and other teams as well, are very similar. The biggest notion is that the customer will contact you and say, “I have this problem. I need you to fix it.” We need to find out what the customer needs, what they’re trying to accomplish, and find the solution. Sales is no different. A customer reaches out, and the whole conversation revolves around understanding their needs, wants, and values, and offering a solution that fits that.

[00:03:46] Kel Kurekgi: The common misconception is that sales is all about persuasion. That’s the worst kind of sales. Real sales, real account management, and all that, are about understanding how you can add more value to the customer, whether it’s for their business or personal life. In support, it’s the same concept—helping customers get value. The only difference is that sales tends to be more proactive, while support is more reactive. But there are so many similarities. If the two departments worked closer together, we could eliminate a lot of the internal friction and the issues customers face, creating better experiences for all.

[00:04:34] Steve MacDonald: If we’re feeling the friction, guess what? That’s going to translate over to customers, and they’re going to feel that friction. There’s a lot of research showing that happy, engaged employees create happy customers. There’s a direct correlation.

[00:04:52] Steve MacDonald: You mentioned friction earlier. Tell me a bit more about those friction points. If we don’t address them, they’re going to affect the customers. What are the main friction points you see?

[00:05:13] Kel Kurekgi: There are a lot of elements of friction. One is this idea that we have to pick up the pieces. Someone somewhere said something, and now we have to fix it. Another friction is when support can’t achieve something, it sounds like we’re just being blockers. There’s a real lack of empathy between the two teams. There’s a lack of understanding that our goals are actually the same. But those microaggressions, whether people like it or not, often get built up by leadership. When I was a sales leader, the pressure to hit numbers every month was immense.

[00:06:13] Kel Kurekgi: One month, I hit our numbers, and everyone was thrilled, but the next month, it felt like starting from zero again. On the other side, there are all these angry customers, and we’re struggling to stay on top of it. Instead of leaders reducing friction, it often gets worse, and the internal teams start blaming each other. This lack of understanding is dangerous for the company.

[00:06:54] Kel Kurekgi: When one team looks internally and thinks, “We are hard done by,” or “Sales are just selling anything,” or “Support is blocking us,” the focus shifts away from the real issue: the company needs to make money. If the company doesn’t make money, it shuts down, and then we all lose. We need to remove those frictions by collaborating and understanding each other. That’s when we can move forward.

[00:07:17] Kel Kurekgi: And this brings us to our main topic today—victim mentality. It’s a mindset that’s widespread in customer experience, and I think it’s a learned behavior from previous leadership where support was seen as just a cost center.

[00:07:32] Steve MacDonald: Okay, I want to dive into that, but I need to highlight something you just said. There are so many similarities between sales and customer success, especially in customer success where we are cross-selling and upselling. One bad customer experience can drive them to another brand. Every business should be focused on Net Recurring Revenue (NRR). So, behind those NPS and loyalty scores is a real revenue number. We are the most involved with customers, and we have the greatest influence. Why, then, do we still see ourselves as a cost center?

[00:07:57] Steve MacDonald: So behind those NPS scores, the loyalty scores, and everything else, there is an actual revenue number that’s being maintained. We have the most conversations with customers, more than anyone else. We have the greatest impact and influence on that. So, to look at us as a cost center, when we’re cross-selling, upselling, maintaining, and increasing in NRR, is ridiculous.

[00:08:21] Steve MacDonald: I just wanted to call that out. That’s what I took away from what you were saying there. It’s as if upper management is reverting back and looking at us as a cost center, not as a value center or an experience center.

[00:08:36] Steve MacDonald: So, in that context, why do we have a victim mentality? I mean, we should be holding our heads up high. We’ve got the controls here, right? But yet there’s this victim mentality.

[00:08:51] Kel Kurekgi: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. We are a value center, and we do add a lot of opportunities to cross-sell. We speak to customers. Essentially, companies need to understand that the people speaking to customers directly hold the keys to whether the customer comes back, nine times out of ten. That’s the notion. What I’ve realized is that this issue is bigger than I ever realized.

[00:09:20] Kel Kurekgi: Last year, I was on a bit of a crusade, encouraging everyone in customer experience to stand up and believe in themselves. I was saying, “You’re doing a great job, you need to push forward, refocus on the positives and what you can achieve.” I had some great conversations and listened to some fantastic speakers. But there was always a nagging feeling at the back. There was always some negativity coming out.

[00:10:00] Kel Kurekgi: I went to a conference where there were some amazing speakers I loved hearing from, but there were a few who always had this… The only way I can describe it is a victim mentality. It was a case of, “Product and engineering don’t listen to us. We don’t get the money we need to do what we want. Sales are looked at as kings, and we are looked at as ERs.” It kept repeating, and I realized this is a learned behavior from previous leadership, where support was seen as a cost center.

[00:10:27] Kel Kurekgi: What’s happened is some people who have risen through the ranks have continued this mentality. Rather than focus on the elements you were talking about, Steve, they focus on the notion of, “When are we going to get the extra people we need to do X?” or “Why doesn’t anyone understand how important CSAT or NPS is?” They keep asking, “Why am I talking to a brick wall? When are we going to have our seat at the table?” But when people realize that the power is in their hands to tell the right story and earn their own seat at the table, that mentality will shift.

[00:11:11] Kel Kurekgi: I’ve learned a lot from project management and sales about how to tell that story. For me, it’s about moving out of our own way and removing that mentality of “Why is this happening to me?” and “Why does no one listen to me?” It’s an egocentric mentality: “No one cares about support.” Until we remove that and start understanding what’s in it for them—just like we often do for our customers—we’ll be going down the wrong road.

[00:11:38] Kel Kurekgi: We’re pretty much going down the wrong road.

[00:11:41] Steve MacDonald: So, here’s what I’m taking away. Our story is a bestseller. It’s the script you used to write that would’ve been a smash hit, but we don’t tell it. We don’t stand up for it. We don’t own it. Therefore, we are our own worst advocates. Because if the mentality is that we’re a cost, a massive overhead that needs to be maintained, then that erodes everything we know we need to do.

[00:12:11] Steve MacDonald: Right? How we need to grow, invest in our people, and treat our customers. Lowering average handle time isn’t necessarily a good thing, right? It’s good if we keep a customer for life because we spend a few more minutes on the call. So, is it a lack of knowledge and understanding? Has it always been this way? Do we not know how to get out of our way? What’s the practical path to taking ownership of our contributions?

[00:12:43] Kel Kurekgi: Yeah. The biggest issue, I think, Steve, is that this information just hasn’t been passed on. Unless you have an exceptional customer experience leader, customer experience professionals are typically focused on things like, “How do we get average handle time down?” or “How do we improve CSAT or NPS?” That’s great for customer experience professionals. But when you start looking at how to speak to executives, how to speak to sales, how to speak to engineering—well, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but earlier in my career, I was speaking to a group of people, telling them about our CSAT and how we wanted to improve it, and I must have been speaking for 10 minutes.

[00:13:28] Kel Kurekgi: Eventually, someone just asked, “What’s a CSAT?” In my head, I was thinking, “How does no one know this?” Then I realized I wasn’t talking to the audience; I was just talking at them, hoping they’d understand. So, I truly believe we have a list of historical leaders in customer experience who deeply understand it, but they haven’t done a good enough job of passing on the ideology of how to sell the story, how to communicate the value of what we do, to other people in a language that resonates with them. If it’s a language that resonates with other customer experience professionals, you’ll get high fives and applause from your own group.

[00:14:14] Kel Kurekgi: But what you really want is that seat at the table. Until you can articulate your value in a way that resonates with the people who need to buy into you and your department, you’ll always be losing that battle.

[00:14:30] Steve MacDonald: So, we’ve spent so much time learning about our customers, but you’re talking about our internal customers, right? We need to spend time learning about them and thinking about how we tell the story. If you’re talking to product development about what we’ve heard, you’ll approach it differently than when you’re talking to sales, right? We know they have very different objectives.

[00:14:55] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, you’re going to say things very differently. That’s what I’m taking away from what you’re saying: we have to first be stewards if we’re going to tell the story well. We’ve got to understand the people we’re telling the story to. We need to be able to tell the story differently when we’re talking to different groups.

[00:15:10] Steve MacDonald: One of the things in the business world is that sometimes you just have to demonstrate, right? You have to prove you’ve got the goods. Here’s how we benefit from you. A big part of that, as you just said, is if we don’t understand the audience, we can’t make that connective tissue. Right?

[00:15:31] Steve MacDonald: Do you have a story or some kind of example where you did that well, and the “aha moment” happened, where all of a sudden that department was like, “Okay, Kel, I get it. This is great! I want more. We’ve got to meet regularly.” Do you have a story that brings this to life?

[00:15:52] Kel Kurekgi: Yeah, there’s an example from a number of years ago. I won’t go into all the specifics, but I’ll keep it high-level. Essentially, we knew there was more our team could do when it came to actually speaking to customers—having the time to speak to our customers. I worked at a company where a lot of our customers didn’t really like us.

[00:16:12] Kel Kurekgi: I’ll be honest, they weren’t fans. They were there because they needed us, rather than because they wanted us. The notion we had was, “How can we create a new team?” And bear in mind, if we’re seen as a cost center, the idea of creating a new team to do something else is tough. Anyone who’s asked for extra headcount in a support center knows that’s tough—unless everything is sinking around you. That’s tough.

[00:16:32] Kel Kurekgi: The first thing we asked was, “What are we trying to achieve and why?” We really needed to understand the problem statement and why we needed it. That’s often where people stop. They say, “I’ve got this problem, and this is how I want to solve it.” Let’s move forward. But if someone doesn’t understand the problem or why we’re doing it, they’ll say, “It’s because you don’t care about the customer. Thanks.”

[00:16:54] Kel Kurekgi: The reality is it’s like a Venn diagram. You’ve got the problem you think you have and how you think you can solve it. What is the company issue? People often see this as high-level, but you need to dive really deep into what the company or team’s issue is. Just like you would as a customer support agent on the phone, you need to understand the problem, what it means to that person, company, or team, and how to solve it.

[00:17:35] Kel Kurekgi: Once you understand this, if you can cross that Venn diagram, the section in the middle becomes your project and solution. That’s what we did. So, if you’re not sure what the big problem is, go ask someone like the CEO or the head of sales, “What keeps you up at night?” What’s the thing you don’t want to talk about anymore and just want fixed?

[00:17:56] Kel Kurekgi: I guarantee someone will say, “It’s the fact that our customers don’t see the value in us but feel like they have to pay for our service,” or they might say, “Our churn rate is horrendous, and we don’t know why.” There could be all sorts of things like that. You dig deeper and ask, “How do you know customers don’t like us?” What will make a customer like us? Really understand and probe that.

[00:18:17] Kel Kurekgi: You can fill in that Venn diagram in the middle, merging what you think the problem is and what you know it is. In this case, it was that we needed a team of people who would engage with our customers and demonstrate the value we actually offer, rather than letting them control the narrative of their perception.

[00:18:56] Kel Kurekgi: I’m going to mix it with you and your needs, wants, and values. For example, if our churn rate is high, that’s always a reason for someone to want to leave us. They’ll push on that, which reduces opportunities for upselling because the customer is resentful about paying for the service.

[00:19:15] Kel Kurekgi: If I can craft a story around what the problem is, why it’s a problem, what will happen if we don’t solve it, and by the way, I have the solution—magic beans, potions, or however you want to describe it—that will help. Then I back it up with data. If you do all of that, like I did years ago, it becomes a solution that I’ve used throughout my career. It’s like an algorithm for success: find that sweet spot in the Venn diagram.

[00:19:46] Kel Kurekgi: And you’re winning. By the way, this also works in your career planning. If you’re sitting there thinking, “I don’t really want to do this job anymore. I want to work in engineering,” the question is, how do you step into it without starting from the bottom? You figure out what the problem is, what your problem is, and what your potential solution is.

[00:20:04] Kel Kurekgi: You find that cross-section in the Venn diagram, go straight into it with your story, and doors will start opening.

[00:20:11] Steve MacDonald: And here’s why I think it’s so important. These are all about relationships, and I kept thinking while you were talking, “I need to do that more with my wife. I need to do the Venn diagram with my wife.”

[00:20:24] Steve MacDonald: Right? Because it’s about creating a relationship where you’re helping and supporting them, finding the heart of it—the core of that. So, here’s something I want to do, and that’s a significant takeaway. I want to reconcile something you said at the beginning of this podcast.

[00:20:43] Steve MacDonald: Okay, so you’re the Director of Support at Zapier, but you said you’ve been in customer experience for 15 years. What’s the difference between support and customer experience? Because we use these things interchangeably all the time, right? I think getting your definition is going to help us in terms of uncovering what we do practically.

[00:21:12] Steve MacDonald: How do we get past this victim mentality? Let’s really understand what it is we’re doing.

[00:21:18] Kel Kurekgi: Support is one aspect of the experience. This is where I think a lot of people aren’t utilizing their full skillset. If you ask most people who work in customer support or customer experience, they can probably pinpoint all the friction points customers are going through.

[00:21:41] Kel Kurekgi: If you ask anyone with a customer support or customer experience background, “Hey, show me your website and point out the parts customers hate,” they’ll say, “This part, this part, this part—they really hate this part.” They’ll be able to list them out.

[00:21:58] Kel Kurekgi: The support element is often about stopping people from contacting us or, when they do contact us, helping them through that. The experience side is about preventing customers from needing to contact us in the first place while still providing a great journey. That’s the main difference for me.

[00:22:15] Kel Kurekgi: I work at Zapier, an automation platform, and we specialize in AI orchestration—making things more streamlined and efficient through automation. This is where I can really dig in and think, “How should this work?” Because, let’s face it, in the customer support industry, if someone’s contacting you, they don’t want to be contacting you. They’d rather be doing anything else: spending time with their kids, watching football, anything other than talking to a customer service representative.

[00:22:52] Kel Kurekgi: With a few exceptions, like the older generations, who sometimes prefer speaking to someone when it’s really important, people generally prefer not to contact us. They’d rather trust a robot to solve their issue. But, most of the time, people want things to be frictionless and effortless, and they just want the solution to appear in front of them. For me, customer experience is about giving them that.

[00:23:27] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s really interesting because a couple of years ago, McKinsey did a study on over 400 highly profitable companies, both B2C and B2B, with huge returns on shareholder value.

[00:23:42] Steve MacDonald: And they found that the number one differentiator across all of those companies was CX. It’s the new competitive advantage. When AI and tools like ChatGPT can write code, and our product features and differentiation are becoming standard, that’s not a long-term sustainable advantage. But knowing our customers and serving them, creating the experience you just explained—that’s how we win.

[00:24:13] Steve MacDonald: That’s why this difference is so important. If you had a recommendation for everyone here in customer support on how they should be thinking about customer experience, what would you want them to know?

[00:24:35] Kel Kurekgi: I came up with this term at a previous company: PESH. It stands for Personal, Empathetic, Simple, and Human. If you’re on the front lines, make sure every single person who contacts you, whether by email or phone, is approached in a personal, empathetic, simple, and human way. If you do that, you’re already halfway there in improving the overall experience.

[00:25:03] Kel Kurekgi: Then go through it and ask yourself, where can we be more personable? Where can we be more empathetic? Where can we make it simpler? How can we make it feel more human and connected, rather than cold and heartless? If you start doing that and truly plan out what that experience should look like, that’s when customer experience becomes a key differentiator.

[00:25:29] Kel Kurekgi: And don’t get me wrong, some people say, “But our company is always focused on cutting costs.” Every company looks at cutting costs, and every company is only interested in making money. That’s the point of a company. Otherwise, you might as well work for a nonprofit, where you won’t get paid as much.

[00:25:48] Kel Kurekgi: But just because you’re focused on cutting costs doesn’t mean you can’t still implement a personal, empathetic, simple, and human experience. In fact, having a leaner organization forces you to think outside the box and ask, “How can we implement automation in certain places?” What are our internal customers—support, sales—struggling with, and how can I fix that? By fixing their issues, they can offer better experiences to our customers.

[00:26:29] Kel Kurekgi: We sometimes get so wrapped up in our own world that we don’t take a step back and realize that we can actually influence a lot more if we allow ourselves to. If you step back and look at the bigger picture, it opens up a lot of opportunities.

[00:26:48] Kel Kurekgi: One thing I’d say to everyone is: if you haven’t given yourself time to step back and look at the problems, ask yourself, “If I could do something—anything—what would that look like?” And then go after it like a dog chasing a car. Just go for it, and see what you can identify.

[00:27:05] Kel Kurekgi: As long as you can break away from that mindset of “Why am I stuck?” or “Why can’t I get what I want?” and start flipping the script, the things you can achieve are endless.

[00:27:22] Steve MacDonald: You know, I’m thinking about various parts of this conversation. The things you can achieve are endless. We already have the bestselling story, we just have to tell it. We impact sales, we impact NRR, we make customers happy—we have so much that we do.

[00:27:40] Steve MacDonald: Yet, the whole title here is about how we play right into the victim mentality. Based on everything we’ve talked about, if there was one takeaway you wanted people to have from this podcast episode, what would that one takeaway be?

[00:28:00] Kel Kurekgi: There’s more than one takeaway, but if I were to sum it up in one line—this might be because of my Turkish heritage—we’re very direct people, born and raised in London, very direct people. The number one thing is probably this: think about all the things that are blocking you. Get over it. You need to grow up and get over it because no one is going to save you from that. The number one thing you can do is really tap into what made you great in support.

[00:28:32] Kel Kurekgi: You know, every customer experience person started off in support, right? They always do. And the really great ones knew how to handle the most difficult conversations, the most challenging ones. If people can get over themselves and the notion of, “Yeah, but I’m a leader now,” or, “I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore,” we’ll see a shift. If we can get over that and see our internal customers—our key stakeholders—as customers, we should build relationships with them, nurture them, and come out with mutually beneficial outcomes and methods to move forward. You can completely change the trajectory of not only your department but also your life, your career, everything.

[00:29:18] Kel Kurekgi: You can take that mentality as well. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that you can use that with your wife and your whole life, but the number one thing is, some people need to stop being a baby and get over themselves. They need to bring back the mentality that got them the success in the first place.

[00:29:36] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting. I interview a lot of C-suite executives, and I ask them the question, “What are your two greatest challenges to creating long-term growth and success in your business?” Seventy-two percent of those answers are internal.

[00:29:58] Steve MacDonald: When you say, “Get over it,” right? Why are we playing this victim mentality? We need to get over it. We need to stop. I don’t want to be like my dad, but I love him. The point is, I don’t get to decide what I want to do with my life, and I can get over the things that are holding me back. So, I love that—you’re saying, “Let’s define our own destiny.”

[00:30:18] Steve MacDonald: We can, and we know we can, and we know we make a significant impact on the business. So, just get over it and let’s make it happen. I love it. I love it. Here’s the thing I know is going to happen: we’re going to have a lot of questions. Is it okay if I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can reach out and ask a question?

[00:30:38] Kel Kurekgi: A hundred percent.

[00:30:39] Kel Kurekgi: Yeah, I’d love that. I often get people reaching out and asking me questions here and there, and I always do my best to try and answer. If you’ve ever had someone offer you key insights in your career that made a difference, the best thing you can do is pay that forward.

[00:30:54] Kel Kurekgi: You never know what that might do for someone else. So, I was going to say in our industry or sector, but realistically, the more people share knowledge and information, and the more they’re willing to work on it, the better. When we all help each other, we get somewhere.

[00:31:10] Steve MacDonald: You just described the mission of why you’re here. Why we’re creating this podcast is because we don’t talk to ourselves or our peers enough. If we can glean insights, perspectives, and trends in solutions that we haven’t even thought about, that’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:31:31] Steve MacDonald: I think you did a great job of that today, by the way. So, I just want to say thank you, Kel, for coming on.

[00:31:37] Kel Kurekgi: Mate, thank you so much for having me on. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and yeah, this was great. Anytime.