Solving Dysfunction at All Stages of the Customer Journey

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We have a really interesting guest and very interesting conversation lined up today with Sanjeet Kaur Bali. Sanjeet, you are the SVP of Global Customer Support, and I’ll let you explain a little bit more about what the company is and your role there. Still, you come from a long line—even in your own family—of service orientation, military orientation. You actually moved a lot as a child, which means you had to be adaptable, which is always a really good trait in today’s business world, right? But adapting and accommodating—that’s gonna be a big part of what we’re talking about because the title here is Solving Dysfunction at All Stages of the Customer Journey, right?

[00:00:48] Steve MacDonald: And we all know there’s a lot of dysfunction inside of every organization. But we’re gonna talk a lot about customer support and the role and how do we help solve that, right? And what’s our unique [00:01:00] position in helping the organization internally and externally? But before we do that, I would love to turn it over to you and just learn a little bit more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:10] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So thank you for having me here, Steve. Really nice to be on this podcast, and generally, I don’t do podcasts, but something about your approach was really meaningful to me, and then this topic is very dear to me. I’m Sanjeet Kaur Bali. I lead transformation change, and I would say post-sales organizations.

[00:01:28] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I’ve been a software professional, a support engineer, a leader for support, professional services, managed services, network operations center, transformation leader. I like to believe that I’ve covered all possible functions in an organization, except maybe product marketing and product management.

[00:01:46] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: My passion has always been to turn support, services, and success into Strategic Growth Engines; very obsessed with execution, very passionate about people, very passionate about doing the right thing for the [00:02:00] business and people, and absolutely relentless about making customer experience a competitive advantage.

[00:02:08] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I always say, we’ll be the reason the customers would buy from us. That’s my goal for my organization and my functions. Being very conscious about not just being a functional leader throughout my career and developing myself as a business leader who sees an end-to-end view of the business and acts accordingly, and not just my individual function.

[00:02:31] Steve MacDonald: You know, I love how you tied the importance of customer support into the overall customer experience and retention. Not only in every B2B business. Forrester came out with a report that current existing customers account for 72% of all new annual revenue every year. So customer retention and expansion is a huge opportunity for us in any organization.

[00:02:59] Steve MacDonald: And it’s all tied to customer support, right? So, you know, the word customer support—and you linked it to experience. There was another, and we talk a lot about this on the podcast, but I really want to get your point of view on this—is that customer experience is now the number one differentiator for businesses today.

[00:03:17] Steve MacDonald: And that’s not just us and our opinion—which is really important, right? However, that’s similar to a McKinsey study that examined highly profitable companies, both B2C and B2B, and reached that conclusion. What we’re going to talk about here today is extremely important. And the last thing that—when you made that transition—what I loved is, in customer support, we’re still looked upon in a lot of ways as a support department, right? And yet, we’re so tied to growth and revenue, and we’re the frontline with the customers. The customers are the highest voice of authority in any business. The fact that we’re looked upon as a support function or a cost center, right, I’d love to get your thoughts on that and kind of how we dispel that today as well.

[00:04:04] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Absolutely.

[00:04:06] Steve MacDonald: But here’s the number one thing: you are very passionate about customer support, customer experience, helping to solve the dysfunction within organizations. I’d love to hear your perspective on that dysfunction and how we could play a role in addressing it.

[00:04:22] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I think every organization that I’ve worked for and now also talking to my peers and different leaders in different organizations, I think people don’t understand the importance of getting things done right, in the sense that dysfunction is almost like a very slow erosion.

[00:04:43] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Dysfunction is impaired or abnormal functioning, right? Organizational dysfunction is almost a systemic breakdown of the functioning of an organization. Now, dysfunction is not just about some isolated problems. It’s essentially about a system that gradually stops functioning, and decay sets in, almost like a whisper.

[00:05:10] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: It’s so quiet that it does not surface until it has actually compromised an organization’s ability to scale, serve, or innovate. If you examine dysfunction, it manifests as the erosion of clarity, effectiveness, productivity, performance, growth, and execution. And people don’t see it very well because we always have different reasons why things are not working.

[00:05:40] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So, keeping the market and macro conditions aside, there’s lots at risk within the execution of our functions, who are set up to do a certain job, and then you suddenly realize that they’re not optimally functioning. However, we often end up getting into chronic reactivity and solving problems that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

[00:06:05] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So now what happens is dysfunction sets in. It’s quiet. It’s generally quiet. And you figure it out very late in the stages. Silos form. Over time, mediocrity becomes normalized. Underperformance becomes the norm. Leaders chase symptoms and make shortsighted decisions over fixing the root causes. Teams tiptoe around hot truths,

[00:06:36] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: for the sake of cordiality, right? So it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because it slowly eats away, as decay does. If you don’t challenge it, then it becomes the culture of the organization. Cultural entropy is the root cause of organizational dysfunction. And very soon you’ll find organizational dysfunction is running on autopilot.

[00:07:06] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: You know, I don’t even have to dwell on it, honestly, Steve, because if you think about Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it says it all. And if you look at any organization which is struggling today, the core things are those five things that Patrick talks about: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, lack of accountability, inattention to details.

[00:07:32] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: And ultimately, you end up with this whole web of band-aids, shortsighted decisions, and really, it takes away the ability of an organization—which could be all awesome—and you then end up at the end of a quarter or end of year doing financial engineering and letting go of people. If leaders could just have the right visibility into what’s ailing the business and solve those bigger problems, the systemic problems. So, I’m pretty passionate about this subject because I feel like as leaders, we have the power to do things right and take out this dysfunction. If only we could have that, you know, constructive confrontation and assessment of these things that are ailing the business—the dysfunction.

[00:08:15] Steve MacDonald: You know what’s really interesting is, I’ve interviewed over 50 different C-suite executives from CEOs, CMOs, CROs, you name it, and asked them what they felt was their largest challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth. 72% of the answers have been internal challenges. As I listen to you, I think those internal challenges are all symptoms of precisely what you’re talking about. They may cloak it in misalignment, right? As an internal challenge, a lack of core decision-making, right?

[00:09:02] Steve MacDonald: Siloed data and all kinds of things. But when it really comes down to it, we haven’t fixed the dysfunction that would put all of that on course. Yep. And so I’m gonna ask you this question in terms of—I think we understand clearly how important this is—but I would like to ask you your idea on a scale of one to ten: fixing this dysfunction inside of any organization…

[00:09:30] Steve MacDonald: Where would you put that on a scale of one to ten in importance? One—it’s not important at all, we couldn’t care less, let’s move on to something else, right? Ten—it’s vital, it’s critical.

[00:09:39] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: It is the most critical part of an organization. Functioning has to be the top priority. And leaders who tiptoe around these agendas will never solve for it.

[00:09:50] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: And what I’ve seen in my own experience is that people have the right intentions. Everybody wants to do the right thing. But are they accountable enough? Are they passionate enough to drive these agendas? And I think sometimes we assume that our leadership knows it all. We think that they have the right visibility to the right problems. And what I have seen is that they know the problems, but not the gravity at which the problems are, and it’s us not doing the right job of bringing that exact visibility.

[00:10:20] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: What I’ve seen in my experience is that when I worked with C-level—when I brought the right level of visibility to these issues and these agendas as a support leader—to them, the way they enabled things to happen and the kind of success that we created was phenomenal. So it’s just the right level of visibility. And for that, you have to be a truth teller. For that, you have to get into constructive confrontation. However, management must then enable such problem solvers. You need to empower problem solvers. You need to empower critics. 

[00:11:00] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: You know, it’s like super important, right? Dismiss what you see, and you don’t want to see it because you don’t want to tackle it, or you want to live in that illusion of comfort that everything is all right. It’s just the macroeconomic conditions. Then you can’t solve for it. So self-awareness… I don’t know if you’ve read the book from Andy Grove on Only the Paranoid Survive.

[00:11:18] Steve MacDonald: No, but I love the title.

[00:11:21] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: It is. It’s about you having to conduct a brutal self-assessment to survive as an organization, right? Therefore, it requires you to always seek the truth, cultivate a culture of truth, and engage in open and honest conversations about your hard truths.

[00:11:38] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So it’s really important. Support can play a great role. Support does a disservice when it does not understand that it sits at the junction where it has visibility of almost a reflection of the customer experience at the customer end. You know, support knows it all because they sit at the frontline and have a great view of all that’s broken, right?

[00:12:04] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So I feel that’s the role that a support leader must play, and there’s power in that.

[00:12:10] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting. As you talk about the C-suite, we’re trained at the C-suite level, right? Like never have I been involved in a board meeting where a board member said, “Hey, talk to me about those internal alignment plans.”

[00:12:24] Steve MacDonald: Right? “Talk to me about the internal challenges that you have and how you’re solving them.” It’s always focused externally. It’s focused on the short term. “How are we doing on this quarter’s quota? How does next quarter’s quota look like?” Right? However, it’s also about sales targets, conversion rates, and strategies, as well as the sales team, its makeup, and how we’re modifying our outward marketing campaigns and messaging.

[00:12:52] Steve MacDonald: But these are the kinds of things that we should be asking. But if the C-suite isn’t being asked, then it isn’t being held accountable, and it’s probably no wonder that it doesn’t receive the attention it should, right?

[00:13:08] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Absolutely.

[00:13:09] Steve MacDonald: So here’s the next question: as a support/customer experience leader, how do we influence this? How do we play that very important role?

[00:13:19] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Yeah, so there are two aspects to it. Just like, you know, I talk about different functions, when they’re not optimized and they’re not running optimally, then they are constantly caught up in. like I say, reactivity to solve a problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Of keeping those standards—they’re defining the standard that they’ve kept for those functions, right? Same holds for support. Support organization. There’s an implicit assumption that this is a mature function, right?

[00:13:47] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: They’ve got it, or you’ll always be stating that, “Hey, you know, the volume of tickets, the complexity of our context, all of this is drowning support,” and support is in its own reactive motions.

[00:14:00] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: And most of the support organizations that I know have been rendered as break-fix organizations, and they’re not building on the capabilities that they need to do—pause and reflect and look at their operating model again to say:

[00:14:14] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: What’s not there? What capabilities do we need to build? What was not working for us? So that’s one part of it. The other part of it is the aspect you touched on before, support being seen as an operational necessity, a support function, right?

[00:14:31] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So strategic integration of support in the C-Suite is absolutely the necessary thing and the leadership that understands the role of support makes sure that support is a robust function in the organization. And I can’t emphasize enough the need for support to be transformed, not just to be this firefighting, tactical, transactional entity. 

[00:15:00] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: But an entity that’s focused on adoption, customer experience, effective and efficient resolution, the right escalation. There are many capabilities around support that we haven’t leveraged. But consider this: which organization is better positioned to drive retention and expansion today? Because at the end of it, you can go and talk all the good stuff…

[00:15:22] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: But customers want their problems resolved first. And if you are suffering at that, if you’re not giving them the right experience, if you’re not solving their problems effectively and efficiently, if they constantly have to log tickets with you versus just be served well or be able to manage with a great product or an excellent solution working for them, then you can do all the customer success motions, and it won’t work.

[00:15:47] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: You haven’t even created the basic stability and resiliency in the regular support framework for them. Support has to focus on: Where are the friction points? Where is the effort? Where is the gap in functionality and features? What are the bottlenecks? What is coming in the way of customer successful adoption?

[00:16:08] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: How do I retain this customer? Is there a risk involved? Is there something that is needed? There are expansion opportunities that allow support to play that role. But for that, first support has to transform itself. And for that, you cannot do it with traditional leadership anymore. You need transformational leaders in support because the impact of support within an organization is significantly greater than that of any other department in the company.

[00:16:38] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I believe, that having led professional services, support, success, and all of the teams myself, this is a very important role.

[00:16:47] Steve MacDonald: It only makes sense, right? I mean, there’s not an organization in existence today that doesn’t say, “We’re not customer-focused. We’re not customer-obsessed,” right? We all are. But it’s to the degree that we actually enact that—that we make that as a part of our core plan. And if customer support has the most conversations with customers than anyone else, it puts us in the driver’s seat for reflecting that voice of the customer, right? The highest voice of authority in the business.

[00:17:22] Steve MacDonald: It puts us at the focal point, the hub, the spokes out to every single department, right?

[00:17:28] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Yeah.

[00:17:28] Steve MacDonald: Yet, you and I talked about this. We have a hard time getting a seat at the table even, right? Like, tell me a little bit about how you go about earning that seat at the table and making sure that that voice of the customer is coming through and is parsed out in the right ways to all the right people—so that they can do their job, whether it’s product development or operations or sales or whatever it is, right?

[00:17:53] Steve MacDonald: All that feedback is coming, right? It’s all there.

[00:17:58] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Yeah, the first is a shift from transactional and tactical to relational, as well as the switch from symptoms to root causes. I believe a support leader must start by understanding both the customer’s context and their own employee context. Because I do believe that you cannot create the right customer experience if you don’t design the right employee experience.

[00:18:19] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So, a great assessment of what’s ailing the business in terms of: What are the recurring issues? What are the systemic themes, right? What patterns are we seeing at the customer end? That needs to be the voice of the customer—that needs to be brought back to the product and development organizations as well as to the management.

[00:18:40] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So having that holistic view because that holistic view is so essential for strategic decision-making of whatever plans that you’re putting for your first-year, one-year, or five-year plan. If you don’t have that view, how do you prioritize? How do you create or kind of, you know, do the right product portfolio rationalization if you don’t have that input? How do you go about designing your end-of-life support policies or end of maintenance, or what needs to happen for your release planning and what’s happening with your releases?

[00:19:14] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: If you don’t have that view. So support leaders cannot just sit there as ticket machinery—you know, ticket management machinery. That’s what most of the support organizations end up being. You know, I was interviewed by several leaders a couple of times for different roles, but I didn’t choose to join those organizations.

[00:19:30] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Because in those interviews, all I was asked was, “Tell me about your metrics.” Right? So, support leaders have been relegated to these: go follow your backlog reduction, get efficient at doing more with less, solve your tickets faster. There’s no holistic view of how this function can do much more than what you’re expecting it to do. Putting them in the break/fix cadence actually ruins the customer experience.

[00:20:00] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So, the goal is that you have a view of systemic issues, patterns, and bringing that voice of customer back to the conversation, building powerful product and dev interlock. Because development teams are themselves busy churning out new releases, fixing bugs, and defects, they need help to gain a view of what’s happening in my product. Right?

[00:20:26] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So support has to play that role. That whole process of data-driven decision-making can only be achieved through support, by bringing that view back to the organization. Also, we need to understand, especially in the context, like the ones that the businesses that I have led, is that complexity is growing, so it’s highly complex.

[00:20:45] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: High volume tickets—that was B2B, and then you have high volume, low complexity B2C. The pain for individuals in the support function is huge because we have been caught up in this reactive firefighting for so long that it has become the rhythm of the organization. We have not done enough to create the right level of capabilities.

[00:21:12] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Whether it’s dedicated teams for knowledge, whether it’s the subject matter expertise, whether it’s the tools, whether it’s the automation. So what you’re doing is reacting, one after one ticket, versus looking at the system as a whole, taking other recording patterns, solving for them, and building great talent.

[00:21:32] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Another piece I think, Steve, is the talent management. We are mistaking headcount for talent. Right? There is no focused motion in any organization on talent, and it’s a very, very important piece. But it’s a piece that is very underserved in the sense that there’s not enough focus on building subject matter expertise.

[00:21:55] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: There is a huge population of highly experienced, highly skilled people leaving the system as they are an aging population. They’ve been around for three decades, four decades. Now they’re exiting the system. Have we created enough succession planning? I don’t think so. So I think in all, we have done a disservice by not optimizing for, back to the basics, ticket management.

[00:22:20] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: If you do process mining of just that piece, you’ll see there’s so many bottlenecks in there. That tells you again about the capabilities that have not been built or been optimized over time to serve the customers right and create conditions of success for your people to be able to be effective at their work.

[00:22:40] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: And also remember, support is a catch-all function. So, everything— whether it’s implementation teams not doing their jobs well, whether discovery is not happening well, or whether sales is selling the wrong product—all of that lands in support. Now, if support doesn’t do a good job of saying, “Hey, what’s coming to me and let me go back and inform the rest of the organization of what needs to be fixed?”

[00:23:05] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: You can’t fix it. That’s the problem I feel support has a crucial role to play, and a very effective one. And a support leader, by bringing the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee to the strategic, C-level table, can change the course of the organization. And not just sitting outside and acting like a functional leader, but leading these charters as a business leader for the rest of the organization with cross-functional collaboration, breaking down functional silos, and solving these problems as business problems, not just support problems.

[00:23:45] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I think that’s the drift.

[00:23:46] Steve MacDonald: If those connection points aren’t naturally evolving out of an organization, right, where the meetings between customer support and product and operations and sales and marketing, and feedback on that new launch you just put out, and the messaging—if those connectivity points aren’t happening naturally within an organization, how do you go about establishing them right when they’re not naturally there?

[00:24:16] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: They will be. I’ll tell you, I’m very intentional about something of this nature. The deliberate piece is not to create these support charters in the sense that once you assess what’s systemic and what’s recurring patterns, you create cross-functional teams.

[00:24:34] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: There is cross-functional ownership of these initiatives when you set them up as like these five initiatives. Right? We are gonna do a great job at discovery. We are gonna do a great job of onboarding. We are going to do a great job on the subsequent two releases that are coming, which are major releases. Or we’re going to do a great job with how we handle handovers. Basic stuff, right?

[00:24:58] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: But when you put cross-functional teams in there, cross-functional leaders are available. They have the same mission. Everybody’s singing from the same music notes, right? Then, when the development leader and the support leader show up in the same room speaking the same language, trust me, even those who are passively resisting the process soon have to come to terms with: What’s the direction?

[00:25:23] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Where is the destination? Where is this bus going? And then the messaging is very clear: either get on the bus or get off the bus, but we are going to solve this, right? So, cross-functional collaboration is at the core of driving those initiatives. If we drive initiatives and keep them just within support or success,

[00:25:43] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: They fail because people see it as somebody else’s initiative. They don’t see it as their initiative. I’ll talk about something very important, because most of the time, when you look at support, everybody’s focused on backlog reduction, improving resolution times, doing things faster, or cutting headcount and doing more with less.

[00:26:02] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: And let’s put one AI/ML solution and run those use cases. However, I think there’s one thing that I’m very passionate about: reducing the volume of tickets. Now, that can’t be solved just by support. It has to be solved by professional services. It has to be solved by engineering. It needs to be addressed by how I view my operating model and build a robust one around self-service.

[00:26:25] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Reactive and proactive. There are three key layers of support that you need to design for each one. So reactive cannot get a bad rap. We have to be reactive. In life, things will always happen. How do we establish ourselves to do the right thing at the right time, in the right way? Because we are prepared when a crisis happens, it hits us.

[00:26:46] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: We know we are prepared. We are gonna tackle it somehow, because we are prepared for it. Similarly, self-serve motions—how do you bring about development, product, all of the things to serve, to build that knowledge that ultimately fuels your self-serve? Similarly, proactive—how do you utilize the right level of capabilities to build insights?

[00:27:08] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Through AI, ML solutions, to then take to the product and the professional services organizations with the right insights on what to solve for. Because we are all problem solvers. At the end of it, it’s just like—do we have the right ways of surfacing these things? So yes, I feel like that’s the play, that’s the playbook: cross-functional initiators.

[00:27:32] Steve MacDonald: You know, there was this great Harvard business study that came out, and it showed that we remember things 23 times better if it’s told to us in the form of a story. Is there a story that comes to mind? All your work and all your experience—you don’t have to name names or anything like that—but where establishing those relationships and providing that kind of feedback and support, like, turned on light bulbs with others that are in those different departments. Is there a particular story that comes to mind that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us?

[00:28:07] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Honestly, it happens every other day. It’s funny how, you know, the information—how we consume, how it surfaces, and the interpretation of it, right?

[00:28:18] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So it happens every day. Yes, one story comes to my mind, and this was a very, very unique context where, right—people were involved. The best of people were involved in a particular account. A big account. Like a big, big, big enterprise account. And everybody had a sense that we were on the right track.

[00:28:37] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Customers were very engaged. And I was not in those meetings, but my intuition was telling me something was going to go wrong with this account. So naturally, I was highlighting it as a very critical account, while the rest of the organization and my friends were saying that this is gonna be okay,

[00:28:57] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Because we are very involved. So I kind of escalated it to my CEO, saying, “Hey, I’m reading something really bad here. I have a feeling we’re gonna lose this account. We’re gonna lose this business.” And my CEO told me that—he said, “Okay.” He met me for 15 minutes, and I took him through all that, and he said, “You know what?

[00:29:16] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Sanjeet, something is odd. I would like to believe you, but I think you are kind of exaggerating this context.” He said that to me, and he was a big fan of mine. But that was the sense, because he had just met the sales guy, and the sales guy had told him that everything was okay and everything was all right.

[00:29:33] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So I told him—I was not trying to be arrogant or anything—but I said, “Okay, from what I know as a customer support leader, and if I have had any experience in customers, mark my words: in one week from now, you will hear that we would’ve lost this business.” And he said, “How do you know?

[00:29:54] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: You’re not in those meetings. There are other people.” Because before that, I also had a two-hour call somewhere where this person told me, “I had no clue.” Another person told me, “I had no clue.” This was the product management team. And they said they had no clue, because they were involved in it, whatever.

[00:30:08] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: In two days, the letter came. We had lost $60 million worth of business.

[00:30:14] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: It’s just an instinct. But we support it, because we interact with customers so much, we know at a deep level how they experience our solutions. We understand at a deep level. Sometimes, in that context, there was nothing wrong.

[00:30:31] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: It was just that the customer was being very polite with us. But my instinct, considering the context, what we were being compared to, and the data’s appearance, along with all the information I was hearing, had given me a view. So, yeah, you find yourself in situations where you face deflection, defensiveness, and denial.

[00:30:56] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So my view, being a transformation leader and talking, because we’re talking dysfunction is that visible behaviors, Steve, you can tackle those. You know, the dangerous behaviors are those that involve passive resistance. People nod in the meeting, saying all the right things, and then go out and undermine the change.

[00:31:17] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So behaviors, at the end of it, and understanding of different people’s different contexts, can sometimes harm the business. Therefore, there is a need for us to challenge each other a lot. You and I can be friends with constructive confrontation. Because we should always bring data and not emotions to the conversation.

[00:31:39] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So, as support, if we could lead the anecdotal part and bring data to conversations and drive those conversations based on data, I think we can have more really good conversations. We need to get away from the culture of tiptoeing around people. Support can play a very powerful role in assessing. If you’re wrong, good, good for the business.

[00:32:04] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I’m wrong. My instinct was bad, I’ll save the account. But if my instinct was right and I’m being super vigilant, and I’m being brutal in our assessment, it serves the business, right? We should encourage that kind of engagement in an organization.

[00:32:20] Steve MacDonald: That brings a whole new level to when you said, look for patterns, right?

[00:32:24] Steve MacDonald: We can’t look at isolated tickets, meetings, and questions. We need to consider it as a whole. And I love everything that you said here. What I want to ask you is one last question, which is: if there was one thing you wanted executives throughout the customer support, customer experience industry to take away—the one thing that’s most important to take away from this podcast—what would that be?

[00:32:52] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: One, realize the importance of the support function. Don’t see it as some operational necessity. It is strategic. So look, I think, pause and look. Re-look at the operating model of your support organization. Are we investing in the right capabilities? Are we utilizing this function as intended?

[00:33:19] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: This function is the talent factory for the rest of the organization. I have built great professional services people, salespeople, onboarding people, customer success people, great developers coming from the support organization. Leverage this talent pool well. Third, and most importantly, create a culture of critical conversations.

[00:33:41] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Face your hard truths, empower your critics, empower problem solvers, and solve this problem. Because it’s really difficult to get new business. It’s easier to retain your existing one. And there’s a huge leakage happening out there because we are not doing things right, because we are not establishing the right capabilities, right?

[00:34:02] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So I feel that there’s a need for us to re-look at support—its operating model, its strategic integration, the role of the support leader at the C-level, what that reports to. Because we have CCOs, right?

[00:34:16] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I think there’s a need for support leaders to be at the C-level as well, to drive the right actions. And then think about it—at the end of it, support is back to basics. Your ticket optimization has to be your number one core thing, but there’s so many other layers where support can play a great role in retention and expansion. And I feel like it’s for us to leverage those capabilities and use that.

[00:34:39] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: So yes, and I think facing hard truths would be the start. Because we need to reassess and have a thorough understanding of what’s ailing our business.

[00:34:50] Steve MacDonald: I think the last thing that you said there was my takeaway, we have to look at the hard truths, right? Those are easy to turn the other way, and they’ve been [00:35:00] there.

[00:35:00] Steve MacDonald: It’s not what I’m being asked to look at. It’s not affecting my day-to-day. I can push it off to the side. And nobody’s gonna ask, right? I just wanted to say thank you, because I know people are going to have questions. Is it okay if we give out a link to your LinkedIn profile?

[00:35:16] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: Absolutely.

[00:35:17] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic.

[00:35:18] Steve MacDonald: The other thing is that the mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives and different ideas and shine a light in areas in our business that we haven’t shined before, right? And if we all do that from our experiences and our background, it’s like the saying: the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:35:34] Steve MacDonald: I think you did a tremendous job in rising the tide today. Thank you for everything.

[00:35:40] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I’ll just say Andy Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive”—not the crazy, anxious kinds. The paranoid. You must have a certain level of paranoia and passion for doing the right thing for your business.

[00:35:50] Sanjeet Kaur Bali: I think I would love to encourage every one of you to be passionate about what you do. I love my job. I want each one to know that—you know, want to do the right thing for their [00:36:00] business, for sure. And that is why, starting with the hard truths. Absolutely.