Technical Support Teams Generate Revenue Through Strategic Framework Design

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a very special guest on with Brie Clements. And the reason why I say very special guest is because you have transitioned to a place in your career and in your company where we all aspire to get to, a lot of us in the customer support area.

[00:00:21] Steve MacDonald: We feel like a support department. We don’t feel like we’re recognized for our direct contributions to all the other departments and growth in the business. And you’ve achieved that. And I think a part of it is because you’ve got not only a framework that you’ve really implemented, you also have a background in sales and sales enablement that I think has helped a lot.

[00:00:43] Steve MacDonald: And so we’re gonna pick your brain a bit today on how you’ve done this. But before we do that, I would love to give you a chance to explain a little bit more about your background and actually how your years as a yoga instructor help you in customer support. How’s that for an introduction?

[00:01:01] Brie Clements: Thanks so much, Steve, and happy to give a little bit more context. So a few key areas that I’d love to highlight today are around accountability. Something I pride myself in, and my team holds themselves accountable as well as myself, and that’s really helped deliver outcomes when we’re seeking to drive change across the business.

[00:01:24] Brie Clements: And it’s something that I always ask my team to check me on. Am I holding myself accountable in this situation before we go run and hold others accountable? And then, your comment about yoga instructing. So I’ve been practicing and teaching yoga for more than 15 years, and how that translates back to my day-to-day is leading with empathy and understanding where each person is at.

[00:01:47] Brie Clements: A lot of times in support, we see people at their worst and at their most frustrated or stressed. So coming in, being even-keeled and calm in those situations, but also teaching the team little simple tricks, right? So taking a few deep breaths when you do have that escalated person on the phone can definitely reset your mind, but also allow you to lead with maybe a different approach too.

[00:02:11] Steve MacDonald: Well, I wanna get right into the conversation. I realize I forgot to mention that you are the Senior Director of Customer Service and Support at For The Record. So here’s the thing. I wanted to start off with a big question. Transforming support from being perceived as a cost center, something that needs to be contained, right?

[00:02:29] Steve MacDonald: That we have to have it, we’re gonna have people that have questions and need help, to a revenue generator in the business. That’s a very, very different perspective for the C-Suite to have. So what I’d love to do is, how did you make that transition? Or how do you wanna start us down the path to explain or understand what you did?

[00:02:49] Brie Clements: Yeah, absolutely. So when I first started in support, the perception of support internally and externally was very poor. So internally, people just didn’t trust the support department as a whole. And that definitely translated over to our customers. And customers actually didn’t wanna engage with us at all.

[00:03:08] Brie Clements: They didn’t wanna meet with us. They didn’t wanna submit issues because in the past, those issues just wouldn’t get resolved. So the first step in rebuilding that relationship was getting the internal support so that way we could ultimately convey that externally to our customers and rebuild those relationships.

[00:03:27] Brie Clements: And so, like I had mentioned in my intro, by being accountable, right? And making sure that if we’re gonna do something, we actually do it. And then delivering a lot of really quick wins initially within the first 30 days of me stepping into that role, and then making sure we had the right team members in place to be able to position support to continue to grow.

[00:03:48] Brie Clements: And so one of the first exercises that we did was start to build out this framework around understanding what are the technical needs across the team, what are soft skills that the team needs to be able to have, and then how can we apply that to each person’s individual personal development growth plan so that way they can continue to grow across support.

[00:04:11] Brie Clements: And so after things were stabilized, which took a little bit of time, and we started to rebuild those relationships with customers, then we were able to spend more time focusing internally in tandem—training the team and upskilling them on those areas. So that framework was really instrumental early on to be able to identify what are knowledge gaps across the team, but then also making sure we have the right resource for the right problem. When we first started in support, everybody was doing everything, and there wasn’t really anybody specialized in anything.

[00:04:45] Steve MacDonald: So let me ask this. I love the way that you answer that question. Well, in order to be perceived differently by executive management, first we gotta get our house in order, right?

[00:04:57] Steve MacDonald: And we gotta make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing and delivering the customer support with excellence. So I’d love to have you spend just a little bit more time on what you changed and explain a little bit more about that framework, and then transition into how do we then change this perception?

[00:05:17] Steve MacDonald: But, so you mentioned the framework, and you mentioned some really important things in there, but I want to get a little bit more depth in there in terms of what specifically you were trying to accomplish and realigning different roles and skill sets and things like that, if you wouldn’t mind taking us a little bit deeper.

[00:05:35] Brie Clements: Yeah, absolutely. So the way we have our support organization structured is we have a service desk or a help desk, right? And they triage all incoming inquiries. So they do need to know a little bit about everything, just to make sure they’re gathering the right information, and then they can triage it appropriately.

[00:05:54] Brie Clements: And then we have a cloud services team and a service engineering team. And the service engineering team focuses on our on-premise software and our hardware, and then cloud services focuses on our cloud-based solution. And so that was the first piece—making sure that we had a technical understanding mapped out of, okay, what types of problems might somebody come to us with and what questions do we need to ask?

[00:06:20] Brie Clements: So that’s where we developed simple things like checklists and scripts so that way that help desk team was properly triaging things so it could get to the right place with the right resource in a timely fashion. And then from there, that’s where we started to understand the matrix and build out that skills matrix.

[00:06:39] Brie Clements: So the first thing we did was ask each individual, assess yourself, where do you think you’re at? And then we had the manager independently assess that person, and then we had them come together and have a conversation and then align on where they’re actually at. Because a lot of times when we’re doing a self-assessment, we might be too critical of ourselves one way or the other, right? And it’s hard for us to actually see that true placement, and then sometimes the manager doesn’t have all the context of different scenarios that person might be exposed to. So we found that to be a really helpful exercise, and we did that outside of our typical performance reviews because we wanted to be building this matrix independent of their past or current performance indicators.

[00:07:21] Brie Clements: And so that’s where it started to allow us to think about support not just from this reactive state that a lot of technical and customer success support teams live in, but being more proactive. So some of the proactive pieces we started to work through were, what are some trainings and workshops that we can have for these gaps that we know that we have?

[00:07:46] Brie Clements: But then what are services that we can provide to customers to be proactive in their environment? And these services are things that we already had been kind of offering, but we hadn’t really been promoting them to customers. And so one of the services that we do with our core customers is think of it like a home inspection.

[00:08:06] Brie Clements: So we’ll go in proactively, check all of the hardware and the software, make sure there are no problems before a court starts, and we’ll do that on a cadence basis. So that way when they enter the room, they know they’re not gonna have any issues with capturing the official record versus in the past, right? We were just relying on them using the system and then reporting an issue to us.

[00:08:27] Brie Clements: So that has been pivotal in some of our very large enterprise customer environments where we’re managing 400-plus courtrooms.

[00:08:36] Steve MacDonald: Wow. So I have to ask you, because I think this is a massive benefit that, if you agree, I want you to underscore a little bit—is when you started to assess the skill set of the team and you did it, but you asked them to do it as well, how did they feel about that process?

[00:08:53] Steve MacDonald: Right? Like you bringing them in and feeling like they have some ownership, they have some say in this whole process that allows them to be more proactive. Because we all wanna be more proactive. We all have a list of things that if we had time to do, we’d want to do them. This feels to me like something that just empowers the employee. Is that a good assessment of what happened? You tell me.

[00:09:20] Brie Clements: Yeah, absolutely, Steve. So one of the first things that I did when I first started in this new department, since I had come from the sales team, was just doing needs analysis and really like a discovery with the support team, right?

[00:09:34] Brie Clements: And just understanding what are their pain points, what are they spending a lot of time on? And the one thing that was consistently coming up from everybody that I talked to was training. They just felt like they weren’t getting enough information and support from the rest of the business. And so that’s why that matrix was so important—to map that out, to understand what do they actually need training on, right?

[00:09:57] Brie Clements: Because if I would’ve just asked everybody, “What do you want training on?” I probably would’ve gotten 101 different requests and could’ve spent a lot of time going down different rabbit holes, and it would’ve been harder to measure if that would’ve actually been effective and what the team really needed.

[00:10:11] Steve MacDonald: So how does that impact their morale, their retention? Like, did you see a lift? Because we all know, overall in business, the more engaged employees are, the more engaged customers are, the more revenue that we make, we grow as a business. Like in terms of engagement of your team, what kind of an impact did this make?

[00:10:31] Brie Clements: Absolutely. So there were kind of two sides of the same coin. We had some people actually use this as a promotion path, and that was really helpful because then we were able to identify quickly what they were doing well. It gave other people who weren’t really sure if they wanted to stay in support or not, if they were even in the right role.

[00:10:50] Brie Clements: And for some people, we identified just based off of their kind of self-assessment that they’re not really in the right role, and that’s so important to identify early so that way we can either place them in another area of the business or help them identify another opportunity outside of our organization. And then for people who were kind of in the middle, right, who were not promoted, but they were like, “No, I’m still interested in this,” it gave them a really clear growth path of what they needed to do to keep developing.

[00:11:21] Brie Clements: And without that, we didn’t really know how to keep pushing themselves other than, you know, maybe I’ll take this certification and that might help me, but they couldn’t have that kind of direct correlation back to their day-to-day.

[00:11:34] Steve MacDonald: Alright, so now I want to transition to that’s getting your own house in order, right? But that doesn’t talk about how do we change perceptions of a cost center to a revenue generator. So I’d love to kind of transition over and start talking about how did you make that transformation? 

[00:11:56] Brie Clements: Yes. So now that we’ve gotten everything stabilized, we have that matrix built out. That allowed us to resolve issues faster.

[00:12:05] Brie Clements: So for that reactive support, we’re able to get the right resource to the right person at the right time. And in turn, that gave up some more capacity on the rest of the team, right? So instead of just being in this cycle where we’re stuck running, we’re able to actually pause and plan and use a portion of the team’s time to conduct those proactive services in courtrooms.

[00:12:28] Brie Clements: And identify issues before they happened, and that we are able to charge as a service that’s an annual recurring revenue line item, which is huge for SaaS, but then also start to have the support team directly contribute back to that revenue other than just kind of being seen as that cost.

[00:12:47] Brie Clements: And then as another outcome, the team’s also been able to help on project-related work with our operations team because they have that additional capacity. And so we’re also able to contribute in that way. But taking a step back, because we’ve built those stronger relationships with our customers, we started fixing issues faster.

[00:13:08] Brie Clements: Customers started leaning in and asking us, “What else is new for For The Record? Or should I explore this new cloud product your sales team keeps telling us about?” Right? So they started to treat us more like an advisor or consultants rather than just somebody they call when something’s broken and they want something fixed.

[00:13:26] Brie Clements: And so that was really helpful to be able to start to pivot those relationships and start to give leads to the sales team as a result of some type of issue stemming up in their courtroom.

[00:13:37] Steve MacDonald: We all know that we have a tremendous capacity to impact cross-sell and upsell, and I think it was a study by Forrester that said 73% of B2B new annual revenue should come from existing clients.

[00:13:55] Steve MacDonald: Right. So we chase new logos and we have to, right? We have to bring in new businesses, but our ability to create additional revenue from existing clientele—and what I’m hearing, the story is—you’re so well-positioned to do that, right? Because you’ve created this advisory kind of a role where they are leaning in and asking you. That’s incredible. You also, did I hear it right, that you actually created a new service line that you’re now selling?

[00:14:24] Brie Clements: Yeah, so it was something we had, but we didn’t really promote it or push it a ton with customers just because in the past the team didn’t have capacity to actually deliver that service, and so it wasn’t something they wanted to go out and kind of broadcast.

[00:14:39] Brie Clements: Right. And because we were able to make that switch, then the team did get more capacity and understand the value. And I think that’s another piece—a lot of times the team doesn’t understand how the contracts work or the contractual value, or even how some of the inner workings of the finances work on the back end of the business.

[00:15:01] Brie Clements: And so that was something else that a lot of the team has now seen. What does a contract look like for support? What are our terms? How does all of this work? Because that was another piece we stabilized and standardized across our customers. When I first came in, that was a mess. It was each customer basically had a different version of our contract, and so it was really hard to manage and deliver a service consistently.

[00:15:28] Brie Clements: And giving the team exposure to that allowed them to also understand the importance that they’re not just here to fix a problem. We’re gonna turn it into, how can we get an opportunity or a sales deal out of this interaction as well?

[00:15:42] Steve MacDonald: So there’s like three parts of what you’re saying here, you know, but it’s all fundamental to—you had to free up time for them to be proactive, right?

[00:15:50] Steve MacDonald: Without doing that, you wouldn’t have been able to lean into these parts of your contract where you could expand the relationship, the cross-selling, the upselling, working with other departments, like you mentioned, operations, right? All of that wasn’t happening if you were just in the throes, you know, your team and department just addressing questions and upset people that were calling in, right?

[00:16:16] Steve MacDonald: You had to make that transformation first before you could do all of this. I have to ask you—you’ve got a sales enablement background. How does this play into this revenue generating and just kind of your mindset and how you approach this? Because you have that background, how did that help? How did that aid in what you’re doing now?

[00:16:39] Brie Clements: Yeah, there’s a couple different areas. So the first area was just the overall mindset. Every interaction that we had with a customer, I saw it as an opportunity to solve a problem for them but turn that problem into an opportunity to discuss something else that was either new that we had or something they didn’t have today, but do it in a really delicate way so that way…

[00:17:02] Brie Clements: We were actually getting at whatever was causing them pain. So, as an example of that, we have a big court customer in Arizona, and one of their judges is hard of hearing. We have a new product that allows you to have speech-to-text in the courtroom, live in real time. And we gave that to them as a pilot because that judge kept saying, “Oh, I want the speaker tilted. Can you turn up the volume in the room?” But it wasn’t really getting at the problem, which was they couldn’t actually understand what was going on in the courtroom.

[00:17:43] Brie Clements: And for a judge, they’re one of the most critical players in the courtroom, right? You want to make sure they’re going to be making the decision that they’re able to hear everything. And a lot of judges are, you know, getting older, and some of them are having a harder time accepting that. And so, we saw that as an opportunity — well, let’s have them pilot one of our cloud solutions. Then it solves their immediate problem, right, of not being able to hear — because they can read a live transcript in the room — but it also gives them exposure. Because now, if that judge can share their experience with other judges across the court system, then we can continue to expand that opportunity.

[00:18:13] Steve MacDonald: I’m seeing a very big connection now to the upskilling that you talked about earlier, right? Because having an agent that can not only have the skills and the compassion to really listen and understand and solve the problem at hand, but to see a challenge that has an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell at the same time — that’s not a low-level agent kind of responsibility or task.

[00:18:39] Steve MacDonald: So, is it back to your training? Is it back to finding the right kind of people to fill that kind of a role? How do you make sure you have the team members that can be trained, but handle that kind of responsibility?

[00:18:59] Brie Clements: Yeah, that’s a great question, Steve. So, one of the books I’ve recently shared with the support team was Never Split the Difference. And so, using some of the techniques in there around mirroring, right? So when you’re on the call and you’re trying to build trust and immediately de-escalate the situation, using that as a quick tactic — by simply repeating the last few words that they said or paraphrasing the statement.

[00:19:31] Brie Clements: And then we also talk about some other soft skills, like tone of voice — and so, playing into those soft skills, also with that understanding of, okay, we’re all one big team. At the end of the day, just because we’re here to solve the problem doesn’t necessarily mean that we only want to stay focused on that. And so that’s where that sales enablement piece kind of came into play — of, okay, we’re going to see every interaction as that opportunity to talk about what other things we can offer to help, when it makes sense, right?

[00:19:55] Brie Clements: Because we don’t want to do that when it doesn’t make sense. If somebody’s truly upset and we just need to fix the problem, and they only have two minutes, we know that’s not the time to bring it up. But if it’s somebody that we have that ongoing relationship with, or it is something like that example I gave — where we can find that immediate way to solve that problem with that upsell opportunity — that’s where that opportunity to expose the team to how to navigate those situations comes in.

[00:20:22] Brie Clements: So something I do as well with my managers is we do one-on-one coaching sessions. We’ll listen to some of the calls that are recorded with the team. We’ll also review cases with them — so we do a daily and weekly case review — and then we talk about those examples and share those stories with the team, so that way everybody can keep learning from each other.

[00:20:44] Steve MacDonald: So I have to believe that you have some KPIs that you’re tracking that are non-traditional for a support team, right? Like, can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think then those KPIs translated to the C-suite is probably one of the biggest parts of this story. But you tell me.

[00:21:06] Brie Clements: Yes. So some of the things that we were tracking initially — and this was just a baseline of things everybody should be tracking — were, you know, our response time, resolution time, things that are in our service level agreement.

[00:21:20] Brie Clements: But then beyond that, we wanted to understand how we’re actually impacting the customer’s business. So one report that we do for our customers is courtroom utilization, and that’s really important for them because it allows them to determine if they should build new courtrooms, if those courtrooms can be repurposed — and they don’t really have another source where they can get that information from, other than from our company.

[00:21:47] Brie Clements: And so that’s a metric that’s huge for them — to be able to see what is that overall percentage, and then tie that back to the number of issues that they’re having in a courtroom to give them really a more holistic picture of what’s going on. So if it’s a courtroom that’s highly utilized, when there’s a higher amount of support tickets, that kind of correlation can make sense.

[00:22:10] Brie Clements: But then also revisit and give an upsell opportunity of, okay, if it’s an older courtroom and it’s highly utilized and they’re having a lot of support issues, then that could tell that court, “Oh, maybe we need to spend some more money and invest in rebuilding this courtroom or re-outfitting it with new software and hardware.” So we can see that business outcome.

[00:22:32] Brie Clements: So that’s just one example of kind of a non-traditional metric. So when we’re thinking about that, that correlates back to churn, right? Because if it’s some of our large enterprise customers we’re providing those insights to, that helps reduce that. But then also thinking about things like, okay, how many times is that customer now going to be willing to give a referral to other court systems as a result of that?

[00:22:55] Brie Clements: And so, while these things are harder to track and they’re not traditional, it’s something that’s been a really good gauge for us to allow what I kind of call that trust accelerator. When you’re trying to build those relationships with customers quickly, to be able to have a good sense of how crucial our software and our solution are back to their business.

[00:23:15] Steve MacDonald: I love that — the idea of this trust accelerator. There’s actually a lot that’s come out showing that selling organizations are at the bottom of the totem pole for trust. Most B2B buyers are waiting longer and longer to even want to talk to us. I think the LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer that came out recently said that 61% of respondents thought that we were being intentionally misleading.

[00:23:43] Steve MacDonald: So this idea of building trust and having it as a core part of what you’re doing is so needed. I mean, our brands are trust marks, right? We learned that early on in our careers. So I just wanted to underscore that — when you said that, it’s so important. You’re doing so many— there are so many pieces of the puzzle that you’re putting together here that I just wanted to underscore that.

[00:24:00] Steve MacDonald: I want to make sure I have a chance to ask this question: What haven’t I asked — what’s important that you want to make sure is a part of our conversation here today?

[00:24:17] Brie Clements: Yeah, Steve. So I think something that often gets overlooked is: what can I actually start doing to make an impact immediately? A lot of times, people get caught up in needing to have this grandiose plan — “I’m going to spend a lot of time building this plan out and dedicating a lot of resources to making sure it goes exactly as predicted.”

[00:24:43] Brie Clements: And what I’ve learned in my time across several different teams in SaaS organizations is — it’s constantly changing. The business priorities are constantly changing. So, if you spend too long trying to come up with the perfect plan or the silver bullet, you’re just never really going to get there.

[00:25:01] Brie Clements: And that’s why I love that matrix, right? Because it gives you that framework as a guide, but you can still be flexible in how you want to adapt and utilize it across the team. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to put together. It’s really just understanding: what are the solutions that we have to offer, what are some of the soft skills, and how does this translate back to individual career goals?

[00:25:18] Brie Clements: So, I want to underscore the importance of getting started today and acting quickly — so you can understand what is that impact you want to make. Because at the end of the day, we all know that the executive leadership team is here to see the results and the outcome. They’re not as worried about the plan, right? They just want to know, is this going to lead to the results we’re looking for or not?

[00:25:48] Steve MacDonald: I love it. It actually dovetails into my last question, which I think is the most important of all — and that is, you know, we’ve talked about so much, and our poor human brains can only retain about two or three things at a time before we get overloaded.

[00:26:03] Steve MacDonald: If you were to have an opportunity to say, “Here’s the one single most important thing that I want the audience to take away from our conversation today,” what would that one most important takeaway be?

[00:26:17] Brie Clements: Yeah, that one takeaway from my perspective, Steve, would be understanding — do you have some type of understanding of your current state in the business today?

[00:26:27] Brie Clements: So, do you know where all of those gaps are? How do you have that documented and mapped out? And then, what are you doing to address those things? That’s something you can do today — just getting started with understanding where you currently sit, and then where you want to go.

[00:26:44] Brie Clements: Right? And understanding what that future state looks like and starting to craft that vision. That’s something that a lot of times people in support don’t make enough time for — that future state — because they’re just so caught up in chasing that reactive nature of things that they don’t stop to think about, “Okay, we’re at point A. How do we actually get to point B?”

[00:27:03] Brie Clements: And how do we do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt our internal team, but also our customers? Because going back to trust, if we disrupt things too much, then they might start asking questions — or you could even accidentally degrade the quality of support you’re giving if you’re trying to move too quickly, or in a direction that isn’t in line with your customer expectations.

[00:27:29] Steve MacDonald: Well, here’s what I know from our conversation today — people are going to have questions. Is it appropriate that I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can reach out to you?

[00:27:40] Brie Clements: Yeah, I’m more than happy to connect on LinkedIn. I love connecting with new faces. If you do reach out, just know that I’ll probably send you a direct message and say, “When can we find 15 minutes to get to know each other better?” I love having that personal connection with my network.

[00:27:56] Steve MacDonald: Well, I have to tell you, the mission behind this podcast is to share different perspectives, unique insights, and unique experiences of how we create success. And the fact that you’ve created so much success — kind of beyond where a lot of us are in our companies — I just wanted to say that’s the mission of what we’re trying to do, right?

[00:28:00] Steve MacDonald: We’re trying to help people have a path, advocate for themselves, garner the resources, build the right teams, and have the time to be proactive and do the kind of things that you’re doing. And so, I call that the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:28:31] Steve MacDonald: And I think you were an amazing rising tide today, just bringing us into what you’ve done and how you’ve been successful at it. So, I just wanted to say thank you.

[00:28:41] Brie Clements: Well, thanks so much, Steve. It’s been an honor and a pleasure chatting with you today, and hopefully this was helpful to the audience. I’m happy to discuss offline with anybody in more detail around how we actually put all of this into motion.