The New Customer Support Model that Drives C-suite Support

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a very special guest on, and a very special topic. We have on Cynthia Patterson, and Cynthia, you are not only the VP of Customer Support at Antech Diagnostics, but your formal training and years spent as a veterinarian, and how a veterinarian and customer support come together, is the key to our topic today.

[00:00:27] Steve MacDonald: There is a new customer support model, and it’s one that not only works really well—you have a gasp-inducing only 6% turnover with your agents—but it also helps you directly provide support and rationale, and buy-in from the C-Suite. Which is always difficult, because no matter how much we try, we end up being looked upon as one of the biggest cost centers in the business.

[00:00:51] Steve MacDonald: Right? And then, so a lot of C-Suite kind of focuses on how do we contain, how do we lower cost? They’re just, we’re trained to do that. So what I would love to do is I would love to hear a little bit more about your background. I found out you were a cyclist, and we might see a cat on your lap, I think, ’cause I saw it running around here a little bit earlier. But if you could just kinda give us the path for how you got to where you are here today.

[00:01:18] Cynthia Patterson: Yeah. It is an amazing journey, and I am so appreciative, Steve, to be here with you and your listeners. And I guess the one thing I wanna start this with before everyone hits the pause button or moves on to the next podcast is this isn’t a story about how everyone needs to be a veterinarian to be great at customer support.

[00:01:34] Cynthia Patterson: Obviously I am biased. This is my chosen profession, and I’m just supporting it in a different way. Right? I was a practicing small animal veterinarian for about eight years, and I loved practice. I had, you know, great pet owners. I am so fortunate to have the career that I had. But I wanted something bigger.

[00:01:55] Cynthia Patterson: Right. And when you’re in vet practice, often bigger is you end up buying the vet practice. Right? Most veterinarians are considering some level of ownership, and that wasn’t big enough for me. So I went into pharmaceutical consulting as a supporting cast member, as a veterinarian, specific to pharmaceuticals in veterinary health. And that was exciting.

[00:02:15] Cynthia Patterson: I loved it. I felt like I was an expert. You know, I’m out lecturing all over the world and teaching veterinarians new things. It was a blast, but I wanted something even bigger than that, and so I fell into this amazing VP role of Customer Support. In the space that Antech Diagnostics exists in, we are a provider of veterinary diagnostics.

[00:02:36] Cynthia Patterson: So whether it’s a lab test that a dog needs, or an x-ray that a cat needs or a horse needs, allergy testing, you name it, we have some kind of resource for the veterinarian. And who better to understand the customers of a business like that than a veterinarian? And so what started my time in Antech was via an acquisition.

[00:02:57] Cynthia Patterson: And so my very small role, at least I thought it was small—I had, at the time, only about 70 support and service repair field team members. Now I have 250, so my job has grown a lot. And there’s constant conversation with my C-Suite team about, yeah, I get it, you know? It’s a big part of the business. 250 associates all dedicated to support.

[00:03:19] Cynthia Patterson: But really, I need 500. So how are we gonna get there without looking like a burden and an anchor to COGS? Right? No one wants to be that. But in our business it’s so important to have this relationship-driven, empathetic level of customer service. And so we’ll talk about that more throughout your questioning today, but that is such a critical part of my juncture—how do I impart upon my associates and my team members how to get there, right?

[00:03:44] Cynthia Patterson: And so I can always say, well, as a veterinarian I feel this, or, you know, as a veterinarian I don’t know if that’s gonna land as well as we might. And I always remind everyone there is a pet or a producing animal. There is some kind of animal at the end of this story. And that’s ultimately who we have to show up for. And I’m really fortunate—I can’t wait to brag on my team during our chat today—but they’re really good at capturing that.

[00:04:32] Cynthia Patterson: And that’s how, I mean, in a nutshell, that’s how you get to 6% or less turnover: you find really engaged people who feel some kind of connection to the end of the story, so that on every call, even when they’re not feeling very empathetic, they find a way to get there and really support the customer.

[00:04:32] Steve MacDonald: So you just casually threw out something there—at 6% turnover. Tell us what happened when you were speaking at CCW recently, and you dropped that stat. Yeah. What happened in the audience?

[00:04:44] Cynthia Patterson: I mean, there was a gasp. And here I am, just casually throwing out some statistics because I was chatting in a small panel. We were talking about finding the balance between the empathy that humans provide and the efficiencies that AI can provide. Right? And part of my luck in this story is I have a really empathetic team and they don’t turn over very often. They really love what they do. They love working with us.

[00:05:13] Cynthia Patterson: And so in loving working with us, they tend to stay. I have associates that, you know, have 25 years of tenure through their organizations. 20 years is actually not uncommon. And so it’s a gift that I have, that I realize is very uncommon in this industry. You know, when you’re talking about support businesses, it’s not uncommon to have constant turnover.

[00:05:36] Cynthia Patterson: You get turnover rates of 60 and 70%, whether because people are looking for more opportunities, better pay, to be seen and heard, or to not be yelled at constantly by frustrated customers. And it takes a really holistic approach to get there. But I forgot that I should probably warn people before I say things like that, because it really caught everyone off guard.

[00:06:00] Cynthia Patterson: You know, I had more people come up afterwards and just say, how on earth can I get there? Because I’m nowhere near 25%, let alone getting down below 10%. And so, yeah, I now will warn people a little bit, like this could be a trigger warning before I say I’m about to success, but we only have 6% turnover. And a lot of that is people need to move because of their family or they wanna go back to school to do something bigger with their career.

[00:06:25] Cynthia Patterson: Just like what I did with mine, right? So it’s very rarely, “I hate this experience, I don’t like these customers, I don’t like this business.” That’s usually a functional reason. They have to leave us, and we’re okay with that. And then also, we have to evaluate too—are we having too low of a turnover rate?

[00:06:44] Cynthia Patterson: So, you know, we do hold people accountable for the way that they behave with customers and the choices they make with troubleshooting, for example. We have all of the normal KPIs that you would see in a service organization, like adherence to schedule. And so we do hold people accountable, but even in that intentional turnover, we still have this really low turnover rate.

[00:07:07] Cynthia Patterson: So I feel really fortunate. And I realize now it’s fairly unheard of in the industry. But a huge part of that is intentional, because we invest so much in the experience of our associates dedicated to customer core, and they feel they have that advocacy, right? That’s my role, not just in shaping the support experience for customers of Antech, but also our associates’ experience and how they’re delivering that customer support.

[00:07:33] Cynthia Patterson: And I take that part of my job really seriously.

[00:07:36] Steve MacDonald: Well, there’s two immediate areas that I want to dig into there. First is, everybody’s probably thinking, okay, is this like a veterinary industry kind of a thing? Does this apply to my business? And the answer is, yes, it does apply to their business.

[00:07:50] Steve MacDonald: And the second thing is that sometimes we live with a problem so long we don’t really realize the greater context of how big it is, or that we really need to solve it even if we don’t know how to. And so I just wanna say thank you right away for coming on, because we’re gonna kind of unpack all this today, right?

[00:08:11] Steve MacDonald: And prove to people that a problem that we think is unsolvable, a problem that the industry has lived with for so long, there is actually another way to look at it. Right? And by doing that, not only do we have low turnover rates, we have high CSAT, and we have really happy C-Suite individuals. Because in the end, we have to be internal salespeople to advocate for our budgets and our resources, right?

[00:08:38] Steve MacDonald: So that we can do the kinds of things that we want to do. And if we don’t know how to talk that C-Suite language and we don’t have the right KPIs that make sense to them and show how we have a direct connection, right? We’re not gonna accomplish that. So we’ve got a lot to cover here today.

[00:08:53] Steve MacDonald: So I would love to just start out and ask you, what are the most important things that you want to talk about in terms of what this model is and then how we go about executing that model?

[00:09:06] Cynthia Patterson: Yeah. So one thing we kind of glossed over is not only am I a veterinarian, and just so your listeners have some context of where do I fit in the veterinary ecosystem—I’m a small animal specialist. I’m a cat and dog specialist. I did some advanced training to get there. But before any of that ever shaped itself, I got my MBA while I was still working on becoming a veterinarian.

[00:09:28] Cynthia Patterson: And so business concepts became the core of who I am as a veterinarian. I don’t know how to separate the two. So I’m glad I did it that way instead of going to vet school, becoming a veterinarian, trying to figure out life, and then going back for my MBA. I just did it all at the beginning, so I had a totally different frame of reference when it comes to these types of topics.

[00:09:46] Cynthia Patterson: And so the one thing that I took away from my MBA—if anyone ever asked me, “What is the one thing you got out of your MBA?”—for me, it was understanding this concept of value propositions. When it comes to, as a business, what do you value and how do you take that value to your customers?

[00:10:07] Cynthia Patterson: Right? So I would love to highlight that, because that part of it plays such a key role in how you shape your support model and how you engage your C-Suite. Because for example, if you’re a low-cost leader, you probably don’t care a whole lot about customer support from that level of a really intimate and highly engaged support team, right?

[00:10:26] Cynthia Patterson: Because you’re gonna be cutting costs throughout your whole business so that you can create an economic model for your customers. Whereas if customer support is the critical part of your value proposition, then you’re gonna probably over-leverage on that. And maybe you’re getting a hint of what my favorite model is.

[00:10:43] Cynthia Patterson: So I think talking about value propositions in the shaping of a customer support model is going to be really important. And then I think taking those pearls, beginning with the end in mind, for those who subscribe to that theory, then you start to say, how do I need to treat my support team, and what people do I need to find?

[00:10:59] Cynthia Patterson: You know, when I was at CCW I was chatting with someone after the event, and we were talking about—well, she really wanted to know—how can I do this? And it was like, well, the best example I can give is if you’re in the luxury handbag market, for example. Let’s take veterinarian out of it, but if you’re into luxury handbags.

[00:11:17] Cynthia Patterson: There’s a certain clientele that probably subscribes as well to luxury handbags. And if you hire a support team where not only have they never seen a luxury handbag, it’s not something they’re interested in, what kind of support are they gonna offer this particular clientele, right? So that model has to be considered from beginning to end before you even start hiring, before you even start figuring out, where do I go as a business?

[00:11:41] Cynthia Patterson: Those things I think are really critical when we’re talking about this in the big picture, because what are you gonna carry to your C-Suite? You can’t go with a model that is completely contrary to the entire scope of the business and the business model. Though I’m really fortunate in that I align in the value proposition itself, right?

[00:12:01] Cynthia Patterson: I am a key customer of Antech in the sense of being a veterinarian, and the passion I have around support and building support models fits really well with where Antech fits in terms of their value proposition with customers. And it makes it easier for me when I’m going and I’m asking for another 50 or another 100 people to really meet our customers where our customers are asking to be met.

[00:12:20] Cynthia Patterson: And then I can ensure that those people understand the veterinary customer, because so many of them worked in the veterinary clinic at one point or another, or they’re really passionate pet owners, right? For those that never worked in the clinic, they understand how important this is. And again, it’s always a pet or producing animal on the other end of the story. Yeah.

[00:12:49] Steve MacDonald: So a couple things. You started out with a very MBA focus here, and I want to go back to that because that’s not necessarily the background that we have in customer support, right?

[00:12:59] Steve MacDonald: And, you know, value propositions and things like that. In our previous conversations, you’ve thrown out terms like lifetime value of a customer. Like we know the costs that we incur for the company, because we’re reminded of that every day, right? But those have to be balanced with the impact on the value proposition and the lifetime value of that customer, right?

[00:13:23] Steve MacDonald: So if you don’t know the lifetime value of the customers that you are serving, you already don’t speak the language of the C-Suite.

[00:13:32] Cynthia Patterson: Yeah. Because it does come down to dollars and cents. Right? There is a limit on how much I can ask for, but I’m always gonna try and take it right to that line and then say, well, what kind of customer experience are you looking for, C-Suite? If you want us to back off a little bit, we can, but this is what that trade-off is going to look like.

[00:13:43] Cynthia Patterson: Right. In the veterinary diagnostics business, lifetime value of customers is critical. Some are incredibly valuable to a business. In our case, you know, there are parts of our business that have contracts associated with them, and the customer at the end of the contract can choose to continue on and we’re all continuing our partnership, or they can go to a competitor.

[00:14:11] Cynthia Patterson: And so where I don’t have a revenue-generating team per se, right? We don’t have anyone that’s outbound calling, and we don’t have anyone shaping deals. We are truly post-sale support—order management, install, and so on and so forth. But if my team falls down on their obligations in this customer experience, then the customer’s not gonna renew their contract.

[00:14:35] Cynthia Patterson: So when that happens, yeah, everyone should look at us sideways. I’ll be honest, I take ownership of that, because we need them to have a great experience so that they’re not saying, well, the six years of co-sale experience have been kind of miserable. I hate having to call in to support. They’re never there when I need them. I’m not getting what I want. I’m going to a competitor.

[00:14:51] Cynthia Patterson: So I remind everyone, while I’m not revenue generating, I call it revenue preserving in the sense that I need these customers to stay with us. I need them to stay engaged. I need them to not blink an eye and say, yeah, I think I’m gonna start entertaining your competition.

[00:15:09] Cynthia Patterson: Or start to have this, you know, tit-for-tat around pricing. Right? “I’ll renew my contract, lower my fee spike at 3%.” We would love to show them all, look what we do for you. We’re here for you 24 hours a day. We have this really empathetic and intimate support model. We can get people on site to help you if you need it.

[00:15:27] Cynthia Patterson: You know, those types of things help me when I’m having C-Suite discussions, because again, I can’t say, I need 100 people and yeah, it’s gonna cost us several million dollars. I’m so sorry, you don’t get anything out of it. Now I can say, hey, look at these customers that have really high CSAT. The likelihood that they are to renew these contracts for another series of multiple years—and that helps a lot.

[00:15:48] Cynthia Patterson: And again, it aligns really intimately with our value proposition. I feel it’s a good type of model that I can create, where we really create this intimate experience, not highly transactional. We’re getting true support to customers, either through troubleshooting, or—like I mentioned to you the other day—people prefer to call in their orders versus using e-commerce because they love interacting with my team.

[00:16:14] Cynthia Patterson: And I still can’t comprehend it. I’m very tech-savvy and I love doing everything without having to talk to anyone. You know, I like efficiency. I like being chased at things. But these customers just love interacting with my team, and for me, that is such a bizarre concept.

[00:16:27] Cynthia Patterson: But it shows you that’s the kind of model we’re creating. We’re going really heavy on the value proposition of high-touch customer service and not so much cost, right? We’re not the cheapest anymore, so to speak. And so our model had to evolve. We are a bit of an innovation leader in terms of product, but that’s not really the thing that people are coming to us for.

[00:16:49] Cynthia Patterson: It’s this shockingly high-empathy customer experience around when they need support, right? So that’s working really well for us. And [00:17:00] again, every business is a little different. You gotta figure out where in that triangle—are you more product-focused? Are you more innovative?

[00:17:07] Cynthia Patterson: Are you more cost-savvy, and you’re trying to create a good cost model for your customers? Like, that’s something everyone has to figure out—where they fit on that triangle. But walking away from my MBA, that is the one thing that has stuck with me and helps so much when I’m trying to sell this idea of advanced support to the C-Suite.

[00:17:24] Steve MacDonald: You know, and the thing I think that I would love to have everybody take away here is that customer support—and the value you create, and the portion of the customer experience that you are—is valuable no matter what business you’re in. In fact, even McKinsey did a study in 2023, and they looked at over 400 highly profitable companies, B2C, B2B, across industries, and one of the biggest conclusions was that CX was the number one differentiator.

[00:17:53] Steve MacDonald: Number one, right? That’s fact. Go look for that study, right? Like, this is the kind of thing we need to do to sell internally—stand up and take the rightful position and ownership of the value that we create. And a lot of customer support organizations, they do cross-sell, they do upsell, right?

[00:18:10] Steve MacDonald: And they’re part of product launches and explanation, and they’re integral, you know, to the revenue model even beyond what you were talking about there. So this applies to everyone—what you’re talking about here, and understanding these business metrics and models and how to talk internally.

[00:18:28] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely.

[00:18:29] Cynthia Patterson: Yeah. I mean, because you can get really hung up on KPIs. And I was telling you the story—I was listening to someone go on and on and on about the average speed of answer. And I get it. It is so lovely to have someone pick up the phone quickly when you’re calling. But if they’re rushing you off the phone so they can do that with the next person, and they’re not asking you, you know, “What other things do you need help with?

[00:18:48] Cynthia Patterson: What are we maybe not doing well that you would want us to address?”—they’re not really digging into the issue. They’re just superficially handling whatever’s in front of them transactionally. “I gotta get you off the phone ’cause the phone’s ringing. I gotta get onto this next call.” I hate that, I’ll be honest.

[00:19:05] Cynthia Patterson: I don’t like that for my customers, I don’t like that for my associates, because they’re not getting this full feeling of empowerment—of being able to listen to the customer’s needs and resolve them. And so, yeah, I mean, I can celebrate that some of my teams have, you know, a 30-second average speed of answer when they’re taking a million calls a year.

[00:19:23] Cynthia Patterson: That’s great. However, how transactional were the majority of those experiences? Because how else do you get to 120 calls a day per person if they’re not just rushing through the calls, right? So that’s where we are continuing to evolve our models, but still show that value to the business.

[00:19:43] Cynthia Patterson: There’s a reason why I would rather have one more headcount than squeeze out one extra second of speed of answer, if that makes sense.

[00:19:51] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. It’s what it all is. What it all is, right? Yeah. And what’s really interesting is that, you know—

[00:19:59] Steve MacDonald: As a customer support organization, we often have a really hard time having a seat at the table in the company, right, when the strategic decision-making is going on. Yet we have the most customer interactions and conversations. We own the voice of the customer, right? And the voice of the customer is the highest authority in the business—higher than the board, the CEO, CRO, anybody.

[00:20:23] Steve MacDonald: So I’d love to just ask you a little bit about—in terms of kind of advocating for ourselves and becoming more valuable to the organization—how important is it to be the voice of the customer inside of the organization? These most organizations lack that, truthfully.

[00:20:44] Cynthia Patterson: Yeah, it’s always interesting to me where companies fit customer support into their org structure and the leadership of customer support in particular.

[00:20:52] Cynthia Patterson: I’m always honored even to be a VP of Customer Support, because I know a lot of companies don’t take it to even that level.

[00:20:58] Cynthia Patterson: And we did some very thoughtful restructuring of the businesses, because we merged—I forgot to mention too—we merged six businesses together in a very short period of time, and we’re part of a much larger parent company. And it’s the first time they’ve ever attempted a truly integrated model. So I had to bring all of these support teams from all of these different parts of businesses that never worked together, or when it was really exciting, they sold against each other. And we said, “Hey, guess what?

[00:21:27] Cynthia Patterson: We’re all friends now. We’re all gonna skip on the lane in the sandbox, and I hope you all love each other.” But it helped me get a seat at a more senior table because of the complexities involved: how do you integrate all this technology together? How do you get all of these people into an org structure that makes sense?

[00:21:44] Cynthia Patterson: How do you not lose a customer when we have, you know, 13 different support teams? How do you not lose them in the shuffle of now all of these fully integrated businesses? At least we think they’re fully integrated. The customer may or may not perceive them as integrated businesses. We had a lot of customers at our first trade show that had no idea we had all merged, you know, six months before that.

[00:22:05] Cynthia Patterson: And so I kind of use that as a little bit more of a leverage tool. And so I’m fortunate in that I’m reporting to the regional president who reports to our company. So I have a pretty short trajectory, and I try and be really thoughtful of when I leverage being a veterinarian, when I leverage being the formal voice of the customer in those types of leadership meetings.

[00:22:27] Cynthia Patterson: And when I’m just advocating for my team, I try and be really cautious of not doing any one of those things too often because I don’t want to be a veterinary expert at the table. Right? I want to be the voice of the Antech customer. So I try and use some discretion, and I think that just comes with years of experience, of knowing when to put your foot on the gas and when to feather it a little bit.

[00:22:49] Cynthia Patterson: But I’m really fortunate in, I think, being a veterinarian. So having a doctor title does help a little bit in my role. I mean, in the industry now for almost 30 years. Right? So I come with extreme knowledge of the customer in multiple different situations, and it helps a lot. Right? It really does help.

[00:23:06] Cynthia Patterson: But I feel, in talking with my peers who I’m bringing from other big companies, right? I’ve got someone that works for me that came from Best Buy and Nordstrom and Wayfair. We’ve got a lot of varied experiences in support, and he’s really fascinated that we’re able to have such a direct line of sight to the top, if you will.

[00:23:25] Cynthia Patterson: I can let anyone on a C-suite team know, hey, this is going on with the customer. It might impact your part of the business. You should be aware of this. Can you help me fix it? And I have great traction, and I thought a really great C-suite team. They’re very engaged and they are always thinking about what is it that the customer needs?

[00:23:44] Cynthia Patterson: What is it that the customer wants? And I know that’s a bit unique sometimes in businesses too, but in a really successful business, hopefully that’s always the motivator of the C-suite—what’s going on with the customer. I think every company should have a leader of customer support integrated with their customers.

[00:24:02] Cynthia Patterson: Right? So in my case, I know the veterinary customer well, but what about people who aren’t as familiar with their industry? It’s important to get out there to understand. Like, if it’s a retail store, get out into the retail stores and watch what customers are doing. Right? Pretend to be a customer yourself and just kinda get a feel.

[00:24:20] Cynthia Patterson: If it’s a service, go out and understand how your customer is using that service. That’s really important. You have to understand your customer in order to have, I think, the authenticity to get the C-suite even interested in what you have to say about the customer. So I challenge all of my peers out there to be really hands-on if they can.

[00:24:40] Cynthia Patterson: And I would hope they should be able to really understand how their customers are utilizing the tools, services, or merchandise that’s being sold by the company.

[00:24:50] Steve MacDonald: I’ve never found a company that said, no, we’re not customer focused. We’re not customer obsessed.

[00:24:57] Steve MacDonald: Right? You know, like, think about that in the role as customer support, and you really own the majority of that voice. Then you own the voice of highest authority. You deserve a seat at the table. And if you don’t have one, the first thing we need to do is just recognize that we deserve it. Right?

[00:25:18] Steve MacDonald: And if we recognize that we deserve it, now you’re starting to talk about all the ways—and it doesn’t take much—to look for ways that you can add value to every single department in the company, whether it’s marketing or sales or operations. And as soon as you are determined to provide that value—

[00:25:37] Steve MacDonald: The same way that you have to have, you know, you speak the language of the C-suite. Guess what? You gotta speak the language of operations. You gotta speak the language of the sales team. Right? You gotta know what’s important to them. Start having conversations with them. I’d love to know, just like on a departmental level—

[00:25:54] Steve MacDonald: Right? How do you integrate within the company itself?

[00:25:58] Cynthia Patterson: I think this is critical. And so again, being a veterinarian, being the end user, the target for our customer base—

[00:26:05] Cynthia Patterson: I get pulled into a lot of things that sometimes don’t have anything truly to do with customer support, but they have a lot to do with the potential for modifications with the customer experience. So I am heavily involved, and my direct reports are heavily involved, in everything that happens at Antech. And I know that sounds creative to say out loud, but it would be amazing if we could just focus on what we’re doing for the actual customer support experience for our customers. But we’re involved in rebuilding our CRM.

[00:26:51] Cynthia Patterson: So, you know, when you bring this many businesses together, you’re also carrying all of their tech debt and all the baggage that comes from the technology. So we are involved in the reshaping of all of the technology, because my team is using most of it, right, to get their job fun. So we’re involved in every single tech project that we have going on that has some adjacency to customers. We’re involved—we call them cross-functional product teams. So we bring new equipment to market, but we also have to manage our older equipment. And so each device or, you know, any piece of x-ray equipment, for example, any new analyzer we’re bringing to market or have on the market, we have a team dedicated to making sure that it’s running appropriately.

[00:27:21] Cynthia Patterson: They’re collecting data on how customers are using it, what they think of it, what kind of trouble they’re running into, and you need customer support to sit on all of those teams as well, right? Because we’re the ones funneling the data that they’re getting out of the CRM or helping translate.

[00:27:36] Cynthia Patterson: Peculiarities of what we are hearing in our troubleshooting calls with customers. Can we engineer some of these things out? So my ask of all of these teams is: can you design this so no one ever has to? My goal is never to have a call, ever, because that means something has gone wrong or something hasn’t been answered well. We’ll take ordering out of it—

[00:27:57] Cynthia Patterson: —’cause obviously I can’t get my customers to order on e-commerce. They just love my team too much. But in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need that either, because they would go right onto e-commerce and get their business done. My hope is someday we get to almost zero calls, because then we know we’ve engineered everything out of our equipment that can go wrong.

[00:28:15] Cynthia Patterson: We’re not having anything go wrong, but I know that’s never gonna happen, right? That’s why we’re so involved in the company. That’s why we work so closely with IT, with operations, with the rest of the commercial marketing team. We work intimately with them, because everyone knows that’s my goal.

[00:28:30] Cynthia Patterson: I would love a world where no one feels they have to call into us. They have everything they need, right when they need it, and they don’t need a human to help them. But yes, I mean, that’s my pie-in-the-sky dream for support. But the only way to get there is to be an active part of the entire experience of the company.

[00:28:48] Cynthia Patterson: Because if one team makes a change, or let’s say a marketing team designs something and is preparing to bring it to market, and I don’t have enough people to support it—right? So I mean, we have to be proactive and make sure that we are ahead of the game before something surprises us and it takes us a while…

[00:29:08] Cynthia Patterson: …to recover on the support side, or we start having those really long hold times because we didn’t plan well enough in advance and we’ve got a lot more calls coming in for something, for example. It is a constant dance, but the only way to make it successful is to be really involved—and, in my case, to be viewed as a trusted leader, a trusted partner in the organization.

[00:29:30] Cynthia Patterson: Because they’ll come to me and say, “Hey, we are not going to launch this until we get your sign-off.” And I’m always like, “Oh, I don’t wanna be that one person that’s making the final decision.” But it is such an honor to be in that space, to kind of give the thumbs up or thumbs down if we’re bringing something to market.

[00:29:48] Steve MacDonald: I wish you could hear the gasps that were just happening from the audience here. Right? Sign-off from customer support. And here’s what I heard: I heard you saying we have to be in those meetings. We have to be proactive. We have to be highly involved with all the other different departments.

[00:30:08] Steve MacDonald: You are taking the position that to do the job right, that’s what I’ve got to do. It’s not, “Am I allowed to do it?” I have to do that. That’s a very different mentality than, “You know, we kind of don’t get invited into the meetings, and we’re just not seen as that integral to the decision-making.”

[00:30:29] Steve MacDonald: I am hearing the exact opposite from you. Exact opposite.

[00:30:34] Cynthia Patterson: And maybe it’s my personality, right? I’m very comfortable walking into a room and trying to figure out where I’m gonna fit into the conversation. Or sometimes it’s saying, “Yeah, I actually don’t have a role here, but what can I gain from what’s being discussed so that I can prepare my team, so that I can find a potential pitfall again, so that we don’t have to find ourselves…

[00:30:53] Cynthia Patterson: …in a bad situation where we’re either under-resourced or under-prepared.” No one wants to be in that situation. I hate putting my associates in that situation where I’m saying, “Oh, guess we missed something, and they’re launching it next week. And I hate to tell you this, but you’re responsible for it. Sorry, here’s your recorded learning. Good luck.”

[00:31:09] Cynthia Patterson: I don’t want anyone doing that to me. So I always tell my associates I do everything I can to never put them in a situation where I wouldn’t feel comfortable stepping into it myself. And so we also are really careful. We choose our words carefully.

[00:31:25] Cynthia Patterson: We choose our attitudes carefully in these meetings because we want to be viewed as a positive partner—and again, that goal of helping the business not find themselves in a pitfall. Part of it is easy for me because, again, experience, role, being a veterinarian, understanding what we’re trying to do with our testing or our equipment—

[00:31:45] Cynthia Patterson: —that all helps a lot. But also, again, I don’t want people calling. I have to go and ask the C-suite for more headcount, and I don’t wanna have to do that all the time, right? That’s what the dance is. And so again, if we can engineer something out of a new-to-market idea [00:32:00] or protect ourselves in a way where we know, “Okay, this isn’t gonna…

[00:32:03] Cynthia Patterson: …lead to a lot of increased calls or an increased need for field visits,” then we’re winning. We’re winning in business, customers are having a good experience, and the teams around us don’t have to constantly pivot and try to put out fires that come up that we didn’t anticipate. So, we have a robust leadership model in support.

[00:32:23] Cynthia Patterson: I’ve got four directors. They each have part of the business. So, we split our business into several—we call them “rooms of the house”—and each of them has a special room that they’re keeping clean and they’re getting all the things they need to do. And they’re showing up in those meetings—

[00:32:40] Cynthia Patterson: —’cause we’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t be in all of ’em, which is great. And not everyone on my team is a veterinarian. I do have one veterinarian on my team, but the rest are all experts with tenured experience in their related areas. And so they can serve as a subject matter expert, or they can be the person that just says, “Well, I actually don’t know anything about that, but I can go find an answer and I’ll get back to you in the next meeting.”

[00:33:04] Cynthia Patterson: It’s working really well. We have a very well-oiled machine, considering we’ve all only worked together for about a year. And in our current structure of support, the teams around us are also either really green or newly structured to the business. It’s working really well for integrating so many businesses in such a short period of time because you see it in our CSAT, right?

[00:33:27] Cynthia Patterson: That’s something I also celebrate. Not only can we give everyone pause with our 6% turnover, but our CSAT consistently is above 93%. We’ll say that’s the lowest team, but a lot of the teams that we measure are well above 95% consistently, month over month. And this is doing anywhere between hundreds to thousands of interactions with our customer base in a month.

[00:33:52] Cynthia Patterson: And I’m so proud of them because that’s hard. That’s really hard to pull off in any industry. And I have to admit, I thought it would be a lot lower. I set my bar really low. I was like, “75% sounds great. I mean, 3.5 stars—I think anyone would feel okay with that.” You know, you hit the button on, “Yes, we can launch this CSAT and see how it goes.”

[00:34:15] Cynthia Patterson: And I’m like, “96%? Is this an anomaly? What about next month?” Oh, now we’re 98. This is getting ridiculous. The percentage just kept going up. And I’m like, “Okay, well I guess we’re doing a great job.” But I do encourage everyone to find ways to use CSAT creatively, and not to burden customers with it.

[00:34:36] Cynthia Patterson: You don’t want anything too wordy or too detailed, because it can get more difficult to get actual feedback. But you want to provide a clear way for customers to reflect when they need to. Because I’m actually trying to find the customers that are unhappy—it tells me more about the business and where we still need to improve.

[00:34:59] Cynthia Patterson: And it’s hard for me, because we don’t have many to pull. But even then, we’ll chase down if someone does feel we really dropped the ball and didn’t provide the experience they signed up for. We’ll show up. It happens so infrequently that we can really go above and beyond to try and turn that negativity into something more positive.

[00:35:20] Cynthia Patterson: Our NPS has shown a clear relationship between that general satisfaction and the likelihood that they’re going to renew these contracts, right? So that lifetime value comes into play there as well.

[00:35:33] Steve MacDonald: Which then also impacts things like NRR—Net Revenue Retention. Those are the kinds of things that you need to know in customer support. Those are the KPIs that the C-suite looks at, right?

[00:35:41] Steve MacDonald: I want to ask one last question, and it’s the most important question because we’ve covered so much territory here. If there was one thing that you wanted the listeners to take away from this conversation today, what would be the one thing that you’d want them to know?

[00:36:03] Cynthia Patterson: You know, I think I’m going to go back to a comment I made earlier about beginning with the end in mind. I’m a huge Covey fan. When I was a young person trying to learn where my lane was in the world, where I was going to go as a businessperson—or even as a veterinarian—I stumbled across The 7 Habits.

[00:36:15] Cynthia Patterson: I had a really long commute for years, so I would just play these on repeat. Eventually they were going to get into my brain—there had to be some kind of gem there. I grew up in a really poor family. I didn’t have any businesspeople to look at as examples of how to conduct yourself or how to live your life. I was winging all of it.

[00:36:31] Cynthia Patterson: When I got my MBA, I was in my very early twenties and I just didn’t know anything. But I found The 7 Habits in a way I could digest it, which was Covey actually narrating his own work in these audiobooks—audio CDs at the time. “Begin with the end in mind” has really shaped my entire world since then.

[00:36:59] Cynthia Patterson: I always start with where I’m trying to go—whether I’m on a bicycle, a paddleboard, snowboarding, or even planning how I’m going to clean my house. I always think about what it is I’m trying to accomplish, and I start with that.

[00:37:28] Cynthia Patterson: I feel our whole conversation today can be wrapped up in saying to any C-suite team, to any executive in support, to any business looking to shape their support model: What do you want the customer to walk away with? What kind of customer are you trying to attract? If they’re having a bad experience, what do you want that resolution to look and feel like?

[00:37:49] Cynthia Patterson: That is critical. You cannot say, “I’m going to build a support team, and good luck—we’ll figure it out as issues come up.” That’s going to be a wild west. You have no idea what that’s going to look like.

[00:38:00] Cynthia Patterson: But if you say, “I am a luxury handbag company, and I want any customer that has even the smallest issue to walk away feeling like they are valued—as if they just spent $10,000 on a handbag. I want my support team to spend 30 minutes plus on the phone with them, whatever is needed to make that customer feel valued, so that they come back and buy a $15,000 handbag from us next time.” You have to start with that.

[00:38:17] Cynthia Patterson: You have to say, “I’m a luxury handbag customer. What kind of experience do I want to have?” That’s how you shape that model. For us, what do I want the veterinarian to feel when they’re on the phone with my team? What do I want the teams to feel when we’re out in the field doing training? What do I want those veterinary technicians to feel when they’re touching our equipment, when they’re learning how to work with it, when they’re now on their own without our training team—running their own samples, taking their own x-rays? How do I want them to feel?

[00:38:54] Cynthia Patterson: To feel if they have an issue and they’re gonna need support. And that’s how we start with the end in mind. It’s obvious we wanna be the most accurate provider of diagnostics because I want that veterinarian to look at their results for that patient that they’re worried about and know that they’re accurate, right?

[00:39:12] Cynthia Patterson: So we start everything and then we work our way back from there. And when we’re having conflict—’cause conflict arises, it comes up all the time when you’re talking about funding. There’s no pointless supply of funding in any business I’d ever talk to, especially when it comes to support, right?

[00:39:27] Cynthia Patterson: There’s always a little bit of conflict that can arise. It has to come back to: Where do we want the end to be? What do we want the end to feel like? And if we can’t get there, what is that going to look like until we can, right? So if we can’t invest in 50 more people today, what is that support experience gonna look like for the customer?

[00:39:47] Cynthia Patterson: And can we handle that? Or can we find funding some other way? Can we find another way to fund these changes? And that is the dance I feel. If we don’t start with the end in mind, what’s the point, right? Where’s your map? I feel like the world we’re in now, the consumer is very demanding because of all of the resources they know are available to companies, and they want that great experience.

[00:40:10] Cynthia Patterson: Sometimes they want the lowest price and they’re willing to say that and say, “Okay, maybe I can tolerate not a great support experience.” But again, you have to know what the end is to be able to make that decision for your customers.

[00:40:24] Steve MacDonald: It’s a vision. You have to have a vision for what you’re doing, right?

[00:40:27] Steve MacDonald: Your vision isn’t “run a customer support department.” That’s not the vision. I love that. I have to tell you that the mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives from different experiences and different insights together from leaders all over the world that are customer experience, customer support people.

[00:40:46] Steve MacDonald: And if we do that, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. I kind of felt like you were a tsunami today.

[00:40:54] Cynthia Patterson: It’s very kind of you. I told you I was so nervous because I was like, I don’t know how your listeners are gonna relate to a veterinarian talking randomly about customer support. But when I put it in context, I tell everyone now, yeah, I’m always gonna be a veterinarian, right?

[00:41:10] Cynthia Patterson: I tell people, “You wanna ask me pet questions? I love that.” This is what I do, right? Like it’s a huge part of my brain that’s full of that knowledge. But I’m also a businesswoman, and I am so fortunate in the teachers and the instructors and professors that shaped my business knowledge because it happened at a critical juncture in my life. And so I feel better now that I probably shared at least one pearl that will spark someone out there.

[00:41:33] Cynthia Patterson: To learn a little bit more, to go digging through Harvard Business Review, to go digging through any kind of study related to “How do I get my support team better?” I feel better now that I probably contributed something positive. So thank you.

[00:41:45] Steve MacDonald: Well, you did. And here’s what I do know—people are gonna have questions.

[00:41:50] Steve MacDonald: Would it be appropriate that I gave out a link to your, say, your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out to you?

[00:41:55] Cynthia Patterson: Yes, and tell your listeners to not hold it against me if I’m a little slow to respond. LinkedIn is my only social media, and because I’ve lost my social media habit, I don’t check it as often as I should, but I do.

[00:42:08] Cynthia Patterson: I always welcome people asking to connect with me and I love interacting with people via messaging on LinkedIn, because sometimes that’s the only way we expand our network in this day and age. And I love trying to coach people to success, mentor people who are new to this, or want other ideas.

[00:42:29] Cynthia Patterson: And I love expanding my network, ’cause someone out there is gonna be able to help me as well.

[00:42:33] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. It’s a two-way street. No doubt about it. So Cynthia, thank you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing and just being a part of that rising—or that tsunami. I appreciate it.

[00:42:46] Cynthia Patterson: You bet. And if something comes from this and you say, “Okay, we need to expand on some of these ideas,” I’m always willing to be another tsunami.

[00:42:54] Cynthia Patterson: I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but…

[00:42:57] Steve MacDonald: In this context, it’s a good thing.