The Whys and Hows of Reverse Engineering Customer Support

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the Contact Center Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got, I guarantee, a conversation that is very provoking and innovative in the thinking we have on Bennett Potter. 

Now, Bennett, you’re the director of customer experience at a VC firm, and specifically, you oversee the customer experience at three different SaaS companies. You spent a lot of the last decade in academia, and you bring a very research-oriented mindset to this. You volunteered your way into customer experience, so you’ve got some different experiences you bring to it. 

But you also have this point of view that sometimes the things we have the most inefficiencies with are the most important. Even down to some of the metrics you’re thinking about, you have an infinity metric that I’d love to explore on the podcast today. But before we do that, if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself so we can get a better understanding of you, then we’ll dig right in.

[00:01:07] Bennet Potter: Awesome. Yeah. My name is Bennett Potter. Thanks for having me, Steve. My background is that I was hoping to be a professor in history, specifically historical theology. So, I spent about 10 years focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries, studying the relationship between the Church of England and its relationship to culture and ideas. I also spent a lot of time working with 19th and 20th-century texts, particularly as they relate to psychology and sociology. I was hoping to be a professor, but that’s not the route I went. All of my career paths have been accidental, but I love it.

[00:01:55] Bennet Potter: The way I got into the position I’m in now is that I started as a resident director at Grove City College for five years, which was an amazing experience. That is the backbone of my identity as it relates to the support side: emergency call management, interacting with resident assistants, serving students, doing programming for students, and thinking through how to create a culture for those students.

I ended up having a job at the end where I got to go part-time, and then pretty quickly went full-time as a UX designer, which I really loved. I put my PhD on hold and haven’t picked it up since. I did that position for about two years and then slid into a product owner position at the same time. I was doing both of those for a startup in the rock climbing industry, a point-of-sale CRM for the rock climbing industry, and it was an amazing experience. I still serve that company and, out of nowhere, had an opportunity to not just serve that one gym SaaS company, but two others. It now represents about 2,000 clients with a large team underneath me, including great managers and tech support.

[00:02:59] Bennet Potter: So, that’s how I got into this. Again, it was unanticipated. I didn’t go for it, but I said yes when I had opportunities to do things I didn’t know. I think what I was able to uniquely leverage was the ability to research. When I started my new job, I needed to figure out how to get the abandonment rate down at a company that was in really dark territory with a high abandonment rate. I had never done that before and never worked in a call center, but I bought 10 books, read all of them as fast as possible, went to podcasts like this to find someone who’s done it, and started thinking through issues on the ground level.

[00:03:48] Steve MacDonald: That’s a really good way of transitioning your experience and background into your point of view on a very research-oriented approach to developing great customer experience. So, what I’d love to do is just get your thoughts on research, customer experience, and how you drive that process. How do you think about it?

[00:04:04] Bennet Potter: Yeah. So, when I think of the example on the abandonment rate, I went from being purely in product and purely in UX, which I loved. I was really hesitant to move out of it. I could imagine a whole life of building and working with teams, developing good products for amazing customers. 

So I was nervous about it. And then I landed a really tough, almost perennial, what was a perennial abandonment problem. No one had really figured it out. No one had cracked what was going wrong for five years. I wanted to end with it, pretty trepidatious, some good fear—appropriate fear—on how to fix this thing. And, like I said earlier, just getting as many materials as I could. 

Because knowledge—you need to get the whole landscape filled out. You need as many counselors as you can, as many voices, to start to set the landscape for where the problems can be. And once you have most of the pieces, you don’t have to have them perfectly figured out.

[00:04:55] Bennet Potter: You don’t have to have super niche knowledge. But once you have enough of the pieces, you can play. And you can start to discern, like, how to actually look at an organization, look at a team, and see where the problems are. So, for me, I wasn’t expecting how quickly research could basically transition a perennial issue from, like, a major problem that no one was able to solve. 

And it was solved within about two weeks, and then solved permanently. So it’s not—we don’t even think about abandonment as a match. I don’t care about it because we’re under 2 percent on the monthly average with our dark days. Super healthy place. 

It’s not even a KPI I care about anymore because we were able to crack the problem. It wasn’t what was expected. I was expecting to have a huge hurdle. But the thesis I’ve teased out over the last 6 to 8, 9 months I’ve been doing this job is: if you can understand the landscape of the problem really well, then you can find a solution extremely quickly.

[00:06:52] Bennet Potter: And on the back end of that solution, there are more problems to figure out and more problems to tease out that need to be solved. But that’s the beauty and splendor of research in general: you go down the road, and if you find the right road associated with the right goal, what you’ll find on the other end of it is happy employees, happy customers, and a ton of work to do to continue serving towards that goal. And all that work is unanxious. It’s spontaneous. It’s supple and pliant. You can move the whole organization. 

That’s, like, from a product side. That’s the idea of agility. If you adapt to the circumstances. And a lot of companies go the agile route, and everything gets screwed up because it becomes too sophisticated, bureaucratic. It requires too many people pulling levers in all sorts of ways. But if you can find the right path and be oriented to it, you’re not going to have any problems, in my opinion, beating the competition, satisfying your employees, satisfying the customer. Because once you go down the road of proactivity, on the other side of getting the core of things stable.

[00:06:56] Bennet Potter: That’s where the fun is! Like, how do we do branded customer journeys for onboarding? How do we do messaging based on how many times we’ve interacted with them in the last 6 months, tailored messaging? How do we get our teams into higher-touch calls with our clients more frequently? Those are harder things to crack, especially in small organizations. But these are fairly small. 

These are not huge teams. I have about 40 underneath me across 3 companies. But we’re starting to do fairly sophisticated proactive work, because we’ve got the baseline in a really strong place. I think the theory was originally, I don’t know if the research will be enough—I didn’t expect that. But I think, now that I’ve tested it a lot, it’s: if you get the core, everything else falls into place, and you won’t believe how good it can be.

[00:07:49] Bennet Potter: And that’s the idea of measured by infinity. If you feel that you have infinity in front of you and you like it, you’re on the right path because each of these—every team, every goal—it can’t always be improved. And that’s actually a bit of a threat to you as a person and a team.

But if you discern it within the life cycle of these organizations and amongst your competition, that’s where the fun is. Like, how do we get to that next step? And how do we set the terms that the industry now has to follow? Because everyone appropriately should be catching up. Companies go here, you zig, and a company zags with you.

That’s right because take that which is good from someone else, learn from it, and move. But how do you become the company that innovates and becomes so sticky, and you get loyalty just like exploding for your organization? That’s when you can tap into the exact core of what the mission of the organization is. Everything else falls into place. And that’s where people like—it just is super fun because you can now take employees who were dissatisfied, frustrated, and start to see them for their individuality, help them train according to that new goal, help pull up those ideas. You’re not in a place where you’re overly anxious and reactive.

[00:09:07] Bennet Potter: So now you can take people who have good ideas and say, “Yes. Go do that, let’s do it. Go do it badly in a week, and then let’s see how it goes. Then, let’s see if we can make it better together, and we’ll do it again.”

[00:09:17] Steve MacDonald: We retain information 22 times more if it’s told to us in the form of a story. Tackling that abandonment problem. Can you tell us the story of how you did that? Don’t name names of companies or numbers or anything that’s proprietary.

[00:09:31] Bennet Potter: So incredibly simple.

One of these companies hung their hat on this theory that the tech was really bad, that our tech infrastructure wasn’t there to support the customer and our internal workflows. Therefore, that’s the reason why the abandonment was so bad because we had antiquated call center tech. We needed to get to that next. 

We need to get to that horizon where we have the new, fancy stuff. It just wasn’t true. It was a bunk theory. Here’s the story. Here’s an analogy. Someone told me to say it, but I think a lot of my analogies tend to involve a little bit of humor.

It’s interesting, but it does relate to the abandonment. One way to think about what happened with that company: The reason why it took only a couple of days to fix is—okay, people are abandoning really quickly. Our call talk time is low for how many texts we have.

That doesn’t make sense. We should be up to one to two more hours per tech. Like, we shouldn’t be dropping these calls, but what happened was, instead of being united on picking up the call and getting that request done, what happened was, people didn’t feel responsible for picking up the call because they identified—there’s only really 5, 6 people identified with actually managing the original queue.

When that call came on, that was about to be abandoned, only those 4 or 5 people felt responsible for taking those calls. So, what we did quickly was, “No, everyone is responsible for this goal on the abandonment. This is an issue that affects all our customers. It’s eroding trust.”

[00:10:54] Bennet Potter: Everyone is responsible for the phone calls, and guess what? If we’re going to abandon a call, directors, if you were directing the ship, pick up the phone in a minute so it never abandons and put them in a callback. We’re going to call you back in the next 12 hours. You put it on a list and, when there’s downtime, you get your team to call that.

That simple. Took one day. We went from, in the average 30s on abandonment, to 2 percent and holding since. We don’t even think about abandonment. It doesn’t matter. Because we’ve recreated a culture, and we didn’t need to do anything tech-wise. Now, the reason why people—there’s—it’s just teams over time. Here’s the fun analogy.

You go on vacation and you put your dogs into a, like, a dog-sitting place. I don’t know what those are called. I don’t have a dog. What this team had done is they had split up. Everyone had, “I take these types of dogs, and you take these types of dogs, and I think the old dogs and the new dogs,” and everyone took their dogs into their own room and they felt a ton of ownership over those dogs.

[00:12:02] Bennet Potter:  Everyone had their badges associated with those specific breeds, and they could only care for those breeds. What people didn’t tell the other people they were working with was that there were a bunch of dead dogs in the closet. 

There are lots of dead puppies all over the organization, which represented unanswered tickets from 50, 80, and 100 days ago. Those represent the client’s frustration, and nobody else knew about the puppy problem in the closet. What we needed to do was, guys, we have to keep all the puppies alive. That’s a given at this type of organization. We’re going to tear it off. 

We’re going to have a moment of silence for the puppies that are gone. Then, we’re going to say, no puppy left behind. We’re going to look at these puppies, and if there’s one that looks bad, we’re all going to go and fix that issue. So it’s actually, we had to cut down the barriers, make everyone responsible for everything. And heighten the awareness of any puppy pain there was. So there’s the nobody will forget that analogy. Maybe you’ll hate it.

 [00:13:04] Steve MacDonald: It was visual. I’ll tell you that. 

[00:13:08] Bennet Potter: Yeah, you get what you get with me. Yeah, but that’s it. People just had ownership of important things, and two, if you have a management team that has to manage 12 different rooms, that is a lot of headspace to go and make sure those places are regulated. 

But if you have one big room, you can go attack abandonment together. Get that into a healthy place, and then you can start adding some KPIs on top of it. Same-day resolution, 24-hour resolution. You can start looking at the speed of the answer. 

You can start adding on top of the baseline. And there is room to say, this guy’s been here 10 years. He’s our best tech on this problem. Let’s go give him some space to do some work on these really hard things. But what they did is, everyone had their own little spaces, but it’s very hard to manage everyone in their particularities if you don’t have a huge bureaucratic structure. [00:14:00] So does that make sense?

[00:14:02]  Steve MacDonald: It does. One of the things that you said at the very beginning there was the most meaningful to me. And that was that there were all these preconceived notions of what was happening. There is rarely a problem that rises in the upper echelons of the company. The P, the firm, the VC firm, and nobody’s going to see a big problem and have no opinion about it. They’re going to jump to conclusions on what’s happening. This was a big tech. We needed to update our tech, and that was a big issue. Let’s go do it. And what you did is you said, no, let’s go investigate. Let’s do some research. Let’s figure out what’s the root cause that is actually handling this before we go forward on our assumptions. And in business, we have so much to do that it is very easy to go forward on our assumptions as true.

[00:14:43] Steve MacDonald: Your research-oriented approach to CX is basically: we have problems. Let’s do the necessary research to figure out what’s the true problem, not based on our experience. I’m sure there were a lot of people who thought the problem was, that had been in the business for a long time, and had long careers, right? They were just dead wrong. It wasn’t because they were bad people. It’s because we just didn’t take the time to figure out the root cause.

[00:15:29] Bennet Potter: Yeah, and that’s why it’s always healthy to bring someone external to an organization. Like, one way to measure the health of a team is by how well they accept new people. How quickly we can get those people shining with their giftings? That’s a really good measure of a healthy team because, too, you want that external voice. That’s why, like, an NPS survey is so useful to get the whole organization aligned on where the direction out is. And you need that external voice.

[00:15:40] Bennet Potter: So I think for this company, what’s crazy about it is they have such good support from a metric standpoint, say, on post-ticket closure, like elite status because of how they care. And what’s amazing is we do not have employee turnover in a call center almost at all. And it’s because there’s an amazing team. 

There is a tremendous depth of knowledge and really good organic training within. So, the moment we figured out just a couple of these issues, all of the other things started to get fixed really quickly. So, we’ve gone ahead, like we built the 90-day plan this summer that we executed. We’ve probably added 10 things on top of that from a process standpoint and a KPI standpoint to just keep getting more angles on how our customer experiences. That doesn’t mean we’re anywhere near close. In terms of what the perfect execution of making sure our customers are succeeding is, we’re not. 

There are all sorts of different limitations that each of these businesses faces. But that’s where the fun is because you can start attacking. Okay, we might have a money limitation on this a headcount problem on this, or a reputation issue here. How do we do it within the limits of what we have? Who’s the best to figure out the problem?

[00:17:11] Steve MacDonald: So, you mentioned in their process at the very beginning of the podcast, we talked about how most companies operate with extreme inefficiency on the most important things. And so you just talked about processes, and we’ve talked in our previous conversations about process simplification and tackling these inefficiencies. Give us an idea of what you’re talking about there—maybe a story that brings it to light.

[00:15:25] Bennet Potter: Yeah, and for what it’s worth, some of this is how I’ve inhabited what you just said—the importance of simplification and efficiency and how to get that. For me, some of this is new from a business perspective, because I’ve never really managed people in the way I’m managing people now. It just wasn’t part of my career. I had it as an RD with RAs; it’s just not the same as the company and having a lot of employees to care for, support, and lead. 

One of the cool things about this job has been the good direction from leadership, not only at my present level but the level above. So shout out to my boss and my boss’s boss for giving some direction on what should be our principal means of payment. It’s something like the best product for the customer is a product that doesn’t require customer experience. 

The product is so good that you just use it and you never have to think about it. You do everything you want with it, and therefore, boom, you’re happy. You don’t need support. That’s the best support possible: no support. So ultimately, product quality—if you can get your product to be as sophisticated, supple, and user-friendly as possible—that is the ultimate. Now, we don’t live in a world where that’s simple to achieve.

[00:18:45] Bennet Potter: So CX, though, has to be embedded within that world of aiming to help R&D researchers do as much as possible to increase the quality of that production. And that’s a first principles kind of medieval understanding of how the world functions: that the good is the most unified thing at the top, and everything that comes out of the good begins to multiply. Multiplication is not helpful. If I were to go to my kid, “Hey, Elvis, son, please tell my wife that I am upset with how she made the eggs this morning,” I’ve introduced a layer of mediation that’s unnecessary. 

Depending on how that conversation goes, he could make the tone happier or more frustrated than I was. You introduce layers of mediation that are unhelpful for communication. That’s one way to think about how businesses can go towards bloating bureaucratically: instead of being as tight to the goal as possible, we introduce layers of sophistication that look nice but create more problems than they fix. That’s something especially my boss, a guy named Mark Lloyd, is all about—first principles thinking, Aristotle legit, how to run task companies. Invoking the name of Aristotle.

[00:19:55] Bennet Potter: The connection there with research is super fascinating because, in the medieval period, you have the vices and the virtues. Today, we have values. Values are economic terms. They relate to how much you value something like a bottle of water is valued like in our country, and that’s all related to economics. 

But you place a different value on something else. So, it’s like money terms. Virtues, though, all subsist in the goodness of the creation of the world. Goodness just exists, and everything is built on it. So, virtues are all tied to discerning goodness. Values are all subjective, and therefore, this idea of worldviews is tied to values. We each have different values; we each have different worldviews. Well, the medieval world didn’t think like that. Everyone just is participating in a world marked by good. And therefore, you only have seven virtues.

[00:21:00] Bennet Potter: There’s no extra kind of virtues. All the virtues subsist within these different virtues. And the main virtue, at least the cardinal virtues, is prudence, which is the ascertainment of the truth. It’s the ability to see and listen to reality and respond appropriately. That’s research. And one of the virtues that subsists within the virtue of prudence is diligence or studiousness, which is a long study in the same direction on the same topic.

Now, this kind of brings up a point we talked about on our earlier call, but the vice—there are vices attached to each of these virtues. And the vice associated with diligence is curiosity. And we, as kind of modern 21st-century people, love the word curiosity. It’s among the highest of virtues for our own time.

[00:21:50] Bennet Potter: he association, I think, is the idea of wonder: like you go and investigate things, and you enjoy the world. That’s the association it has. But actually, it’s one of the deepest vices of the medieval period. You do not want to be a curious person. That’s where you get the “curiosity killed the cat” type of thing. 

But the reason why is because you have these things called curiosity shops—lots, hundreds of little things you can look at that are all a little bit different, but they’re all cheap. And that’s the point. The difference between curiosity and studiousness is depth. Curiosity—you have a hundred things; they’re yours, they’re equipment in your little arsenal of knowledge, but you don’t know enough about them, and they’re not durable enough. And once someone asks you the question, “Why?” like three times, you’ve already exhausted your knowledge of that thing. Diligence is building. So, everything that is tied up with that virtue of the good builds, so that your equipment to manage the world—to be just, to be courageous, to be temperate—those are the virtues built on prudence. 

[00:22:57] Bennet Potter: All of those things rely upon your understanding of reality. So, if you’re curious, and you are imprudent, then you will act unjustly. You will make unjust decisions. You will have false courage. You’ll attack things that shouldn’t be attacked. And then you’ll also be intemperate. You’ll think you can control the whole world.

For me, that’s my 16th, 17th century history coming back to this random new location called me, as a director of customer experience. It’s actually so applicable—tremendously applicable in terms of how to solve problems, much more applicable than the kind of modern sensibilities around knowledge acquisition.

[00:23:45] Steve MacDonald: Curiosity is meant in society today is a very good thing. The perception is that if you’re curious, you’re going to explore, you’re going to learn, you’re not going to accept the status quo, that you’re going to, if you don’t look for answers, you’re not going to find them. 

So I love the difference in the analogies there and what I want to know is, how does this translate into organizational learning and then collaboration, and how you bring the teams together? I understand exactly what you’re saying. How do you translate it into actually getting work done?

[00:24:13] Bennet Potter: Yeah. I’ve always been pretty anti-self-help books and anti-business books. It’s just, I think me being so oriented to history and the great books and stuff, I’m just allergic to all the modern self-help type stuff. But the name is Patrick Lencioni. So if anyone, I think, can express some of the things that I’m actually—like my felt experience around this—it’s someone like him as it relates to the ideal. 

How do you get your team to function within the realm of prudence and diligence while you do it? By making sure that your goal is crystal clear, and if you can’t, as a director or a manager, articulate every single day what the most important thing is for the job, you have not discerned a good enough vision for your teams. 

If you are bored by your own speech about what we need to do for the customer today, you are probably marked by curiosity. And your teams will reflect it long term because they will be off task. They will not discern the right thing to start on. They will think the problem is the tech or they think the problem is the sales team talking to customers too much, instead of saying, “Hey, will you reach out to our support?” They will misidentify the problem. 

So you need to repeat. Once you know the goal, if the goal is good, then it’s good and it persists as good, and it’s worth pursuing and it’s worth thinking about. And like one of the coolest things about Lencioni—one of the things I’ve traced in his work—is he makes this great claim that your biannual reviews with employees should be the best moments and the most exciting meetings of the year.

[00:26:00] Bennet Potter: Nobody should fear them. We love them because you guys had attacked a really hard goal, and you’ve done really good work, and you’ve achieved, hopefully, and you’ve failed and you’ve learned from the failures. But doing good—those meetings should be so joyful for everyone involved, even if there’s a hard word to offer. But they become strategy and an opportunity to talk, and reflect on the good again. 

How do we do this for this set of customers that you’re managing? Like, it’s a really hard problem you’ve been tackling, but how do we get at it? What do we need to do to research them? Or do we need to meet with them more? Like, how do we problem-solve together? So I think that’s really good as at least a litmus test of if you’re doing badly. If you find yourself annoyed by repeating the same thing, then you need to recalibrate and understand what the vision ought to be.

[00:26:50] Bennet Potter: As leaders, you should be voraciously reading and understanding your clientele and your team’s needs, listening to every single place you can. So you can make sure that the goal is protected as a company. So most people who are curious, often curiosity ties itself up in being charming, that you have to hide that you’re curious or you look pseudo-intelligent because you can spout off all these facts and stuff. 

But that’s not being pseudo-anything. It’s unhelpful. So like the way to, you can know if someone’s probably marked by curiosity—just ask them how many books they read last year. If it’s under five, it’s not enough. Sorry. The world’s too complicated. 

Five books are not enough, especially if you’re pursuing the good into the future and you’re not just doing reactive work. Then you have to be learning more because the future, the infinity, is upon you. You must discern the new thing. You have to try a new thing. 

You’re in a new season and I’ve got to do this new budgetary thing that somehow got placed in my lap, but it got placed there because I’ve done really good work. Now I have to go learn a new thing, or the business does well, so we can achieve that next goal.

[00:27:52] Bennet Potter:  Everyone’s got to relearn the thing. So I’m just saying that if you’re not voraciously reading, you will not be top of the game. You will be curious, no doubt. You’ll be at least infected by curiosity. That doesn’t mean you’ll be like a full-blown sellout to it. But you’ve got to read probably 20, to 25 books a year to not be at least somewhat susceptible to the disease.

[00:28:25] Steve MacDonald: I’m going to add one thing as a major takeaway that I have. Then I’m going to ask you, if you had 30 seconds, what’s the one takeaway that you want people to have? 

Here’s my takeaway: I love the idea of simplifying and reiterating key core goals, like “no puppy left behind.” That was so visual, it evoked all the right emotions, the right actions, the right attitudes. Making it simple—the answers don’t have to be complex, but if we simplify in the right ways and then unify, then everybody is on the same page. 

So in 30 seconds, I would love to know what is your one single takeaway that you want people to have from this podcast.

[00:29:00] Bennet Potter: eah, I would say something like, be open to being ignorant. If you’re ignorant, that is the first step in prudence. You don’t have enough. You lack, that’s fine. The journey is towards the infinite good for you and your teams and you and your clients. 

Do not abdicate the responsibility to take the long journey of learning from every encounter, and make sure that when you set your vision, you’re not bored by it. If you’re bored by it, it’s not a good vision. If the vision is good enough, it is an untappable well for you to pursue with your teams. 

If you have that untappable well, it’s good for you and your clients. And it’s like the best journey to go down to. So you get an infinity of learning, an infinity of work. So something like that.

[00:29:55] Steve MacDonald: Bennett, thank you so much. This has been fun, but just eye-opening at the same time. I love your medieval examples which help us think about these things. This is what the podcast is all about, is bringing on different perspectives and new learning so we can all start to think differently, but simplifying how we can think too. I appreciate you coming on, everything that you’ve said today, really do

[00:30:21] Bennet Potter: You’re sweet to me. Thanks for reaching out.