The Evolution of Buzzsprout Support

In this episode of "Happy to Help", we have Buzzsprout co-founder, Kevin Finn, on to walk us through the evolution of Buzzsprout support.

From the humble beginnings of a shared Gmail inbox where customer feedback directly impacted the platform's future, to the present-day well-oiled machine of a dedicated team, this episode uncovers what happened behind the scenes.

As we discuss the early challenges, Kevin highlights the fine balance between nurturing a startup and the burgeoning demands of customer care. Through the years, Buzzsprout support has transformed into a Podcaster Success team, and Kevin and Priscilla talk about what that looks like and how to navigate those changes within a growing team.

Mentioned in this episode:
Happy to Help - Episode 5: The Right Tone for Remarkable Support
Buzzcast - Episode 46: The Day Podcasts Stopped

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!

Follow us on Instagram @happytohelppod

To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Priscilla: 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help. A podcast about customer support from the people of Buzzsprout. I'm your host, priscilla Brooke. Today we're talking about the evolution of Buzzsprout support. We'll talk about the years before we had dedicated support, growing the support team and transitioning to a success team. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it.

Priscilla: 0:20

As always, we have our wonderful producer, jordan, with us Hi Jordan, hey there. And today we have our wonderful producer, jordan with us Hi Jordan, hey there. And today we also have Kevin Finn joining us. Kevin is a Buzzsprout co-founder and spends most of his time on the Buzzsprout product and occasionally he'll come into support and give our customers some excellent experiences, but for the most part he spends his time on product and kind of creating the culture that we work in every day on product and kind of creating the culture that we work in every day. So I asked Kevin to join us today because he's been with Buzzsprout since the beginning and he's had a front row seat seeing the growth of the support team over the years. In fact, kevin was here long before I joined the Buzzsprout team, so I'm excited to learn from him today from those first years of Buzzsprout support. So when Buzzsprout originated, it was 2009. And how many people were here when Buzzsprout started, kevin.

Kevin: 1:09

Oh, when Buzzsprout officially launched for the first time to the public, it was really just Tom and I still so Dave, who is one of our lead designers here at the company. He was working with us at the time but as a contractor like he wasn't even a full-time employee.

Priscilla: 1:25

Oh, really, so it was just two of you.

Kevin: 1:27

Yeah, really. And so we knew that we wanted to add Dave to the team, but we were small enough and just didn't have the revenue to be able to afford him yet, and so Dave was living out in Seattle Washington or in that area at the time. He wanted to move back to Jacksonville. We were coming up with this idea of, hey, this is a big shift for a company to go from the two co-founders to start having employees, and yeah, so that's what we're working towards. While we were developing the first prototypes and starting to code and build this Buzzsprout product.

Priscilla: 1:59

When you launched Buzzsprout, how long was it before you started getting support like emails, and who was handling those?

Kevin: 2:07

Day one, like all product launches, you know you pick a date and then you open it up to the world and usually around the time that you open it up, you want to start doing some sort of marketing around that, whether that be like a press release or you know you get on social networks or whatever is a big way to do it today. But you're trying to make some sort of splash, you're trying to get as many people as you can to recognize hey, here's something new. You have this finite window of new and you try to capitalize on as much as possible. So, as expected, when you're, you know our circles weren't huge at that time, but maybe we got out in front of whatever, maybe 15, 20 accounts. Maybe I huge at that time, but maybe we got out in front of whatever maybe 15, 20 accounts. Maybe I can't remember exactly. But in that, in the first day or so of launching and yeah, I think probably within the first couple hours of the site being live to the world, we probably got our first support email.

Priscilla: 2:55

How did you guys balance covering support but then also developing a product over those like first years? Were you kind of dedicating specific time to support or was it just kind of checking it throughout the day? How did that work?

Kevin: 3:07

Yeah, a little bit of everything, tom. You know he worked his way and I worked my way and there were some differences and it might be interesting to talk through some of those, but we definitely didn't have systems Like we didn't sit down and take the time to be like this is how we're going to do support. We did not. We just said who knows what this is going to be, this is going to be something huge or it's going to be something small. It's probably not going to be something huge right away, and so we were just doing support over email. So both of us had access to a shared Gmail inbox and we had it open in a separate tab.

Kevin: 3:37

We launched the site, we went to whatever marketing stuff we were doing at the time, which again was like there was no product hunt. I mean, twitter was around. I do remember posting it on Twitter. Pod news didn't exist yet, so there wasn't like getting any mentions in pod news or whatever. But we're just kind of beating the trees as best we could. Probably posted some stuff on Facebook. I was probably working like Google SEO magic, as best I could, to try to generate anybody who was searching for podcast hosting. Maybe I was paying a little bit for some paid ad search on that day or something. And then, yeah, those first support email comes in and probably Tom and I were both like super excited to see it and couldn't wait Like I'll get it. No, I'll get it. And we were probably very excited about responding to a potential customer and so it's fun and it's very exciting at the beginning. Now, how does that play out over the next six months?

Jordan: 4:24

It does start to really impact how you do work right, yeah, I mentioned the wheels started falling off at some point, both juggling the same Gmail account.

Priscilla: 4:33

Yeah, as issues come in, it's like, oh, now we got to handle these bugs that are coming in, that we're seeing through support.

Kevin: 4:39

Yeah, but I think there's a couple of different ways you can at it. One in the beginning it's kind of like a curse and a blessing, but oftentimes I think people look at it as more of a curse than a blessing. The reality is that that's super helpful to be able to have direct feedback from your customers, from the people who have just spent. We spent probably nine months or so building that initial version one of what Buzzsprout was and so we've thought about these problems that we're trying to solve for a long period of time and we've come out with our best answers to these problems. And then you start immediately hearing back from people who are using the product and you're figuring out did we get it right? Did we get it wrong? They have opinions. They think that the way that you're solving is not necessarily the way they would have solved it, or it's not what they're used to. Maybe they're coming from a competitive product and they're checking yours out, and so it's disruptive for sure, because you're coming from a long period of time where your head's down developing and you're not doing anything else other than developing and you get to work for long stretches of uninterrupted time. You get a lot of deep thought, and now we knew from the very beginning that we wanted to be a product that served our customers well.

Kevin: 5:50

It was something Tom and I always talked about as we were talking about building products and moving into a product industry from a service industry was that service was something that was built into both of us. We liked being in the service industry, but now we were going to build products, and so how do we translate service into product? We knew we wanted to be known as somebody who is a software company that offered great service always, and so here's our first opportunity to do that. Well, Now we had other software products. We launched a time tracking product before that and we had a content management system and we had experience doing this. But this is a new type of customer, the type of customers that we get on Buzzsprout in broad strokes, like non-technical. A podcasting can be a lonely game, things like that. More things that we've learned. We didn't necessarily know all that day one.

Priscilla: 6:33

Yeah, and as you started growing Buzzsprout I mean you started in 2009 and I didn't come on the team until 2017. So, as you were bringing people on the team that were not support specialists so more developers, more designers, marketing did you train those people to do support or did it just stick to you and Tom?

Kevin: 6:54

I think Tom and I carried the bulk of it, but it was an expectation that anybody that was added to the team would be trained up so that they could do support, and oftentimes we'd loop them in just depending on, like, the load that we had for the day. So it's important to probably also recognize that as we built out the team, Tom and I weren't necessarily replacing ourselves first. That didn't come until much much later and so we hired programmers, we hired designers and there was overlap in the work that, like, I was doing as a designer and then the work that Dave was doing as a designer. But I was still designing and so was Dave. But I would primarily carry the majority of the support work, even more so than Tom in our early days. Tom loves doing sports still does like to this day probably does more support than I do.

Jordan: 7:36

He really loves it.

Kevin: 7:38

But just because of the amount of work that we each had to do, like it was easier for me to probably context switch out of deep work into support and then switch back without losing as much ground as somebody like a programmer. So programmers are writing code and they're, you know, tracking down drugs and they're designing databases and stuff. So to context switch out of that it was more of a cost associated with it and so, like we just tried to be as respectful as possible. But again, I think Tom actually got a lot of life. He gets a lot of life. He's more extroverted than I am and whether that happens over email or a conversation in general, he could jump out of programming and do support for 20, 30 minutes and it would actually energize him and then he would jump back into coding and he would code better and he would love it.

Kevin: 8:21

For me, again, being more introverted, if I interacted with customers for 30, 45 minutes an hour to clear out the support box before jumping in, I would end up feeling more drained. So figuring out what's the best time of days to do that, what's the cadence to do that, that's the right thing. So like I figured out for me, like every 15 or 20 minutes, hopping over and answering one email and then getting back into my work. That worked better for me. I didn't feel as drained. Tom would do it. He would code for like two hours and then he would do support for like 15, 20 minutes and then he'd go code for two hours. That was his cadence.

Priscilla: 8:51

Yeah, I know at some point you hired someone for marketing and they also kind of started to focus on support a little bit more. It became a little bit more in their roles and responsibilities Correct. I want to talk a little bit about how marketing and support kind of go hand in hand in that way and how that's a good strategy for bringing someone on your team, almost like part-time on support, who's also kind of helping you with the marketing side of things, because I do think those two responsibilities can go hand in hand.

Kevin: 9:20

Yeah, and the overlap that you're talking about has to do with, I mean, customer communication. Yeah, so, whether they're prospective customers that you're trying to reach on the marketing side or existing customers that need help with the product, I think it's the same thing. And so when we were small and the smaller your organization, the more hats you wear. So, like we were just talking about at the beginning, it was just Tom and I, so we wore all the hats and then, as we built the team out, we built that. We came up with this position for a marketing slash, customer support person, and I can't remember exactly what we called the position. Did we think the marketing was the bigger job or the support was the bigger job? But I think it was actually support being the bigger job.

Kevin: 9:56

We knew that there was a job around support. We knew we had enough customers at that point. Let's set the timetables here. So we launched in 2009. The person who you're talking about, who came into this hybrid position that eventually has now grown into our head of marketing, his name is Albin, and if anybody listens to BuzzCast or interacts with Buzzsprout at any conferences, you probably met Albin, because he heads up our marketing. So he's a very public face of the company now at this point, but this was around 2014,. I think it was about five years after the launch that we met Albin. We knew he was a great cultural fit for our team and we thought he could handle this hybrid role of we know there's support that needs to be done. It didn't feel like yet that was big enough to be a dedicated position to be just doing support, but we knew it would be over time Like we could track the growth curve that as long as we stay on this trajectory, there definitely will be a head of support role here.

Kevin: 10:48

What we didn't know, as clearly is, if there would be a marketing role like that has a lot to do with how fast you grow, what the opportunity in the market is.

Priscilla: 10:55

I was going to say marketing kind of takes what you put into it too. You can ignore marketing easier than you can ignore people writing and leaving you emails.

Kevin: 11:04

So yeah, yeah absolutely, and so Albin's role when he first came in was support being your number one priority. Make sure all of our existing customers are well taken care of and then, whatever leftovers you have, we have some experiments that we'd like to run on the marketing side, and so we did that for three years and Albin did a really great job of kind of finding the right tone, and it was kind of a similar tone. Again, you want similar tones on how you market your product versus how you now interact with existing customers right.

Kevin: 11:31

You don't want to sell people on one experience and then they come in and start interacting with your support team and it sounds totally different. Or you sounded all super friendly on the marketing side when I met you at a conference but then I get you know gruff emails back, super professional, grumpy emails, right, yeah, so that was good and that was a lot of stability that was added to the customer experience overall. Funny story. But this is when Tom and I were just doing support One of the earlier reviews for a different product that we have which is called Tick, which is a time tracking software, and when that launched one of the big like blogs at the time a big, it was like a corporate blog. It was called cnet, I don't I'm sure cnet's still around in some yeah right.

Kevin: 12:08

Well, they did a review of tick and we're like, oh, this is great, and it actually was great. It brought us thousands of customers within the first couple weeks of the article going live. But the the person who wrote the article had actually tested the software as you would expect. They took screenshots and and they did a glowing write-up of what the software does, and then they also tested our support system. So they wrote in a few times, kind of like Secret Shopper in disguise, to kind of see what they got back. And they wrote in the review that the support was great in that it was always a timely response and it answered their questions sufficiently. But they noted that the tone ranged from happy to help to sometimes gruff, and so it's Tom or Kevin.

Kevin: 12:50

Right. And so for years we would go back and forth of which one of us is happy to help and which one is gruff, and Tom would always say, oh, you were gruff, and I'm like I don't think so, man, like I'm pretty sure you're the gruff one. And so we went back through the sent emails to try to figure out who the secret shopper was and if either one of us were ever gruff.

Priscilla: 13:07

Did you ever figure it out?

Kevin: 13:09

No, I mean, I'm convinced it was Tom, tom's, convinced it was me.

Priscilla: 13:12

So I don't know who's to say. I mean, I think you've both been on both sides of that at some point in the last 18 years.

Kevin: 13:18

Sure, but we both have the same goal and that we don't want gruff. Gruff was not the goal that we had. No, we don't want gruff.

Priscilla: 13:24

And a couple episodes ago, jordan and I talked about setting tone for your support team and that it's important to do that as early as you can, and so you know that's a good example of having that in line, ready to go, so that when you're working, even if you're not a dedicated support person, to know exactly how you want that tone to come across is important. Yeah, okay, so before we leave these like early years, kevin, do you have any advice for people who are starting a new product and are kind of in those early phases of support, when you have those limited resources?

Kevin: 13:56

Well, you know, I don't know that I have advice that would help you provide excellent support, but I would say that there is a lot of good that comes out of doing support for the product that you built yourself for as long as possible. I mean. The cost, of course, is that it's going to slow down your development work, but I think that's not really as big of a cost as you think it is in the moment, because you have this long list of things that you want to build and enhancements that you want to make, and you have this roadmap that you think we have to do all these things before we're going to actually make it big. And there's a gift in the forcing mechanism of slowing down to take care of the few customers that you have already in those early days and listening to them and really understanding their problems more, and then using that as an opportunity to rethink like, oh, we thought we needed to do this, but nobody's really struggling with that or nobody's really asking for that. And there's this idea that we tried and a few people are stumbling on that. Maybe we got that wrong.

Kevin: 14:53

Maybe we need to rethink that before we go on to the next thing, and so I love these ideas of forcing mechanisms, like putting them in place in our lives and then, instead of like doing everything you can to move beyond it as long as possible, using the opportunity that you're in to sit there and figure out what are the learnings that we have in this season that we won't be able to get once we move out of it. Like once we hire somebody to be a full-time support person, we can have this like inauthentic thing where we come in and do support once in a while and stuff, but it's not going to ever be this again. It's not ever going to be. We have to interact with our customers, we have to take care of our customers. We are forced to slow down our development timelines because this is so important to us.

Jordan: 15:34

Yeah, it's easier to identify the pain points when you're actually in the trenches Right Exactly.

Kevin: 15:39

Those are things that you won't be able to get back. Yeah, we will be able to get back. We will be able to put systems in place where we don't lose touch of them completely, but it's still not exactly this, and so I say, like, use that gift for all it's worth and embrace it and say we are forced to slow down. What is the good that can come out of this? We are forced to interact with our customers instead of building new things.

Priscilla: 16:00

Or maybe we get to we get to interact with our customers. Yeah, I'm sorry, new things. Or maybe we get to we get to interact with our customers. Yeah, I'm sorry, but it's the forcing because you have to do it. Yeah, I see what you're saying, but kind of like reframing, I'm trying to use that as a positive right.

Jordan: 16:11

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin: 16:11

Reframe that it is really good. There is goodness in going slow. There is there's, especially when you launch something new to new people. A lot of people talk about product market fit and stuff. I'm not sure I subscribe to all of the teachings around product market fit, but what I do subscribe to is you thought about a solution to this problem that you just put into the world for a very long time. Now let the world have some time to figure out if you were right before you just knee jerk, react to the earliest feedback that you get, just because this person happened to find your link first and clicked on it and create an account and then said, uh, I don't like this, it doesn't mean you were wrong. Maybe just the first person who found your product, maybe it was. They just weren't the right person and so give it time. Like maybe more people will come in who your product resonates better with. Maybe you did get it wrong, I don't know, but there's goodness in that forcing mechanism.

Priscilla: 17:00

Yeah, that actually makes me think of when I first started with Buzzsprout. That was one of the refreshing things that I remember being trained on was that not everyone is going to love the product that we offer, and that that's okay, and that sometimes we won't be the right fit for someone, but that doesn't mean that the product is bad, and I remember kind of hearing that and it was really refreshing to hear that and go okay, we don't have to be perfect for every single person. We just have to find the people who are going to resonate with what we believe and how we want to do podcasting, and so that's just really important to keep in mind. Yeah, so over the years from 2017 to 2020, we really just brought on one additional person Addie joined the team and so it was just her and I doing support and it was fun because it was just the two of us. There was a lot of bouncing off of each other, but there wasn't a lot of structure as far as the support team went because it was just the two of us.

Priscilla: 17:52

So in 2020 is when we kind of started moving and having this idea of offering beyond your regular traditional hours coverage, so expanding beyond that nine to five. Correct, we hadn't done that before. We had really just been working nine to five, and anything that came in after five waited until the next day. And anything that came in on the weekend, tom and Kevin kind of kept an eye on, but it waited until Monday for the most part. Kevin, you were the first person to bring up this idea of doing weekend support. Do you remember what drove that? Yeah, I remember what drove it.

Kevin: 18:23

Well, I have my version of history in yogurt, so let's see if they align. Okay, I would say that we'd always since 2009, when we launched the product that we'd always done some version of after hours support, and so we would consider that nights and weekends and holidays also, and what it looked like until we decided to put a more formal structure around it was that it was never the responsibility of Albin, or when we brought on Priscilla or when we brought on Addie. It was never their responsibility because we hadn't formalized it. What it was was something that Tom and I would just do on our own, and the negative to that was it was super inconsistent, obviously, for the customers, but it also put I think is my perception anyway. I don't know that we've ever talked about this, priscilla, so let's have this talk now.

Kevin: 19:12

I mean, let me ask how you felt about it, but I felt like it put people like Alvin and Priscilla and Addy a little bit in a position of, oh, I took off on Friday, I had a great weekend. I come back Monday morning and I'd look in the support box and I noticed that Tom and Kevin responded to 50 customers over the weekend. Hey, I don't know how I feel about that and that wasn't anything that we wanted to do. We didn't ever want anybody to feel like they couldn't have their weekend and Tom and I would do our best to not let it detract from our weekend. But if we had an hour here, an hour there, we would hop in and take care of some of those customers as best we could. But I felt like the negative was that it made the team sometimes feel like, oh, they're doing support on the weekends. Maybe I should be, can I really enjoy it? Like so yeah, let me ask you now did you ever feel like that?

Priscilla: 19:59

You know it's funny. I don't think I would have said that without you saying that. Now, I don't think it would have been something that I remembered.

Kevin: 20:05

Right.

Priscilla: 20:05

And I don't remember being a strong feeling, but I do remember there would be moments where I'd be like, oh, I should have done that, like I want to impress Tom and Kevin. I should have been the one looking on Saturday to see if someone had written in. What I remember being the biggest driver was you and I had a conversation once where you kind of posed the question how many potential customers are we losing over the weekend when they write in about our product and then we don't respond until Monday about our product and then we don't respond until Monday? And how many people are we losing when they go to another host that has weekend support and get an answer same day and we can't get to them until Monday and they've already made the decision and so at that point they're not going to come back to us, and so that was in my memory kind of like the driving force between you know, that kind of started this conversation of weekend support, because we really just started thinking about weekend support and not so much nights.

Priscilla: 20:55

And so in 2020, the first three or four months of 2020, addie and I split up the weekends and one person would put two hours in on Saturday and one person would put two in on Sunday and it was kind of throughout the day.

Priscilla: 21:08

You just jump in and you'd look for those specific emails that were new customers or potential customers or people who had run into issues that needed a quick fix, type of thing. And it worked well for us for three or four months because we just kind of took an hour out earlier in the week and we would put it in on the weekend and it was fine. But what we noticed was that it had this really big effect on our podcasters and they were loving the fact that they could get an answer back on a Saturday when they weren't used to it, and it really was a small hit to Addie or I to spend two hours on a Saturday in the inbox. And then it made Monday so much easier too, because we would have cleared out X amount of emails over the weekend and then Monday morning we'd come into a lighter inbox. And so we started to realize over those four months that putting in such a minimal amount of after hours coverage had a really big impact on our podcasters.

Kevin: 22:01

Yeah, and I would say a lot of this has to do with the space that you're in. So for Buzzsprout it was a different product in that this was kind of our first product that was aimed at. A lot of people who fall into the market for Buzzsprout are hobbyists, and so during business hours they are working their primary job and podcasting for them is something that they do as a hobby, and so they get home from work and they fire up their podcast. Or it's the weekend and they've cleared out some time on Saturday to try to launch their first episode or something. And so running a product that a large part of your target market is doing this stuff after hours and then your support team is not available to them after hours. We kind of missed early on, I don't know that we saw that coming In hindsight it's a duh moment.

Priscilla: 22:47

It's obvious, yeah.

Kevin: 22:49

But it took us a little bit of experimenting in a few years before we started putting those pieces together and realizing that it's not the majority of our support, but it's an important.

Kevin: 22:59

Part of our support is taking care of people after hours, because that's the time they have to do their podcast, and most of the product support that we do is upfront. So it's people who are just starting out and now they've got they run into a question or they're not sure if I should mark this whole podcast or this specific episode as explicit or something like that. Or can you help me with my artwork? These are early questions that are simple to answer and then just take someone from a prospect to a customer and then from that point forward, their interactions with support are very low, and so if you can just help them get over those initial hurdles, there's a huge benefit on the back end of that and being able to offer that support when they do it, versus having to wait 24 hours for a response. It's a big again. Who are we? Who is Buzzsprout? Is customer service important to us or not? And if it is, then we need to be available when our customers are using our product.

Priscilla: 23:49

Yeah, and I think that's about the time where I started to feel like support was part of the product and kind of take ownership of that in the role, in that we were providing this service and it was even higher than just your traditional kind of support team. It was probably about 2020 when we started expanding those hours of coverage and so, if you're following the timeline, this was like March of 2020 that we were kind of getting into the groove of providing some weekend support and we were starting to see this growth in podcasting about that time and so we were trying to get prepared for that and we were making product updates on Buzzsprout that we knew were going to help grow the product and so, kevin, you and Tom and Marshall started looking for a new person to bring in to kind of help expand our weekend and evening hours at that point in March of 2020. We just didn't realize we would be doing all of this at the same time as a global pandemic.

Jordan: 24:44

That's right, when podcasting like exploded. So you? Guys like really needed a lot of support. Yeah.

Kevin: 24:50

And ironically it was also when nights and weekends kind of went away, because every day Saturday, because no one's working anymore, Exactly.

Priscilla: 24:57

Well, and it was funny because we hired a third person, full time person, for the support team and she started on April 1st and that was like two weeks after we had gone fully remote as a company and so we were training someone new fully remote for the first time and also starting to see the beginning of this kind of boom in podcasting, which meant, you know, boom and new podcasters coming to Buzzsprout, and so we were training a new person while we were kind of experiencing this influx of emails.

Priscilla: 25:27

And then, when she got trained is when we really started leaning into many more hours, nights and weekends and I remember thinking at the time how overwhelming those first couple months were, regardless of the fact that we were all dealing with the trauma of a pandemic and everything that was going on at that time but just being like, wow, we are getting so many more emails, our influx of emails have gone up so much in the last 30 days, and we're trying to train a new person and get her fully on the team and running and we're trying to move into after hours support and so I want to kind of talk about the importance. Oh man, we wait until the last second, but in the.

Kevin: 26:06

Moment.

Priscilla: 26:07

I actually think that really when the boom started, like we were in a good place, it was kind of a sink or swim moment for Megan, the new person we had hired, and so she had a lot of like on the job training we talked about as we hire new people. She'll sometimes bring up that when she started she got like a week of training and then that was it and then she was just in it and running with us. But I think it's important to talk about hiring kind of ahead of time and seeing where your product is going and, like you were saying earlier, the support is going to grow as your product grows, and being prepared for that is really important, even if it means kind of bringing people on before you're at a place where you need those people where you need those people.

Kevin: 26:56

I would say that this is one of, if not the only, places in our business where we intentionally violate a principle that we hold to like in every other instance the principle itself. We've adopted it from a company that we follow quite a bit, which is 37 Signals. They wrote a book called Getting Real and Doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work and a couple other titles, and in one of those books they wrote an essay that resonated with us, that we follow pretty closely and which is only hire when it hurts, and the principle there is that you should grow your team slowly and very intentionally and you can do a lot more than you probably think you can do, and some of the trade-offs for that stuff they're good things, and so if you want to do more design-wise, think about restructuring how you do work before you hire another person. If you're not getting as many projects done as you want, think about how to break up project management down to the team level instead of hiring a project manager. So in principle, we apply that to our business and it works very well.

Kevin: 27:51

Where it doesn't work well and where we don't subscribe to it is on the support team, because that work is not something that we want to be the most efficient at. We prioritize quality of support over efficiency, and so when somebody writes in, we want to give them the best answer. We want to connect with them individually. We might even want to offer them help about something that they aren't asking about. We might want to take the time to do a phone call or to do a Zoom call, or we might want to look at their website and help them dig in the code.

Kevin: 28:21

These are things that are outside the scope of what Buzzsprout offers, but we want to offer remarkable experiences because it has so many benefits. Not only are you making a customer for life, but you could potentially make an advocate that one customer could tell 10 other people, and then you have 10 customers Like there's. There's so many benefits and it's a core part of our product, and so we don't want to sacrifice on that. And if you're not getting through to the customers who need you, if you're not getting back to them in a reasonable like not even reasonable remarkable amount of time, then you're not living up to the brand promises that we want to be able to keep.

Priscilla: 28:52

Yeah, it was kind of what you were saying earlier too, when we were talking about marketing. You can have a little bit of control about how much you lean into marketing, but support is going to be there regardless. It's the same thing with design or with product. You can control a little bit more about what you're launching and what you're designing and what you're going to put your effort and money and time into, but with support, those emails are coming in and you don't really get an option of whether you're going to respond to them. You're going to, and so then the question becomes what's the quality of those responses? Are you going to have two people answer them with low quality, or are you going to bring in a third person and allow that quality to be so much higher?

Kevin: 29:27

Yeah, and that's the thing with that principle is the principle is called hire when it hurts. And the question for us was who is it hurting? Is it hurting us? Because if it hurts us, we'll take the hurt, we'll pay that price, and that's okay. But if it hurts our customer, then we're not willing to pay that price, we're not willing to ask our customers to pay that price. And so for support, we do not hire when it hurts. We try to stay ahead of the need to be able to continue to offer remarkable support for anybody who interacts with our support team in any way. And so that does mean that sometimes you run the potential of is it possible that we're overstaffed a little bit on support? I mean, we've never felt that way.

Priscilla: 30:02

No, we've never felt that way.

Kevin: 30:03

We've never hired somebody and we're like, oh, we're a little bit ahead on this one, but that's fine, everyone can relax, we take a little bit more. No, by the time that person is transitioned out of their old job to their new job and sometimes they want to take a little bit of downtime in between and then they come in and they get trained and then they want to feel comfortable running Like by the time you get through all that, it's always oh my gosh, what if we had waited one more week? We would have completely drowned. And so you think you're staying ahead, but you never really stay ahead. But we try as much as possible to foresee our needs. In the next four to six months, are we going to have enough customers, enough support, requests that we need another person? And if the answer is even like half of us feel like yes, then we're like okay, we'll start the search.

Priscilla: 30:43

Yeah, I remember when we were first bringing people onto the team, with me feeling like we don't need more people. I'm getting kind of nervous that we're going to bring people on and I'm not going to be needed anymore because we're bringing someone else on. Is it because of me? But then quickly realizing that, oh no, we're growing and this is actually like helpful to have someone fully trained before we need them and are in a place where we're up against a wall, and so it's been cool to see that over the years, how we hire new people and how we bring them on and how it's worked out. Timing wise, yeah.

Kevin: 31:11

And I mean, what's the downside? You're investing in something that will always be a win.

Priscilla: 31:15

Yeah.

Kevin: 31:16

Like when have you ever had to call a company or email a company and you were, I don't know, annoyed that they answered the phone too quickly, right? Or they responded to your email like too well and too quickly. Like oh, that's annoying. Like no, you're investing in something that's never going out of style which is just great customer support, understanding people's needs, responding to them quickly. This stuff is never going to get old.

Priscilla: 31:42

People will always feel valued for that That'll always be a positive interaction and a lot of times that's going to be the thing that differentiates you from a competitor is going to be those personal interactions and that's the loyalty of your customers are going to be linked to that. So one of the things when we started bringing more people on the team that we realized was that we really needed to get unified on our communication and tone goals. And so as we brought more people on, that's where that kind of started to solidify and we started putting more structure into the team, and that's when we were moving to after-hours support, so we were kind of dealing with managing schedules and there became a need for kind of a little bit more hierarchy within the team, and so that started to be talked about and really implemented over the next probably three or four years. And so if you are interested in kind of how we got to those things, how we defined our tone or how we set our communication goals, we have episodes about both of those things too, so you can go back and listen to those if you haven't heard them already.

Priscilla: 32:38

But over the last four years, like I said, we've added several people, so now we're kind of at a place where we're pretty comfortable and we have the ability to do kind of more than just your basic run of the mill support, and so we're able to lean into a success team. Kevin, back in I want to say the fall of last year, the fall of 2023, you and I had a conversation about transitioning from a support team and really what podcaster success looks like and what a success team would look like. We're kind of in the middle of this shift, this mindset shift with the team about, like you were talking about earlier, taking the time to get on a phone call with someone or help them with their website coding, those kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about what your ideas, your driving force was behind that moving into success from support?

Kevin: 33:29

Sure, yeah, I think the evolution is typically a company approaches a support department as a responsive mindset. So people will have needs that go beyond the solution that we put out into the world, and when those needs come up, we're going to wait for them to reach out to us and then we're going to respond in the best way that we possibly can. So those include thorough answers, empathetic answers, timely answers. That's all great. What we're wondering now is how of the success team can be a group of people that are working to take care of existing customers in the best way possible. So some of that will be responsive. For sure It'll be a big part of what they do. But are there proactive things that we can also be doing to take care of existing customers? And then the other side of that line, of course, is the marketing side, and marketing then becomes more of an outreach arm to prospective. So it's a lot more responsibility. That starts becoming like in the world of support. It felt like, well, we're moving beyond support. That felt reactive and we want to be proactive. So for our company we were going to call it podcaster success, because all of our customers are podcasters, but it could be applied to any other company as well. But it's moving from a support team to a success team, which is how do we make our customers successful at whatever the goals are that they're trying to achieve? And we think there's a lot of opportunity here. And so it's moving beyond support and it's teaching. So now we're becoming teachers and we're becoming advocates and we're becoming motivators. And the best way to do that stuff isn't being responsive. It's not waiting for somebody to write in and say I'm feeling down today or I'm feeling alone, or I feel like I'm speaking out into the void and I don't know if I'm reaching anybody. Well, now that you asked for it, my motivational response isn't going to hit as much as it would is if I just offered it to you without you asking. So are there opportunities to do this while we're being responsive? Absolutely.

Kevin: 35:35

So somebody writes in and says, hey, I was thinking about updating the artwork for my podcast and I reached a little bug. Can you get the file formatted right? Can you help me? Yes, I can help you do that. And, by the way, that podcast that you're doing, that is incredible. I love it, and I know 10 people in my life who would want to subscribe to the show. I'm going to tell everybody about it right now.

Kevin: 35:53

So, like now, you answered their problem and you motivated them at the same time. That's the type of solution that we want. Can we write articles, like we see the support requests all the time about people are struggling with their artwork. Is there anything technically we can do to solve this problem for them? No, it's just a little bit of a complicated thing. But how about we write an educational piece? If we wrote our support response that we give 10 times a day, if we wrote that in a blog post, then maybe who would find it on their own without even having to reach out, like let's do that too. And so it's just finding all the different ways that we can also help people become successful. That doesn't always align with the best way of doing that is waiting for them to reach out first.

Jordan: 36:29

Man, I remember when you guys changed from support to success and I was like that's interesting and I didn't know the story behind, why we made that change. And now I'm thinking like man, we could have a full episode on proactive versus responsive support.

Priscilla: 36:45

Oh, absolutely, we should definitely do that I'll write it down.

Priscilla: 36:48

We'll get it on the docket. I think there's another side of it too. So proactive support is such an important part of podcaster success. But one of the things that Kevin you, I feel like, drive a lot is this idea of delighting our users and letting that be part of the success team, and so, as we're moving into this success world, it's fun to think about ways that we can go above and beyond and delight our users.

Priscilla: 37:14

One of the things I think about is Chewy, the dog food brand. You know have been seeing recently where they will do. Things like this is going to be a little sad. So if you have a dog, just fair warning, they will. If you they see that you cancel your subscription, they'll reach out and they'll say, oh, what you know? Why'd you cancel your subscription?

Priscilla: 37:31

And if the person writes back and says, oh well, my dog passed away or something like that, they will go out of their way to send flowers and like a gift to their former customer to show them that they care about them and to show them that you know they're there if they ever get a dog in the future, and those kinds of things that are so out of the like regular support box. Those are the things that I'm like really excited to like get into as a success team, because, we've said it before, with podcasting, specifically in this industry, it can be such a solo sport and you are doing it alone. And you were talking about the encouragement and it's one thing if someone reaches out to you and then you encourage them back, but it's another thing If you reach out proactively and you encourage them. It really can help you delight and make their day better. And so I'm just excited, as we move from support into success, to see more of that kind of in our support team and kind of in the fabric of our support team.

Kevin: 38:25

Yeah, this reminds me of this, priscilla, but something unexpected that came out of our the Buzzsprout meetup that we did at the end of last summer was during our Buzzsprout meetup we had a pickleball tournament, just a team pickleball tournament, not highly competitive, just for fun.

Priscilla: 38:38

but we it was a little competitive. It Not highly competitive, just for fun. It was a little competitive. It was a little competitive. Anything just for our listeners. Anything Kevin's doing is competitive. So we got to start there.

Kevin: 38:47

But we had champions. We had a male champion and a female champion. We did, and the female champion happened to be on our support team. Yeah, and so Priscilla encouraged her to add to her email signature that she was the 2023 Buzzsprout.

Priscilla: 39:02

Pick a Ball champion. Pick aball Women's Champion. You did it for her. I actually don't think I encouraged her to it. I think I did it for her against her will. I think she didn't want it to happen and I said come on, lindsay, you want this. This is going to be fun. We'll just do it for a week and see how it goes.

Kevin: 39:15

Yeah, see, you're so good at celebrating people. You were celebrating her. You changed your email signature for her.

Priscilla: 39:20

Yeah.

Kevin: 39:20

And we had this surprising a number of customers that wrote back immediately saying oh my gosh, you play pickleball. I love pickleball. And they had this connection with her.

Jordan: 39:34

She's been invited to the West Coast to go play with some of our users on the West Coast.

Priscilla: 39:36

They've invited her out there. No way, yeah, and they still come in. I saw today, since we did that for Lindsay, we've added some job titles for other people on the team and one of our someone on the team, he loves the Nuggets the Denver Nuggets.

Kevin: 39:46

Yeah.

Priscilla: 39:47

And this morning someone wrote in and said go Nuggets to him because it was in his job title. So yeah, I think those are just such a fun way to up the level there.

Kevin: 39:56

Right, yeah, we oftentimes get trapped into this idea that the only way to connect with customers is for us to make the connection with them, as opposed to also dropping breadcrumbs that allow them to connect with us. No-transcript them. Feel like hey, if I have a problem, I know that pickleballer at Buzzsprout is going to take care of me, and if not that pickleballer, then somebody on that team.

Priscilla: 40:37

Well, when we were talking about empathy, one of the things we talked about is the more you know someone, the more you're willing to give them grace and understanding. So that's the same kind of thing. It's almost like a little bit self-serving If I let you know a little bit more about me than when you run into an issue with the product. When you write in, you're going to have a little bit more grace for us as we try to fix it, Rather than not knowing anything about us and just assuming that you're going to have a terrible experience. So you come in hot and frustrated right off the bat and so, yeah, it can be a little bit self-serving, but really helpful to like get to connect with your podcasters or your users in that way.

Kevin: 41:11

Yeah, I love that transparency and vulnerability. You know and you played a big part. It reminds me of a podcast episode that we did off of buzzcast and so, if Jordan can dig it up, there's a really cool um podcast episode that we did called uh the day the podcast stopped. Yeah, jordan remembers that when you guys remember that one um, but that was an opportunity. So what happened was um, buzzsprout got attacked by some hackers and they brought our services down for uh, the total 36 hours, or something like that it was long and painful.

Kevin: 41:39

It was painful for all of our customers, but we wanted to be as transparent about what happened and how we worked through that with our customers as possible, and so we brought in Priscilla. You spoke on behalf of the support team. We had engineers speak on behalf of engineering and designers and but how I categorize it? That speaks to allowing customers to connect with us. We were all very vulnerable in that episode about how we were feeling and how we were dealing with it, how we felt about our customers, and it was also proactive in the fact that it allowed us to be vulnerable and then put that out publicly so all of our customers could see that we are humans.

Kevin: 42:09

We make mistakes. Sometimes we do things well, sometimes we don't, sometimes things are out of our control how that makes us feel. So it was a very vulnerable period like for us to be able to do that and it was received really well. I think the result of Buzzsprout being down for almost 36 hours and being attacked was that our customer loyalty went up, which is like the opposite of what you would expect.

Priscilla: 42:30

Which was baffling.

Kevin: 42:32

Right.

Priscilla: 42:32

Yeah, and it started on a weekend. I remember sitting down on Sunday and starting to work on it and just being really nervous of how people were going to respond and handle it and how we were going to be able to respond to people. And it was the first and really the only really big thing that we've kind of gone through as a support team, you know, dealing with this huge outage. It wasn't really an outage, but this attack and I just remember being blown away by how kind our podcasters were and how they reacted so well to that transparency that we were, you know, putting out in every, every response yeah, that was a crazy time.

Jordan: 43:06

Yeah, and I think to this day, that is maybe the most popular episode we have.

Kevin: 43:12

Yeah, well, it's a very fun episode because it's set up very much like a true crime podcast, like yeah, it's, it's very dark net diaries.

Priscilla: 43:19

Yeah, we can link it in the description. Yeah Well, that's where we are today. You know we are in podcaster success. We are figuring out what that looks like. We're kind of looking at these new things that are coming on the horizon, or not really on the horizon. They're here AI and things like that and how to make podcast support more efficient. I'm sure pretty soon we will have an episode all about AI and customer support and what that means and how to use it to make your team the most efficient. But that's where we are.

Priscilla: 43:45

It feels like in the last what is it? 18 years, 14 years that Buzzsprout has been around 18, yeah, 18. That's so long. But the support team has really transformed from those early years of you and Tom doing it to now having a team of eight people who have structure and we almost have coverage 24-7. I mean, we pretty much have coverage all. But you know, 9 pm to 6 am Eastern time Every other time we basically have coverage and it's just crazy to see how that's changed so much over the years. So thanks for coming on, kevin, and talking us through all of that. I feel like I learned a ton about those early years.

Kevin: 44:26

No, I loved it. Thanks for bringing me down memory lane and thanks for all the work you do supporting our customers. You do an exceptional job of taking care of our existing customers and leading a team through a lot of transition. Like you said, we've made great strides in the years that you've been here and now taking the additional leap to help teach other people how they can bring some of the things that we've learned into their support teams, and so you're doing excellent, priscilla. We're so thankful and grateful to have you on the team. Jordan, thank you. It's always a pleasure being on a podcast with you, the best producer in the business.

Priscilla: 44:55

I agree, she is the best, she is for sure. She keeps it light, she keeps us moving along, keeps us on topic and makes us sound so smart in her post editing she really does. You've now listened to this whole episode and you're probably like, wow, kevin and Priscilla sound smart. I'll tell you, when we were recording it, we did not sound this smart.

Kevin: 45:11

Not nearly as impressive.

Priscilla: 45:12

Yeah, Jordan is responsible for all of that. So thank you Jordan, Thanks you guys.

Kevin: 45:16

All right, y'all have a great one, thank you.

Priscilla: 45:23

Have a great one, thank you. It's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences and give our advice on what we would do in these situations. So what do you have for us today, jordan?

Jordan: 45:31

So today I found a thread on Twitter that sounds eerily familiar to experiences I've also had in the past, so I thought that this would be a great one to bring to you, okay. So the Redditor asks after any shift, I get into this cognitive loop where I'm replaying every awkward interaction, whether with customers or with managers, and I think about every stupid thing. It keeps me up at night and I just feel so embarrassed and ashamed and stupid. Does this happen to anyone else and how do you stop it? Does this sound a?

Priscilla: 46:04

little familiar to you. Oh my gosh, that's so relatable, so relatable and it's such a good thing to talk about in relation to customer support, because there's so much to sit and like go through and you get off of a support shift because you've probably worked with, depending on your industry, anywhere from like 30 to 70 customers, and so there's a lot of interactions to go through. And if you're the kind of person that reruns your day, like I am and I think like you are too.

Priscilla: 46:31

Jordan. It can be really hard, and so I think that's a great question or a great thing to discuss. It makes me think of a story. About a month into working for Buzzsprout, I remember having the email service that we use to respond to podcasters allows you to review an email or an interaction, and I remember it was like the end of the day on a Wednesday or something, and I got a notification on my phone that a review had come in and I looked at it which I should not have done because I wasn't working at that time and I shouldn't have done it. But I looked at it to see what it says and it was. It wasn't even a bad rating, it was just kind of like a mild rating. It just it wasn't positive, it was negative. And then when I went and I looked at the email, it was legitimate the things that they said I really should have done better. And it just kind of put me into a tailspin and I remember that night like I didn't sleep well. I was so stressed out about going to work the next day and I was running through and then it kind of like set off these dominoes. Think about all these other email interactions I had had that day that maybe didn't go so well, and I think in that moment I had this realization of hey, if this is going to be your job every day, you can't let this derail you the way that it's derailing you right now, because you won't survive it. We just had this conversation with Kevin about support and he said something about hiring people who aren't just going to be able to be empathetic for a couple months, but are going to be empathetic for years and are going to be excited about helping users for years, and this kind of goes along with that. In that moment I went if I let this affect me this much, I will not last because I won't be able to handle it with the amount of conversation you have with customers on a day-to-day basis. And so here are some of the things that I do when I find myself getting into that kind of tailspin. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone else who's kind of dealing with turning off their brain when they're not working and not rerunning those things.

Priscilla: 48:27

I try not to think about or talk about support conversations outside of work. I don't mean that I never think about the product that we're developing or the efficiency of how I work or kind of making my support work better, but I don't think about the conversations that I've had. I try not to dwell on the conversations and I try not to talk about them. So if I have one that maybe I don't feel great about after the fact, at this moment when I'm not working, I try not to dwell on it because you're not going to be perfect all the time.

Priscilla: 49:01

So there's steps you can take while you're working to be better and so if you can't get a certain conversation out of your head that didn't go well while you're working, then email that person, follow up with them and say hey, I just wanted to follow up with you because I feel like I can give you a better response than I gave you. That transparency is good, but if it is after hours and you're trying to sleep, you're not in a place where you're going to go and respond to that person. So sitting there and worrying about it and stressing about it isn't doing anyone any good. So jot it down in your phone and your notes app that you're going to reach out to him in the morning and then go to bed and forget about it and don't sit there and stress about it. So when I close an email in support, I am prepared to forget it, if that makes sense, like I've done all the things that I need to do follow up wise or I've written down whatever notes I need to do for whatever needs to be changed with this email, but when I'm actually sending it, I am it is closed, it's a closed book. When I send it until they come back to me and that way it's not sitting in my head. Is this open Rolodex of things that I have to remember to do or things that I should have said differently. Once I send it, I'm happy with it and I'm going to back that email, and so hopefully that mindset can help.

Priscilla: 50:12

I also, you know, give myself a lot of grace. I think it's the most important one. You're not going to be perfect and if you realize something after the fact, you know, like I said, you can respond again and say, hey, I can do this a better way. But if it's too late for that, then you just kind of have to give yourself some grace and move on and figure out how you're going to be better next time, put steps in place to be better next time, but don't let yourself dwell in that, because that's not going to make you any better if you just sit there and beat yourself up about it.

Priscilla: 50:39

All right, well, thank you for bringing that to us, jordan, and remember, if you're listening and you want to share your story with us or a question about something you're running into in your work in support, you can email us at happytohelp at buzzsproutcom, or you can text the show. There is a link in the episode description that says text or send the show a message, or send the show a text message. You can click that link and it will come directly to Jordan and I and we will read those on a future episode. So send those in if you have them. I want to say again thanks to Kevin for joining us today. It was great to have him on the episode and to get so much good insight about the early years of Buzzsprout and just the transformation of the support team over the years. And thank you, jordan, as always, for being the best producer that's out there.

Jordan: 51:24

Yeah, that's my favorite episode so far. You say that every episode All right.

Priscilla: 51:30

Well, that's it for today. If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to leave us a review and follow us on Apple Podcasts or anywhere where you get your podcasts, and you can find us on Instagram at happy to help pod and interact with all of our content that we're sharing there. Thanks for listening. Now go make someone's day.