Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
If you work in customer support, if you lead a support team, or if you are looking to better the customer experience for your company, then this podcast is for you!
Happy to Help is a podcast about all things customer support brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. Join us, every other Tuesday as Buzzsprout's Head of Podcaster Success, Priscilla Brooke, dives into the world of customer support to make remarkable support the standard, not the exception!
Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
The Importance of Finding Your Community
We’re thrilled to have Sarah Hatter, the brilliant mind behind ElevateCX, on today's episode to discuss the importance of community in customer support and give us a sneak peek into ElevateCX's upcoming events!
We discuss all things community, from the importance of finding your people to ways to get connected virtually! Sarah shares why she decided to start ElevateCX over a decade ago, and how it has evolved over the years. Plus, she gives us a glimpse into the upcoming Denver and London ElevateCX events.
As a support professional, finding a community, especially when working remotely, is vital to a healthy work life. This episode will give you a jump-start on finding the community that is right for you!
To learn more about Sarah, find her on LinkedIn and at ElevateCX.co!
Join the ElevateCX Slack Channel to get connected right now! Then get your tickets for the ElevateCX Denver and London events!
Books Mentioned:
• The Customer Support Handbook
• CXOXO: Building a Support Team Your Customers Will Love
We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com
Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today's episode is all about finding your community. We'll talk about the importance of finding a community in the support industry and give you information on some upcoming events that will help you grow as a customer support professional. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. So I can already tell that this is going to be a really fun episode, Jordan, because we have a very special guest. Sarah Hatter is joining us today. She is the author of the Customer Support Handbook and the founder of Elevate CX, which is a community for customer experience leaders. She has been a leading voice in the customer experience industry for over a decade and continues to pour her expertise into improving the customer's experience across all industries.
Speaker 2:So welcome to the podcast Sarah, thank you, that is quite an intro. It ages me, fills me with pride, but also reminds me.
Speaker 1:You are full of wisdom.
Speaker 2:How long have I been at this game right? A really long time, it feels like.
Speaker 1:It's so great, though, and I feel like we have like a heavy hitter on the podcast today, so I'm very excited about it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I'm excited to be here because this is my lifeblood. This is what I do. I want to connect people. I want to use my time on this earth to help people you know, build great, long lasting relationships, and I think we've all noticed, at least in the past four or five years, that community is something you have to work at. It's something that you have to cultivate, finding your people and finding spaces where you can consistently meet new people, build great relationships and then rely on those relationships, whether it's for getting a new job or getting an endorsement. That's so important and it's so hard to do in a very siloed industry like customer support is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's so true. So we always like to kick off each episode by highlighting someone who had a positive impact on our lives. So, Sarah, how has someone made your day recently?
Speaker 2:Man, I can't believe we're kicking off with this. I am unprepared. The very first person who's coming to mind is truly Taylor Swift, and that can't be right. It can't be right, but it is right. There are no wrong answers. There are no wrong answers. You know I'm not joking. 12 years ago, when I started CoSupport, which is my boutique consulting firm, I wrote a blog post about Taylor Swift's customer experience, and if you have been around the Swifty world for long enough, you remember Red, the Red tour, you remember 1989, you remember, like how deeply invested she was in her fan base and like all of the little things like the studio sessions that she would invite super fans like starting.
Speaker 2:yeah, all of the little things like the, the studio sessions that she would invite super fans, like starting Taylor Nation. All of these things which sure it looks like marketing but it's also understanding very, very like purely the power of community, the power of people who are coming together over like a common bond. And I recently, I've recently transitioned one of my best friends to being a Swifty who was like he was never into her, and now he's blasting August like 24, seven and we watched the Taylor Swift documentary about.
Speaker 2:you know, scooter Braun, that that whole thing and it just made me sit back and realize like, wow, somebody has to make the first move in building a movement right or momentum or something. Somebody has to be the one to say I don't like how this is going. She didn't like how albums were marketed, she didn't like how tours were marketed. She didn't like that. You know, people didn't have access to what she wanted them to have access to. So she built that.
Speaker 2:And I just had this whole conversation with my friend last night after watching this about how that parallels so much about what I see happening in the Elevate community, where once you find your people, once you find this commonality in this space, the community itself can thrive in so many ways that you never thought possible or never thought that you intended to. And as I start to release more and more control, like elevate to the community and let them kind of run with things, I'm really proud to see that happening, seeing people step up, seeing people want to be more involved and take leadership and not having to be the only person to do that. But that comes from a place of a solid foundation in your community, a place where you're like I'm seen, I'm heard If I speak up. I won't be laughed at If I want to take lead on something. I'm not going to be abandoned here, and it's amazing.
Speaker 2:Like you know again, I was just Taylor Swift is a powerhouse. She's a juggernaut, but so much more than just a pop queen. Yeah, there's so much business acumen there to learn, so I was amped on thinking about her today because of that. So that's what you get from me.
Speaker 1:I think that's great. I mean, if I'm being honest, a day doesn't go by that Taylor Swift doesn't impact my life positively.
Speaker 3:So that's a perfect answer Great, Okay, I remember. I think it was during her 1989 years and I remember on social media she was posting videos of herself wrapping Christmas presents for members of her fan club. Do you?
Speaker 3:remember this I do, I do and I remember being like, wow, she is like the busiest person on the planet and she is taking the time to like, buy gifts and wrap presents for her listeners. And I was just like man, that is so meaningful. She treated them like humans. You know what I mean? Yeah, and you want to be cynical and be like, oh, it is so meaningful. She treated them like humans. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:yeah, and you want to be cynical and be like oh, it's just, she's just doing that because she's on twitter and then, as soon as the video stops, someone else takes over, right? I don't think that's true?
Speaker 1:I don't think so either.
Speaker 2:She's too much of a perfectionist to let somebody else wrap the present right and as we've all, learned, as we've all learned from Taylor Allison Swift jet lag is a, it's a choice. If you want to do things perfectly and well and show up, then that's you're choosing to do those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so great. I could talk about Taylor Swift all day, but I feel like we should shift back to community, yes. So before we jump into that, sarah, I want to learn a little bit about you and how you found yourself in the customer support world and what has made you stick around Gosh.
Speaker 2:It's been a long long time In 20, gosh it's not. I can't even use the 20 part because it was 2005 when.
Speaker 2:I started working for a startup in the SaaS world, which was still a very emerging. You know, cloud-based software was still very new in the early 2000s. I was the only non-technical employee at this company. I was doing customer support and you know, over the years we're charging hundreds of thousands, if not a million customers. I'm the only support person. I have no technical experience, I'm not a developer, I'm not a designer and you know, you just feel very isolated and very, very undervalued and I always felt like. You know maybe this is just insight into what I think of myself, but I always thought that I was the most important person at the company. Right, I'm the only one, who's?
Speaker 2:talking to customers all day long. I'm the only one who's getting insight into what they think about features that are launching. I'm the only one who's dealing with refund requests and nonprofit pricing requests and things like that. Everyone else is just kind of in their silo building things. So I started over the years like really feeling a sense that I needed to speak up for myself when it came to the idea of customer support, and I needed to start by being explicitly different than what people's baggage was about. Customer support and that's everything from like the return line at Walmart. That's everything from like you know when you dread having to call Comcast or when you know you have to go to the DMV. That's the baggage that we have and that's what we call customer service. So that was my first thing was that I will refuse to be called customer service. I refuse to be called customer service representative. I am a customer support professional. I am doing a different breed, a different design of support for our customers, and that included things like really pushing for client education, customer education the best customer is an educated customer. The most loyal customer is an educated customer Doing videos and FAQs and responding to people after they've written us and said there's a bug and saying, great, we'll get to it, and then saying, hey, we got to it, Right, and you think about all of the stuff that's really standard.
Speaker 2:Now. It really wasn't back in 2005, let alone 2000s or whatever. So in 2009, I was doing my daily chore of clearing the Gmail inbox and I got an email from someone I replied to and he brought me back and said this is a really good reply. And this might come off really weird, but I live in Australia and I do your job in Australia for a company that's like your company, and I've never met somebody who did my job before and it was the spark that just lit everything on fire for me. I was seen suddenly by my own people. Right, yeah, and I wrote him back. We became friends. That guy is Matt Patterson, who is now at Help Scout, who most of us know in the CS world.
Speaker 2:OK yeah, two years after that event, matt and I both ended up at South by Southwest and we got together for some in person. We sat at a little tiny table at a coffee shop that was just full of people. I remember like Tony Hsieh from Zappos was like knocking his backpack into me while I'm sitting at this thing and there's like you know, it's like South by the olden days it was, it was who's who, and Matt and I sat there for hours talking about our job and writing down like do you have a good answer when someone asks you for feature requests and do you have a good script about how to tell people there's going to be downtime? And what do you do if somebody's mad that they forgot to cancel their account for five years? Right, exactly, yeah, to do so. I quit that job.
Speaker 2:I started my consultancy, I wrote the book, the Customer Support Handbook, and I was on the speaking circuit just going all over the country at all of these tech conferences. I was usually the only woman on stage, sometimes the only woman on the audience. People are talking about code and people are talking about this and like cognitive leaks when it comes to your consumer, and I'm like you should be nicer in emails, like you should be happy and act happy and use exclamation points, and like write better scripts. And I was the oddball. But I started to gain traction where it mattered and that was in these larger scale SaaS companies like Atlassian and, you know, automatic, who makes WordPress. They started listening to me and giving me more of that platform and then, by 2012, october 2012, I had this idea let's get everybody who I've ever met, who does my job, in a room and do a conference and we'll do just one big show. It was begging for people to show up and 200 people showed up and by the end of the day, it was what are you going to do the next one? And that's just how things have to start. Somebody has to get out there and say you know what? This doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:I think I'm the person to make it happen.
Speaker 2:I think I'm going to loop in a bunch of people who are as weird as me, who want to see it happen.
Speaker 2:If no one's going to listen to us, we're going to listen to each other and we're going to listen to each other until we're loud enough that they can't not listen to us and to see what has happened since then in the world of customer support not taking the credit for it fully, but I think in our niche world of tech, saas support you can look at people like myself and Matt Patterson and Mercer Smith and Andrew Rios and Erica Clayton and say we have been the consistent voice Ben McCormick, don't wanna forget him Consistent voice for 10 plus years. We've not only been the consistent voice Ben McCormick, don't want to forget him Consistent voice for 10 plus years. We've not only been the consistent voice, but now we're raising up more voices and giving more people that opportunity that we didn't have. And it's stunning to look back on like truly the rapid pace that technology has grown, the rapid pace that customer experience has grown. We've gone from customer service to customer support to customer experience. Right, it's funny how it just grows and grows, and grows.
Speaker 2:It just grows and grows, but every single one of those steps is an indicator that we're more trusted, that we're given more authority, that we have a bigger voice, that we're now like a bigger part of the overall structure, of what makes a customer-centric company, yeah, so, yeah, I mean it's been a long ride. That's it in a nutshell, and then, of course, we'll probably get into this more. The most recent change in the Elevate community is me stepping back as being the full-time, 100% solo leader and making it community-owned and community-led. It's been a massive shift for us, but we're at a point where that's appropriate and necessary, and if we want to continue to raise up voices, then people like me have to get out of the way. And I've built the stage, I've polished it up, and now it's time for someone else to have something to say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I think you're clearly the best person to come on and talk about community and the importance of community and having one and finding your community, especially within customer support, because, like you said, it is so siloed especially depending on the company you're in, it can be, you know, very siloed. You're one single person doing it by yourself or you're in a small team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it can be very lonely. So can you tell me a little bit about that first conference and kind of how that experience was, meeting all these people in person and having that kind of community for the first time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's nuts when you're in it, because I think when you're in your 20s, I mean I was 28. Was I 28 or 29? Maybe 30? I don't know. I'm so old at this point now I can't do the math. You're filled with such optimism, right, and you're not quite at the point in your career, your age, where imposter syndrome has taken over.
Speaker 2:So you're just doing what you think you should do and you just have all the confidence in the world, which I did, and I think I was spurned on too by meeting people like Matt and Ben and these people who were doing what I was doing and mirroring my passion and my energy. That it makes it easier. And so the second event that we did six months after we did our first event, we did another one in New York, and that was where it really hit me. This could be a thing, because we're selling tickets Now. There's people from Uber and Vimeo and Google Speaking and all of the apps that I use Pinterest, meetup they're on my stage telling me about their job. That's the moment that it really clicks, like this isn't just me and my friends hanging out in San Francisco. This is an opportunity for us to get together, and we were also really lucky, too, that at that time, slack was becoming more ubiquitous, so we just started a Slack community and just put every attendee into our Slack community.
Speaker 2:No joke, didn't even ask for vision, just pulled them right in, didn't even tell them, just copied the email list and put them in the Slack community and it starts with, you know, 300 people and then it starts with 400 people and, you know, sometimes it's really quiet in there and sometimes you know you're the one just kind of it's like crickets and you're trying to get information from people. But the more and more and more I think you continue to be consistent with your voice and show up and ask questions maybe a question of the week or introduce someone or talk about the next event you're doing. Slowly, people start to gain confidence to participate and also I mean this is a huge, huge reminder to anybody who's looking to start a conference you might be the person who finally has the conference or the community or the event that people have been looking for, even if there's one already. That's like topical right, yeah, right, there's lots of CX communities out there. There's lots of CX conferences out there. But what if you know if I'm working at a SaaS company, an AI startup, in Silicon Valley? But what if you know if I'm working at a SaaS company, an AI startup in Silicon Valley, and I'm a team of two and we know that we have funding on a ramp to expand to a team of 10 in the next two years. I'm at a different place than someone who's like in CXPA, and they're the head of global customer experience for Samsung. Exactly, right, yeah, these are different spaces. I'm even at a different place of someone who's going to go to the Disney Institute for trading, because those are typically C-suite executives or people on that track. So that's where our niche came in.
Speaker 2:Was that we were the underdog or the underserved community, and I think that's what works really well for us. So, in starting a community, don't be afraid of competition. Competition proves market value and it proves need. Don't be afraid. Don't think that, oh, there's someone else already doing that because they may not be doing it. Well, how many of us have joined a community or a group on Facebook and it's just dead. It's just crickets and spam and advertising and it's not relevant, helpful info, right? So think about what you want to accomplish, think about who you're trying to serve, what you need and fill that need for yourself. That's truly what I did is I wanted to bring together people who were like me and who I could learn from, who I could teach and who I could also grow with. So that's always got to be the angle and I truly think that when you do things with an authentic self and with an authentic motive, you're going to be successful in whatever it is.
Speaker 2:But success looks different to everybody, right? Some people might say a 300-person Slack channel of people in the same profession who are getting together weekly is a massive success. Some people might say anything under 10,000 is a waste of time. So it just depends again on your industry and who you're trying to serve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we work in podcasting, and that's so much of what we tell podcasters all the time is. You know you're measuring your own success. However, you're going to measure it, and just because there's another podcast out there that's similar to yours doesn't mean that your podcast isn't going to be worthwhile for who knows how many people, and so it shouldn't stop you from running after what you want to do. And if you run after it for a couple of years and then decide, all right, I've done it, I'm going to step back, then that's not a failure either, but you have created something that has really lasted a long time. I mean, how have you seen the event evolve over the last 12 years that you've been running it?
Speaker 2:Well, this is such a good weird story I think about all the time because sometimes it takes me. I'm a little bit stubborn in how I want to control events and want to control the whole systematic approach to events. I will tell you, when we started, we were doing massive events. We were doing 300 person events, 400 person events. We did an event in Portland that was 450 people. We've done an event that was even more than that in San Francisco, where we had two tracks and I was hosting both tracks and I put the schedule together so that I would announce one speaker in the CS track and I would run around the stage. I would run like 200 feet to the other room and announce the next person in that like customer success track or whatever it was at the time.
Speaker 2:I don't remember. Yeah, and that day I had a guy come up to me, jake Bartlett. Jake and I go way, way back when, before I started the conference, I used to host a CX breakfast meetup in Chicago, where I lived, and he used to go to this. So this is like 2011. He came to me and he'd been to every event that I'd done at this point maybe four or five events and he was like yeah, you know, I like the smaller events. It's really hard to talk to people at these big events.
Speaker 2:There's someone here. I didn't even know that they were here until I saw that they tweeted that they were here and that's someone that I know, and it started from there. So this is probably 2014, 2015, which at that point, we'd done seven or eight events already, where we just started whittling down everything that we did and we started doing smaller locations. We started capping our audience. We moved from doing a one-day structure where we'd have like 12, 15 speakers in one day, to two days with the same amount of speakers, so you have like way more social time.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and this is where it's hard for me, because, keep in mind, when I was doing Elevate as a full-time job, this was part of my salary. A big chunk of my salary was ticket sales, sponsorship money paid for our event fees and then ticket sales was on me. So whatever I brought in after, that was how I got paid at the end of the day, and so I was always kind of shifty about like 200 people. That's not very many vacations for me to make, and so you start to kind of get scared about that. But if the audience likes that, the audience is going to show up and they're going to buy those 200 tickets right and the sponsors are going to be happy that people are there. They're going to fill the room.
Speaker 2:But then the weird thing happened. After COVID, we come back in 2022 to our first event and I decide I'm going to do a smaller, an even smaller event, the smallest event I've ever done, which is a hundred people, and that includes everyone in the room speakers, sponsors, I think we. I think we ended up about 112 people. Oh wow, my sponsors came back to me and told me how much they like the smaller event and that blew my mind yeah, I was telling them like it's going to be less people.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be this huge room of leads, but I'll give you the you know email addresses in advance. You can start to market to them, start setting up conversations. Multiple sponsors came back to me after that saying this is like the sweet spot, this is the good number, and I still have those conversations. It's the quality over the quantity. No-transcript, it is.
Speaker 3:That's the point of it. Right, I know, or meeting people Sounds like a retreat. It is.
Speaker 2:That's the point of it. Right, we kind of refer to it as like summer camp, because it's very much structured around like I'm going to get you in the room with the right people and I'm going to give you tools to interact, and our speakers are going to have 15 minutes on stage to set a conversation topic, and then we really want you all to talk to each other. We really want you all to meet each other, to hire each other, to come in and give talks with someone else's team right.
Speaker 2:Or consult. That's the point of this community. The point is not staring dead-eyed at someone on stage talking about the future of AI. I don't care about the future of AI, right Like I don't care. And if I don't care, I'm guessing most people don't care either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no offense, ai. We've all gone to those conferences that are like four days and they're jam packed with, you know, talks that are really great, and then you go from one talk to the next, to the next to the next. By the end of the day you're wiped.
Speaker 2:And so the social event that's at the end of the day You're, and how is your brain going to retain anything? How are you going?
Speaker 2:to go back and be like oh, that one talk I saw on Monday at 11 was okay, but it's too much for the human brain and as customer experience professionals, our brains are diluted with constant interference and constant interruption and constant problem solving. So you're getting a group of 100 people together who already have a lot of cognitive fatigue and they already are very burnt out just physically because of the day-to-day job that they do. If they're people managers on top of managing CX experience, they're white. So our goal is to pour into them. Our goal is to show them that they're valuable and that they're important. But certainly not, you know, I'd never allow someone on stage to talk for 30 minutes. I'd never allow that, you know, because it's just going to put people to sleep and we want them to be engaged enough to have, you know, something to talk about in an hour or so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, One of the things I loved when I was looking at the agenda for this coming up event is that there's so much time to have community, but there's also I think you mentioned somewhere in the agenda that there was like time to go and check on your support inbox, which is something that when I was starting in support, I was the only person doing support for Buzzsprout and I would go to these podcasting conferences and be the person at the booth, but then I had this inbox that I needed to stay on top of and it was so difficult, and so I love the fact that there's time built in that you can sneak away and help out whatever you need to.
Speaker 2:You don't have to sneak away because, yeah, the way that we structure the event is it's single trap. Everyone's in the same room, including our, our sponsors. So it's a big hotel ballroom with the stage at one end, round tables in the middle and our sponsors are set up in the back around the edge. I chose round tables with a capacity about five to six people each so you can sit there with your computer if you need to. You can have it open. You don't look like the weirdo who's doing work while people are talking.
Speaker 2:We all know that all of us are.
Speaker 2:We can multitask, we can listen and learn at the same time right, but it also the effect that a typical conference sitting in a chair, theater style, has on your body all day long adds to your brain fatigue, and so if I can give someone just the added comfort of being able to rest on their arms or to rest on, you know, put their hand on their chin and kind of ease it up or stretch, we're already 10%, 20% above what most people's experiences are going to be at a regular conference. I'm very anti-junk food, and so that's another thing that I kind of force on people is that you're going to have a beautiful, big, healthy meal. It's going to be plated. You're going to have waiter service taking it to your plate and sitting down. You're going to have salads. You're going to have no sodas. You're going to have, you know, good brain stuff. We always have, you know, a basket on the table that has granola bars and beef jerky and snacks and mints for people to keep them fueled, because you know we're investing in people.
Speaker 2:We want them to understand that that's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so great. And I'm a note taker, like I love to take notes. But sitting at a table versus sitting stadium seating, when you're trying to take notes, it changes the quality of my notes. It does, and I will always choose a table over sitting like in a theater.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also like, think about theater seats or think about anything that's like a lecture hall. They're beautiful, they look great in event photography, they look phenomenal that big stage, that big screen. So the more body comfort we can give to people of all sizes and all mobilities, the better experience they're going to have. And these are things that I really truly believe that most event producers don't think about until someone says it out loud. They don't think about it until they see somebody else doing it and then they're like oh yeah, I should do that too. I truly believe that there is like a hierarchy for events, like there's good events and then there's great events, and we see in TV and on Instagram and on YouTube something like Inbound from HubSpot, where all of the flash and money and polish has gone on to stage design and celebrities. But the true experience as an attendee is not great.
Speaker 1:It's not memorable.
Speaker 2:It's not thoughtful, it's not. I don't feel seen and taken care of, I feel lost in the crowd and I go home exhausted. So if my whole job is to figure out ways for the exact opposite experience, I want someone to come in and be surprised at the thoughtfulness and go home feeling energized. That's why our return rate is so high. That's why we don't do marketing. Never have done a Google ad in my life. That's why because the community experience is so strong that that's what we've built.
Speaker 1:Well, it's getting me so excited for this conference. Yeah, I know it's your first time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's my first one. I've never gone before. I've gone to one other customer support conference years and years ago, and so this will be the first one for Elevate, which I'm really, really excited about. But I think that just the importance of having these communities is, I think it needs to be talked about more. When I started doing support eight years ago, I didn't know anything really and I didn't have anyone who I knew personally who was doing support, and I had a really hard time finding any kind of community and really didn't find it until I started hiring people for my team.
Speaker 2:Really, Then you're sort of like building your own core people.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly Right. And then we went to a conference and I started to kind of get plugged in at that point back in 2019. But it really was like it felt very lonely for a while there, and so I'm so excited about this one because we're sharing it with the people who are listening to this podcast, who I guess that means they've already found somewhat of a community because they're listening to this podcast. But the excitement of going hey guys, this is a community that you can get plugged in right now yes, like you can go online and get plugged in right now and there's going to be so much benefit for you if you do that. So I kind of want to talk about the benefits of being in that community a little bit, yeah, outside that. So I kind of want to talk about the benefits of being in that community a little bit, yeah, outside of Elevate CX, just finding the community in general and we've talked about it a little bit.
Speaker 1:You know, in support you're working. Most of the time you're doing support for a company that's in a different industry. So you're doing support in this other world and you can feel very siloed and especially you know the size of the company you're working for, or the type of company or the type of service you can feel different levels of siloed. I think I'm lucky that I work in a situation where support is very incorporated with the decision-making process throughout you know, the day, throughout the month. But some people are not in that situation and they can feel very siloed and so having that community is so, so important. How do you feel like you've seen Elevate CX kind of step in and have that positive impact on people over the years?
Speaker 2:It's such a great question and I love what you're referencing this idea. There's a book by Richard Yates. It's a book of short stories called Seven Types of Loneliness, or Seven Kinds of Loneliness, and I always think about that because the book is about all of these different people in different situations, but they all share this common loneliness. I am the only person here, and it's not that I'm alone in my waking life. It's that I feel unseen and as we know also, you know, to be loved is to be seen. So, community and finding your people this the very most important human element, the thing that drives humanity and has since the Ice Ages, the caveman days, is that we find people we can be with to keep us safe, to keep us well fed, to keep our brains growing, to keep us warm at night. Right, this is it. That's the human experience.
Speaker 2:So when you think about work-related networking which just makes me gag thinking about it, the only time I wish that we had video on this podcast is you can see my face when I say the word networking. But you think about things from when we were kids, like the Rotary Club or you know whatever. We remember all that stuff, but that's not how our generation of employees and our generation of people really think about community. We are online beasts. We are people who are seeking out communities in different ways and we need an employment-type driven type, driven, industry driven community to mimic that. So online communities have an incredible opportunity to find people in that space, whether it's Slack or Discord or even like Facebook groups, because we're already there, right, we are already seeking that out. What makes Elevate thrive is a couple of things. One, we don't have a lot of structure around how the community interacts with each other. There are like hundreds of private channels. I'm not even in in our Slack community.
Speaker 2:Like there's other stuff too, and I just tell people like, yeah, like someone will come to me and say do you think that people would want to do Dungeons and Dragons through Elevate? And I'm like I don't know, try it and ask, see if it works. And what do you know? There's 25 people in that channel. Right, you have to allow people to find what they need organically and if it's not there, let them build it, let them run with it. There's a lot of communities that have people that are very. They have a lot of structured control about who can speak and who can post and who can join, and for us, the only requirement is that you work in customer experience, whatever that means, because that's what we do.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing that's really, like I said, made us thrive is that we have an oversight committee of people who have been in the last few years is resources for job loss. We have a fund, the community fund, where anybody can donate to the community fund and anybody can ask for assistance for the community fund, and we give out cash $500 to people who are looking for help. The caveat is you have to pay it forward in the community. You have to go through, you know, a coaching session with someone who's going to go over your resume or we've got to go through join our jobs channel and be a part of that, but we will still help you in that way. We have a freelance and consulting group now that meets as a peer group on Zoom once a month. That is people who are in CX that want to consult or have lost their jobs and want to learn how to fill that time, and it's people like myself or Jennifer Yoder, ashley Hazlett, who are full-time consultants telling people how to do it, how to create a marketing funnel, how to create a, you know, contract, those things. The more resources you take from the community and feed it back to the community, I think the more engagement you're going to get like hands down. But you also can't be rigid about what your community is meant to be and how it's supposed to look.
Speaker 2:There is one community that I'm endlessly fascinated with because this is one of those. Like if it were a country club, they wouldn't let me in kind of situations Like you have to take tests on what like MPS scoring. Ok, I'm not joking, you have to take tests to prove that you know industry knowledge. You have to take tests to prove that you know industry knowledge and if you don't pass the test, they offer to sell you their test prep book. That's created by their community so that you can take the test again and then get in Right. And I'm just like no sure. Sure For someone, sure, great, awesome, do it.
Speaker 2:But for us it's more, like you know, our job has brought us together, but our community is based around the people, the people and their needs, and we saw that especially during COVID, having our community thrive and grow when people were going through the worst time in recent history. They're not sitting there talking about their close rates or first touch resolution. They're talking about I've never worked from home before. What do I do? That's the important thing is to let people have that space, and I'll also allow your community members to step up and I play hardball with people.
Speaker 2:If there's someone who has been to one of my events three times, I will walk over to them at the table and say okay, next time's your turn on stage, it's your turn to talk. Got to start giving back, and sometimes all they need is that little bit of a nudge and for someone like me to say I'll coach you, I'll help you with the slides, I'll help you get up there. But everybody has to give back. Everybody has to be in in that constant. You know they have to have the constant nudge of you can't just be here and lurk or just absorb, right, you have to give back to people.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think you said something earlier about you know, having the freedom to ask questions and bounce things off of people and not feel nervous for getting judged or feeling like your questions are silly. That's something that in the early years that I was doing support. If I had something like that, I feel like it would have helped me to just grow that much faster.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Being able to bounce those ideas off of people 100%. I look at the community that you have and some other online communities that are in that same vein and it just makes me so happy to see all these people throwing out questions, getting ideas back, because you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. You don't. It can be inspiration from someone else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you start to talk about tool sets, for instance, that's one of the biggest areas of conversation on Elevate, we have a whole channel that's dedicated to Zendesk. We have a whole channel that's dedicated to Codef, who's one of our sponsors. They build this awesome no-code AI tool. We have a whole channel that's dedicated. That's just. I need help and people are in their daily saying does anybody know what this means in Zendesk? Does anybody know how to do this? Or has anybody worked with a BPO before? We're thinking of offshoring and then someone from Hire, a Ratio, who's one of our sponsors as a BPO. They're like I can tell you anything you need to know. How can I help you? Right, and there's no judgment.
Speaker 1:There's no judgment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's no pressure, even from our sponsors. They're not there to sell, they're just there to support the community. We make that very clear and very explicit, like this is not a place for you to do quick wins.
Speaker 2:This is a place for you to show your investment in the community by sharing your knowledge and sharing what your app can do, and they abide by that because they respect the community right? I think that that's one of the hardest things about running a community especially when your members get into the thousands is that the bigger the community you have, the fewer people are going to introduce themselves when they join. The fewer people are going to ask a question, especially when they're new. The fewer people are going to say did you guys see this cool article? Because there's weird shame and embarrassment about that. Did you guys see this cool article? Because there's weird shame and embarrassment about that. And so my thing for our leaders and our oversight committee and myself is that I always start the conversation. I encourage them to always start the conversation. I encourage them to watch for those people who are posting for the first time and amp them up and DM them. And we know, when you join Elevate you get a little greet bot thing that says please introduce yourself. And if that person has joined and they haven't introduced yourselves in a week, usually they get a DM from one of us saying, hey, how's it going Right? So we're really encouraging the engagement and hoping to set the tone that you can talk about. You know, someone posted an Instagram today of like this horrible tech conference event that was so embarrassing and then we're just talking about it. There's a music channel Talk about Oasis coming back on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those things unfurl into conversations about your work life and what you need. Help with Yep and those relationships that you build through talking about dumb stuff online. Those are valuable when you need a job. Those are valuable when you're looking to hire someone and you're like I've tapped out of every resume, I need a job. Those are valuable. When you're looking to hire someone and you're like I've tapped out of every resume, I need a direct hire fast. So it's hard because you definitely like who wouldn't want to just like have the Rotary Club and people pay a membership fee and they're very everyone's very proper and everyone does their job right, like that's not how it happens.
Speaker 2:That's not how community organically happens. Community organically thrives through humanity first.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and you know, earlier you were talking about how you saw people asking questions about how to work remotely and during COVID it really started to grow. I think that that is such a good example of a question that you really don't have a ton of people to ask about that's. You know, we all went remote and for some people that was very foreign, for some people it wasn't and they had worked remote. But for some people it was so different and they didn't know how to do it. And being a developer and working remotely is different than being a support professional and working remotely. And so you might ask a developer oh my gosh, like in your own company, how do I work remotely? What are some of the things you use? And some of that might be applicable, but asking another support professional how they're working remotely and what their strategies are is going to be just a completely different experience.
Speaker 2:So this is a great segue into how our community has transitioned since COVID, since the COVID times, because I am very well known in the customer experience world.
Speaker 3:I'm you know, someone the other day called me a LinkedIn influencer and I had to shut the computer down and walk away from it.
Speaker 1:I believe it though, yeah.
Speaker 3:I was just like what does that even mean? That's your portfolio.
Speaker 2:I think I come up, I think, when someone's like searching for CX professionals or something like, I'm up there and that's just. I need to like reevaluate my life choices, right. But this is one of those areas where I was not equipped to be the best source of truth. I was not equipped to be the best source of wisdom because I haven't worked in an office in 25 years. I'm a consultant first and an event planner second. I don't have a staff. I don't have a direct team of people. Certainly I don't have a direct team of people. Certainly I don't have a direct team of ICs who are working for their first company like their first job and have just had their world ripped out from under them and then they have to show up to work every day as if nothing's happening at home.
Speaker 2:I didn't have that. I don't have that experience, but people in my community did. People in my community had the experience of transitioning to work from home before COVID and they could, you know, step it out. People in my community were introverted I am not, I don't have that wisdom right and so they could step up and say here's my experience. We had an isolation channel, I think, during COVID, where I just encouraged people like share your. This is where we vent, this is where we cry, this is where we support each other.
Speaker 2:It's okay to talk about whatever you need to talk about, and from that we're seeing, then connections being made to people who are taking stuff offline and having their own meetups and having their own Zoom calls or whatever it would be. Or specifically like doing a Zoom call meetup where they talk about transitioning your team to work from home, right, so that's, I can only be the expert as much as I have expertise. Yeah, if I don't have expertise, I tell people this all the time Like, when you think about building a community, you have to have the expertise that the community needs, at least in like the core of what you're doing. Right, I'm a CX professional, so I should be. I'm, you know, that's what I do for a living, that's what I've done for a living, so I'm appropriate as a leader for a CS community. A developer or someone who's a software engineer is not an appropriate leader for a customer support community, right?
Speaker 1:Nor is somebody who works at an oil rig, nor is somebody Just like yeah, right, just like I wouldn't be able to tell a developer how to write code. No.
Speaker 2:I can't tell you that you need to be thoughtful about that. It's like where am I investing my time? Is it in somebody who was trying to make a buck off of me taking their NPS test? Or somebody who saw an opening to become a popular, you know, event or community because they're a software developer? And then they knew some peripheral CX people and decided to do this Like no, that's not, that's not the best way to do it. So I think it's like really important that you create your community around whatever it is like your interest or whatever it is you do for a living, but you also recognize that there are other people who have that wisdom and encourage them to share it. Encourage people to ask questions, but encourage others to answer.
Speaker 1:And there's so much you know, humility and authenticity in that too. There's nothing worse than listening to someone talk to you about something that you know that they don't know what they're talking about and they're talking as if they do, and you're like I know this is not your area of expertise. And there's something so authentic about asking someone a question and them saying actually, I don't know the best strategy for that, but I know this person and they've gone through that and they can walk you through it. That for that, but I know this person and they've gone through that and they can walk you through it. That's just so refreshing and it makes that bond so much stronger between you and the person. And then the third person you've brought in, yeah, and so it just makes those relationships better in the end.
Speaker 1:And you know, we, as support professionals, spend so much of our days pouring out and supporting customers, and then you turn around and, for some people, go home and make dinner for the family. For some people, you go home and you're on your own or you go to a social event, but you don't get that same kind of pouring into you that you've been doing to other people. And so having this community, especially when it comes to customer support professionals, is so important, because then you're getting that poured back into you and you can feel that support that you've been giving out.
Speaker 2:I think it's profound that you point that out. You know, one of the things that I concern myself with a lot when it comes to the world of customer experience professionals is the idea of the emotional labor that we put into our jobs. You know teachers, psychologists, people who work in CX right, we have a deeply emotionally invested job and to say that we can just work for eight hours and close our computer and run off into the sunset and be happy is a falsehood. It's never going to happen. And to say that we have thin skin because we take that, you know, we internalize things that are going on with our products or our customers reaction to them. I want to internalize what I'm doing because I want to have passion for what I'm doing. I want to be invested in every single email that comes across my desk. I want to be invested in getting the right answer to the right person, monty Williams, who used to be the head of CX at Away Luggage. If you Google his name, you'll get an incredible article about Away Luggage and why he left, because he was like this environment is so toxic to customer service. People like I will not be a part of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he always talks to me about how the importance is trying to change one person's day. We have the power to do that in customer experience. Yeah, we have the power to do that in multiple ways either in preventing friction for consumers, in creating an easy in, easy out solution, in becoming a product that's a habitual part of their day. If we're building software, we can influence how that product is built. But if they have a problem or a question, and the way that we respond to them, the timeliness, the information, the tone that can alter somebody's day.
Speaker 2:And if we think about it in that terms, then the emotional labor has an investment quality to it. It's not just wasted, right. And then we go back to our families. We think about it in parallel, but we can also talk about our work as I'm a fixer, I'm a helper, I'm a wisdom sharer. I'm a fixer, I'm a helper, I'm a wisdom sharer, I'm a giver, and it really helps to soothe sort of that burnout if you kind of flip your perspective on it. But we know this as support people. I know this as someone who runs a support community and is so invested in people's emotional, intellectual well-being. The people who need to understand it is our bosses and our boards right and our investors and our CEOs. They need to understand that we're not transactional employees who are just answering a call, getting off a call. Answering a call, getting off a call.
Speaker 2:We're not just sitting there tagging emails under a certain taxonomy and hoping that in a year we fix the problem. That's not who we are. So you know, I think that there are very few places for people in our industry to feel seen and heard, to feel loved, to feel respected and invested in. That is my purpose on this planet. I think I'm doing it okay. You know, we're 14 years in. Maybe there'll be another 14 more, but if my goal at the end of the day at every conference I do, or every day, at the end of every Slack day, if one person messages me and said that they had a wonderful time or they felt so good or they met someone who helped them, that's it. That's the point of it all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I remember those early, like really months of starting work in this role, in a customer service role, because at the time it was customer service, that's what you know, that's how I referred to it and people would say, oh, what's your new job? I'd say, oh, customer service. And then I always felt like I needed to say, well, but it's kind of more elevated than that, it's like a tech company.
Speaker 1:And you know we're sorry. Yeah, right, and you just feel this level of like. Oh, I already know that people are going to look down on this role. Right, and I have felt very strongly over the last several years of changing the way that people view customer support within a company, how important it is to the success of the company. And I mean I said earlier, we are lucky I am lucky to work for a company that values customer support and pours into it and cares about customer relationships and really is customer focused. But so many people who work in customer support do not have that experience and so coming to an event like Elevate, cx or being part of the community online can have huge impacts on the way that they see their own work, like you were talking about, and like pouring into customers and having that, you know I can make someone's day better Like that kind of impact is important and gets me so excited to like think about that and people changing the way they view their own work and changing the way customer service is viewed.
Speaker 2:Exactly Like you have this experience so you know how important it is for your direct reports to feel that they are being invested in, that you care about them, that your one-on-ones are consistent, that they're getting good knowledge. I'm the same way. I was at a startup, the only customer experience person again, the only non-technical employee who was told. When we're talking about work and this stuff, I was always told that your job's not a priority. I was always told that that's not a priority for us. I was told when we decided to do Fridays off in the summer. I'm the only person in the entire company that doesn't get the Friday off because I have to be there for customers and I'm the one who has to tell a customer on Friday morning you're not going to get an answer until Monday afternoon because everybody's off for the summer. That would never happen. Now, hopefully, because we've learned from those mistakes. We've learned the value of support people. At least I think we're trying to. I hope we are.
Speaker 2:But, also because of people like you who had the experience of not having that understanding. Here's what I need to give to the people who are coming up and I think that, especially in tech, we've lived in a very engineer, developer, designer-centric world that in the past let's say five years, especially since COVID people are really re-understanding and re-imagining what nucleus of their company should be centric right, we're seeing more and more that it's customer experience and that's including marketing and product and people who are actually answering emails. So that's a huge win. Until you've been in it, you can't prescribe the medicine for it, but I think we have enough people doing that now and speaking up and enough people that have been empowered through Elevate and other conferences and other communities that the voices are strong. So I'm very optimistic for the future of customer experience. I'm very optimistic for the leadership that we have in this industry and I'm excited to see what happens next. What's the next big breakthrough?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so okay. So the event is in Denver, it's coming up, it's a month from today, I think.
Speaker 2:It is, it is which is so exciting.
Speaker 1:No pressure. For anyone listening, it'll be a little less than a month. For anyone listening, it'll be a little less than a month. But what can people expect from this conference? Specifically, like, what kind of talks are going to be there? If you're trying to sell it to someone who's trying to decide whether to come or not, I'm the worst at selling things.
Speaker 2:Let's just be honest Like. I just really am, so maybe people can just reach out to me or join our Slack to be convinced.
Speaker 2:But I will say not only are we doing our Denver event at the end of September, we're also doing a London event, so I'm going to talk about both events coming up. Denver is what we call our flagship event. We choose Denver because it's equidistant to most people in North America. It's easy to get to. We have a great relationship with the venue there. This is two full days of talks that are tactical, that are purposeful. We also, at the end of the first day this is the second time we've done this Suneet Bhat, who used to be at Help, scout and Boulder and now he's teaching at Rutgers University.
Speaker 2:He leads a workshop about your personal journey, your personal happiness journey, your personal contentedness journey. This is one of those things for me where I say you know what? Let's stop talking about CX for a minute and talk about the people and the humans behind the work. Yeah, so he leads this for us, this discussion for us. We're super stoked about it. We're doing peer groups on day two, in addition to, like I said, all that curated social time and our working brunches, yoga in the morning. Most of it is just meeting people in your industry, getting to know each other. There's no MPS scores allowed. I really want to talk about people's personal experience in the customer journey that they're creating. So sometimes that's about people management. So sometimes that's about people management and sometimes that's about understanding the limits and boundaries of empathy that we give to customers.
Speaker 2:If you go to elevate CXco and click on the Denver link, you actually will see all the speakers, summaries of their talks. You can just click on their names. So we're we're stoked about it. We love bringing everyone to Denver. We're also taking a big group of people to Casa Bonita for dinner. So if you want to come, please come. But then our London event, which is the. We haven't been to London since 2019. I'm stoked to get back to London. I love the UK, I love visiting, so this is always an excuse for me to go. But because of our amazing sponsors, intercom and Horatio, we are able to make this a free event and this is our very first free event.
Speaker 3:I just saw that on the website and I was like what? Yeah, no way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're very blessed. We're very blessed by Intercom and Horatio.
Speaker 3:Lunch and drinks included. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we feed people, don't worry, come on. So this is the future of what I think our community and our events are going to look like, especially, like I said, because we're moving into being community led. We can come to sponsors and say we want to maximize the experience that people have, and we know that this is a very underfunded market right now. People just aren't paying for events like they used to. They don't have budget and they don't have travel budget. So if we can come to them and we can make it accessible and we can say, just show up at 10, you'll get a sandwich at noon, I feel like it's going to be. That's the future that I want to see for people. I never want people to not be able to go to an event because their work won't pay for it, especially when I know how impactful they are.
Speaker 2:So, we are really working to make as many of our events subsidized or free as possible. Our Denver event, codif our premier sponsor has been giving away tickets. They've been purchasing tickets for people and we have a few more of those. So if you are unable to pay for your ticket and you really wanna come, or if you're local, please reach out to us. We can get you a seat, keeping in mind that the community is also bearing the weight for that. When somebody from the community pays, that ticket covers two people, so we are able to kind of like give away more seats and get more people in the room.
Speaker 2:You know, again, this isn't a profit center for us. This is not my full-time job or salary. So we have a lot of room to help our community grow and I'm excited for that. I'm really excited for London, because London is such a grab bag when it comes to the word CX. It means so many things to people there. But yeah, all of those talks are going to be thematic and get about the customer journey. We have a lot of locals. We've got speakers from Intercom, from PagerDuty, from TuneCore lots of great attendees already. So it's going to be fun. We have fun stuff coming up and then we hope in 2025, you know we'll continue our virtual content. We do masterclasses live every other Friday on various topics. Again, if you are someone who is in the CX world and you want to get involved in that, join our Slack. Go to the website. Join our Slack, join the fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, that's what I was going to say. For anyone who can't physically get out to one of these events. What do you? What kind of talk? A little bit more about those online resources that you have for people to learn and grow when they can't go in person.
Speaker 2:Definitely part of our expansion when we pushed into being community-led. A big caveat for this was that I cannot do all things by myself anymore, and I certainly can't do them and stretch myself so that I'm only giving 10% to each thing. If I want to give 80% to something or 60% to something, I have to have everything else off my plate, and that was why we never did virtual content in the past. Number one the other people are doing it and they're doing it great, right? Well, that's also like my own bad advice that I'm taking now. The other thing was is yeah, it's limiting when people can't travel to a big event and they're missing out or, you know, they just don't get that. They don't get the same experience. So we started doing these. We call them masterclasses. I hate the word webinar, so that's the branded language I use.
Speaker 2:They are just hour long conversations about a topic with an expert from our community and it's all over thematically, it's all over the place. We just did one about from Karen. The CEO of Bullseye did a deep dive into resume rewriting to you know accelerate your job search.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've done one before that's about learning how to enforce boundaries, create and enforce boundaries with your customers and with your teams. We've done one on people managing what makes a good people manager? If this is your first time managing, what are the basics behind it? So not just pure CX conversations. It's really based on what we're seeing in the community and what our community members are saying. I want to come on and talk about this specific subject so that we are really really lucky that we have sponsors who are helping us pull that off. That's again every other Friday at 11 am PST.
Speaker 2:We just took a break for the summer, but you can go to the masterclass tag. What is it called? The link? Yeah, the link on our website and you can see our past videos, their evergreen content. So we keep them up for anyone to see. You can see the schedule of what's coming up next. We are actually doing a live. Anyone to see? You can see the schedule of what's coming up next. We are actually doing a live masterclass at our Denver event and you know this is just part of the experiment. Who knows? So fun, who knows? I think it's going to be great, but we're excited about it. So, yeah, that's our virtual content. Again, I mean, I hate to push it, but join the community, join our Slack channel. You'll get updates and you get to participate as well. There's no like leadership board that only they get to be on stage or talk. We really open it up to anybody who has something freely that they want to share, without judgment, without shame.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll push it for you. I think you know it's so great. I just am new to joining the Slack, I'm new to kind of pushing myself into this community. But even you know, in the last couple of months of starting to interact and lurking a little bit and commenting every now and then, it's been really encouraging just to see the free sharing of knowledge and information and support and encouragement.
Speaker 2:It's invaluable.
Speaker 1:It really is, it really is. It's so, so wonderful to see it and it makes me excited to get my team in there and I, you know I can't wait to go to the conference later this month. It's going to be a lot of fun it's going to be great.
Speaker 1:Do you have any tips for people who are listening to this and like really want to come? Yeah, and you've already mentioned that they can reach out to you about some free tickets but maybe there's not a free ticket for them. Do you have any tips for those people about kind of selling their bosses on the importance of this?
Speaker 2:This is one of those areas again I'm ill-equipped, right. Yeah, there are so many people in our community, including Mercer Smith, who's even wrote us like a manifesto about this, like there's a document that you can like sign and give to your boss, saying here's what I need.
Speaker 2:I think you need to really stress the importance of what is your boss's future plans for your team and for what you do, whether it's reducing touch points or whether it's reducing first touch resolution or reducing, you know, whatever friction amongst customers Does. Your boss want to see you as someone who grows in to have this really great, defined relationship with your product team, where support is informing product versus the other way around. Those are things that you only learn through these kind of pool set experiences and this is how you access that wisdom and that training. There are things like the Disney Institute, right where I talked about that. I don't even know if they're really still doing that anymore, but that is kind of like one of the only places that you can go. Or you can go to Zingerman Academy in Michigan and talk about how they do customer experience with sandwiches, but that's not really relevant to most people, whereas this is Using our masterclasses and using the community is a great way of proof of concept saying look at these people who are in these stellar roles, these names that you recognize or that you see on LinkedIn, that are sharing great stuff.
Speaker 2:They came from the Elevate community. I want to be like that. I want to learn how to push our organization forward and reduce churn and increase retention through support-driven growth, those kinds of things. But I have to learn the tools to do that. I have to be given expertise. It's nothing that I can learn on the job. We can hack our way through on the job and we can ask questions of the job from people, but you only get direct experience and direct knowledge from somebody else who's been there before, an expert who's sharing that with you, and I think that's the number one thing, and I also I'm. You know, maybe this is a radical opinion, but if your boss isn't investing in the future of your employment, you should find another boss. Yeah, like truly every single boss. Fernando Duarte, who works for Odyssey, was on our masterclass about people management and he has the lowest churn rate of employees I've ever heard. It's something like in 20 years he's lost one employee to like quit right Unbelievable.
Speaker 2:And so I was like I need to get you in front of a camera and a microphone and you need to tell us how. And it's so silly when you listen to what he talks about. Like, yeah, I invest in my people and I help them out and I let them lead the one-on-one times and I find out what areas in their career they want to grow and I support them when they grow. I support them going to classes and learning new skills. That is invaluable for people to understand. Like, that's the kind of boss I need. That's the kind of manager I need, someone who advocates for my growth, someone who advocates for this person wants to be a manager. Let's give them the tools how to do that. So I think that's something to keep in mind.
Speaker 2:I know that the job world is scary right now. I know that the employment world for CX people is also kind of on a knife edge because we don't know when AI is going to fail and we're all going to get jobs again, right, we're kind of waiting for that to happen. We're waiting for the crash, but in the meantime, we still have to do our jobs well and effectively and we still have to prove our value to our bosses. So I just tell people, tell them that you're looking for wisdom. Tell them that you're looking for expertise. Tell them that this is a deep dive, two-day concentrated opportunity for you to get that download from like experienced leaders in your industry. Right, and you know, if you have to like. I always also encourage people to look up the prices for the last conference your boss went to. Yeah, look up the prices for the conference that your developers go to every year.
Speaker 2:RailsConf is like twenty two hundred bucks. Yeah, if you work in e-com or D2C or if you're in that kind of world, those conferences are $1,400, sometimes a pop, and that's just to walk around booths where people are selling chewing gum. So think about them over and under. We're offering you know, I do this all the time with people. I help them do the math Two nights at the Curtis Hotel in Denver is $622, including tax. I'll get you a free ticket. Just show up. We'll make it happen, Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think when you're talking about these things too, it can be very it can be hard to go to your bosses and say, hey, I want to do this, I want you to pay for me to do this. It can be difficult to advocate for yourself.
Speaker 2:They should pay for you to do this. They should pay for a $300 conference ticket. Something else is wrong with that company.
Speaker 1:And I think so much of the gap there is knowledge is they don't understand the impact your role is having on customers and how much of an impact this can have on you to make that experience so much better. And so bring that information, explain it to your bosses how much this is going to impact how you do your job and how that is going to impact your customers and the relationship you have with your customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, A few years ago we had a community member, Stefan, who did a whole talk and we actually ended up doing like a webinar about it too, where he brought out the spreadsheet that he had built. That was a cost per ticket analysis of how to quantify how much every ticket that comes through costs us as a company. That's with an all-in, fully loaded staff, that's with all the apps that we use, that's with categorizing what type of ticket it is. And he did this by hand, and people in our community did that by hand with his spreadsheet template for years until Idiomatic came out and said we're going to automate this and create an app for you to do the same thing, Whether you're doing it by hand or you're using a tool like Idiomatic.
Speaker 2:I really urge anybody to figure out the cost of tickets, because you can take data to your boss and say if we want to make this better and more efficient. The answer is not a chatbot that's got to make it worse. The answer is equipping the people who answer these emails and write our knowledge base and keep our website up to date and follow up with customers. That's the answer. The only way to do that is by you know learning how to do it.
Speaker 1:You got to be somewhere where you're learning how to do it, being intentional about learning it, and community is such a good way to do that. Well, I really appreciate you coming, sarah. You know we've said it before, but it's so easy to get stuck in that silo. It's so easy, when you're working with people all day, to get burned out of pouring into other people, and so I hope that people hear this and are encouraged to go join a community or, if they're already in a community, to plug themselves in even more, and hopefully they'll reach out to you and show up to the event in Denver and London. I think that's just. It's so great.
Speaker 2:So thank you so much for doing that and being here and sharing all of that with our listeners. Thank you. This conversation went in wild directions but yeah, that's what we do. That's I think it's great. I really appreciate you taking the time to focus on communities as a service, if you will, as something that's like essential to who we are as people and especially who we are as support people. It's my passion and it's always great to meet more people who understand it.
Speaker 1:Yep, and our goal is always to make the experience more remarkable. That is, with this show. That is our goal. Let's make the experience more remarkable, and a way to do that is by supporting the people who are in control of molding the experience Absolutely. So now we're going to jump into our support in real life segment, and Sarah is going to stick around for that. This is our segment where we discuss real life support experiences and questions. So, jordan, what do you have for us today?
Speaker 3:All right. So we have a question that is found on Reddit. In my new job, I help the team supporting our customers about technical issues. Do you have any book advice that could help me not only to improve my writing, but also write good emails to our customers and be polite, direct and clear? Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:This is a good one. This is a good question because I feel like Sarah is. Oh, you literally wrote the handbook on customer support.
Speaker 2:So I feel like I got to tell you yes, I were supposed to write a follow up to this book and I didn't, and I should have. This book that I wrote in 2014 feels so old. It feels like an old, dusty spell book that people kind of like have to like. You know they shake off like cobwebs on it, but I am astounded at how many people still use this book as a reference, and that's what it's meant to be it's a reference tool. In the back of this book.
Speaker 2:The last half of this book is all scripts and they're all based on scenarios Like how do I respond to someone who needs this or what should I say, and it's examples, for here's three examples. If you're having downtime, here's three examples. If you've made a mistake, here's three examples for someone asking for refunds and how you should handle that scenario. It is still applicable to anybody who's starting out in this and just needs an extra sort of jumpstart. Now, this was way back in the day when people were using Gmail inboxes, right and like. Now we have macros and now, like Help Scout will help, they have an AI tool that will help you write your macros or write your scripts.
Speaker 2:I say, lean into that. I also think that you need to think about who your audience is. Mimic the tone that they are emailing you with right. If it's a more buttoned down, conservative kind of audience, like that is your core customer, that's your ICP then you should be writing to them respectfully and with as many links as possible to your knowledge base. Teach them how to do things so that they're not asking you questions. If it's more casual, then be more casual. Be human, show your humanity. One thing that people need to understand when they are training teams who are email-based particularly, or text-based in any way, is that all of us, as consumers, are suspicious that we're not talking to a person.
Speaker 2:We are all suspicious and we don't trust AI enough to give us the correct answer or the answer that we want. We've got to prove that to them. We've got to prove our humanity. I had one of the best customer experiences recently with Urban Stems. Oddly enough, their manager and head of CX actually spoke at one of our events a few years ago, so I was really proud of her team. This was solved quickly. They were friendly. They were like fun, used the exclamation point in a couple of times, did exactly what I needed to them in, I swear, like 30 seconds, wow. So, but I knew it was a human being. I could tell it was a human being talking to me.
Speaker 2:It was not just a chat bot. I think that's one of the most important things is to use your own voice, make sure that it's appropriate for your audience, but to not be afraid of sounding casual or human or. The other thing, too, is that people are very afraid of like redundancies and someone coming back and say, yeah, I need more information, I need more help. So make sure that you're guiding them to the help center, but don't be afraid to say let me know if you need anything else. Let me know if this answers your question. Don't be afraid if they come back and say it didn't. I need more help Like that's what we do, that's our job. Yeah, that's what we're doing for a living, right, yeah?
Speaker 1:And I would say don't get so caught up in being perfect when it comes to your writing and grammar and all of that, because there's so much humanity in a misplaced comma. There really is.
Speaker 2:And you know it's so funny I use grammarly. I'm like ride or die for grammarly. Sometimes, I Grammarly stop.
Speaker 1:No, you don't know what I'm trying to say Exactly Same thing.
Speaker 2:Stop making me sound like you know I'm a robot, Right Exactly. Or that I'm just like applying to Oxford University and trying to be like really buttoned down. I'm not that person, Right the importance is the clarity.
Speaker 1:That's the importance of the communication. It's not always that there isn't a comma splice, it's that you're being clear and you're educating and you're talking at a level that the person you're working with can understand. And you know, we just recently on my team had a little writing seminar where we talked through some writing techniques that we can use to help with that clarity, and so it may end up being an episode on this podcast in the future. But there's so much. I think it's just different to think about the idea that you're not trying to be the most perfect writer, you're not applying to a college. No, you're not trying to be perfect, you're trying to communicate clearly. That's the importance.
Speaker 2:And you're also representing the brand that you're responding to, and so you're representing the brand truths in a lot of ways, or the brand persona. So if you have a marketing department that has created personas for your customers, you need to get with them and say this is not who's emailing us at all, like these are not the people who are actual customers. I know our customers better. Don't be afraid to assert that sort of leadership and those rules Absolutely. And also like, really think about old school, old language ways. This is also in my book. I'm very known for it the fact that I hate the word feedback. I never use it. I never use it in my daily life. I think feedback, as you know, is that horrible retin sound that microphones make when they're too close to a speaker.
Speaker 2:We shouldn't be equating any customer's information that they're sharing with us as that word. So think about ways that you can splice in. Instead of saying feedback, we say thank you for your insight, thanks for sharing with us, thanks for sharing your experience, your perspective.
Speaker 2:Your perspective is so valuable because that tells somebody that you're listening to them. Sorry for the inconvenience. That is just a stock answer. I'm really sorry this happened. We're working on it. I want you to know. I'm really sorry about this. Oh man, this is so frustrating. Let me see what I can do yeah, yeah that's what you would say if you ran into someone and spilled hot coffee on them.
Speaker 2:That's what you would say, sorry, for the inconvenience, right, right, you wouldn't do that. No, that's ridiculous, right? If I did something in person that caused you to like just your whole day is dead because I unplugged something at the Starbucks, that you're where you're working and you're like I just lost all my work, I was like, well, I'm sorry for the inconvenience Like I would go, like I would be arrested for my response to something like that. So there's no reason for us to not think about how would I do this in real life, or how would I say this or what would I want someone to say to me and that's probably the worst thing about who I am as a person is that I will coach CS people like on the phone all the time Kindly, not like a Karen, but I will tell people all the time like you know, what I really wish you'd say is dot, dot, dot.
Speaker 2:Like that would be really helpful for me, because sometimes, again, this gets back to that If you don't know the answer, you don't know the answer until someone gives you the answer or helps you along or helps you understand, or gives you that insight. It changes things. So, anyway, you can get my book for free If you come into our community. I'll give you the PDF. Please don't spend $3 on it on Amazon, although people still do. I don't know why.
Speaker 2:Another more recent book is Mercer Smith's book CXOXO. It's a whole book about loving and understanding your customers and their basic needs. She has a lot of really great examples in there, and that just came out this year, so it's current, oh great. Instead of being 10 years old, it's like much more current. She's also a big member. She's on our oversight committee and a member of our Slack community, so she's also accessible in there.
Speaker 3:I'm sensing that we need to start like a CS book club here. I've got a whole list of books that we're going to have in the show notes.
Speaker 2:We have a CS book club oh.
Speaker 1:I want to join it. I want to join that book club. We have a book club. We're going to Mercer's book right now, so I agree I love a good book club. Well, if you want to share a question with us, you can email us at happy to help at buzzbroutcom, or you can text the show using the link in the description. We'll pick one question every episode to discuss, and so if you send in a question or a story, we might discuss it on a future episode. Sarah, is there anything else that you want to share about the upcoming events where people can buy tickets? Anything like that, anything more.
Speaker 2:Just go to our website, elevatecxco. You'll be able to find anything that you need, like I said, from our past master classes to our future events to buy tickets. To get in touch with us I get every email that comes in. I check them. You'll always hear back from me. There's a link to join our Slack community, which is gated because, again, we are just qualifying that people work in CX and they follow our code of conduct as well.
Speaker 2:But I think, yeah, I can just encourage people to join us and to start poking around in Slack Like you have, priscilla. You start to see the conversations unfold and you start to see that you know this is a really fun place with, like, really engaging people who want to be helpful for others. Yeah, I think that's the thing that we can say, as all humans like, just seek out the helpful people. The more that we do that, the more we shine a light on the people who are helping and the people who are sharing wisdom freely and are really trying to lift others up. I think we we take away the spotlight on people who are lifting the ladder up behind them. That's what we need less of and we need less attention given to those types of people.
Speaker 2:We need more attention given to people who are in the trenches with you wiping your brow, you know, and making sure you've had enough water today, and I think that's really what Elevate is trying to do.
Speaker 1:That's just such a wonderful note to end on. So thank you so much again, sarah, for being here. Thank you, and thank you to everyone for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
