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
How Whole Company Support Improves Products and Processes with Kristi Ernst Thompson
In this episode of Happy to Help, we dive into the transformative power of whole company support and its impact on product development and team processes!
Special guest Kristi Ernst Thompson, Senior Technical Support Specialist at Help Scout, joins us to share how involving every department in customer support—from developers to leadership—fosters innovation, strengthens cross-team collaboration, and enhances customer satisfaction.
Whether you’re part of a small startup or a large organization, this episode offers insights to help you connect with your customers and build better products!
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.
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, priscilla Brough. Today, we're tackling the topic of whole company support. We'll explain what whole company support is, how it can impact your team and customers, and the best ways to implement it for your company. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. So this episode is going to be a fun one. I can already feel it. We're talking about whole company support today, which is something that I really love, yeah, and we have a really fun guest with us today to talk about it. Kristi Ernst-Thompson is based in beautiful Colorado and is a senior technical support specialist for Help Scout. She has been offering remarkable customer support to Help Scout customers for just about eight years now offering remarkable customer support to help scout customers for just about eight years now and she heads up their whole company support initiative, which is why I asked her to come on today's episode and talk with us about whole company support. How is it out there in Colorado, Kristi?
Kristi:Sunny, as always, and a little chilly, and I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Priscilla:I'm a little jealous of your weather in Colorado. I'm based in Florida and it is warm here still in the middle of November.
Kristi:So yes, we just got our first big snowstorm last week, so it is officially ski season.
Priscilla:Oh my gosh, so much fun. So, Kristi, we always start out our episodes asking the question of who made your day recently? So has anyone made your day better?
Kristi:Yes, I'm going to say the director of my daughter's nursery school. She contacted me via email because I was way over the deadline for getting her annual physical paperwork turned in for the new school year. And I emailed her back and I apologized and I explained like a bunch of life circumstances had gone wrong and that's why I was running late and I told her I would get it turned in as soon as possible. And she could have responded really harshly because I was, I had messed wrong and that's why I was running late. And I told her I would get it turned in as soon as possible. And she could have responded really harshly because I was, I had messed up and you know she could have been a stickler about the school policies. But the next day when I saw her in the school hallway she just said can I give you a hug? And man, if that's not world class customer service right there, I don't know what is.
Priscilla:That's amazing. That's so great. That's the human to human. You know you could look at it from the director of a school needing to get all your things checked off and the frustration when that's not happening on time. But she looked at it like this is a human who's trying to balance life and I'm trying to balance life and, you know, maybe they just need a hug. I think that is a great example.
Kristi:Yeah, Instead of looking at it as the director, she was like as a fellow mom. I got you, it was so sweet yeah.
Priscilla:Oh, I love that. That's really great. So Kristi and I met about a month ago, and when we first met, I feel like we just started noticing a lot of commonalities between the two of us. I mean, we have mutual friends in Colorado, which was the first thing we connected on, and then the second day, at the conference where we met, we were wearing basically the same colorful tennis shoes, which was really fun, and we've just kind of had like these moments where we've connected on a lot of different things. But one thing I realized yesterday, Kristi, is that I think we started working in customer support in the same month. What I noticed? That you started working at Help Scout in March of 2017. Is that right? That is right. That's when I started working for Buzzsprout and it was my first customer support role. And was Help Scout your first customer support role? It was my second one. Okay, so can you tell me a little bit about your path to customer support?
Kristi:Yeah, I would say kind of two things drew me to customer support. The first is I really wanted to work remotely back before. It was cool like pre-pandemic, like 2015. I wanted to do the digital nomad thing and travel and work as I moved around.
Kristi:So customer support seemed like a way I could do that without needing to go to like a coding bootcamp to become a software engineer or something. And then the second motivation was it felt like a natural fit for my skills and experience because I had grown up working in my family's bakery and talking to customers on the phone and then I was an elementary school teacher for a few years. So I feel like I've had a lifetime of growing my people skills and my problem solving skills. So I always say in customer support I'm still using my teaching degree. It just looks a little different than when I taught kindergarten. So I'm not teaching kids to read, but I'm teaching grownups how to forward an email. And you know the stress to pay ratio is much improved as well from my teaching days. And you know no one is wetting their pants that I know of, and if they are it's not my problem.
Priscilla:It's not something you have to solve. I love that. I mean when I started working as a 16 year old, I worked in a bakery. That was my first job. There's another thing that we that was my first job was in a bakery and I loved it, but it was it's what you said is the like people to people skills and you start building those.
Priscilla:And then I majored in education for a while, when I was in college and taught for a couple of years but didn't end up graduating with an education degree. I went into advertising but same thing. It was like I really love this person to person, human interaction of it. But is that where I want to end up in education or in like face to face customer service? And so I landed in customer support, kind of in a similar way that you did.
Jordan:That's so fun, your career journeys are so insanely similar it's creepy.
Kristi:I know, are we the same person? This is very strange.
Jordan:I think you might be. Kristi is like Colorado Priscilla.
Priscilla:Much cooler. She snowskies. She's very cool. So let me ask you my perspective before I worked in customer support and then when I actually started working, customer support now has changed so much. When I first was offered the possibility of working in customer support, I was like, oh no, no, no, I don't want to work in a call center, I don't want to do tech support. But I feel like now that I'm working in it, it's way clearer that this is actually more of like a service. It's less of a like call center help people log in, reset passwords and much more like a human to human coaching, almost like it's so much more in depth than what I assumed it was before I started working in support. How is your perspective of what customer support is changed from before you were working in it to now?
Kristi:I think a big thing I've learned is how much business impact a support team can have. We're the people who are having the most conversations with customers out of anyone in the company and we know the product the best. So customers' interactions with us it can really make and break. Do they stick with us for another year or not? So we can really take ownership of how our customers understand our product, how sticky it is for them, how much value they're getting out of it and ultimately, how much money they're continuing to pay us. So it's more than just answering a ticket and closing it. It's really about building relationships and hopefully investing in our customers so they stick around for a long time. Yeah.
Priscilla:For anyone who's listening, who's not familiar with Help Scout, can you tell us a little bit about what Help Scout does and what your client looks like?
Kristi:Yeah, so Help Scout is customer support software, so that includes a help desk knowledge base and live chat, so it's basically everything you need to talk to your customers and take care of them. So I've been using it for about a decade now and I've always loved how user-friendly it feels. You don't have to be like a super technical person to use Help Scout, yeah, and it's really been built to create an experience for customers where they feel like they're having like a personal one-on-one conversation instead of feeling like they're just like a numbered ticket in a giant queue with like a faceless corporation. I always say using Help Scout feels like you're emailing with a friend.
Kristi:We work with accounts from all sizes. Like my brother is a psychiatrist, he uses Help Scout. He's a one-user account, and then we also work with much bigger accounts. You know where it could be 200 coworkers all collaborating in their shared mailbox in Help Scout, and we see people across all different industries, from e-commerce to law firms to property managers. So it's really fun. All the variety we see in our queue every day. That's really awesome.
Priscilla:Yeah, we use Help Scout at Buzzsprout and we've been using it for, I want to say, like six years, and you're right, it really is set up so easily to work through. It's very easy and intuitive. I don't feel like I have to have any special technical knowledge to use it. It's really easy and I really like that. It does feel very personal. A lot of times there's, you know, images that come up with different customers as they write in, so you kind of have an idea of who you're talking to and it does foster that environment for you to have human to human conversation instead of like ticket based conversation, which I think is really helpful.
Jordan:Yes, we're going to be talking about all company support on this episode, so this is very appropriate. But it was my turn to hop into support. I was a little nervous to be going into like support software because it seemed a little daunting and I was like, oh, this is actually like very user friendly and clean. So as someone who is non-support, I can attest to the fact that Help Scout is very user-friendly. It's nice.
Kristi:Oh, that's so wonderful.
Priscilla:Yeah, that's music to my ears, that's just how we want it to feel, and that's a great segue, jordan, into what we're going to talk about today, which is all company support. So Kristi is here really to talk to us about how they do it over at Help Scout and what kind of advice she has for us about implementing it for our company. So we do it at Buzzsprout as well, and so I thought it might be good to just start by defining what whole company support is on our end. It's just the basic idea that support shouldn't only be done by the support team and that everyone can find value in dipping their toe into support and doing some support, and so that's kind of the idea that the whole company comes together at different times to offer support and work directly with customers. What would you add to that, Kristi?
Kristi:Yeah, I totally agree. Whole company support, or, you know, some companies call it like all hand support. It's basically giving everyone in the company, regardless of your role, whether you're a founder or on the finance team or a designer. We want to give you opportunities to have real conversations with real customers. And how you implement that can look different, you know, from company to company but that's the gist of it.
Priscilla:So when did Help Scout start running whole company support, and was there a specific situation that kicked that off?
Kristi:I personally got involved in like 2018, but the story begins long before that. So support has always been baked into the DNA at Help Scout, because we build support software. So when the company was first started and it was really tiny, there was no support team. You know, it was just like the founders and like the two engineers doing support. And then, as the team grew, it remained a value of ours to continue having everybody on the team talking to customers and to this day, our CEO, nick Francis, is still a huge advocate of whole company support and I'm so grateful for that.
Kristi:And then there's also like a practical component to it, because we're a fully remote company, so we're scattered around the world, but once a year we get together in person for an annual retreat and our customers don't care that we're on retreat, they still want help that week. So everybody pitches in to help with our customers. We call them power hours. We do a few power hours throughout the day where everybody jumps into the queue and answers as many questions as they can, because otherwise the support team wouldn't be able to participate in the retreat. So just practically speaking, we kind of need everybody to be able to help during retreat week.
Kristi:So when I joined Help Scout in 2017, the support team lead at the time was overseeing our whole company support initiative. But as her role evolved and she took on more responsibilities, she just had less bandwidth to prioritize it. She's now a VP in the company and I was looking to grow my role on the support team. So taking over whole company support and kind of revamping it and trying to build some new enthusiasm for it in the company so that she could step away and prioritize some other projects, it was just sort of like a natural step for both of us.
Priscilla:So what does it look like for you guys doing whole company support now? Is it only happening during that retreat or does it happen throughout the year? What does that breakdown look?
Kristi:like. We do try to keep it ongoing throughout the year because you know it's like a muscle that can atrophy and you know our futures are always evolving, so we try to keep it fresh in people's minds. You know, the more practice the better. So it kind of depends on the team lead. Right now Some teams do it once per month, other teams do it once per quarter and then we all do it during that annual retreat. The way we do it is everyone has freedom to look through the queue and they can pick out a question that they're interested in working on and do some research and try to find the answer. And then they draft up a reply and then if they want someone on the support team to review it before they hit send, to make sure it's correct and everything, then they can just drop a link to that conversation in a Slack channel and then somebody on the support team will check it out and give them the OK.
Priscilla:That's great. So the way we do it is similar to what you were just saying. We do it like two to three times a year, so we're not. Some people will do it more, like Jordan, for example, loves being in support and working with our customers, and so sometimes she'll come in like once a month, but some other people will come in two to three times a year and so it's not quite so frequent. And we try to look at, like you were saying, different teams, different departments might have different frequency when it comes to being in support and spending time in support. Do you do it for a full day? Are your shifts shorter?
Kristi:Are they longer? Like, how long are people usually in there? Yeah, we just do an hour, we call them power hours and yeah, that feels manageable to people. You know, it's kind of like you can't really make an excuse to not take one hour away from your day to day work, you know. So we try to make it pretty approachable in that way.
Priscilla:Yeah, when we first started doing, we called them support shifts at Buzzsprout, and when we started doing them back in 2017, we started playing around with them, seeing how it worked and we did full days.
Priscilla:So it was you had a full day in support, basically once every six weeks is how we did it, and we were a pretty small team at that point there were like 12 of us, and so it was really helpful. There's one person in support and so, you know, in six weeks, every now and then I'd have another person in there with me, which was really fun. But it was also really intense to give an entire day to support. If you're a developer or if you're a designer or if you're in marketing, to take a full day out of your six weeks to be in support. And so when we kind of revamped our support shifts last year, we did half days. We went OK, maybe a half day is better, a four hour chunk, and that kind of gives you the freedom to be in the queue some, but also to get out of the queue and do some support related like investigation, that maybe you wouldn't do when you're in the middle of designing, you know the next amazing piece of marketing.
Priscilla:And so that's what we did last year was kind of these four hour chunks, but then this year we even cut it back a little bit more and now do two and three hours, because we found that the four hours felt a little long, and so it's cool to hear that you guys do just one hour power hours. So when you do them, does the person visiting the temporary support specialist do? They basically stay in the queue the whole time.
Kristi:Yep, they, they're supposed to be. I mean, I don't know what they're. You know they could be on Facebook, but they're supposed to be in the queue for an hour. Yeah, because you know a whole day. It's not just a big ask for the participant, that's also a lot of mental load for the support team. Who's like supporting that learning?
Kristi:Absolutely so yeah, I think you kind of have to factor in both sides of the coin as you're trying to develop a program that's sustainable both for your support team and the non-support people who are participating. It has to feel doable for everybody, you know.
Priscilla:Yes, absolutely. When we were doing the full days, it was just me and one other person, and so I think it was a little easier to balance because there was just one of me. But now, with a bigger team, whole days would be too difficult, I think, to keep sustainable beyond one. So, as you've incorporated whole company and support over the years for Help Scout, what are the biggest benefits that you're seeing like for your team and then also for your customers?
Kristi:I've got five reasons why we do whole company support and these are sort of like anchoring principles that we always come back to over the years. Ok, number one it shortens the feedback loop from our customers. Number two it keeps the customer at the center of everything we do. Number three it deepens every team's understanding of our products. Four, it strengthens the company through cross-team collaboration. And five it ultimately helps us build a better product. And there's actually a secret sixth bonus reason. We don't share this with the rest of the company, but the bonus to the support team. It helps make our work visible to the rest of the company. But the bonus to the support team it helps make our work visible to the rest of the company. That ensures that we've always got a seat at the table and it helps the rest of the company value the work we do. Love that for me.
Priscilla:Yeah, that's great. One thing that we've seen as just a cool benefit of doing a whole company support is that people who come into the support team from outside have this fresh perspective on the way that we work as a team. So I don't know, when we run into an issue in support, sometimes we will build these like workarounds to get around it. We don't even realize we're building and then we're doing these workarounds and then someone will come in from the development team and be like, why are you doing it this way? We'll say, oh, because that's just how we've done it and that's the workaround. And they'll say I could fix this really easily for you. And then you don't have to do this workaround. And so having that fresh perspective for us is really cool and makes our lives simpler and makes things more efficient as we develop processes and continue and support. So that's one cool thing that we see from doing our support shifts each year.
Kristi:Absolutely. Yeah, I love those moments. I was just looking back through the whole company support Slack channel today and I saw a few weeks ago where an engineer was like we need to fix this immediately, you know, because he was feeling the pain and you're still right, the support team. There's so much stuff that we just are sort of like this becomes our normal, we'll live with it. But when an engineer is in there and he's like I could fix this in six minutes, you know, it's just so cool to see those moments happen and they wouldn't be happening if they weren't in the queue talking to customers.
Priscilla:And then they take that insight back to their daily work.
Kristi:No-transcript day yeah, it allows them to build a product in a context and not in a void, and that's just so valuable and neat to see that play out.
Priscilla:A couple months ago our head of marketing came and did a support shift and he was working with someone you know.
Priscilla:So we're in podcasting, so we're working with podcasters every day, and a podcaster had written in about some formatting being off in their episode description and it's something that we would have solved one way on the support team show them how to adjust their formatting so that it looks correct.
Priscilla:But our head of marketing didn't know that that's how we would have answered it, and so he actually did a little more research into why the formatting was showing the way it was and found that there was a different way we could be formatting our feeds for it to look correct on the directories. It's a little technical, but it was really cool because he found this, did the research, figured it out with his additional knowledge from his side of things, from the marketing side, and was able to write and pitch a new way of formatting so that that issue wouldn't even show up in support at all. And it all came from did, because that one ticket caused him to kind of go down a rabbit trail and try to figure out how to fix this thing that we didn't even know could be fixed, which I just think is such a cool example of why it can be so fun to get in and do these support shifts and how it can be so valuable for everyone involved.
Kristi:That's so amazing. Yeah, just what a great investment of resources that now the support team is not going to have to handle that question again in the future, and also the customers are going to be delighted as well.
Priscilla:Exactly, and I think one thing we try to do when we do our support shifts is they're a little bit longer, so they're two to three hours, so they're longer than your power hours.
Priscilla:But we kind of say, hey, be in the queue, we want you to start in the queue, we want you to work through emails. But if you find something like that that you go oh, I actually have special expertise in this, I can find more about this, I might be able to solve this now. Then we kind of give you free reign to do that, to look into that, to spend your time in the support world, but maybe you're not in tickets for the rest of your support shift, and so it's cool to like see people navigate that on their own and how some people will send, you know, 40 emails over the course of a couple hours and some people will send two emails and spend a ton of time digging into a specific issue they found or something internal that we could fix. That would make things more efficient for the support team, which is also really cool.
Kristi:Yeah, that's why I always tell people we don't have a quota. You know, it's not about the numbers, it's about are you learning something, and that's the point. As long as you're in there and you're learning something, even if you're just reading old conversations, I'm cool with that. I just want you engaging with real customer conversations in some way, in hopes that that'll impact your work and, ultimately, the product and the business.
Priscilla:I think what you just said was really important. Even just reading closed emails and seeing the conversations and seeing what customers are running into, yeah, I think that's a really good strategy, especially for people who are new, who don't have much experience in support or at the company at all. It might be daunting to get into a support shift or to do a power hour when you're like I really am new here. But being able to read through the emails and see that is still going to be super valuable because you're getting access to that information even though you're not the one actually responding to an email. I think that's a really cool strategy for people who are new. And one thing you mentioned about your retreats. This is another cool thing that we just experienced. I was thinking this too. Retreats this is another cool thing that we just experienced. I was thinking this too.
Priscilla:Yeah, we also do yearly we call them meetups, but yearly meetups for our whole team and so we recently went to Nashville and it's the same thing you were talking about. You know, it's a couple of days, we're spending time together as a team, but the support doesn't stop, and so the support team still feels kind of on the hook for being in the inbox and clearing the inbox and talking with customers and helping them out. And so in the past we have broken it down and tried different strategies and this time in Nashville, we did like team support shifts and we would do just 15 minute support shifts where everyone would get on in the same room silence. You know everyone's working together for 15 minutes, and then we would stop it at the end of 15 minutes. We like set a timer and then we would go on and do the next event together and then do another support shift for 15 minutes and I like that.
Priscilla:You did full hours. It makes me think to next year, like, oh, maybe we'll do full power hours. I like that. Yeah, 15 minutes felt really fast, but it was cool because you know we had like 20 people there and so, with 20 people jumping in and for support, everyone's volume is going to be different depending on your company and your customers, but for us, having 20 people in the inbox at one time for 15 minutes really allowed us to get pretty close, if not fully clear the inbox before starting our next group activity, and so it was a really cool way, like you said, to value the support team, to say, hey, we care enough about our support team to want to all jump in together and to get this clear so that they can be just as present as the rest of the team, and so that was just another cool way that the support shifts, or whole company support, can really show itself and be a huge benefit to your team?
Kristi:Absolutely yeah. You mentioning that you were all working in silence for 15 minutes reminds me of this past May. At our most recent retreat, a bunch of us got together for a power hour in like a ballroom in the hotel. But, it also happened to be the room that we were going to be doing karaoke later that night, so the DJ had arrived to do his soundcheck. It was the silliest, most unhinged power hour. I mean he was just blasting the Spice Girls while we're like trying to answer emails.
Kristi:It was so funny, what a vibe.
Priscilla:It probably wasn't the most focused power hour that you could have had.
Jordan:It was the best one. Yes, exactly.
Priscilla:So how does whole company support help with training new employees? Do you guys bring new employees into support for any period of time before they go into their roles?
Kristi:Yes, so every single person who's hired at Help Scout, regardless of their role, goes through a version of support training. Of course it's less intense than what the actual support team hires go through, but it's two parts. So the first portion is asynchronous. So basically they're working through a series of assignments that get them like digging through our knowledge base and reading through our saved replies and internal documentation and playing around and experimenting with our features and like starting to actually use help scout. And then the second part is synchronous, so they get assigned a buddy on the support team and they work up drafting replies to well, pretend customers, but they're based on real questions that we've gotten in the past and then their support buddy will, uh, review them and give them feedback both on their like writing style and tone, because we want that to feel unified across the company.
Kristi:But then, also the content to make sure that we're answering questions accurately and, uh, help, scout um has just recently released a new feature called ai drafts, which has been really incredible for whole company support, because it learns from the replies you've sent and also from your knowledge base, and it does its best to draft up a reply to a customer question. It doesn't send automatically or anything like that.
Kristi:You still need a human to review it and make sure it's accurate, because you know we always got to kind of double check what AI is doing. But it's been so helpful for making the queue feel less daunting to people because they're starting with something. They're not just starting with a blank page. They're at least starting with the draft that the AI tried to come up with and then they can research and just fact check to make sure it's accurate. So that has felt like a game changer over the last few months.
Jordan:Yeah, it's way easier to edit than to write something from scratch, especially when you're unsure of your knowledge base in that area. So that's amazing.
Priscilla:That is really cool and I really like that. You bring everyone into support when they first come on the team. That's something that I think is just so valuable for everyone who is working on your product to have that be the intro to the product this is how customers use it, this is what they're saying about it and then once you kind of get through that, then you go on to your own role, whatever that is, and you have that foundation, which I think can be really super valuable.
Kristi:Yeah, I mean, how well can you work on a product if you've never used the product?
Priscilla:Yeah, Do you see any drawbacks, Kristi, with doing whole company support? Have you seen any places where it's added friction or been difficult?
Kristi:seen any places where it's added friction or been difficult. Dude, I'm gonna just be real Like it requires ongoing maintenance and adaptation to evolve as the company evolves and the product evolves. And it's ongoing work training people and supporting them to participate and it's ongoing work continuing to like be a cheerleader and an advocate for it so people understand why we do it and remain enthusiastic about it. I have no power at Help Scout, so I'm over here trying to get VPs you know to do something and I have no authority to be like you have to do this. So that takes work. You know it's like there's like a propaganda component to it of like convincing people this is valuable. So you know we don't do this because the support team needs help in the queue. You know we're doing it.
Kristi:It would be easier to not do. It is what I always say, but it's that we still believe the investment of time and energy and resources is worth it.
Priscilla:Yeah. So what would you say to someone who's on your team Maybe they're a developer, designer, someone outside of the support team, not someone necessarily in the leadership, but someone who's, you know, working on the tool every day, who is kind of hesitant about it? They don't really want to be in support, they don't see the value in it. What would you say to them to show them that, hey, this is valuable?
Kristi:Well, first I would say you know that's totally understandable and in their shoes I think I would be prone to say like, oh, that's not my job. But yeah, my response is caring about your customers and how they feel about your business is part of everyone's job, because if you don't have customers, you don't have a job. And I also encourage people to frame it this way, like it's like going to the gym. It might feel hard and you might not feel motivated to do it or look forward to it, but it is valuable, it is a good investment and it will pay off.
Kristi:And, I would say, realistically, the vast majority of people, I would say, do find joy in it and find moments of delight. But I totally get that there's never going to be 100% of people on the team who love troubleshooting and crafting emails. So I've never aimed for 100% happiness, nor have I actually ever aimed for 100% participation, because it's just not possible. I don't think so. I think having realistic expectations of like. Hopefully I can get as many people to do this and benefit from it as possible, because I am not their boss and I can't make them do it. That's always been the way I've approached it, and then I can't be disappointed.
Priscilla:Yeah, Well, and I think the fact that you're doing one hour power hours also should be an encouragement to anyone on the team, because one hour does not feel like a huge commitment. No, and having the ability to get in the support inbox as a designer should be fun and exciting, and I think sometimes people can get a little bit nervous about oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to like write emails to people. What if I get it wrong? What if people see that I don't actually know every little facet of the product that I am working on? Because a lot of times your support team has the most knowledge of the product because they are working on it and working people through it and giving advice all day, every day, and so I often find that sometimes the people on the support team feel the most comfortable because they have such a well-rounded view of the product and the people who are coming from, like the marketing team, they have a lot of information on the product, they know it, but they don't know all the little tiny intricacies of you know how to log in or how to reset a password, all those little things they might not have, and so there's a little bit of like worry there and I think setting up a situation where they have someone, like you were talking about, that can review their emails before they send them out, and making sure they know they have a safety net when they're working in the inbox, I think can be really valuable for people who are kind of held back a little bit because of the nerves of actually writing to a customer, because for some people that's going to be really hard, especially if you're more introverted and you're really not comfortable, you know, working with people directly.
Priscilla:I mean, if you think about now, this is a general thing. That's not for everyone, but for people who are developers, a lot of times they're going to be a little bit more introverted and maybe not wanting to talk directly with customers so much, and so I think there can be a little bit of that like anxiety that comes up when you're saying, hey, I want you to get in the inbox and talk to our customers for an hour and so letting people know that, hey, when you're in the inbox, you don't have to send emails. You can read closed emails or you can type out emails and leave them as drafts and we will review them and tell you when they're good to go. So there's no fear that has to be involved at all it's extraordinary to me to think about.
Kristi:Our team is spread around the globe, so English isn't the first language for everyone, so I could see how you know, daunting to write a technical troubleshooting email in English if that's not your first, first language. So yeah, there's a lot of things about it that do make it intimidating.
Priscilla:Yeah, intimidating is a good word. I think that that's exactly right. It can be intimidating, but I think you're right, there's so much value in that. So, for anyone who might be listening to this, who wants to start the process of creating this for their company, what would you advise them to think through?
Kristi:I'm a big process person. I really like having processes written out and documented and clear so that if I'm hit by a bus, things carry on.
Priscilla:People know what to do.
Kristi:And then I think also having a mindset of this is fluid and we have to be adaptable and evolve over time. You know, for example, when it was the height of the pandemic and everyone was just like in survival mode and so stressed, we pulled back some expectations around whole company support to give people just a little extra mental bandwidth. Or there's been points in the company history where everyone in the whole company was doing it monthly and right now some teams are doing it quarterly. There's been times where we've experimented with different things, like the support buddy being on a video call, almost like office hours, so that instead of just communicating via Slack you could talk with your support buddy on a video call. So I think being willing to adapt over time based on what the company's current needs are is really important.
Kristi:Yeah, and then also just being realistic about it taking ongoing effort and maintenance. For example, it takes me some time to like schedule all of these power hours and review everybody's time zone and make sure that it works with wherever they're located. You know, just sort of like logistical things that take ongoing work, but then also like the propaganda piece for lack of a better word of continually reminding people like why are we doing this? So that they can remain invested in it. I think that that takes ongoing energy and effort and creativity as well. So I think all of those are important to keep in mind that this isn't just something you set up one day and then you forget about it. It really takes ongoing work, and so there's got to be somebody on your team who has bandwidth to kind of care for it over time.
Priscilla:Yeah, I think that's really important. I also think you know, as you're setting this up, as you're looking at your company and figuring out how this is going to work with your company, look at the people on your team. Are they going to benefit from having it be monthly? Are they going to benefit from it being quarterly? You know your product and so you should be able to look at your team and the people that are going to be coming into support and doing this and how is it going to benefit them.
Priscilla:The frequency or the length of the shifts Like, for us, we find that two to three hours works pretty well, but for you, you might go. One hour is better. For us, or actually a full day is really what we want, because we want you to get in there and really be in it, and so a lot of that is going to change, depending on the company that you have and the product that you have and the service you're giving your customers. And so I think that while you're building I think it's something that a lot of companies don't do as well as they should letting things change as you find better ways to work. And so you know, this year might look like one thing, but next year it might look different because, like you said, the pandemic, or because you're remote now and you weren't remote before, or maybe there's company shifts that change the way you want to do things. And so being able to change that and keeping in mind that the most important thing here is that your team is getting access to your customers and your customers are getting access to your team and that's happening I think that's the biggest thing, and so if you're keeping that as kind of your guiding light when you're making these changes, that's going to help this be a successful thing for you to do for your company.
Priscilla:What advice would you give to someone who is trying to get their leadership to buy into whole company support?
Kristi:This is my number one piece of advice. When I speak with support teams who are trying to get whole company support up and running at their company, I think leadership buy-in is so essential that I don't think you can actually do whole company support without it, because the trickle down effect is so huge. Are our team leads seeing this as something that's taking away time from felt? Like gosh? I can't take the time to do this, whereas but depending on who your manager is, it's like no, there's a priority. Of course I'm not going to schedule a call during my power hour, you know. So I would say you know, start small. If you're trying to pitch this to your team leads or you know the founders, you know you can't just dive in headfirst with weekly power hours or something you know, brainstorm with your team leads what feels like a nice little way we can dip our toes into this and then grow it over time.
Priscilla:Yeah, getting the leadership to buy in first. Be like, hey, before you decide if we should do this as whole company support, let's just next week will you give me two hours of your time and will you come in and do a power hour and see it firsthand? Because once they're in there working on it, they will see that there's value there. Yeah, they'll be hooked, they'll see that they're learning things and they'll be like you know, actually Kevin over in design him doing this would be great too. Exactly so you don't have to necessarily get buy in for the entire company right off the bat.
Priscilla:Get one or two people who don't usually work in the support to come in and if you look for those leaders who are extroverted, who already kind of like that, get those people in first. They will find the value in it, they'll see it and then you know word of mouth it'll trickle around and then hopefully that will help get buy-in for the whole company. But I think what you said is really important. It has to be top down, it has to be the whole company, because once you get to a place where it's optional and it feels like it's not part of your job to spend an hour in support once a month or whatever the frequency is then it's going to feel like you're stepping out of your job and you're putting on a different hat and you're doing support for the support team.
Priscilla:It's not what the point of it is, and the point is for you to keep your designer hat on and to go into support and let that influence the support that our customers are getting, and so there's so much value in that, and so I think you have to have the whole company kind of buy in from the top down so that everyone knows, like you said, this is not something that you're leaving your job to go do. This is part of your job. This is part of your role, as a designer is being able to communicate with our customers occasionally.
Kristi:Absolutely Such a good perspective and strategy.
Priscilla:All company support, like we've said so many times, is such a valuable tool that can bring your team closer to your customers, but it also has the added benefit, like you said, of your support team feeling valued and giving the team access to your support team and insight into what we do every day in support and what we're walking hand in hand with our customers through, and I think there's just a ton of value in that. And so thank you for coming on, Kristi, and sharing with us how you do it over at Help Scout and the importance of whole company support. Before we wrap up, how can people find you online?
Kristi:Yeah, feel free to look up Kristi Ernst Thompson on LinkedIn or shoot me an email at Kristi at HelpScoutcom. Awesome, thank you so much for being here. It was my pleasure, so fun, to talk about this stuff and I really appreciate you having me.
Priscilla:It's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences and, jordan, I think you have something for us today.
Jordan:So this happened back in September, but it's making like the rounds on social media again, which is how I found it Okay. We talked about airlines in the last episode and we're talking about it again this one as well, because I really couldn't pass up the story. So a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Houston had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque, new Mexico, but the delay, like, caused the flight crew to exceed their shift hours, and so the passengers had to wait for a new crew at the airport, and it went like well into the night. But you know, the worst thing about airports is when the restaurants close, yes, and you can't get food Right.
Jordan:And so this very thing happened to the passengers. They were at the airport and there were no restaurants open, and so, of course, they're hungry, they're grumpy. It's a bad situation. So the pilot ordered 30 pizzas for 153 passengers, and he made sure that everyone was served before eating himself, yes, and so this absurdly kind gesture from the pilot made all the passengers feel so well, taken care of that. Even though it was a really bad situation, they actually left with a positive experience, amazing.
Kristi:I know that is such a cool story. I a positive experience.
Jordan:Amazing, I know.
Priscilla:That is such a cool story I had not heard that before Me, neither and one. It's a good example of customer service, right, because the pilot, who is not, it is not his job to make sure that the passengers are happy, really. I mean, it's his job to get them safely from point A to point B. Yes, but he's going out of his way to provide this great service for his passengers. But really, it's also like a very cool leadership thing too, because he's making sure everyone's eating before he is, and he's I mean, I'm sure the flight crew is included in that the people that are there and working are getting some pizza too, and everyone is in this shared experience of frustration, really.
Priscilla:Yeah, and he's taking it upon himself to try to fix that. I think that's such a cool story.
Kristi:Yes, I love that, just above and beyond the call of duty. And he, he flipped it from a situation where those people would have said I'm never flying this airline again to I am loyal to this airline for the rest of my life. That's amazing.
Priscilla:Yeah, and now the story that everyone's telling from it is not oh my gosh, we got grounded and then we had to wait in the airport forever. And now the story is the pilot bought us pizza when we were all hungry, in the middle of the night and frustrated, like that's the story that's going to be told. I think that's just such a cool way for him to take ownership of that and to make everyone's day better with pizza, which is wonderful, because pizza is the best. Everyone loves pizza. Well, if you have a question or a support situation that you'd like us to discuss, you can email us at happy to help at buzzsproutcom or text the show using the link in our episode description and we may discuss your situation or talk about your question on a future episode. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on Apple podcasts. Thank you again, Kristi, for being here with us and thank you to everyone for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
