5 Easy Ways to Instantly Improve Your Customer Service in 2025

Want to take your customer service to the next level in 2025? 

In this episode of Happy to Help, we’re breaking down five simple yet powerful strategies you can start using today to improve your customer service—no expensive tools or complex workflows required!

Tips for leveling up your customer service:

1. Humanize Your Emails – Treat customers like real people, not ticket numbers. A little personalization goes a long way!

2. Shift Your Mindset on Problem-Solving – See customer issues as exciting challenges to tackle, not just tasks to complete.

3. Optimize Your Time Out of the Queue – Use slow periods to sharpen your skills and expand your product knowledge.

4. Empower Customers with Self-Service – Proactively provide resources so customers can solve issues faster on their own.

5. Celebrate Remarkable Service – Recognize great customer interactions to build a culture of support excellence.

Whether you’re answering emails, leading a team, or building customer relationships, these five strategies will instantly improve your approach to support—making customers (and your team) happier along the way!

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!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Season 2!
• 1:17 Who Made Our Day Recently
• 6:57 5 Simple Steps for Better Support
• 9:29 1. Humanize Your Support Interactions
• 15:45 2. Shift Your Problem Solving Mindset
• 21:57 3. Take Time to Sharpen Skills
• 25:53 4. Give Users an Opportunity for Self Service
• 27:21 5. Celebrate Remarkable Service
• 34:32 Support in Real Life: Carolina!

Transcript

Priscilla: 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. We're back for season two and in this episode we're looking at five strategies you can put into practice today to level up your customer support. This year We'll talk about humanizing emails, finding enjoyment in problem solving and the importance of celebrating remarkable work. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. New year, new season. Jordan, how are you doing?

Jordan: 0:30

I'm doing so good, so excited that we are back. I can't wait for the season. It's going to be a good one.

Priscilla: 0:35

It's going to be a good one. We're recording this right at the tail end of January and I feel like January is always a transition month into the new year. You're like recovering from the holidays. You're just trying to get through that first month of the year, and then February is really when you get to settle into like, ok, what is 2025 going to be?

Jordan: 0:52

Oh, I hope so. I hope that's true, because so far it has been a month.

Priscilla: 0:57

Yeah, January is not. It's been a rough month.

Jordan: 1:00

It's been crazy. Yeah, for a lot of people. Yeah.

Priscilla: 1:02

Okay. So today, though, what I want to talk about to like kick off this season is I want to talk about some strategies that you can put into practice today that will level up your customer service going into the new year. I love this, yeah yeah, I'm really excited about it, but before we get into it, you know we always start episodes with sharing how someone made our day, and so I thought it'd be cool if you and I share any ways someone made your day over the last couple of months while we've been on break.

Jordan: 1:30

I love that we've had a couple of months to like come up with a good story, because usually it's like a week later and it's like did anyone make your day? I'm like I don't know. I haven't talked to anyone yet.

Priscilla: 1:41

I'm just hanging out in my house by myself, so do you have a story?

Jordan: 1:46

I do. I have a really good story, and it's because this is about an industry that is typically known for not being good at taking care of people.

Priscilla: 1:57

Okay, I could name a couple industries, but I won't.

Jordan: 2:00

Yeah, so this is definitely one of them. So I recently had a family member that had to be admitted to a hospital. She's totally fine, like it's all good, but it's always just such a like a scary moment because with health insurance you're just not sure, like you know, what is covered in your plan, but at the same time they have to deem it like medically necessary in order to cover it.

Jordan: 2:23

So there's still just kind of uncertainty. You don't know what the cost is going to be. It's really stressful, you have a lot going on. And I got a phone call from Florida Blue, our insurance, and I was like, oh no, this is going to be them calling me to let me know that it's not going to be covered. So I answered the phone and it was a sweet lady and she told me hey, I saw that your family member is in the hospital and we just want to check on you and see how you're doing.

Jordan: 2:53

I was like, oh my gosh. And I was like, well, I'm kind of stressed because I just don't know what this is going to cost me. And she's like, oh yeah, let me look into it. And she goes you know what? This is actually covered 100% and you don't even have a copay, so you just take care of your family and don't worry about it. And I just I started crying. I was like, oh my gosh, like what a weight lifted off my shoulders. And then, even after that, she was like so is there anything else we can do for you to help your stress?

Jordan: 3:18

Like, do you need counseling.

Jordan: 3:19

You know, and I was just like, wow, that didn't just make my day, I mean, that made like my entire month because I was so stressed about it and it was just completely uplifted and I was able to carry on like normal

Priscilla: 3:32

And I'm sure you're feeling like, oh, I have to be the one that handles all of this and I have to be the one that takes care of all of this.

Priscilla: 3:37

And then she comes to you to say, hey, actually let me take care of you in this situation, like yeah, that's such a good story. I'm so glad that was a good experience.

Jordan: 3:45

It was so amazing, and from a health insurance company, yeah like right, oh, more of that please, more of that.

Priscilla: 3:51

Yeah, more of that for 2025, please, that would be great. Yes, my story was a little bit, you know, not quite as intense. I subscribe to like a clothing subscription service called Newly, oh yeah, where you basically like, get to choose six items and then they ship them to you each month and then you get a new box and then you ship it back and it's fantastic. That's why you're always dressed so nice, I don't know about that.

Priscilla: 4:13

So I subscribed to this service Nuuly, and earlier in January I got a box, a Nuuly box, and the driver of the UPS truck Right, so not someone from Nuuly they left it on my front porch and they left it in a place where it was not covered and then it stormed, I mean like huge rain storm all afternoon.

Jordan: 4:35

Like a Florida torrential downpour.

Priscilla: 4:37

Yeah, I wasn't home, and I wasn't. I didn't get home until like 10 o'clock that night, and so by the time I got home, the package was fully soaked through. Every item of clothing in it was drenched. I had to like hang everything up to like dry out and I was like I can't wear any of this. This is so frustrating.

Priscilla: 4:54

And I was frustrated, but I was a little bit more worried that something would happen to an item and then I would be on the hook for it, and so I emailed the Nu newly support team and said hey, you know, I'm not actually asking you for anything here, but I'm just letting you know that this is what happened and everything is drying right now and hopefully it will all dry out and there will be no issues. But I wanted to let you know ahead of time in case something goes wrong, and really it was for me to cover myself and make sure that I didn't get in trouble for anything, right, yeah, but the next day they emailed me back and they were so apologetic that it happened, which I was like it's not actually your fault, you didn't leave it on the porch in a place where it would get wet, like that was not you, and they offered to take everything back wet as it was and to reship things if they could, or they offered to reimburse me half of the cost of that month.

Priscilla: 5:45

And I was like holy cow. I wasn't expecting you to go out of your way to make it better for me, like I was expecting you to say OK, thanks for letting us know. If you need anything in the future, let us know. You know what I mean. Like just something, just general. And so they really took that situation. That was not their fault. They made it better and luckily all the clothes dried out and I was able to wear them and it was all great and they continued to offer great service even after that initial email. But it really was like a shock to see how they handled that in such a positive outcome when I wasn't really even asking for them to do anything special about it.

Jordan: 6:20

Usually what happens is you write in and they're like well, that wasn't us. I mean, I've had it happen with like things where it gets delivered to the wrong house or just never shows up, and they're just like sorry, I'm just out like a hundred bucks yeah exactly that's what you would expect and, honestly, to an extent they would be okay with saying that, because the reality is it wasn't their fault, yeah, but they took responsibility for it anyway.

Priscilla: 6:49

And wasn't their fault yeah, but they took responsibility for it anyway and they made it better because they wanted to keep a happy customer instead of the risk of having someone frustrated.

Priscilla: 6:53

So that was really great. So shout out to Nuuly. They made my day and I'm going to keep ordering clothes from Nuuly. I just love it. So let's jump into these strategies.

Priscilla: 7:03

When I was going through these and kind of organizing my thoughts there's a couple different ways you can take this my hope for this episode was that it would be an episode that you could listen to and put into practice these strategies, like today, to make your service better, starting tomorrow morning, and so what I really wanted to do was find strategies that you don't need to purchase outside software or develop any big plans or anything like that.

Priscilla: 7:30

That's kind of going to delay it a couple weeks and then you can actually start doing the better service in a couple weeks, yeah. So this is not a comprehensive list of things that you can do to make your service better. There are certainly AI tools and different software that you can implement and bring into your process that will make your service better, but the idea behind these five strategies is that they are things that you can change right now, in this moment, and make the next email you send better. It's more like mindset focused. Yeah, because a lot of times, we're limited in the resources that we have, and if you're working in customer support right now and you don't have the ability to get the budget approved for a new AI tool, then how else are you going to level up your service? And so, hopefully, some of these will be things that you can put into practice that will make your customer service better, like immediately.

Jordan: 8:18

Yeah, this reminds me of those baby steps to like a healthier you. You know like maybe you go out walking 10 minutes a day and maybe you go to bed like 30 minutes earlier than you normally do so it's almost like that, but for your customer support, yeah.

Priscilla: 8:32

It's much easier to say, okay, I'm going to go to bed 30 minutes earlier and I'm going to wake up in the morning and go on a walk first thing, than saying, okay, I'm going to go find a personal trainer and I'm going to start training twice a week for an hour twice a week Like, that's such a big thing to accomplish and it takes a lot of groundwork to go and find someone you like and then to get yourself to the gym twice a week and then you're probably not going to stick to it, right. But if your goal is to go to bed 30 minutes earlier and wake up and go on a walk in the morning, that's so much more achievable and it's still going to have an impact on your mindset, you know, and your health in general Right. And then you'll get to the place where you can do those things that seem really big now but might not feel like such a big hurdle in two or three months, once you've gotten used to. You know, going on your two mile walks every morning, yeah, all right. So nothing here is going to be super groundbreaking, but all of these strategies have the ability to have big impacts on your customers and on the service. Just keep that in mind. Yeah, all right.

Priscilla: 9:29

So the first one is humanizing your emails. This one is so easy and will take your emails up a notch immediately. Yeah, if you're reading an email and grabbing the most applicable canned response or saved reply that you have and then clicking send, then taking this humanizing approach is going to really level that up right away, because right now that's not part of what you're doing. If you already are kind of humanizing your emails, then pushing that up a notch anyway, making them more personal, is going to deepen that relationship with your customers right off the bat. So what does this look like? For us, this looks like being intentional, about viewing each interaction as a real person. A lot of times, when you look at an inbox full of emails, you don't see a waiting room full of people, you know, but the reality is it is a waiting room full of people. It's a bunch of people who are waiting to hear from you, and so the first thing is being intentional about what you view that inbox as, and viewing it as people who are waiting for your help and not emails that need a response to move out of the queue.

Priscilla: 10:36

We talk a lot about treating customers the way we would treat family members and friends and open an email Think of it as a person that you know when you're reading through it and give them that additional patience, that additional empathy that you would give someone that you love right. A lot of times when you get an email, especially from a customer who's frustrated, it can be really hard to extend that extra patience and empathy, and so what I will do, or what we talk to our team about doing, is putting ourselves in their shoes and really seeing things from their perspective, and so that will help you. If you take the time to do that before you start responding, that will help you bake empathy into your response If you really take the time to go. Ok, what is Julie experiencing and why is she frustrated and what am I missing from my side? Because I'm looking at it from my perspective and she's looking at it from Julie's perspective.

Priscilla: 11:30

How do I shift my perspective? How do I be intentional about doing that? And then that gives you a little bit more understanding for what she's going through and hopefully allows you to build a little more empathy just into the way you're talking to her. A more fun way that this shows up is being personal with your customers. Yeah, so this could be including a GIF or being conversational in your tone when you're talking with someone using emojis Exactly.

Priscilla: 11:57

Right, or just, you know, just in general, being personal. Well, you know, one thing that we like to do I was in the queue a little bit this morning and I did it a couple one thing that we like to do I was in the queue a little bit this morning and I did it a couple of times but we like to see how long people have been with Buzzsprout and call that out in our emails. So I was working with someone this morning and he had been with Buzzsprout for seven years. You know it was in the form when they emailed in how long they've been a customer, and so it's an easy thing for us to grab. And I noticed it and I said, oh my gosh, mark, you've been with us for seven years. That's crazy. Thank you for being a loyal user for seven years. Yeah, and then I gave him a credit to like thank him and cover the next month of being on Buzzsprout. That's so cool. That's an easy way to personalize the interaction and to strengthen the relationship between your user and your support person. So if you are a support specialist, those are some ways for you to humanize your emails. But if you're a leader, so maybe you're leading a team and you're not in the inbox as much, but you want to make sure your team knows how to humanize their emails or how to be more personal and lean into that casual tone. What you might want to do is develop a tone document for your team, right, so you can tell them hey, tomorrow let's try to be more human, let's try to type how we talk, let's try to use GIFs and emojis and see how that goes for a couple days and see if we have good response from that. But then further on, that might look like developing a tone that you train your support specialists on and we talked about that in an episode last season about how to develop that tone for your team and so that can be a really strong way as a leader to lead your team into the direction of a more human approach to support, to lead your team into the direction of a more human approach to support.

Priscilla: 13:50

Another thing is you know, if you like, start doing this tomorrow, you're going to find it's going to take you a little longer to get through emails. You're going to have to slow down a little bit to look for those ways to be personal or to be empathetic. You have to tell your team you're okay with them going a little slower in order for that to happen. Yeah, because if you feel like you're rushed to get through an email, you're not going to take the time to do what might be quote unquote optional right, which is like adding a couple sentences about how you're thankful for someone being on your platform for seven years. You know what I mean. So you kind of, as the leader, have to encourage that and make it possible, and then you can find ways, as a leader, to humanize the people on your team to your customers.

Priscilla: 14:27

So we've talked about this a couple of times, but we have little like fun job descriptions in our emails. That, in and of itself, humanizes everyone on the support team to our customers without us having to do anything additional per email. So those are always like personality based, so something about like loving to ski, being obsessed with a certain sports team, or I think Tom's is something about being a troubleshooting Jedi because he loves Star Wars. So you can put those things. You can put those things in and you'll be surprised how many people call that out when they see it. You can also include pictures in your emails. This is something that we haven't done yet that I am back and forth on whether I want to do it. But if you feel like that is something that you want to do, to put a face to the name of the person who's emailing you then that's a great thing to try and you can try it for a couple of weeks and if you don't like the outcome of it you can take it out. But humanizing your emails, I think, is the easiest way to level up your support and might have the biggest impact, because when you think of these emails as real people, because they are, and they see you as a real person because you are, then that relationship is going to be so much stronger, which turns into brand loyalty and turns into word of mouth, recommendations and all of those things that you want to have to grow your business.

Priscilla: 15:46

Number two is shifting your perspective on problem solving. So this one's fun because it shows you how powerful your mindset is and the way that you approach a problem. You know a massive part of working in customer support is problem solving. Some problems are easy. Some problems are very complicated. Depending on your industry, you might have a different balance of that. There may be a lot of really hard emails that come in, versus a couple easy ones, or vice versa.

Priscilla: 16:15

But what does it look like to shift your mindset or your perspective on problem solving? To me, this looks like viewing your support inbox as the opportunities to make someone's day better. So it's not just a list of questions that you have to figure out and answer and oh, I have to do this again, I have to go through and figure out why this is broken, again Like, oh, my goodness. But instead looking at like okay, this is Cindy, she's running into this issue because we've already humanized the email and now saying how can I make Cindy's day better by problem solving for her and solving this issue? Yeah, and it also looks at viewing each question as like I mean, I was trying to think of a better way to say it because this feels a little kooky to me but like as a quest, you know, as like something you have to accomplish.

Jordan: 17:04

It's almost like gamifying, it right, yeah.

Priscilla: 17:06

Yeah, exactly, it's like when I sit down to a complicated email that is how I view it I'm like, ok, this is a puzzle that I need to solve, yeah, and it makes it more fun. And then it also makes it more satisfying when you do solve the problem, yeah. So I feel like you know, when it comes to the inbox, you have a couple of different ways that you can approach it, and most of the time, the approach is the inbox is full. I need to clear it as quickly as possible, and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to send the fastest answer I can send not necessarily the best answer I can send and so when you're thinking in that mindset of I need to get these emails out of the queue so that I can get to the other emails that are in the queue and then move on, because there are going to be more emails coming in and I need to stay on top of it and clear the queue If that's the thought process, then you're not going to be setting yourself up to answer the emails in a way that is the best way, and the best way is going OK, how do I solve this problem? The best way for this person and not thinking about the rest of the queue while you're in one email, while you're talking to Cindy.

Priscilla: 18:12

So in my first days of support, I remember being so overwhelmed by the busyness of the inbox that I really was like I just have to get answers out. Even if they're not fully answering a question, I need to get them out, even if it's really more of like a delay response. You know what I mean. Like I'm going to ask a follow-up question to delay this a little bit so that I can get to everything else and then it'll come back and then I'll get to it. Eventually. What I was doing was I wasn't giving good support and I was really just building. I was making myself more work to do. I was just delaying it for later in the day.

Priscilla: 18:45

And so that was a quick habit that I developed out of a necessity to get through an inbox. So that was a quick habit that I developed out of a necessity to get through an inbox and as I focused on changing that and going OK, actually spending a little bit more time right now with Cindy might solve her problem and eliminate the need for four additional emails that take up another 15 minutes of my time just later on in the day, and so, instead of that mindset, I would challenge you to approach an email as a problem that you're trying to solve, not delay.

Priscilla: 19:14

So this starts by understanding the situation right. As you open an email, you read through it a couple times and you understand what's being asked and the context around the question. The second step is making a hypothesis about what you think is going on. You're the expert on your product because you're doing support for it, and so you should be able to make a hypothesis for what's happening. It might not be right, but you can go through and figure out what you think is happening.

Priscilla: 19:41

I read something once that said that talking out loud to yourself helps with problem solving.

Priscilla: 19:48

I'm all for that, but I do think that talking out loud to yourself helps with getting the facts in order and figuring out where to go from there. So once you've got your hypothesis, then you look for evidence to back up what you think is happening, and so you might go through their account and look for evidence of why what you think is happening is actually what's happening and what's causing the issue. You try to replicate the issue that they're running into and then if your evidence supports your hypothesis, then you can respond with that information in a clear way, solving the problem. And if it doesn't, then at that point you know what additional questions, what additional information you need to move forward with coming up with a new hypothesis or problem solving, continuing down the road, because sometimes you won't solve it in the first email. But if you take that approach from email one to try to solve the problem and not delay the problem, then the likelihood of you solving it in one email and one 10-minute chunk instead of four five-minute chunks is much higher.

Jordan: 21:09

And the customer is not going to be miffed that you wrote in, having ignored something that they said earlier.

Priscilla: 21:16

Yeah, or not taken into context, something about their account that it would have taken you an extra minute to find but would have been worth looking for. As a leader, you can encourage this by using this mindset shift yourself. I mean, it's such a top-down situation. If you think like this as a leader and you tell your support specialists, the people on your team, that this is a value that you have in your team, then that's going to encourage that mindset shift, and so I definitely you know that's just a big one. It starts from the top. So if you expect your team to think about problem solving this way, then you should show that in your approach to difficult emails as well.

Priscilla: 21:58

Number three is optimizing your time out of the queue. So when you are in the queue, you are usually head down, working email to email, working with customers, trying to be human, trying to problem solve with the right mindset. But it is really important to make sure that you have time in your day outside of the queue for you to focus on growing as a specialist, right that professional development side of things, or growing your knowledge about your product, or going back and researching how people on your team have effectively handled emails or calls or situations, but it doesn't have to look like these big projects. It really can look like smaller, research-based hours. For me, what that looks like is, as you're working through emails, you look for areas where you need to sharpen your knowledge.

Priscilla: 22:49

You look for those emails that you dread. Think of the emails or the calls that you're like I hate it when I get those because I never feel confident in them. Well, why don't you feel confident? Because you don't know the information or the details around those specific areas. So take an hour, take two hours or whenever you can get that time and put yourself into that area and become the expert on it. Or reach out to someone who is an expert on it and say hey, can I pick your brain Because I still don't feel confident about this certain area and I want to make sure that the next time I get an email that is related to that, I don't feel a pit of dread about it. You know what?

Priscilla: 23:28

I mean, yeah, and if you're listening to this and you're a support person who's alone in the queue and you're like, well, this is great, but I'm the only person who does emails and I'm the only person who's in this queue and I just can't get out of it for an hour. You know, no one else is going to take it while I'm out. Find a slow time and let the inbox be for an hour. Yeah, it is really important to get out of the inbox. There's so many reasons to get out of the inbox, one of them being to grow your knowledge, and if you don't make time for that, then you're not giving yourself the ability to level up because you're not giving yourself time outside of it, and so there are definitely going to be lulls.

Priscilla: 24:04

Every single support team sees busier times and lighter times, and so if you can find one of those lighter times and build an hour, build two hours into your afternoon when you can get out of the inbox and put some focused work in outside of the inbox, now, if you're like there's really no time, if I did that, then I'd end up with 200 emails in the inbox that I'd have to get done and I wouldn't be able to get through them all. Then maybe you talk to someone one of your leaders or someone in the management team and say hey, is there any way that someone else could monitor the inbox for a couple hours a week so that I have the ability to go and sharpen my knowledge in certain areas, because that's the only way I'm going to grow. Advocate for yourself for that time, because it's important.

Jordan: 24:49

I mean they call it sharpening the ax, for a reason Exactly you can't chop through a tree with a dull ax.

Priscilla: 24:55

Yeah, it would be annoying, yeah, it would take longer. And, honestly, the reality is support never goes away. There's always going to be emails to answer. That's always going to be the case and for years when I was working on a smaller team, we just never did anything else but support, but emails, but working directly with customers. And you're doing yourself a disservice when you do that, when you don't give yourself any time to grow and to get better and, like you said, sharpen your axe. So, as a leader, advocate for your team, you know you probably control the schedule. So build time in there for your team members to take time out of control the schedule. So build time in there for your team members to take time out of the inbox.

Priscilla: 25:33

It might feel silly in the beginning to say, hey, I'm going to kick you out of the inbox for an hour and I'm going to let you go and do some self-guided study on what you need to study and learn more about. But do that. I promise you it will make your service to your customers way better when your knowledge is that much stronger. Mm-hmm Number four empower your users for self-service. This is pretty standard, but if you are not already looking for ways to educate your customers and help them find their own answers before coming to you, then you should start that tomorrow, so you know there might be some feeling of like well, I don't want to give them all the answers, but you do Trust me, you want to give them the ability to find as many answers as they can before they come to you. It will make your life easier and it'll make their life easier. So this can look like looking for trends in the inbox when you're working with customers and putting that in a help doc and posting it on your site.

Priscilla: 26:35

So some people probably have full-fledged, big help guides that are great and some of you probably don't, but I would say it's really important to focus on that education piece, and so that can look like educating someone on how the tool works in an email. Or it can look like identifying trends and beginning to work on help documentation that you can post publicly so that people can find their own answers. If you don't have that in place already, then that's a really important place to start when you're looking at leveling up your service and really giving your customers the ability to solve their own problems before they come to you and that way, when they do come to you, the things that you're helping them with are the ones that are really more complicated, that they can't solve on their own. Yeah, okay. And then the last one. This is my favorite, okay, this is my favorite way to level up your support this year Celebrate remarkable service.

Jordan: 27:28

Oh yeah, it's easy.

Priscilla: 27:29

Celebrate it. Yeah, I mean, if you listen to the companies who have remarkable support, you'll hear a common theme. They talk about it. They talk about their support. They share it publicly. They share it as a team with each other. They talk about the fact that their support is a big part of their product and that it's really remarkable.

Priscilla: 27:47

So Southwest right is all about exceptional support, and a big part of that is that they tell stories internally about really good support situations and really good support interactions with customers, and so what they're doing is they're reinforcing their values through those stories. They're saying, hey, these are the things we value. And so I'm going to talk about this story that shows Jordan exemplifying that value in support, because that's going to tell everyone else on the team that this is something to be celebrated and that we're not just saying this is how we do things, please do it. We're saying this is how we do things. Jordan just did it and she blew everyone out of the water and Jordan's amazing for doing that and celebrating that story. And then you get to see and this is how it affected one of our customers who now has a much stronger opinion of whatever your company is Southwest or Best Brat or whatever it is- Plus, everyone loves getting a shout out Exactly.

Priscilla: 28:41

Positive reinforcement is a powerful thing that we really can utilize a lot more. It's really big, but it's kind of like the you know the chicken or the egg question, like when you're celebrating support, does it make those support interactions show up more, or is it because those are showing up more that you're celebrating it? You know what I mean. It's like that which one is first? So the reality is tomorrow you can find something in either work that you've done or work that a peer has done and celebrate it publicly to your entire team. Yeah, this doesn't have to be only the leaders celebrating people on their teams. It can be a peer-to-peer celebration. I mean, if you were to be a fly on the wall on our support chat with Buzzsprout support, you would see that daily people are shouting out other people on the support team.

Priscilla: 29:32

And sometimes those shout outs get into the company-wide chats.

Jordan: 29:36

That's what I was going to say I see them pop up all the time. It'll be, you know, just someone that's in the support team. They'll get like a great review, they'll screenshot it and share it with everyone and they'll be like, hey, great job, blake, you're awesome. And then everyone you know does their little like confetti emojis and hearts and stuff and it's just really fun.

Priscilla: 29:54

Yeah, it reinforces that feeling of oh, the work I'm doing is important and it is making people's days better, and I have the ability to do really good, remarkable service. And when I do it it gets recognized. People see it, and so it's not just going to Cindy who reads the email, doesn't respond, and then where did it go? And I took all that time to, you know, exemplify this value, but no one saw it. And so it's really good to celebrate your team and celebrate really good work.

Jordan: 30:23

I think in support too. You get a lot of instances where you're dealing with rough cases or someone's not super happy for whatever reason. Just getting these kind of positive reinforcements really helps. It's like if you get a hundred good comments on something but one bad comment, you really feel that bad comment and so it helps when you get something really big like a kudos, yeah.

Priscilla: 30:47

And I would say, when you're celebrating people, especially as a leader, as a manager on a team, be specific about what you're celebrating, like, what is it that they did that is worth celebrating? I've been watching this documentary or this docuseries. It's a couple of years old now, but we're kind of in that lull between the last football game and the Super Bowl right now, and so I'm like, oh, I kind of want some sports to watch because we've got a couple of weeks, and so I've been watching this docuseries about quarterbacks.

Jordan: 31:16

Oh, I think I was watching that too. Yeah, is it on Netflix?

Priscilla: 31:19

Yeah, it's pretty good, so good. But one of the things I've noticed is Kirk Cousins. I'm really not a big football person in general, but Kirk Cousins is a quarterback you know. I'm learning a lot about him through this docuseries, and one of the things that I've noticed and that he's done a couple times so far, is that when he pulls his guys over to the sidelines after a really good play, he will take them aside and he will celebrate them in that moment and say like that was awesome, good job. But then he will be very specific about what they did. That was really good.

Priscilla: 31:48

So it's not just like, hey, great catch. It's like, hey, most people wouldn't be able to do what you just did and to come back from this route and then cut to the side and catch the ball. But you did that, bro. Yeah, it's so like intentional and specific and it reinforces that specific action that you want everyone to do, naturally. And so if you, when you're celebrating those wins, be specific, tie it back to the values that you as a team value, the things that you value. Tie it back to that so that, as other people on the team see it, they will want to find ways to show those values and hopefully get shouted out and try to make sure that everyone's getting that kind of celebration when you can. That's such a good example. Yeah, I saw it and I just thought, man, the way he did that was so good.

Priscilla: 32:35

If I was getting that compliment, it would feel so much more impactful than just saying, hey, great job catching that. But like, oh, you noticed that what I just did was hard and that I did that well. That makes me feel really really celebrated and really good. So, as a leader, you know, celebrate your team when someone does something good. Make noise. Make noise in front of the whole company. Sometimes a customer will write back and say oh, kara, you're so wonderful. And Kara will have already signed off for the day. And I'll respond and I'll say she is wonderful, here are the things that I think she's great at, and I will celebrate Kara to the customer. And then that is another level of celebration for Kara, who is seeing then that her leader, her manager, is coming in and reinforcing that with the customer and saying you know, you're right, we are really lucky to have Kara on the team. Thank you for noticing that.

Jordan: 33:22

Oh, that's so cool.

Priscilla: 33:23

I love that, yeah, okay. So just quick recap five things that you can start doing tomorrow or today. If you're listening to this on your way to work before you sign into your email queue, you can humanize your emails more. Take that step up and write to people like you. Talk and see them as the people that they are. Shift your perspective on problem solving. Look at it as a fun thing that you get to investigate and figure out and make someone's day.

Priscilla: 33:49

Don't view it as here's a list of emails I have to get through so that I can clear an inbox. Optimize your time out of the queue. Advocate for yourself and find time to leave the queue so that I can clear an inbox. Optimize your time out of the queue. Advocate for yourself and find time to leave the queue so that you can sharpen your knowledge and grow your knowledge about the areas in the inbox that you dread. Empower your users for self-service. Focus on educating users so that they don't have to come to you every time they have a question, but that they can find those answers themselves and then celebrate remarkable service. Whether you're a specialist or a leader or a manager or the CEO of a company, when you see good work, make noise about it.

Jordan: 34:27

I feel like these are all very doable, priscilla. Good job, I think so too.

Priscilla: 34:35

Okay, it's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences. This week, I am bringing something to the table. Yeah, I have a pop culture support story to share. Okay, so there are two seasons that I love, you know. People ask about like, what's your favorite season? Fall, summer my two favorite seasons are baseball season and awards season.

Jordan: 34:56

Very Moira Rose of you.

Priscilla: 34:58

Yes yes, Luckily for me they do not overlap, so when baseball is on hiatus we move into awards season, which usually is like January, February, March, maybe a little of April.

Jordan: 35:11

Yeah.

Priscilla: 35:11

And so that always gets kicked off Awards season always gets kicked off with the Golden Globes, and so this happened earlier in January, but it really stuck out to me and I just thought it was wonderful and I wanted to share it on the podcast. So, jordan, I think you have a clip, I do.

Jordan: 35:25

Oh, golden Globes. Thanks as well, yeah.

Priscilla: 35:27

Whoever else I forgot, I do apologize. You know what you mean to me. Oh, craft service, our great dame, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, carolina, carolina. On those cold winter nights in New York where I was the only one overheating, she'd be there with a coconut water every half an hour, calling you Carolina, god bless you. She kept the whole crew going. She's craft service, see you.

Priscilla: 35:51

Ok, so what we just heard was Colin Farrell, who's an actor accepting an award for a part he played in a TV show called the Penguin, which I haven't seen it, but I think it's like Batman, dc Comics related, oh yeah, but he plays the penguin and he has a lot of prosthetics on in this character, and so what he's talking about is someone in craft service named Carolina who made sure that he was staying cool by bringing him coconut water while he was on set.

Priscilla: 36:23

And he says, like in those cold nights, I was the only person overheating and she was there with me, giving me my coconut water to keep me going, and it was like such a cool moment to have someone, like in a support role, shouted out on a big stage and thanked for what could be seen as a very small act, but the reality is it had a big impact. If he wasn't able to stay cool in his prosthetics and the character get up he was in, then it would have affected his acting and Carolina, who probably was like, yep, this is an annoying role. All I have to do is give this guy his coconut water whenever he wants it. I mean and I don't know Carolina, so I don't know how she viewed it, but the fact that she did it and it made an impact on him enough that when he accepted the award for that role, one of the people he thanked for helping him get to that award was the person in craft service who made sure that he had a cold drink when he needed a cold drink.

Jordan: 37:23

Watching the full clip. He very quickly thanks, you know, producers and directors, and like all these actors and like they're doing such a good job, and then he goes oh but Carolina, with the coconut water and he takes so much time for her.

Priscilla: 37:39

There's a change of his inflection, his like passion, when it comes to it. He's thanking these actors that he's working with, he's thanking these producers and these directors, who have all done amazing work. But then, when he remembers Carolina, he goes oh my gosh, but how could I have done it without Carolina? Because she was the one who kept me cool.

Jordan: 37:59

Yeah you can feel it in your soul how much he loved her.

Priscilla: 38:04

And his accent, his accent, helps a lot. I just love his accent, but it is just one of those things. When I saw it, it made me so happy and I was like I have to talk about this on a podcast because it's one of those things. You think sometimes that the work you're doing every day does not have the ability to make big impacts on people, and that cannot be farther from the truth.

Priscilla: 38:27

As a support professional, you are coming alongside people.

Priscilla: 38:28

In whatever company you work with, whatever product you're serving, you're coming along real people who have questions, who need assistance, and you are being the person who's helping them. Yes, it's possible that you help people and they don't remember it and they just move on with their day, but the reality is there are going to be people who are impacted by the service you're providing in so much of a way that it makes them do their job better, it helps them to succeed, and that's really cool. And so if you're doing customer support and you're feeling like you're not making a difference, just remember Carolina, who was craft service. You know which is the food and drink of production and she's probably cold late at night and she's doing this pretty thankless job and then she turns on the Golden Globes, where Colin Farrell is so overtly showing her that he appreciates her work and that her work made an impact on his work. I just think it's such a cool thing, so hopefully that can be an encouragement if you're feeling like your work isn't important because, oh my gosh, it's so important.

Jordan: 39:32

Thank you so much for bringing that story in. I just love that. It gives me such a big smile Like I'm ready to take on anything today.

Priscilla: 39:39

Yes, so if you have a question or a support story or a situation or some kind of you know, shout out that you want us to discuss. Send us an email at happy to help at buzzbratcom, or use the text the show link in our description to text us directly. You may hear your question or story discussed on a future episode of the podcast. As always, if you liked this episode, share it with someone that you think would benefit from it, or you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We would love to hear from you. That way. Reviews are really helpful just to let people know why this is an important podcast to listen to. I'm excited to jump into season two with you, Jordan. We're going to have some really great episodes coming up this year, and so I am really excited about it, and I hope that this one starts everyone out on like a strong foot as they enter 2025 and look to level up their customer service. Well, thank you everyone for listening. Now go make someone's day.