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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, on the second Tuesday of every month as Buzzsprout's Head of Podcaster Success, Priscilla Brooke dives into the world of customer support to make remarkable support the standard, not the exception!
Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
The Role of AI in Customer Support with Conor Pendergrast
How should customer support teams use AI without losing the human touch?
Priscilla Brooke sits down with customer success expert Conor Pendergrast to explore the evolving role of AI in support workflows. From using AI as a smart assistant to drive efficiency, to building better customer relationships through intentional automation, Connor offers real-world examples, clear do’s and don’ts, and practical tips for teams of all sizes.
Learn how to strike the balance between AI tools and authentic human service, and hear why empathy, intentionality, and trust remain at the heart of excellent support even in an AI-powered world.
Learn more about Conor at CustomerSuccess.cx and subscribe to Conor's daily tips for CS!
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 Brooke. Today we're tackling AI and customer support. Ai is all the rage, but how can we use it in support to make our work better, provide excellent experiences and build strong customer relationships? Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it.
Priscilla:We launched this podcast a year ago and I knew when we launched it we were going to have to talk about AI. Yeah, it was going to happen. It has been such a hot topic recently and I was always kind of like oh, I don't know, what do I want to say about AI. I'm still figuring out what I think about AI and how to best use it. Yeah, on today, who has some really great insight into how you can use AI with your customer support teams to really continue offering customer-focused support and using AI as a tool to help you do that.
Priscilla:So joining us today is Conor Pendergrast. Conor is a customer support and retention specialist with over 15 years of experience. He has worked as a director of information and communication, spent 10 years with Expens as a director of information and communication, spent 10 years with Expensify focusing on customer success and retention, and currently he is the founder of customersuccesscx, where he helps CX leaders grow their careers, empower their teams and drive meaningful business impact. He also writes a wonderfully helpful daily newsletter for support professionals. Thanks for joining us, Conor.
Conor:Thanks, Priscilla. That was quite the intro. I'm impressed with myself.
Priscilla:You should be. I'm impressed with you, and everyone listening should be impressed. We always like to start our episodes with a lot of positivity, and so one thing we like to ask our guests is who has made your day recently?
Conor:I'm going a bit left field here because it has absolutely nothing to do with work or anything like that I will shout out two of my son's friends' parents. So I live in Birmingham the Birmingham that's in the United Kingdom, not the Birmingham that's in Alabama for anyone who's in the United States of America.
Priscilla:Thank you for the clarification.
Conor:This is going to surprise you. There are places outside of the United States that have the same name. There actually was a York, just a York existed, so anyway. So I live in Birmingham and we have the Botanical Gardens here in Birmingham and it's a lovely place. It's got like nice glass houses and flowers and it actually has a really nice playground, and so my son's friends' parents were going there and they just threw it into the little WhatsApp group and said, hey, we're going going to go here, and it turned out to be a really lovely day. We rocked up at about 10 o'clock, which is when it opened. It was sunny.
Conor:When I say it was sunny, I mean it was like this is england and it's april and so you don't really get consistent dry, warm, sunny spells, but we did for the whole day and I mentioned earlier in the green room that I have a little bit of sunburn, so that's how I got sunburned, but it was just it was just, it was me, it was my kids, it was my son's friends and their parents, and it was just like a really chill day.
Conor:And then, after we finished, we all came home. I went for a short run, came back I'd abandoned my son again at their house. I came back to collect him and they were sitting out the front drinking wine. So then we segued straight into just sitting out the front having a nice drink, getting more sunburnt, getting some pizza and then falling into bed, all of us totally exhausted on the Sunday. So it has nothing to do with work, but I will shout out to Eleni and Christina, who are the two parents that's so great.
Priscilla:It is such a good reminder to us to you know, think of other people. Reach out to them Like you never know what someone else is doing with their day. They might be totally free and able to go and have a fun Sunday afternoon. So, yeah, I love that.
Conor:Exactly.
Jordan:And I'll tell you what when you're a parent and you have another parent support system where they're like yeah, the kids can play, you can just drop them off, go do your errands. That is so rare and precious and you just hold on to those people as tight as you can. It's such an amazing thing.
Conor:Yes, I agree.
Priscilla:Thank you for sharing that, Conor. Before we get into the world of AI and how we can use that, I know I gave a lot of your background in the intro AI and how we can use that. I know I gave a lot of your background in the intro but for anyone who isn't familiar with you, what else is there for people to learn about? What it is that you do and the work you do in customer support and how you've kind of gone through that the last 15 years?
Conor:I guess my earliest customer support interactions where I was doing like paid work. I worked in a shop that sold sheet music. So when you're a musician, you have sheets of music and you read off them. And let me tell you, dear listeners, I was neither a musician nor really like a salesperson, nor, let me just say, I was not a good fit for this role. But thank you, liz. Liz was a friend of my mum's and Liz just gave me the job and I was awful at the job. I didn't know anything about music. People would come in with the most basic questions and I'd just be like I don't know. I got to go and ask Liz, but it was great. But I would say, looking back at myself at that point, that was very much like cutting my teeth on being in an environment that I didn't know very well and didn't do great at it. But I'm very proud of the work that I do now.
Conor:It was a far stretch from where I was. So after that that was university. That was the usual thing of just like make a couple of quid on a Friday, spend it all on Friday night, make a couple more quid on the Saturday and keep some of it after Saturday night. That was the goal. The goal was like always end up in slight profit. After you hit the pub on Friday and Saturday night, it was Dublin. All right, I am Irish, so what can I say?
Conor:After that, I worked for a social care company. We created a software product in there and I spun it out as a startup, moved to London, lived the London startup dream, which is mostly like getting trains to the rest of England and having terrible Wi-Fi on those trains and really considering what I'm doing in my life, did that for a year and left and joined Expensify. I initially joined Expensify, funnily enough, as a sales generalist, because what I realized from that earlier role, that startup role, was that my skills as a salesperson were lacking, so I needed to work out how to sell, although I have different philosophy around sales now compared to what I was expecting to want there. Within a week of joining Expensify, we all realized that there was this new team that we were creating, which was much more about account management in a long-term relationship building way, and so I joined that team as one of the first four people on the team, and then we evolved that over time, I eventually, after nine and a half years at Expensify was the senior leader there, which is the sort of like step below director Left there in February 2024.
Conor:And since then I've been working independently. I'm a coaching consultant for customer support professionals and leaders. So if you have, if you provide customer support, my job is to help you provide better customer support. And I do that, as I said, both through coaching and consulting customer support, and I do that, as I said, both through coaching and consulting.
Priscilla:So since this is an episode about AI, I figured I would let AI ask a question to kick us off.
Conor:Oh God.
Priscilla:Love it, yes, so I asked AI what AI would like to know about you, and this was the question they asked what's one experience you've had, either as a customer or working in support, that made you think this is why I love what I do?
Conor:So I don't think there's a single experience that really showed me or reminded me like this is why I love what I do. But there was a pattern of types of customer support interactions that I really liked. Even after nine, 10 years at Expensify, even as a senior leader, I was still managing some escalated support interactions. And it was the pattern of like one customer hit a really peculiar bug and like it would talk on my little curiosity and I'd be like I there's something there, there's some pattern there where I think there's some that I can work out what's going on. And you'd like dive into the logging tool and you'd find that one weird error and you trace it back to the code base and you'd be like hang on, this file hasn't been changed in six years. How is it possible that no other customers have ever hit this error?
Conor:But for some reason it's like it's just a bug that has existed for six years and no one has ever hit it. We've all seen weird upgrade flows or migrations, or you've added a new piece of functionality but you've needed to change stuff in the back end to support that and because of that sort of ingrained knowledge, you have just had this like habit and pattern of how you sleuth on things. So it's so sort of like weird. One person will hit this in in in a six-year period. Bugs that I, I love and I find just endlessly fascinating and it'll usually be one of those things where, like, I'm the only person who's patient enough to spend an hour on it.
Conor:And that's all it usually like. It doesn't take a huge amount of work most of the time, but it's just. It's kind of fun. I like it. Those are the fun ones.
Priscilla:Yeah, the investigation. I love that too. I love the okay. Something's going on here. I know there's an answer. An answer exists.
Conor:How do I find it? Yes, an answer exists to most questions.
Priscilla:So let's get into it. Ai and customer support it's the hottest topic right now. Everyone is talking about it in customer support, outside of customer support, just if you're working in a professional setting. Ai has come up, and so I feel like people can hear AI and start to worry about the slippery slope of what that means if we make everything fully automated and fully AI, and so I want to start by putting it into a really practical frame. So, Conor, how do you use AI in your day-to-day that makes your life better.
Conor:So, as I mentioned, I coach customer support leaders to help them provide better customer support. That will typically involve like an hour long conversation every two weeks and one of the ways that I use AI in that process is I have a call recording tool and the call recording tool records the call and then gives me a transcript afterwards but also gives me a summary afterwards. It's that kind of like really simple follow-up step that then I've dropped that into the Notion page that I've created with the client and so we can both go back. So the following time when it's time for us to speak again the day before we speak, I will always go back and I'll look at the action points that we pulled out of that. I'll look at the summary. I'll look at the video if I need to, but very rarely.
Conor:The other thing I started doing this week as well, hot off the presses this week, was I pulled the transcript and I ran it through chat, gpt and I said to it, like what priorities should I have going into the next conversation with this person? And it pulled out things and it pointed out a couple of things like oh, here's what they said they wanted to do and here's an approach that they said they wanted to avoid. Here's the style that they wanted to take. And because I have pre-programmed ChatGPT with my own set of instructions, it doesn't do like wishy-washy stuff. I've told it to be very direct with me. You probably know the Kim Scott book, radical Candor I told ChatGPT in the custom instructions I said use the Radical Candor approach. So every time now it says something to me, it says I'm going to challenge you on this specific point. And it doesn't say like here's a gentle nudge or anything like that. I hate the gentle nudges, I do not like gentle nudges, I just want clear and direct feedback. And so it gave me the prep notes. It said like here's the things that you might want to consider bringing up again. And then I went into the conversation and then I fed the transcript from the second coaching session into it. I said, ok, did I hit everything? I'm pretty sure I hit everything. And it pointed out some places where I had failed in my role as a coach. It pointed out places where I'd done really well and like clearly pushed this person and clearly like directed them to make progress and make decisions that they were not making.
Conor:That's one small way in which I'm using an LLM like an AI tool. The other ways I use it. I do use it in podcast prep a little bit as well. So if I want a quick summary of, like, for example, topics that haven't come up, gaps that might be interesting to talk about other podcasts that are similar to podcasts I've been on before all those kinds of ways that you can just save a little bit of time, a little bit of Googling. That would speed it up. I use it to rewrite things, sometimes to get it closer to my voice a little bit, or to like, change it from the style that I've written an email in to a LinkedIn post, for example. What I will do personally is I'll avoid using AI to create things itself, but I will lean on it, like I said, to challenge my ideas and to give me direct feedback instead. I think that's a useful thing for me so far. The funny thing is it's like this is all very much in the context of it's useful for someone who's a manager, probably, or a leader.
Conor:But, if you're on the front lines, if you're working directly with customers, this isn't how you're going to be using it, but there are probably lessons you can pick out from it as well.
Priscilla:Yeah for sure. So, as someone who has been in the industry for 15 years, how have you seen AI really change the way people approach customer service, especially in the last four to five years, or really like two to three years, as it's been really hitting the mainstream and becoming used by so many people?
Conor:Yeah, I would say even two years ago, I was extremely skeptical of how effective AI products could be in managing customer interactions, mostly because it seemed really basic and, a lot of the times, like a person could do it better with better information and better context, faster really.
Conor:And it's really only in the last two years that I've started to change my mind even more recently than that, I'd say just in the last year of seeing actual progress on AI based tooling for customer support professionals.
Conor:And there are real downsides to that. Like I think there have been some really destructive actions that some companies have taken in the last year fueled by this idea that ai can do all of their customer support flows and it's utter, utter rubbish and utter garbage. Like I think the real value that we're starting to see is that you can use ai as a tool to bring great customer support, but that will be by allowing your support team, and your success team as well, to engage in higher value, higher leverage activities or just higher value activities in general. We as humans, are creative, we are insightful, we are interested, we are curious. We are the ones who are actually creating these companies and creating these products and services, and we are going to know them the best, and we should use AI tools to support us, not vice versa. It's just a baffling idea to do it the other way around.
Jordan:Yeah, I actually saw a story recently where an AI customer service bot had fired a customer and they were just like it's best for you to cancel your subscription because I don't see a route that you can take. I was just like, wow, it's best for you to cancel your subscription because I don't see a like a route that you can take. I was just like, wow, that's rough.
Priscilla:It's dangerous. Yeah, it's interesting because if you look at like support forums or I know we're both in some different support communities and on LinkedIn you'll see there's this push and pull of people who are really excited about the tool AI and how they can use it to make their work better. But then you'll see people who are nervous and they're anxious about what that means for the job they have and the value they bring to a company, because they've seen things like what you were talking about and just these massive layoffs because people feel like the AI robot or chatbots can fully do what their role is and the value they bring.
Priscilla:So what would you say to the people who are in customer support right now, who are kind of in that worried stage so maybe they're not quite as comfortable with AI yet they're still like I don't know, I don't like this, I want to fight against it what would you say to them?
Conor:Yeah, I think we have a real challenge in that we do have sort of like a perfect storm of really like not great situations happening in a lot of ways, and customer support has traditionally not been very well valued by companies and it's been really under-resourced and these are already unstable positions in a lot of cases. I think, broadly speaking, your work will look dramatically different, but I think you will still have a value to bring to a company, so long as the company values you already.
Priscilla:Right, and don't just completely ignore that AI is there and hope that it goes away, because I don't think that's happening. So what customer support tasks do you think AI is best suited for? What would you give to AI and what would you say, oh, I don't want AI to touch that.
Conor:Yeah, it's a tricky question. The first one is like if there is a reliable association between a question and an answer, you can probably have AI engage in that. That could be like you have a solid knowledge base great, good work, you set yourself up for success. You should have had that anyway. But now there's like a big incentive to actually have a great knowledge base. It's like before now it was like oh, let's build a help center. Yeah, Okay, great, we threw one together, It'll work fine.
Conor:And now if you have a well structured health center, you're kind of off to the races and you can do really great work and get your AI doing that because it's got a solid basis of information and when it contradicts what you think, it's going to be pointing out that your knowledge base is wrong. If you don't have a solid base of any knowledge, then you're not really going to get much benefit from AI, because it's just going to be making stuff up and you don't want that. If you can't afford a wrong answer, you probably shouldn't get AI involved either. So that might be, for example, for topics around compliance or topics around legal questions or anything like that, where you don't want it sort of firing off some half-thought-out answer or its best guess of what it is. You could probably use AI in summarizing and interpreting and suggesting, but a human expert should probably be involved in reviewing and confirming those sort of things.
Conor:And then there's the like sensitive topics as well. If you have a product that has a subscription associated with it, cancellations and discussing cancellations you probably want that to go to humans a lot of the time as well. A lot of people will be very comfortable with having AI interactions. Just do the whole cancellation flow for them. If you want to go down the route of fully understanding the problems and seeing if you can rescue an interaction, then you probably want to have that go through humans as well.
Priscilla:Yeah, and I think the holiday after hours coverage. I think that's another way that AI can really be helpful, especially if you're a small team and you're struggling to provide coverage for what your customers need or struggling to take time off, letting AI come in and stand in the gap for you so that you can have a break and letting AI take that.
Priscilla:And, like you were saying just a second ago, I liked the idea of not giving AI the work that cannot be messed up, kind of the idea that you know, if it's that important, it really should be someone who can sit there and give it the focus that it needs, because with AI, you might not have a quick review of what happened and so something could slip under, and so I think both of those are good examples of when to use AI, and then some ways where you know really you might want to be human first in that situation.
Conor:Exactly. There's also opportunities for like decisions that are really about your company and your company's culture. So one topic that came up this week with the client was thinking about like how, when you offer premium support, how are you framing your premium support? Should it always go to human support agents or should it also go through your AI agent first? In that particular case, I was of the opinion that the average outcome would be better if it goes through your AI interaction first and then, if it's not addressed, then it just gets quickly escalated and it's a prioritized response at that point. But that's going to be very particular to the type of support that you're giving and what the expectations are as well, because if you're doing paid support some people might expect that you always get through to a person.
Conor:But like that means you have to staff like 24-7, 365. That's going to be an expensive premium support option and if someone's paying a relatively small amount per month for that premium support option, it's not going to be human. First, and it probably shouldn't be, because then it would be a lot slower and people would be a lot more frustrated by that as well.
Priscilla:Yeah, that's a good point. We don't do premium support here at Buzz Brown. It's something that I don't have a ton of experience with myself, kind of having tiers to support. But I can imagine that if I was paying for this premium tier, that I wouldn't want an AI to be first. But at the same time, if it's a night or a weekend, there's got to be some understanding that, hey, there might not be a person ready at my beck and call on an evening or a weekend. Now, maybe during working hours I always have a quick response from a human. But you might find that there's some times when that AI first can still be the initial expectation. So one of the things that we do on this, we're saying, hey, we really care about human customer support and feel very strongly that that is what makes you stand out in your competition is when you have these human interactions through customer support. So where does AI live in that world of really human, empathetic, personal customer support?
Conor:God. It's such a curious topic because relationships are actually created in a whole host of complex ways and everyone listening today will have relationships or feel like they have relationships with companies and they don't know the people who work there. And it's the strangest thing. What I'm talking about is effectively brand loyalty or maybe, dear listener, parasocial relationships, like parasocial relationships, have become this sort of buzzword. Talking about podcasts and I listen to podcasts I listen to podcasts all day long. We do too.
Conor:It was the London Marathon recently and I was following a couple of people I actually know, but a couple of more like better known athletes. It was funny. Afterwards, I was equally invested in knowing how Claire got on, as knowing how Philly got on, even though Philly is a YouTuber and like a running professional athlete like she's a proper professional athlete but like see videos from her once to twice a week and I really want to follow up on her. It's not from her having a relationship with me, it's very one sided. It's entirely based on what I am feeling and how I am engaging with her as a creator, and so I think, actually, thought through that lens, you can actually use AI to promote relationships between your customers and your company and products and services as well, because it's effectively just another way of having consistent brand perceptions and consistent brand interactions. Brand perceptions and consistent brand interactions, so long as you have set it up in a way that it all acts naturally together and feels like it's all part of a single ecosystem.
Conor:I think that you will be able to use AI as a way of building relationships with customers as well, which is sort of the opposite of what I would ever have said before. I started thinking about this and I will say AI doesn't have empathy. It's not real. A lot of the writing that AI does it winds me up so much. The sugar sweet kind of over apologetic stuff. That's not what I want. As I went back to earlier. I like clear, direct and kind, but to the point, without being over sweet. So yeah, that's my thought, but like I'd love to get your take as well.
Priscilla:It's hard, right, it's an interesting question, right, it's the idea that I want to use this artificial intelligence to help build relationships with my customers. But this is not a human person. But I care about the human interaction of myself, as a person who works for and represents Buzzsprout, with the customers who use Buzzsprout. I think, personally, that that is a huge part of offering really remarkable customer service, and so when you bring AI into that, you go okay, well, those things can't coexist, because one is a robot and one is a human and you can't have human interactions with a robot. It just can't happen. But I think the thing that you know you were talking about with the person you follow and wanting to know how they did in the marathon Well, the reason you care about them is because they have been authentic in showing you their lives and bringing you into their lives, so you are the one with the feeling and the connection to them. They don't have a connection to you, but they have opened up themselves so that you can connect with them.
Conor:Yeah.
Priscilla:So I think that when I approach it, I think, ok, ai is a tool that I can use. I'm not going to use it as the only way that Buzzsprout connects with a customer, but it might be that sometimes, or the first time that someone reaches out, that's how they connect, but then they know that I am here on the other side of whatever email or phone call and available if they need me, and I feel very strongly that when AI is used, there should always be the ability to get to a real person.
Conor:I entirely agree it should be very clear.
Priscilla:I don't want any roadblocks that are going to say OK, you have to say representative six times before you get to a representative, or whatever it is as a company or as a product Buzzsprout. I want to make sure that no one feels like man. If I'm going to reach out to the support team, I know I'm not going to get a person until I've been on a chat bot for 20 minutes.
Priscilla:And so I want to make sure that that human interaction is available, but not everyone will want that. Some people will say, hey, I actually want, like, immediate responses and immediate answers, and I don't care if it's an AI, because what I'm trying to do is log in and I don't want to wait for Sally to answer the other email that she's working on before she helps me log in. I want to be able to log in even if it's AI, or that's better than having Sally, and so I think that's where I kind of look at it is. There's going to be levels where AI can really be a really great tool to use, and then there are going to be levels that are still going to be those human interactions. And there are going to be levels that are still going to be those human interactions and AI can help you make those stronger because it's taking away the easier, more time-consuming tasks that you might be putting your time in when you should be building relationships.
Conor:Yes.
Priscilla:The thing that I love about customer support is the human interaction side. So what I want AI to do is come do the things that keep me from the human interaction side, and I think that if you approach it in that way, then those things can coexist. Do you want to shout out any specific companies that you think do bring AI into their customer support?
Conor:really well, I'll shout out Zapier first.
Jordan:Okay.
Conor:Because one of my like maxims, one of my philosophies, is like the best customer support is not needing customer support. Yes, by just having like a product that helps you. And zapier has like great ai-based troubleshooting in their product. Now, okay, so if a step breaks, there's just like a troubleshoot this button, and so it will read the error, interpret the error and then it will suggest solutions for it.
Conor:And it's just one of those small things where I don't need to spend as much time at all fixing the thing. So shout out Zapier for that thing.
Jordan:Yeah, and I love that Zapier has kind of upgraded the clippy of Microsoft Word.
Conor:Yeah.
Jordan:In that you run into a thing and it's like uh-oh, you need help. And it's like, yes, you need help. It's like, yes, you're back, great, I do.
Conor:It looks like you're trying to connect notion to todoist. Can I help with that? Yes, you can. Thanks, and I will say uh, I think intercoms finn is actually quite useful and I'm sort of specializing on implementing and optimizing intercom for customer support at the moment and I've spent more time like talking to finn to get answers than like searching the knowledge base or anything like that, because it's just so much easier to have finn summarize the answer than me to have to go off and search it and like click through a bunch of links that's so cool yeah it's funny, like that's what I want really is like I don't want to have to go and search the knowledge base.
Conor:I think the knowledge bases are really useful and I will often. Then, after I've got the summary, I will go to the page, sometimes to verify the information just because it sounds a bit fishy, or sometimes just to get a bit more detail on it. But yeah, to zapier and intercom as well. For intercom, it's also the fact that they're like very openly talking about from a customer support team's perspective what it's like to use AI and what they're building and they're very specifically not trying to like fire 90% of their support team.
Conor:They're taking this as a way to add value, via their support team, to their customers by having much faster response times, by having much more detailed customer support knowledge and detailed product knowledge for their support reps and by specializing them a little bit more as well.
Priscilla:I think it's good to know the companies that are doing it well so that, as you're trying to find ways to integrate this into your daily workflow, you know who to look to, who's already doing it really well. What do you think about being honest and transparent, about talking to an AI, like, do you recommend that people be very honest or do you say, hey, that they don't need to know that it's an AI? What do you think?
Conor:I think they probably should know. That's an interesting one, though, because I think the research is that people have better interactions if they don't know it's an AI, but I still think that the honesty aspect is better there, just because it's more clear and more your expectations are set differently that when I'm talking to an AI, I do interact in a different way. When I'm talking to ChatGPT, I am asking questions in a specific way. When I'm talking to Finn, I'm asking questions in a specific way. When I'm talking to any kind of AI, I'm talking to it in a specific way. When I talk to a human, I talk in a very different way.
Jordan:Yeah, yes.
Conor:I am one of those strange people who says please and thank you a lot of the time to the AIs, Me too yeah right when the AIs take over.
Priscilla:I want them to know that I was kind to them.
Conor:Yes, Exactly, exactly. We do not. We want to be like third or fourth against the wall. It'll be fine, just like drop first.
Priscilla:Yes, I saw an article recently a coworker sent to me that was basically saying that when you say please and thank you to the AI, you're actually causing a lot more processing. Yeah, and it's a bad thing, and you should not say please and thank you.
Conor:And I thought, well, why don't you take that out on your end? Yeah, yeah, I think OpenAI had some sort of press release where they said that they have spent tens of millions of dollars on customers saying please.
Jordan:And thank you.
Conor:Yeah, but you know that's OK. They have plenty of money, Don't worry about them.
Priscilla:Yeah, they'll be OK. So, before we wrap up, what I want to give some listeners is some good advice, some good kind of next steps that they can take. So what would you recommend? Either support professionals who are on small teams or leaders, what would you recommend that they do as those first steps in implementing AI and bringing it in? How would you start?
Conor:I think that the starting point is like understand what actually sucks about your customer support at the moment. Because, not all of us have like 30 minute response times for messages, for like emails. Not all of us pick up the phone in 15 seconds. Not all of us have like one minute before your chat gets picked up by a human team member. I would say the majority of companies providing customer support are doing it much slower than they want to. That's true.
Priscilla:Yeah, I agree.
Conor:There's going to be things that you, as a support leader, know suck and have sucked for so long, and they predate you. It's fine. It's not your fault. You're working with limited resources. No one blames you.
Conor:It's time to just identify what those top pain points are for your customers in their support experience and find out how you can best address those.
Conor:So it may not be that you have an opportunity or that the most pressing matter actually may not be to get like an AI conversation agent. Maybe what you've found is maybe you've got like super dialed in follow the sun scheduling and actually you've got it really well staffed, and actually the problem is that there's inconsistencies with how customer support agents are answering questions. Well, okay, maybe the best step as a starting point is like finding an AI driven conversation quality tool that will plug into your existing help desk and give feedback to your support agents on where they're not aligned with tone or voice, where they're giving incorrect information or those kind of opportunities Like that might be. Your first step is getting consistent, high quality support interactions before you take any other opportunity. But you, as the support leader, you're going to be the one who actually knows what these problems are, or you're going to hire someone who's very expensive, like me, to come in and tell you what all your problems are Exactly?
Conor:Yeah, so that's what the starting point is. Yeah, alongside that, also think about, like, what would you do every day if you had unlimited resources? Like maybe you do something once a quarter at the moment and you would love to do it like all the time. I'm thinking, for example, if you're someone who does voice of customer reporting. Voice of customer reporting typically takes like days of energy and effort and you're only working with a small data set. And you're only working with like small data set and you're only working with like predefined tags. And if you forgot to update your tagging list to like add in the new feature that you rolled out three weeks ago, well, I guess we'll look at that next time instead. And if you want to do that consistently pre-AI oh, that's a lot of effort and you're not going to do it every week or every month.
Conor:But, now we have tools that will plug in again, plug into your existing help desk and that will help you, as a support leader, to demonstrate the value of customer support experiences and demonstrate the value of customer support by bringing the voice of the customer to the rest of the business and saying, hey, here's what our customers are struggling with and help you push for prioritization more effectively, instead of just like one Slack message at a time into 16 different product channels that no one reads and no one gets any traction on. I would say those are the two things that you should consider is like what are the things that suck the most and what are the things that you could do that you could change from being like a once in a blue moon thing to being an everyday thing and everyday activity through these two links.
Priscilla:Sometimes you know we talk about AI and it's like, oh, it's going to take over my job, ok, but there are some aspects you would like it to do for you because you don't like doing them. We can love our work and have certain tasks that we really dread doing, and how can AI make that a more enjoyable experience? Or how can AI take that off of your plate, and so I think that's another way to like. If you hate scheduling and you're like man, having to figure out the schedule every week is so annoying, well, maybe AI can help you with the scheduling part. Now, if you love the scheduling part, ok, then you keep doing that, but maybe AI comes in and helps with training new people.
Priscilla:You know, whatever it is, I think, looking at the things that you hate to do during the day, the things that you're like okay, here I have to do this again. Let AI do it for you and see how that makes you feel, and maybe they do a pretty good job of whatever it is, and then you can start offloading that onto AI and opening up your hour to do more of what you were saying. What AI software do you recommend? You've mentioned Intercom and Fin, but what else do you recommend people test out?
Conor:I'm all about like addressing the problem with the right solution. So it's going to be like what's the best tool for the job? If I say Intercom, there are going to be tons of situations where Intercom doesn't make sense for someone, where it's just not the best tool for the job. Job, I think my recommendation is actually go to somewhere like Elevate CX or go to somewhere like support driven and chat to other people who are in similar situations. Like, if you're providing a B2B SaaS tool, you're going to have different requirements than if you're providing, like, b2b e-commerce support and you're going to need different tooling as a result of that and different products as a result of that.
Priscilla:I think that's a great way to approach it Find people that are in your space, that are doing it, and get their recommendations. Okay, to wrap it up, what is one main takeaway that you would want someone who's listening to this episode to take to remember as they go into their work for the rest of the week?
Conor:In 10 years, most jobs will probably still exist. Customer support will probably still exist. It'll likely look different. I think in 10 years, customer support will be more fun to work in. I think customer support will be more fun to engage with as customers and a lot of that will be thanks to, like, proper, decent people introducing AI in an empathetic and engaging way with high value opportunities. I think it is going to get a bit weird for a while now, but hopefully less weird in the future.
Priscilla:Yeah, and I like the idea of customer support becoming more fun and more valued.
Conor:Yeah.
Priscilla:Well, thanks for joining us, Conor. This was really fun. I appreciate the care that you bring into the conversation and it's nice that you come into it with. Hey, we have to be intentional about how we're using it. We can't just haphazardly bring it in and hope that it works out, that you have to be intentional about how you work it into your workflows and you have to be intentional about how you let it interact with your customers, because you want to retain that trust and so you can't just let it on the loose and hope that it works out. I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights and, like you were saying, if anyone needs more information or they want some personalized advice for their company where they are, reach out to Conor because he will help you.
Conor:I will. I would suggest going to customersuccesscx. If you want to get an email from me tomorrow, go to customersuccesscx. Slash daily and I say daily, but technically it's week daily because I don't really want to write and send an email on the weekends. So it's not really a daily email, but it is a week daily email.
Conor:So, I send an email to customer support leaders every Monday through Friday and it contains one small short little lesson or idea or thought about how to provide a better customer support experience. But if you don't like emails at all, you can find me on LinkedIn Just have a search for Conor Pendergrast.
Priscilla:And we'll have all of Conor's links in the description so he's easy to get in touch with. I would highly recommend signing up for the newsletter. It really is just a nice little nugget of an idea and then the next day builds on that. I really like that. A lot of times there's kind of a cohesion there from day to day, and so if you work in customer support, you absolutely should subscribe to it. It's time for Support in Real Life our segment where we discuss real life support experiences. Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences. So Jordan has a story, I think, for us today.
Jordan:Yeah, okay. So this one comes from a story I found about Patagonia. Obviously, patagonia is already pretty famous for treating their customers really well. So this woman and her husband go to a Patagonia store on the Upper West Side because her husband needed a new winter coat. Her husband finds a coat he loves and they're up at the register paying. And the woman kind of jokingly says to the employee I'll have to come back soon.
Jordan:I have a Patagonia sweater I love, but you know, it's getting holes because I've worn it so much. And without missing a beat the employee says oh well, we actually consider that a product failure. And she tells him no, no, no, it's my fault. I've been wearing it nonstop for years. It doesn't own, you don't owe me anything. But the employee insists that Patagonia's philosophy is that if their product doesn't hold up long term, they see it as their responsibility, not the customer's. So right there, and then no receipt, nothing. He offers to replace her sweater. And then it gets even better. She tries on a new sweater in the same color, falls in love with it and ends up buying a second one in a different color at full price. And then they arranged for both sweaters and her husband's coat to be shipped from a warehouse so they didn't have to carry everything around New York Like it just keeps going. The story keeps getting better and better and better. I love it so much.
Priscilla:It's just a great example of really fantastic customer service. Yeah, you know it's not like a support question, but I think what it reminds me of is the importance of empowering your employees to make these decisions, because if she had to go and ask her manager, can I do this? And then it would lose the impact. It might still be a good result, but you wouldn't have the impact of being right there at the cash register and saying, oh well, that's on us, let me get you a new sweater and let me ship it to your house. And the employee has total ability to do that, and they've been empowered to do that by their leadership. So, Conor, to make this a support in real life question, I'm going to pose a question to you how would you help a company that is struggling to empower their employees to make those kinds of decisions to delight customers?
Conor:Yeah, it's tricky.
Conor:I mean, probably you'd come back to like why are we looking at it in the first place?
Conor:Like Patagonia has this as really as a strong philosophy of theirs and has done from the start. But if I'm talking to a customer about it, it's like what's the genesis of what we're trying to do here? And if, fundamentally, what we're trying to do is create a much better customer experience, then we've got to find ways of doing a much better customer support experience, and removing those roadblocks and getting much faster resolutions to those problems by empowering individual agents is a great way of doing it. Now you could put like thresholds in place for it. You could say like if it's under $75, then go for it, if it's over $250, you've got to get someone else to look at it. But you could also put it like a buddy check system in there rather than going through a manager, so that instead of going off and having to find a manager, you can talk to a colleague and just say like hey, I just need a buddy check, that I'm being sensible in the refund that I'm about to give.
Priscilla:Does this make sense to?
Conor:you as well.
Priscilla:Yeah, and it can have a really positive impact on the agent or the professional too, because if you're the one getting to make that call, that the customer gets this new sweater, it can be really fun for you to be like I get to make this call, I want to give this to you. It feels very personal, whereas if you are only following a process that's in place, then it feels like, well, this is coming from Patagonia, it's not coming from me, so it's a little less of a personal thing. But if you make it something that I get to make the call on, then that I get to make the call on, then I can kind of approach it with a little bit more personality or personal touch because I am the one making this call for you. But I think you're right, I think, putting those guidelines in place, if you're worried about it, if you're nervous to give away that kind of control, then you can put those guidelines in place. You can try it out for a little bit, do some reporting, see how it works, pull it back if you need to and kind of figure that out until you find a good place where you feel comfortable giving that empowerment to your employees.
Priscilla:If you have any questions or a support story or situation that you would like us to discuss or shout out, you can email us at happytohelpatbuzzsproutcom or text the show using the text the show link in our episode descriptions, and you may hear us talk about your story or discuss your question on a future episode. As always, if you liked this episode, please share it with someone who works in customer support and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you all for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
