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
Live Demos, Orientations, and Reducing Support Tickets Through Customer Education
In this episode of Happy to Help, Priscilla Brooke is joined by Buzzsprout teammate Cara Pacetti to explore the strategy behind Buzzsprout Orientations. These orientations are a live onboarding experience designed to empower new podcasters with confidence, clarity, and connection!
We're breaking down:
- The difference between demos and orientations
- How proactive education reduces support volume
- Lessons learned from months of live customer sessions
- The power of human connection in digital onboarding
- Tips for launching your own educational initiative (without burning out your team!)
If you’re a Customer Support Specialist, CX leader, or anyone thinking about proactive support, this episode will inspire you to invest in education and see measurable results in satisfaction, confidence, and reduced ticket volume!
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. In today's episode we're taking a deep dive into the importance of customer education. We'll talk about a recent project that we've been working on and how educating your customers can move you toward the goal of offering remarkable support. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. So it's not every day that our guest is joining us and recording in their closet. Is it Jordan? Have we ever had this?
Jordan:As a podcast producer, I get so excited when I see someone recording from their closet, because there is no better space for sound than a closet. I don't know what it is.
Priscilla:Sometimes there's like the clothes hanging there. They absorb all of the bouncing sound and so it just gives you a cleaner, crisper sound.
Jordan:Yeah.
Priscilla:Well, today we have Cara Pacetti joining us. Cara's on the Buzzsprout team. She's been on an episode of Happy to Help before. She has an education background and an administration background, but really, the thing about Cara that makes her so good for this job is that she has a huge passion for people. The thing about Cara that makes her so good for this job is that she has a huge passion for people, so I'm really excited because she's been working on some really cool customer education initiatives over the last year, and so that's what we're going to talk about today is customer education, the importance of it, some strategies for doing it well, how Cara has really taken that project and run with it over the last couple of months, and what she's learned along the way, so I'm really excited to talk about that. Before we get into all of that, though, I, Cara, want to ask you the question that we ask everyone who comes on the podcast who has made your day recently?
Cara:I did know this question was coming, so I gave it a little bit of forethought before jumping on today and actually it's a small example, but I feel like it's still significant. I was paying a bill, a medical bill, because that's what I do in my family, but I was not the patient and it wasn't my dependents. It was for my husband and it's an HSA card, so of course I need a receipt. Well, it's not my email on file. I'm not the patient, and the administrative or the billing person I was working with started to get a little funny about that, which I always crack up when people do that. I'm like I'm trying to pay you.
Cara:Why is this hard, but I get it. She was a little hesitant and I kind of explained but at the end of it I kind of backed off and said you know, it's okay, he can forward it to me, just send it to his email. And I felt like she heard that human heart of mine and went you know what we can do this? What's your email address?
Cara:Let me just forward this and you know, kind of she didn't break any rules, she just kind of went a little bit out of her standard procedure and, boom, sent it to me. I was able to print it in that moment, file it away, which was very helpful and just I thought that was, that was customer service, and it just made my day that she took a moment to make it easy for me. It was no benefit to her really, it was one extra step, but I was appreciative that she took that for me and did that.
Priscilla:Yes, yeah, I feel like we've talked about it on the show before like this idea of giving your employees, or giving the people on your team, the ability to make those changes in the moment when it makes sense to do it. Now, obviously, if you have like procedures and things you have to follow, like those are in place for security reasons, that makes sense. But, like you said, in this situation it wasn't a breach of security, it was just a email that needed to be sent, and so, like giving people the ability to make those kind of decisions in the moment and like trusting your team to do that, I think can, like you said, have these really good, positive outcomes, whereas if she had to stay with sending the email to the person directly, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it wouldn't have been a good experience. You wouldn't have felt really good after the call and it wouldn't have made you feel any kind of way about the person you were working with or the company that you were working with in a positive way.
Cara:So I think that's a great example.
Priscilla:And it's like a really good, like very small example, but where it actually made your day easier and it made your day better.
Cara:Well, when you asked the question, that is what popped up. So she, she, I remembered it. So it was little but not insignificant. Yeah, no, that's great. Oh, I love that.
Priscilla:So today we're talking about customer education. A couple episodes ago we had Chase Clemons on from 37 Signals and he talked about how their support team kind of used themselves as a fire department or like a local fire station and the idea being that like, yes, they put out fires and they go to people's homes and they solve problems you know, obviously not the support team but the fire department but they also handle the initiatives like fire safety and prevention that the fire department doesn't only handle the putting out of the fires but it also handles the educating people on how to avoid fires in the first place, or taking initiatives in the community to have, like, fire hydrants set up and things like that, so that you're ready for the fires when they come. And so I, you know, kind of got me thinking about some of the things that we do in that proactive support realm at Buzzsprout to get ahead of those fires. Out to you, Cara, because about a year ago we started working on a project that has become what we call Buzzsprout Orientations as a way to educate and train our podcasters as they are getting used to Buzzsprout and getting started with their podcasts before they launch, and so I thought it'd be a really great time for us to have a conversation about customer education, the importance of it and that project and how it kind of has evolved over the last year.
Priscilla:As we've been learning and seeing where those pitfalls are, as we've been falling into them and figuring out, you know how to solve those problems. So before we get started, I want to kind of set the scene on why customer education is important. A lot of support teams I would say all support teams really but like the majority of support teams, really focus on that reactive support. But there is an aspect of remarkable support that is the proactive support side of things, and so that is the stuff that gets out ahead of the fires, that gets out ahead of the issues, and so we, you know, recently had an episode about knowledge bases. That is proactive support. That's giving people a way to find their own answers before having to come to us as a support team, and this training project that we've been working on is another great example of that proactive support.
Cara:Totally agree with you, Priscilla. It's so important, and the knowledge base is one thing, but I know when I first started, my training was done in person with you and I also had a lot of stuff to read through, because we have excellent help articles and we have a giant knowledge base. We also have great videos. But there was something about that one-on-one conversation with you that stuck, and maybe that's just me as a learner, but I think there's different customers all throughout and their learning styles are just so different, and so you want to not only educate the customers but also find the style and the format that they can learn it in.
Priscilla:Yeah, the fact of the matter is that customers can't succeed if they don't understand what they're doing or they don't understand the product. Like they can't succeed in using something if you don't know what it is or you don't know how to use it. You know what I mean. You can have a jump rope, and if you don't know what you're supposed to do with that jump rope, you're not going to ever learn how to jump rope. But as soon as you understand what's supposed to do, then you're like OK, well, now I can pick it up pretty well. And so it's this idea that, like, we, as support professionals, can come in and go, hey, in order for you to succeed, we have to educate you on how to use the product in a way that will make you succeed. Let's talk about some of the things that we were seeing back when we were first thinking about launching this project and some of the things that we noticed as far as, like, that need for education.
Cara:Usually the phrases that I see are I'm not a tech person, I just I don't understand tech, it's too much. I'm not tech savvy, but also there would be a lot of back and forth emails, so we would kind of introduce this is how it works. We are a podcast host, we need to get your content out to the directories, and that just didn't resonate because they just didn't understand that. And you could tell with the back and forth wait, but wait, I have to download my episode. Well, no, you need to upload your episode.
Cara:And it's just confusing and I kind of think of like if you have family members who maybe didn't grow up with computers and internet and podcasting, and I think about when they ask me for help and I'm leaning over their shoulder and I'm showing them on the screen and I'm helping them, and that's what we'd see in the inbox and I just went man, I wish there was a way, like if I could just meet with this one podcast or this one customer and help them. Maybe it would make things a little easier for them. And so those are kind of some things that I saw in the inbox.
Priscilla:Yeah, I definitely feel like one of the big things we saw a lot is this continual question email thread that goes on and on and on, where you have someone who writes in their new they ask one question and you answer that question and then they ask the second question and there are all these really basic, really fundamental questions and you can say, hey, go read this article.
Priscilla:And sometimes people will do that, especially if they're taking ownership of their own knowledge. But sometimes what we would see is that people would see how quickly and how great we were in responding to them, that they would go. Man, I can just keep asking Cara my next question. I know she's going to get back to me really quickly with a really solid answer, and so then what you end up is with these like really really long email chains back and forth with someone who's just trying to gather that foundational knowledge, and we were noticing that was taking up a lot of time in the support inbox. It was taking away time from being able to troubleshoot more technical issues or more urgent issues that were coming in, and so that was one of the things that I remember seeing, I also think, this confusion about what our product did so for us, it's podcasting, and podcasting can be pretty technical, and so we'd have a lot of people that would write in like, isn't this what you do? Aren't you supposed to do this for me? What am I paying you for?
Priscilla:And it was because they did not understand the service that we were providing. Now I hear myself say that and I go OK, well, shouldn't you be able to clarify that, like in the product or in your marketing or whatever? And the truth is, yeah, I mean that was clear in the marketing, but there's still this level of misunderstanding that someone can come into, especially something more technical like podcasting. Then they can come into with this misunderstanding of what it is that they're paying for when they pay for a Buzzsprout account, what the features that they're getting when they reach out to us.
Cara:Another thing that we would see and this one's kind of tough when we did see it is they do everything on their own, never reach out to support. And then they reach out to support and say I published my episode. How come it's not on Spotify and iHeart and Apple? Yeah, and we look and we're like, oh no, you didn't walk through the process of submitting your podcast there, but yeah, so we'd see that here. They did this legwork. They didn't even reach out and then they are still. They missed the mark. They missed their launch date. I remember seeing that. That one was tough.
Priscilla:That is a really good example of why it is important to do this educational piece, because, you're right, the issue that we were seeing was that people wouldn't submit to directories before they wanted their launch to happen, and there is a wait period there.
Priscilla:It's much shorter now, but a couple of years ago it could have been two weeks, and so if someone was planning on launching their podcast on September 1st and then on September 1st they uploaded the episode and it wasn't live in Apple, and by the time they'd reach out to us, it was too late to fix the problem for them, because there had to be this waiting period, because Apple needed to review the podcast submission, and so it was very much like oh no, now your first interaction with support is something that we can't actually fix for you, which makes this whole thing start on a sour note, which is not a good way to start. And if we're looking at our podcasters and going, how can we make them succeed? Well then we need to get ahead of that and make sure they know that process really well.
Cara:Absolutely. I feel like, from our vantage point, we were like this was avoidable. Yeah, this was avoidable. How can we make this not happen again?
Priscilla:Yeah, and I think, like just the terminology, giving them that understanding of the terminology helps them feel more comfortable and more confident and have those educated answers on your end without having to come to support all the time.
Cara:And when they do reach out to support, we can better assist them because they are using that correct terminology in the right way. And then so when you're troubleshooting, you're like OK, I know exactly, because sometimes we have to read in between the lines a little bit.
Priscilla:Yeah, another reason I thought that really getting ahead of this education side of things was really important was because anyone who has an online subscription service or online payment in any way has to deal with disputes. A lot of times, the reason people are disputing charges is because they don't recognize the charge. That could be because they don't know that it's a monthly subscription service, even though they put their credit card in or they don't know how much it's going to be each month.
Priscilla:And all of this can be found in your account. But again, if you don't know how to find it, you don't know what you're looking for, then you won't be able to put those points together. And so you know, having the ability to educate on what to expect when you're getting billed, how often, what days even two sentences in an orientation can give people a little bit more understanding and then can avoid those confusions about billing disputes and that feeling of like sleaziness that you can sometimes feel when you don't understand why you're being charged money. Whenever anything is related to money, it always can feel kind of very easily.
Cara:Yeah, getting all that information out there up front to me shows transparency. It shows trust, both from the customer and from you, that you're going to say hey, at the end of the day, we want you to be successful, we want it to be with us, but if it's not, that's okay. This is how you cancel X, y, z, and if you need help we're here. And so education at the front to me shows confidence and it shows trust.
Priscilla:Yeah. The last thing I want to say that I personally ran into a lot before we started doing these orientations was just the request for phone support. So I would run into situations where we'd be back and forth with someone in an email and I'd go, man, a 10 minute conversation would actually be a lot easier and I always, when someone asks for phone support, I always want to say yes, yeah.
Cara:Yeah.
Priscilla:But I know that is not sustainable for our team right now, as we are and as we're set up to offer phone support. It's just not something that we can do consistently for everyone. But that doesn't mean I don't want to offer it to some people who can really benefit from it, and so there would be times when I would find someone who really just wasn't understanding the process via email, and so I would offer to get on a phone call with them, and it would be a 10 minute conversation that would give them so much understanding of what whatever confusion was causing them to be frustrated Right. So, whether they didn't understand the billing thing, or whether they didn't understand why they couldn't launch their podcast at a certain time, or whatever it was, a very short, educational phone call would relieve so much of that stress that just came from not knowing, and I would get off these phone calls and the majority of the time would go. Man, I wish I could call everyone who was confused, because it really would help so many people to lose some of that anxiety around the whole launching process or the whole billing process or whatever it is that causes that. You know causes the frustration when you reach out to support having someone to actually talk to you. And then they go oh man, you're a real person and I'm a real person and we're talking about this and you're explaining it to me while I'm driving in the car.
Priscilla:Like I remember having a phone call with someone while she was like in her commute and I was explaining to her how RSS feeds work and the technical side of things. And as soon as I explained it for her, it clicked and she went well, now it makes sense why it has to be done that way, and it's not just that you're being difficult as a support team, but that this is the process and how it has to work. And then her frustrations and anxieties just disappeared because now she knows how everything works. And so that was something that I feel like we saw a lot was that request for phone support, and just as a team, we really wanted to give that. You know, yeah, all right. So all of that to say.
Priscilla:We started to ask ourselves what could we do to get ahead of all of these questions? What if we could reduce the problems that people are running into, reduce those questions that people have before they have them? What could we do to stop that ahead of time. And so that's where, you know, we kind of started to lean into this proactive support a little bit more.
Priscilla:And then we started looking at a project that would allow us to do demos is what we were calling them at the beginning with customers and how we could do that in a sustainable way. And so that's when we started moving into kind of this Buzzsprout demo discovery project. And so, you know, the idea was to start thinking through how are we going to train podcasters in a way that would be sustainable for our team, that wouldn't be super time consuming because you could offer one-on-ones and just constantly be doing one-on-ones with people and training them. But would that be the return on effort that we want it to be, or would it be too much and not enough of the result? Yeah, so, Cara, what do you remember about those early beginning stages of the project and what we considered when we were building this project?
Cara:Well, it's funny that you say the one-on-ones, because that even actually was a part of our discovery project as well. We gave that a try For some podcasters. We'd identify in the inbox and say they would benefit from a one-on-one, and I did a couple of them. It was intimidating, but I found that what was done one-on-one could be done in a group. It was the same demo I was doing for just one person, but I was jumping on calls and saying the same thing, and so we kind of learned and, like you said, the time just wasn't worth the investment there. And so one part I remember specifically in getting started was okay, how are we going to try this out? We got to give it a try and I had to cold email new signups and like, as they signed up, I would just. I just went through the list and emailed and asked them to come join an orientation, and that's how we got our first audience. Yeah, for an orientation.
Priscilla:Yeah, so I know we talked about one on ones as a strategy and we talked about orientations, which was the idea that we'd have like multiple people in a call with you.
Priscilla:We also talked about like recording a demo and just having a demo video. That would also be pretty sustainable for us, so that like leans on the sustainable side of things, we'd make a video, post it, and that's that. We shared the demo with people. But what we noticed with the demo was that then you're lacking that personal connection, and part of this project that we started to realize as we were working on it was this gives us a way to personally connect with our new users.
Priscilla:As they're signing up, their first interaction with a support team is going to be in person with Cara, which really was one of the strengths I mean, it is one of the strengths that Buzzsprout has is, you know, we have a really great support system for our customers and they know that and they know that we're here for them if they need us, and so it was kind of like gave us that big win right out the gate when we had these person to person, and so that's why the demos really didn't feel like they were solving the problem that we were trying to solve, and then the one-on-ones felt like they were solving the problem and giving this really hyper-personalized one-on-one option, but it was not sustainable, and so that's like you were saying how we ended up with the orientations, kind of this like option in the middle of the two. Cara, do you want to just like explain to our listeners, like, what the orientations look like?
Cara:So an orientation is a live stream event.
Cara:Attendees register and attend live and I basically share my screen and walk through what your Buzzsprout account looks like, what are the steps on getting your podcast launched and listed on the directories, and during that time the attendees can ask their questions. We actually prompt them to ask a question before they even sign up, and so it's very interactive. Even though I'm not seeing the faces of the attendees, we're interacting and the conversations are great because they're actually helping each other. Sometimes when I'm talking, I remember they were a Buzzsprout customer, maybe they've been in podcasting, but they clarified the question for me from another attendee because it didn't make a lot of sense, and they said I think she means this. I'm like, thank you. And so it feels like I'm in a classroom with or maybe not even a classroom that's a little formal but a very comfortable space just chatting with our customers who are here to get launched, and so that's a little bit about what an orientation is yeah, the nice thing about the orientations is the fact that it's for our new podcasters.
Priscilla:It's really when we were building it, we were thinking who are we building this for? Is it for anyone who's using Buzzsprout or is it more specific? What type of customer are we trying to target with the orientations? And really it was the new podcaster who's just starting, who doesn't know what they're doing. And so when you think about like a demo, which is a traditional type of way that a lot of support teams educate their customers, this is different. While it is giving you a demo, like there's part of your orientation that is, a demo of the product. There's also this aspect of the training side of it, with the how to get listed on directories or strategies and recommendations for naming your podcast. There's like this extra level of our personal guidance in the orientations, more than just here's how you change your billing.
Priscilla:This this here's how you, you know, get to whatever, but it's more of here's what you need to think about as you're getting in that launch position, getting ready to go, and then you have that added section of the Q&A that really encourages the engagement. Do you remember why we landed on naming them orientations?
Cara:Well, you know when you first start middle school or high school. Yeah, totally I remember, yeah, I remember and you go into your school and you got to walk the classroom and you walk your schedule and you find out where your locker is and that's the orientation, that's just getting you there. And so I know you and I, Priscilla, we're like it's not a demo, because we're not just standing up there projecting this thing and there's no part on the podcaster side.
Jordan:Well, and a demo can be done, like on a YouTube video that you just send out to anyone.
Cara:Yeah, right, but in orientation you're walking the halls like you're meeting your teachers, you're in it. And so I remember us landing on. It's like this is the Buzzsprout class of May 21st and they are going to get oriented with Buzzsprout and podcasting in general and we're here to support them. And that's how we landed there, and I do love that they're called orientations, I think it's fun.
Priscilla:Yeah, I remember us talking about the names and one of the things we really liked about calling them orientations was the fact that you would have, you know, five to 10 people in an orientation each week and they would feel like they're part of the class, of whatever.
Priscilla:And there was this camaraderie with the podcasters who were joining you, like you were just saying that are helping each other, you know, in the chat, while you're helping them in the video, and you know we haven't really gone there yet with these, but I liked the idea of, okay, what could we push more beyond these orientations to actually like encourage this community more down the line of these?
Priscilla:You know 20 people who were in this orientation together. How can they continue to support each other? Because we've talked about so many times on this podcast that podcasting can be very solo and isolating, and so what if we were able to use these orientations as a way to be like you all started in the same month, you all launched in the same month and now you can support each other as you continue podcasting? And so we haven't really gone that far yet, but that was part of the reason for naming them orientations was that we really want to build that idea of this is your group like. These are your people to help you and Cara's walking you all through it and giving you all the information you need to be successful.
Cara:And it's so awesome because sometimes when other people ask a question, they're like oh OK, they asked my question's not that silly, I can ask too. And then they get confident to ask those questions, whereas sometimes they may sit quiet.
Priscilla:Or they won't know to ask the question. Yeah, right, like sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And so if you're in a one-on-one with someone and you don't know what question to ask and they're going through their script and then you're done and you didn't know what questions to ask, you might miss out on information that later you're going to need. But if you're in an orientation with 10 people and Cara goes through a script and someone else thinks of a question, that might help you to have a better understanding, even if you wouldn't have thought of that same question. So, yeah, you're right that, like, having more people in the room can help a full, more well-rounded knowledge of the product and how it works and how to be successful.
Priscilla:Okay, so we had the discovery project and we did a lot of testing during that. We tested different types of orientations or different types of demos. We looked at what software are we going to use that's going to allow us to have people in the room with us? Is everyone going to be on video? Is no one going to be on video? Are we going to screen share? Are we not going to screen share? How long should these be? One of the things we talked about a lot was how many people did we want to have in the orientations?
Cara:If you make it too large, then sometimes people can talk over each other or it gets. Maybe there's so many questions coming in that me, as the host, it's hard to keep up with or following up. If I'm trying to send emails afterwards, that's 30 people to follow up with and then, if you go too little, you lose that classroom, that orientation field that we were just talking about, where, okay, all five people are new and all five people don't know what to ask and so you're missing that benefit. And so we decided to cap it at 20. And I remember it starting a little smaller and now it has grown to where it's about 10 to 15 consistent that attend every week and sometimes we see 20 register, but it's about 10, 15 consistent, yeah, and I think that you know you were saying that if it's too small you lose that orientation feel.
Priscilla:I think if it's too small you lose that orientation feel. I think if it gets too big you lose that orientation feel too.
Cara:Yeah.
Priscilla:Like we could open it up to 50 people, but if 49 people show up in an orientation, you, Cara, have so much more to cover. Now you've got all these questions coming in and we want to keep it. One of the things we talked about was we wanted to keep it easy for people to join without feeling like they were giving up half of their day, and so we wanted to keep them at 30 minutes. You kind of sometimes go a little long with Q&As because sometimes people have questions that need to be that, but really what you need to be there for is that first 30 minutes and then, if you need to drop off, you can drop off, and so that was another reason why we kind of landed on that. 20 people is the cap, and occasionally we'll open it up a little bit more than 20 people if we need to, but we try not to get into those higher numbers and if we ever find that people are wanting to sign up weekly for these more than 20 a week, then we'll add a second one on in the week, because you know we want to keep that total per orientation low.
Priscilla:I know in the beginning a way that we were measuring success was how many people joined the orientation, and we pretty quickly learned that that is not a good measurement of success, right? No, because you could have people join and then your script could be off and not be exactly what you wanted it to be, and so it wasn't beneficial for those five people, and not be exactly what you wanted it to be, and so it wasn't beneficial for those five people. Or you could have one person join and it could be a great orientation and they learned a lot and they got this really good foundation and in that situation it would be successful because that person got exactly what we were trying to do with the orientation. And so what other ways do you, as you've been doing these now for several months, what other ways do?
Cara:you use to measure the success of the project. Some of the things I look at I will look at their accounts and see after the orientation, did they create an account and did they upload an episode? Because to me that is a measure of success. We walk through that during the orientation. And another big one is did they submit to the directories? Because that's a big part of the orientation and so I like to see when I look into an account of someone who attended the orientation, they have episodes and they're listed on the directories.
Cara:Also, in the inbox, we're not seeing those long one question like process emails where they just keep asking question after question. I do see them come in but now they're asking well, what's this magic mastering feature and how do I enable subscriptions? And they're talking about features and they're learning to use the different parts of our product and not the like very foundation of getting started. Like we conquered that in our 30 minute orientation and now they get to do the other fun stuff and we can help them with that because that's what we're here for and so those to me, are great metrics of success. Yeah, that's like best possible outcome.
Priscilla:Yeah Well, and you still see in the inbox sometimes the people who have those back and forth questions, those foundation questions, but those are not the people that were in an orientation and you don't see it from the people that were in the orientation. They now have that foundation. So when they ask those questions, like you were saying, they're the questions that are a little more technically advanced or a little bit more like I want to tweak and make things really great. Cara's enjoyment of doing it. I think that's a way that I measure the success of it. You know, when you're choosing someone to do this, you want to look at the kind of person that would enjoy it. Because if you have someone who is an extrovert, who loves people, who loves training and making people feel confident in their knowledge, that person is going to do a better job than someone who is more introverted, who doesn't really love being on camera and who has a little bit harder of that, like your listeners or your attendees are going to draft off of that energy from the person who's hosting it.
Priscilla:And so for me, when I look at these kind of projects we do and the success of them, I often want to look back at just the happiness and the enjoyment from the person who is running it. And so it's fun for me because Cara, when she comes out of an orientation, is almost always like oh yeah, that was great, that was fun, like we had a good time, and that tells me that it's successful because it is bringing life to Cara and it is educating our podcasters, and both of those are ways to measure the success of it. And if Cara was coming out drained every week, then you would question is it worth it to be doing this for our customers, if what we're giving up is this employee satisfaction or just employee happiness? And so that's another thing that when I am looking at measuring success for things like this, that's what I'm looking at, which is always fun because Cara loves them and she's so good at them I do, I really do which is always fun because Tara loves them and she's so good at them.
Jordan:I do, I really do. I imagine that you gain a lot more confidence as you go, when people thank you for it or they tell you oh my gosh, that was so wonderful, like that completely changed my experience. I couldn't have done it without you. I bet after just a couple of comments like that, you're like yes, let's go to the next one, let's go, we could do it.
Cara:Yes, yeah, absolutely.
Priscilla:And that's a great point, jordan, is you start to hear that from people. Yeah, and they say man, when I launched, I got invited to an orientation. I met Cara and she was the first person that I met on the Buzzsprout team and now I feel like I know the people who develop this product that I'm using and there is this level of like thank you so much, I couldn't have done it without your support and of like, thank you so much, I couldn't have done it without your support. And when you hear that from people, it's very easy to go oh man, that shows me that this has been successful because it's made so-and-so's day better.
Cara:Absolutely, and I say all throughout the orientation I'm from the success team. I'm a real person and we are a team full of real people, and so that's so awesome. I'm like I'm not faking it. I promise we are real people and we're actually really all very excited to help you, and this is what it looks like. Yeah, so when you get our emails, please know this is who's responding to you. Yeah, and I did want to point out one other benefit of an orientation new employees. So we've had some recent hires, and I think two out of three so far have been to an orientation, and so it's a great tool. If we're using it to educate our podcasters or our customers on our product, we actually also use it for our own employees, and so it's a really it's an added benefit to have orientations available even for that.
Priscilla:That is a really good point, especially because you would have people that are joining not your support team, so they're not going through all this rigorous training that someone in support goes through. But maybe it's a designer who's going to work on one very specific part of the product, or maybe it's a marketer who's working on one. You know specific strategy, but to help them with their work, they need to have a good understanding of the product, since they can come to an orientation on their first week for 30 minutes and get a good understanding of it to help them better their own work. That's a great example, some of the things that we would recommend you think through as you're considering this kind of a thing, because not everyone's proactive support and education is going to look like how we've done orientations. But there are a lot of things to think through when you're trying to decide how you are going to educate your customers.
Priscilla:So the first thing is timing. When do you want to get this education to your customers? Do you want to hit them right off the bat when they sign up? Do you want it to be that first thing, or do you want to give a little time and come in at a place later in their journey where you can give them a little bit more of like specific and directed education. You know what I mean. For us, it's right in the beginning, because you have to have the foundation knowledge. But for something else that's not super technical, you might say, hey, actually we don't need to come in right at the beginning, but once they upgrade to a pro plan, that's when we need to come in, because now they have access to all these other features or something like that. Right Another thing, Cara, I know that you went through a lot of trial and error with, was software. What software are you going to use? What did you end up trying? And then, where did you end up landing when it came to software?
Cara:We started with StreamYard and it was great. The only thing that we really wanted in the end was like a landing page. We wanted it to be very user-friendly and we wanted it all kind of held in one place, and so we actually now use Crowdcast, and Crowdcast has been wonderful. We have a full-blown channel that offers multiple orientation dates, because we were seeing podcasters want to sign up but they can't make that date next week, and so we said, okay, here's a whole month, pick which one you want, and it's updated. And so Crowdcast has been a very reliable and user-friendly channel for streaming live.
Jordan:Yeah, I love that. It offers flexibility for the users too. It's not like you're going to miss your window to be in this live orientation and sorry, that's it.
Priscilla:That's all you get, yeah, but that was a big part of that early discovery was to figure out how we want to like. What is that platform going to look like. That's going to enable us to give these orientations in the best way possible. And, like you said, we did use StreamYard for a little bit and they were good. I remember liking StreamYard but we ended up with Crowdcast because they really had that landing page aspect, which was really nice.
Priscilla:One of the things I know we talked about was who should lead it. Picking the right person who's going to really have a lot of joy in this is really important. You might find that you actually don't want the same person to lead every single week, that you want it to be a rotating cast, or, you know, maybe your team just doesn't have the ability for it to be one person to dedicate time to it every week, and so you want to give people one orientation a month and you split it up amongst your team. Those kind of strategies. You want to look at that like who's going to really enjoy it and who maybe isn't the best fit for that personal kind of training and coaching. And then I know, Cara, that we had a lot of conversations about promotion how you get it in front of your customers. Oh yeah, what are some of the strategies that we used, especially in the beginning? I know that it's like evolved, but can you talk about a little bit of those strategies like from the beginning?
Cara:Well, I mentioned earlier those cold emails.
Cara:Yeah, so, many emails just like they signed up and we got their email. I sent it to them and that was not. It was not worth the investment of time for me. So we needed to get it out in front of everybody more consistently and then give them the option to sign up. We used our weekly newsletter that goes out and we did see a lot of success with that. We also would share. We have a community group for Buzzsprout and so we would share it there, I think weekly. Every time we'd have one and we'd set a reminder hey, we're going live in an hour. You could register here and all of that really did get the ball rolling. I mean, the word got out and we had attendees, but it still wasn't really targeting necessarily new podcasters, because they may or may not be getting the newsletter, Maybe they didn't choose to subscribe, or in the Facebook community group again, like you have to be in the group. So we wanted to get it in front of new signups at Buzzsprout.
Priscilla:Yeah, and one of the things that we did do right from the beginning was we included it in our support signatures yes, so that people could sign up right from the beginning. Was we included it in our support signatures? Yes, so that people could sign up right from the support email? And then we would also proactively send it to people who interacted with Buzzsprout support, like right after they signed up and said like I need help launching, and we'd say, hey, great, here's some resources, but also join this orientation next week. That's going to be the best. And so we were very proactive in like pushing it through support to people. But you're right, well, it got the target that we needed. It was reliant on the people in the support team to actually be the ones pushing it.
Cara:Yes, All of those are still in place. In addition to we have added it to our onboarding email. So if you don't publish an episode right away when you sign up for Buzzsprout, you'll get an email saying, hey, are you ready to publish your first episode? And that orientation link is included there, that invitation, and I think that's a really great email, because maybe they signed up and then they started looking at things and like me and said no, this is too much, I can't do it. And so here we are saying it's okay, it's okay, come join me in this orientation, I'll walk you through it, it's not that hard, let's just check it out and so they can sign up that way, and that has been. I feel like that's really increased the number of signups, and so that's been exciting.
Priscilla:Yeah, as you're thinking about this and how this can look in the support you're offering your customers, think through like, what are the best ways that I'm going to promote this to the people who I actually want to be, the ones who sign up and come to the orientation? And you know, for us it took us a minute to get to those welcome emails, but that's just because we wanted to make sure the orientations were successful in the way that we wanted them to be before we started incorporating them in our onboarding processes. But once we were like, okay, yeah, these are great and we just need to now get more people in here, that's when we really started putting them in that onboarding and it became really successful. So, as you're working through it, like, think of those different strategies to get these orientation invitations, or whatever you call yours, into the hands of people who really need that. Ok, and then a couple of pitfalls to avoid. We talked about some of these.
Priscilla:But length you want to make sure that it's easy to consume for people. Don't make them sign up for a two-hour orientation. That's going to be so long that they have to block aside time for it afterwards. That she says to everyone you can leave or you can stay for the Q&A. It's easy to do during a lunch break, you can watch it, you don't have to set aside time for it. So think about the length, be aware and consider your customers in that sense. Think about the technical depth that's needed for your customers to be successful. So you don't want to get too technical, but you might, depending on the product you're supporting, you might need to give some technical kind of foundational knowledge, and so you want to be careful to balance that. And then content accuracy. You know there are a lot of changes in the podcasting industry, and I'm sure it applies to so many other industries that things are always changing, yes, and so you want to make sure that the content you're giving in your orientations is always accurate. So, Cara, I know for you you're constantly revising your script, you're constantly updating things based on how the product is changing or how the industry changes, and so you know, be aware of that your script for your orientation or your education or your training or your class or whatever you call it, that should be a living document that is always updating and always changing.
Priscilla:And maybe you start doing orientations and you realize people don't have questions about this page. I don't need to spend two minutes on this page. I can spend 30 seconds on that page and then move on, because people don't have questions about that, and so be aware of that. We talked about class sizes. Don't let it get too big, because then you lose the camaraderie of the orientation, which is what you really want to hone in on and let people feel like they're a part of this group, and so, yeah, don't let them get too big. Try to make sure there's enough people there so that there's conversation. But there can still be value in an orientation. That's two people, as long as there's engagement there and they're tracking and understanding what they're being taught. And then the last thing I have on my list here is just host burnout.
Jordan:Yeah.
Priscilla:Be aware of the person who is hosting these. It can take a lot of energy to sit there with a new group of people every week and have an exciting personality and engage with everyone. It can be tough over time. Oh yeah, and so you want to check in with your host and talk with them about hey, how are you feeling? Do you need to take, you know, a week break? Do you need someone to fill in for you? Like, talk with them, be aware of that burnout, because what you don't want to do is push, push, push, start doing so many of these over a week and then have it just hit a wall and then your host is like, listen, I can't do this anymore and no one else is trained and ready to back them up. Do you have any other pitfalls, Cara, as someone who really led the charge on this project?
Cara:I would say like, just don't put too much pressure on yourself to be perfect the first time. It is live. But one thing I always start out with when I do the orientation is just because we work in the podcasting industry doesn't mean that my audio is going to be perfect. So if I have a glitch, please let me know. We are not immune. And so just being real, like just viewing it as you are a real person, and especially with a discovery project, if you're just implementing it. We did a lot of ups and downs and trial and error, so just keep looking forward and don't add so much pressure on yourself to be perfect the first time. Your customers will teach you the right fit and you'll work that out as you continue to try things out.
Priscilla:Great advice that is really good advice, yeah, so key takeaway, I think, from this episode is that education is proactive support, and proactive support is remarkable support, and so taking the time to invest in this kind of training strategy, this proactive support strategy, can really result in a remarkable experience for your customers 100% worth the investment.
Cara:Yeah, not only for the customers but for us as a team. That knowledge base and just educating our customers is going to help everybody. It's going to help us communicate, it's going to help build confidence, both for the customer and then as we're troubleshooting things. So, absolutely, and also the connection, the human connection is the biggest part, just being able to say, yep, we're here on this journey with you, we're here to support you.
Priscilla:I love it. Yeah, if you have launched an educational initiative with your customers or if you are looking to do it like what worked, what didn't work, I want you to reach out to us. You can text us directly using that link in the show notes and let us know what things you did that really worked well, or what things you tried that maybe didn't work so well that other people can avoid, and we'll share that on a future episode if you want to send us in your thoughts. Thanks for joining us for this, Cara. It was really great to talk about orientations with you. It was really fun, Thank you so much.
Cara:Well, you know it's my passion project. I love them, I love the orientations and they do really fill my cup, so I'm excited to share about it, and I really hope that your listeners will take this and take on the challenge in their companies as well. I can't wait to hear about that.
Priscilla:It's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences. So what question do you have for us today, Jordan?
Jordan:All right, we have a question from Support Driven Slack that says hi y'all. I'm curious how you might handle the situation where a customer sent in a ticket, the team verified it is a bug and sent to the developers, but the issue will take a couple weeks for the developers to have the fix released. Do you keep the ticket with the customer open or on hold, or let them know the date the issue fix will be released and then mark the ticket as solved?
Priscilla:It's a good question. It is a good question. I think that the biggest thing when I hear that, the biggest thing I like take from it is this idea that like maybe you would let them know hey, you're right, we see the bug that should be released in a couple of weeks, have a great day and you send that. And what you lose by doing that and closing the ticket is the connection with the customer once the solve has been released. And like that win. You know, a lot of times we'll talk in support about like getting the win, like you go get the win. Like we fixed the thing that they ran into. Now go get the win. Like don't let it fizzle out, capitalize on the fact that they got whatever they asked for solved, or it got released, or it got updated or whatever it is. So get the win.
Priscilla:And so I would highly recommend not just closing the ticket. So we use Help Scout and then Help Scout, there's a snooze feature, and so you can snooze an email for however long you need to and so say you know that the fix is going to be released in about two weeks. Snooze that email for two weeks and then when it pops back up, you can check and see if the fix has been released. Then you can email the customer and say hey, this thing we talked about two weeks ago, we have not forgotten you. It is live now. You should be all set to go. If you run into any questions, let me know, and then that allows you to get the win.
Cara:Oh yeah.
Priscilla:And it makes your customer feel like, oh my gosh, they remembered me, yeah. Be like oh my gosh, they remembered me, yeah. And if you don't have a snooze option you know, because a lot of people don't you can make yourself a to-do to follow up with them. You can use tagging to tag the question and then come back to it. You can leave it pending and then that way you don't lose it but never miss the opportunity to follow up.
Cara:Always put yourself as a customer. What would you want? Yeah, it would make my day to be concerned about something and it kind of gives a high five to like if they're the one that pointed out the bug. I think they said they're the ones that wrote in like thank you so much for helping us find this. Like all right, we're in this together and so absolutely make that connection Again. Let them know, let your customer know you're in this as a team and it's fixed for you, and have a good day after that. Then you can close it.
Priscilla:Yeah, that just made me think like one step beyond that.
Priscilla:When people have feature requests for something and they say I really wish like it's not necessarily a bug, but they're like I really wish that this product or this feature could do this thing, and you start tracking that, like in your voice of the customer project or however it is that you track feature requests, if that becomes a feature down the road, go back to those customers and say, hey, I know last year you wrote in and asked about you know whatever dynamic content.
Priscilla:Well, I want to let you know we just launched it and we'd really like you to test it out and let us know what you think. The impact that that has on your customer is huge because it accurately communicates to your customer that you cared about them, because by thinking of them and keeping them like top of mind or keeping a way to find get back to that person, that shows that you care about them and it communicates that to them when you reach out to them, and so we do that a lot at Buzzsprout. Support is whenever there's a new feature that gets launched that we know either came from a feature request or just like aligns with some feature requests that we have, we will say like hey, Cara, can you go take an hour and go find some of those people that requested this and let them know that it's been launched? One. It allows us to have people using it right away, but it also gives us the benefit of getting that win with that customer who requested that.
Cara:Those are my favorite emails to send. Honestly, they really are.
Priscilla:I love them too, yeah they're so fun.
Cara:You're like guess what yeah exactly, guess what.
Priscilla:We did it. I told you we might do it and we did it. Yeah, absolutely, those are fun. Well, if you have a question or a support story that you would like us to discuss, or just like a story you want us to shout out, you can email us at happytohelp at buzzsproutcom, or you can text the show using the text, the show link in the description, and we may discuss your question or story on a future episode. As always, if you liked this episode, please share it with someone who works in customer support and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. We would love to hear what you think about the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
