Customer Support Leaders

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 45 Val discusses using a personality type such as Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies   to help you pull a team together, and work with each other. Also, here’s 101 things you didn’t know about Val ! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail From The Archives: Specials: Fireside 16 Valentina Thoerner is a Empress in the support world, and, having moved from a support lead role at Automattic, now heads up Product at Klaus . Her official title is "Empress of Product", hence the tiara (though she assures me the truth is the other way round).  She describes herself thus: “At Klaus, I am the Empress of Product, m...

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 44 Matt and I have no complaints. Plenty of other people do, though: customers! How do we deal with those complaining customers, whether we agree with them or not? Support the show

Send us Fan Mail From The Archives: Specials: Fireside 13 Tadas Labudis comes on the show to talk about ticket tagging taxonomies and tactics! Then we wrap up the show but the conversation continued - so I’ve included the bonus tip, too! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 43 Vaishali Dialani is Head of Customer Experience at NOW Money , a fintech company with a unique customer base and on a mission to ensure everyone has instant access to financial services they can, and want, to use - no matter who they are, where they are from, or how much they earn. Vaishali and I talk about the specific challenges in supporting these customer...

Send us Fan Mail Two guests for the price of one today as Whitney Brittingham and Aakrit Prasad join me to discuss the relationship between Product Led Growth and Support Driven Growth. Whitney has been in Support for over 8 years, and is currently the Director of Customer Success and Support at AptEdge , an enterprise software company backed by top VCs on a mission to transform customer support i...

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 41 Andrew Ou is a UX Strategist/Designer and joins me to discuss the role UX plays in CX, and specifically in Customer Support. He also has a free guide for listeners, giving you 5 ways UX can help SaaS companies can increase revenue and profitability , which is something we all want to know! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 40 Reagan Helms and I discuss what when you have experienced folks who do not want to step into leadership. How do you develop them in other ways once they bump up against the proverbial glass ceiling? Support the show

Send us Fan Mail From The Archives: Specials: Fireside 11 Sandra Thompson comes to share her significant expertise on Emotional Intelligence and its importance in our ability to serve customers.   We break EI away from Empathy, and talk about some of the elements of EI. After we finished recording, Sandra also mentioned a workshop she runs using Riders and Elephants , a brilliant resource to help...

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 39 Craig and I share similarly long tenures in Support - and may even have encountered each other in the wild at one point in the early 2000s! Today, we talk about the evolution of support channels. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 38 Sam Semuhin returns today to talk about how we can empower our teams to achieve their best selves, deliver their best work, and hire the best! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 37 Sophie Heller joins me from Outschool , which, as you might expect, experienced serious hypergrowth in the wake of COVID-19!  Sophie explores how those first days and months unfolded, and reflects on her feelings about the experience now. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 36 Sam Semuhin is Customer Care Manager at Upflow . Today, she wanted to talk tools! We cover the pain, the overthinking, the money, the user experience… and everything! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 35 Jason Yun , co-founder of Relay , has a background in the medical profession, and had his interest piqued by my chat with Ethan a couple of weeks ago. Here, we move away from Emergency Care and into the comparison with Community Care. How do we set up our customers for success?  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 34 Empress Val has led Product, and led Support. How should these teams work together? We talk about Product accessing Support data, and meander around tagging, customer verbatim and all other related things. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 33 I hooked Craig back, as we kick off 2022 (!), to talk about what is probably top of mind for a lot of us: goals and OKRs. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 32 Ethan Walfish believes there are a lot of things we can learn in Support from the medical profession. Also: when is an Operating Room not an Operating Room? When it’s an Operating Theatre. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 31 Ash returns to tell me I’m wrong. I tell him he’s wrong. And then we have a very civilised discussion about the double-edged sword of getting your team to track their time. Should you or shouldn’t you? Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 30 Simone returned for a chat in mid-December ’21, to talk about building careers in Support, and specifically helping people in your team transition to leadership. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 29 Matt joined me in the run-up to Christmas, and in the wake of The Great Resignation, to talk about: what happens when good people leave? Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 28 Craig joins me to talk about one of my passions - data! In this case, what’s useful for your Support team to know, right where they are: talking to customers? Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Specials: Fireside 27 Here, 100 weeks into the podcast, we ask: ‘How does your CX match up to your company values, mission and ideals?’ Join me in conversation with Nate Brown as we talk about his idea of “Mission-Driven CX”! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Week 99 Topic: Reflecting  Looking back over some of the best advice, and a couple of bonus outtakes from the last 99 weeks of the podcast!  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Looking forward to 100+ weeks! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail From The Archives: Fireside with Mo McKibbin Mo McKibbin talks about the challenges of screening for those magical unicorns: technical, customer success-support hybrids, remote, in Europe, ideally with specific industry experience. And we excitedly steal each others' favourite interview questions. Support the show