Neil Smith, Senior Director of Support at Iterable, shares how he’s built an effective, efficient, and inclusive interview process that helps him hire a lot of amazing people, fast ..read more

Ben Gardner, Director of Support at Drift, shares his 5-step process for expanding support from a 9-5 model to a 24/7, “follow the sun” model ..read more

Pam Dodrill, Vice President of Customer Support and Success at Zapier, dives into the four tenants that help her team stay weird and authentic at work and how that helps them maintain a high CSAT, high employee engagement scores, and low attrition rates ..read more

Antonio King, Head of Support at Veho, shares how he’s scaling the shipping company’s rapidly-growing support team through a combination of aggressive hiring and establishing key support functions and operations. In this episode, Antonio discusses how he finds and hires great people at scale, which support operations he’s focusing on first, and how he approaches everything with transparency ..read more

Ashley Sachs, Director of Support and Success at Whereby, shares how she balances agent growth with relentless productivity. With a little inspiration from Ted Lasso, Ashley reveals how she manages that delicate balance, how she helps agents discover their “spark,” and how a culture of growth empowers her team to crush their KPIs ..read more

Tony Won, Head of Customer Experience at TruPlay Games, shares what he thinks support leaders often get wrong about agent training - and how to fix it. Tony has worked in the video game industry for over a decade, doing everything from UI/UX design and music composition to leading customer support and experience teams (including building a few from scratch). In this week’s episode, Tony shares his best tips and tricks for how to set actionable goals and KPIs, how to teach for actual learning instead of teaching to a test, and how to better involve your agents in the creation of training materi ..read more

David Kohl, Director of Support at Shopify, shares how he and his team use deep customer understanding to drive merchant growth. In his 25+ years working in customer support (with a brief foray into sales), David has supported many different types of customers, in several different industries. Everything from highly technical customers at Hewlett Packard to small business merchants at Shopify. In that time, he’s learned a thing or two about how to deeply understand customers and adapt support operations to fit their specific needs (at scale). In this episode, David shares: 1. The first three t ..read more

Angela Raiford, Director of Community Happiness at Patreon, talks about how she uses data and segmentation to support over 7 million users (across B2B and B2C) — with a 50-person team. Patreon was one of the first companies in the rapidly growing creator membership space. As a support leader there for over 6 years, Angela has pioneered several innovative strategies for: 1. Supporting a diverse user base (creators, fans of those creators, and other patrons) 2. Using data to efficiently deploy team resources between B2B and B2C customers In this episode, Angela shares how she identifies the ..read more

James Baldwin, Director of User Success and Support at Change.org, talks about how he handles unpredictable spikes in ticket volume. James has a ton of experience with this topic because Change.org’s ticket volume is largely tied to world events, which means he can’t always predict when spikes will happen, how big they’ll be, or how long they’ll last. In this episode, James shares how he plans ahead for these spikes, what’s included in the plan, and how he keeps his team motivated and energized when ticket volume skyrockets ..read more

Eric Broulette, Director of Global Support at WP Engine, shares his best practices for building and maintaining a relationship between the customer support and product teams. Eric credits this strong relationship at WP Engine as one of the key reasons his team’s support interactions decreased by 5% last year, despite the company’s customer base growing by 20%. And this year, his team is on pace to decrease volume even more. In this episode, Eric shares how he builds a great relationship with product, why that collaboration is so important, and what data his team uses to act as the voice of the ..read more