Support Leaders

In Episode #6 of the Support Leaders Podcast, we interview Shawn White, Director of Customer Support for Sendgrid. We discuss his career in customer support at great companies including IBM, Doubleclick, and Photobucket, and how he ended up at SendGrid. In this episode, you will learn: How SendGrid has scaled enormously over the years How SendGrid manages tier-based support and SLAs How Shawn helps SendGrid define customer satisfaction goals How Shawn thinks about self-help and documentation in relation to support The tools that SendGrid’s support team uses and the channels they support The book’s Shawn recommends: Jack Welch and the G.E. Way Good to Great

In Episode #5 of the Support Leaders Podcast, we interview Kathryn Castle, Head of Technical Support Engineering EMEA for Optimizely. We discuss how she started teaching English after studying at the University of Warwick before starting her career in support. We talk about all of the changes she’s seen since starting at Optimizely in 2014. In this episode, you will learn: How Optimizely balances support between different technical teams as well as collaborates with different teams across the organization What support channels Optimizely uses and how they chose those How Kathryn improves her team’s efficiency with tooling and strategy The book’s Kathryn recommends: Crucial Conversations High Output Management  

In Episode #4 of the Support Leaders Podcast, we interview Lauren Cowher, Director of Customer Experience at Havenly. We talk about her experience at Princeton, working in healthcare, going back to study anthropology at Goldsmiths College, and then her first customer support role at WriterAccessd. Then we talk about how Havenly’s support team has grown to support customers and interior designers in their dynamic marketplace. In this episode, you will learn: How Havenly manages an onshore and offshore support team How support for a marketplace creates unique challenges and how Havenly solves them How the Havenly “Happiness Guarantee” has been built into their culture and has impacted the entire company. Lauren’s favorite book: Uplifiting Service 

In Episode #3 of the Support Leaders Podcast, we interview Andrew Spittle, Happiness Engineer at Automattic. We talk about his first experience using WordPress and building a company in college. Then we talk about how Automattic’s support team has grown extensively as a fully remote team. We go into Automattic’s amazing company rule – no internal email,  and how that affects the support team. In this episode, you will learn: How Automattic effectively supports a wide variety of different products. Why every employee at Automattic starts with 3 weeks in support, and how Andrew’s team makes that possible. Why Automattic built their own live chat product and how it enables them to manage live chat for a completely remote team at scale. Why Automattic has no internal email and how they manage internal communication. Andrew’s favorite books: The Effortless Experience The Effective Executive Tribal Leadership Leading Change

In Episode #2 of Support Leaders, we interview Zach Bouzan-Kaloustian, Director of Customer Support at DigitalOcean. We talk about his time at Foursquare, Fab.com, and then growing with the team at DigitalOcean. He explores his ideas of “Support as a Product” and goes into detail about how they are solving their massive knowledge management challenge. In this episode, you will learn: The makeup of DigitalOcean’s support team, how many tickets they get, and how they have scaled. The DigitalOcean support tool stack, why they chose to move to Salesforce ServiceCloud, and what their challenges were in moving.  How DigitalOcean manages real-time chat with customers at scale. The skills required to be a support agent for DigitalOcean. How DigitalOcean’s support team works with the Risk and Saftey and Customer Success teams. 

In Episode #1 of Support Leaders, we interview Antonio King, aka “Tones,” the Director of Experience at Shinesty.com. We talk about customer support as the one night stand vs. customer experience as the relationship, customer satisfaction vs. customer effort, growing a team for seasonal peaks, some funny customer stories, and much more! Show notes: Here’s one of the Fun.com videos we mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PHthbqnTlc To learn more about Shinesty, visit their Website: https://shinesty.com The NiceReply blog post I mentioned: https://www.nicereply.com/blog/frictionless-customer-support-shinesty/ Effortless Experience Book: https://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Experience-Conquering-Battleground-Customer/dp/1591845815