[00:00:40] Maxime Manseau: Nice. So it's good to see you everyone today. I was super Excited to invite my friend Kinsey. Kinsey and I think met a few months ago. I don't even remember how Kinsey, maybe you remember better than me, but we've been chatting about like different stuff and Kinsey is pretty good at one thing.

[00:00:59] Maxime Manseau: Or at least there is one thing when you, when we're talking to each other, is that just while me was like basically your support model. So today I wanted to invite Kinsey to tell us more about it. So thank you so much Kinsey for giving me a bit of your time. Thank you for the opportunity to share.

[00:01:14] Maxime Manseau: Maybe Kinsey, we can start with just a brief introduction. Just tell me a bit more about, about yourself.

[00:01:20] Kincy Clark: Yeah. Hey, my name's Kinsey. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining. I live in Northern California, a small town called Winters. Married, two kids. And professionally I work at an e commerce fintech called Bolt, where I run the support and education.

[00:01:36] Maxime Manseau: Awesome. And for the ones who don't know me, my name is Max. I'm the co founder of Birdie. There is one thing that I love in my job, it's like talking with different like super leaders. And I love to do this fireside chat just to meet new people. And the main goal of those ones is for you to live with actionable insights.

[00:01:56] Maxime Manseau: What I want today is just when you head up, you're thinking a bit about hey, this is how my super model is organized. This is all the stuff I learned like, through Keensy and hopefully like you can take action, like tomorrow, if you feel you need to take action on it. So Keensy I think you have a few slides that are gonna walk us like along the presentation.

[00:02:18] Maxime Manseau: Should I start them now? Yeah, just want to give a shout

[00:02:21] Kincy Clark: out to Andrew though for tuning in from Vacaville, 15 minutes south of where I live. So that's pretty cool. Let's get started. Nice. Yeah.

[00:02:30] Maxime Manseau: Maybe I'm going to let you start with a bit of context,

[00:02:35] Kincy Clark: so go ahead. Yeah. So when I joined Bull, these are, we have many challenges and support, but these are the two that I'm highlighting for the purposes of this.

[00:02:43] Kincy Clark: We had a kind of a vague assignment process, like, How were things getting assigned to different people? There, there was some rhyme to the reason, but not really. And then the other big thing that I noticed right away was that team members were working on issues that they were not well suited for. So we had, the kind of shorthand here, we had technical people working on non technical problems.

[00:03:03] Kincy Clark: I'm going to find that a little bit better next. And then we had non technical people working on technical problems and my Eureka moment, Max was, I was talking to. One of the gals that was on the support team and I asked her like, Hey, doing my discovery as a kind of incoming new manager.

[00:03:22] Kincy Clark: And she was telling me what she liked to work on. And he said do you want to do technical things? And she said, yes, but everything else said, no, like her body language, the tone, everything said no. And I'm like, it's okay. If you don't want to work on technical things, like there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

[00:03:37] Kincy Clark: But I just realized like we got a huge mismatch here and that, that interview with her really made that clear that people were unwilling to admit this because again, we're tuned to think technical people are the great, brilliant ones, especially in support. There's a, and we'll talk a little bit more about the tiering and how you create some bad career incentives.

[00:03:59] Kincy Clark: I think it was that interview that really was pivotal for me to understand, like I had a really deep problem here.

[00:04:05] Maxime Manseau: I'm stopping you once again, but that's very funny because. Basically, what you're saying is you realize that this person was doing a job that she didn't like, everything started from there, from

[00:04:16] Kincy Clark: your teammates.

[00:04:17] Kincy Clark: But telling me she liked it, clearly not true. Very uncomfortable. You could just feel it, like her whole body. Because Yes, I love

[00:04:24] Maxime Manseau: technical stuff. If you're a technical support engineer and your boss is asking you, do you love technical stuff? Of course the answer is yes, especially your new boss.

[00:04:33] Kincy Clark: Yeah, okay. So that was a really big moment for me because I like getting people to the right place, so they can do their best work. So yeah, so what I did is I did, I'm going to go quickly through the methodology and I'll talk a little bit more detail about this as we move along.

[00:04:46] Kincy Clark: But really it's okay, what kind of issues are we getting and then category categorize these issues in a way that aligns with like the skills, the interests and the environment that we're operating in. So the product and some other things. And I have a list at the end that kind of some evaluation variables you can use to evaluate your situation because I've run product teams, probably about seven or eight startups or support teams.

[00:05:09] Kincy Clark: And it's all different. But like I. I can't copy paste previous organization onto a new one, and they look very different every time. And from that, we develop an org structure, and then we develop process around the structure. A lot of people start with process first. I would argue, my, to me, structural organization is the third most important thing when you're thinking about performance.

[00:05:30] Kincy Clark: And the only two that are more important are culture and the mission of the organization. So you have to have a good structure in place. very much. And to riff on this a little bit, like my background, I have a significant time in the military and we, in the army, we task organize. And that means we change the shape and sizes of our organizations constantly to meet a mission and situation.

[00:05:51] Kincy Clark: So I have a background of thinking about organization first. And applying that to the problem as part of the solution. And I think that's really important when you're thinking about managing a team is how can you constantly be thinking about, Hey, is this team organized the right way? Cause organization drives everything, careers, incentives, success, everything.

[00:06:13] Maxime Manseau: And to the people here, just want to mention, it strike me like the first time we met I feel that your career in your He's really present in, in in the way you approach everything in support. And I think this is something I had never seen before. I just want to tell this to people because I think you, I would say replicated like some behavior from the military for your day to day job in support.

[00:06:39] Maxime Manseau: And that's pretty interesting. Yeah,

[00:06:41] Kincy Clark: the military is not as rigid of an organization as people think, people see Full Metal Jacket or whatever movies and they think like we're all like robots that get told what to do by angry Jill Sargent's that is not how it works the organization and the way people operate is no different from a company as a leader, I have some different tools, but Like you, people don't do what they're told, much like the real world.

[00:07:04] Kincy Clark: People have different incentives. They have different understandings of the goal. And even in stressful combat situations, you'll have differences of opinion and you have to navigate those. And your answer isn't just to like, Hey, you got to do this. That's an answer sometimes, but a lot of times you got to navigate around it.

[00:07:20] Kincy Clark: So I think that's important context to realize. Like I'm not bringing in a drill sergeant. Approach at all. This is we're trained to think about problem solving. And I just, I've been trained on how to think about solving problems from an organizational perspective.

[00:07:35] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, got it. And would you mind tell me, telling me a bit more about what was like bold support when you arrived over there, like just, so we have a bit of

[00:07:43] Kincy Clark: yeah, so it was a single team.

[00:07:46] Kincy Clark: It was a smaller team. So I was, part of this, I was fortunate to draft off some hiring cause we, we raised money that year. So I was able to increase the size of the team. And I think that informed to some degree, the structure that we inherited, but it was a, a single support team. And I had.

[00:08:03] Kincy Clark: A manager that was hired at the same time I was so I was hired in as a director I inherited a manager and I also Had some experienced people and one person that in particular was really I think identified as someone who could take a leadership role. So I had Two subordinate leaders, one team, myself and then just a mix, like I implied earlier, just a mix of technical people, not so technical people, ethical cherry picking.

[00:08:30] Kincy Clark: I, that's a, that's one of the term my friend uses a lot when he talks about like ticket, assignment methods, people were looking in the queue and grabbing what they thought they could do, but sometimes they would get stuff assigned to them. So there wasn't a ton of structure around it.

[00:08:42] Kincy Clark: There's a lot of process. But there wasn't like a real clear structure and that's really what I thought I needed to add.

[00:08:49] Maxime Manseau: Got it. Yeah.

[00:08:51] Kincy Clark: And organizing it, right? Like at the end of the day. Yeah so one of the first things, and again, this is unique to Bolt, this may or may not work for you, but one of the things that I quickly identified was I needed the way to think about issues coming in and what kind of issues we're getting.

[00:09:05] Kincy Clark: And it's really easy to just to say technical and non technical and I think. That's an okay way of thinking about it. But what I realized was the problems I could divide into terms of structure. So I, people have heard this many times before that have seen this presentation, like we've had Godzilla problems.

[00:09:24] Kincy Clark: So Godzilla shows up in Tokyo, starts smashing everything. That's an unstructured problem. Like we've never dealt with Godzilla before. We really wouldn't know there's no Godzilla playbook maybe there is, but we don't, funnily enough, we tried to build one, but anyway, but this is really a problem that's defined as no real clear path to solution, but we do have to solve this problem.

[00:09:44] Kincy Clark: And we're not even sure what the outcome is. Do you keep Godzilla alive? Do you study him? Do you like shoot him into space? Do you kill him, blow him up? This presents this is a significant problem. So in the tech world, in the software world, this could be a systems outage. Like we got to get the systems back up, but we really don't know why it went down.

[00:10:00] Kincy Clark: But we did, we can't really give a timeline. So on the other side of the spectrum, I built structured problems. So a structure problem, I use Rubik's cube here as a metaphor because Rubik's cubes in theory, anyone can do them, but it takes a certain amount of discipline. And practice to know how to do them by yourself without watching the video.

[00:10:19] Kincy Clark: You have to watch a video a lot, to, to learn how to do it. I can't do one. The reason I use a Rubik's cube as an example is because I think in our world, especially in the tech world, we think of unstructured problems as easy problems. Problems, not really worth working on. Those are the ones we want to outsource.

[00:10:36] Kincy Clark: Structural problems can be hard. Anyone who's done taxes in America can tell you it doesn't mean it's easy, right? Exactly. And it requires discipline and it requires a different mindset of a person to do this. And then in the middle, I love Legos, so I just Legos provides a framework of semi structured problems.

[00:10:53] Kincy Clark: It just completes the metaphor, but really when I think about this, I think about, Like the degree of structure of the problem. So this is how I evaluated the issues coming in because at Bolt, we had issues coming from consumers. We had issues coming from SMBs, mid market enterprise, and there was just a mishmash of there was no easy way to organize these problems that I could see that we had set up already.

[00:11:17] Kincy Clark: So I had to come up with something that works for everybody that worked for all of our marketeers. So this is

[00:11:23] Maxime Manseau: what I came up with. Just to illustrate, do you have in mind a s what you would call at bolt a semi structure issue? What would it look like? I'll

[00:11:33] Kincy Clark: show that in the next slide, but I think the semi structure problem is one that's moving from unstructured, and we'll talk about, like, how that works, into structure.

[00:11:41] Kincy Clark: So there's a phase where, I think, theoretically, I would describe it as something where maybe we don't have an exhaustive playbook. But we know what the answer looks like, and we know most of the steps needed to get the solution. But it may take some creativity, it may take some creative problem solving to get through a few things.

[00:11:57] Kincy Clark: So maybe it's not as well documented as I can fully get it. Okay. Yeah. Good question. Oh, that, that's good. So when we think about structure, this is how I scale issue resolution. So I take unstructured problems. And again, I think in the Valley, shorthand for the tech world that's where I work, we praise the Godzilla killer, right?

[00:12:16] Kincy Clark: Those are the DevOps guys late at night, like figuring out what happened. It's the support engineer who like goes into the logs and find those things. And so like the Godzilla killers are like, These guys are amazing. They're so smart. They're the ones who often get the headlines after an outage or something like that.

[00:12:31] Kincy Clark: But if we think about this really yeah, we want to celebrate that to some degree, but if we just had Godzilla problems, that would be terrible. Like we need to move these problems into structure. And so what I devised here was a way of Hey, we've got Godzilla problems, we move them to Legos, we move into Rubik's cubes, we document them fully, and maybe they're out on the help side at this point, and then we automate them somehow into the product.

[00:12:56] Kincy Clark: So what does that really look like? What that really looks like is someone solves the Godzilla problem. Maybe we see it again and we now have kind of an idea how to solve it. So now we can document a process. It's lightly documented. We can now hand it off to a structured problem team and then they can document it more clearly.

[00:13:16] Kincy Clark: Now we've got a playbook for it. The playbook can help inform the documentation team on ways to solve it. Maybe we don't want to tell customers about it. So maybe that just stays internally and it's an internally documented. But ultimately that becomes a problem statement for the product team, because now we can go to them and say, Hey, this is how we're solving it.

[00:13:36] Kincy Clark: But you guys may have better ideas,

[00:13:38] Maxime Manseau: but this is the. Yeah, I like the, I would say like the way you're seeing this. Cause like when you're working in support, in fact, you could, you must, push everything you could to the product team, because somehow this is the ultimate, like a way to to resolve an issue, and to make sure it doesn't happen again. Exactly. And it ultimately that's how software is built. In an ideal world, if you had no product problem, you probably wouldn't have like super team.

[00:14:07] Kincy Clark: Exactly. But that's a theoretical, yeah, it's unlikely that a software product would cures and things like that.

[00:14:15] Kincy Clark: But absolutely, like to me that's an important theoretical that kind of keep in mind that in a theoretical, perfect product, would it need support? And that's okay, because it'd be a perfect product. Again, the likelihood of us living in that world is pretty low. At least with software tooling the way it is.

[00:14:29] Kincy Clark: But anyway, so that's our model for how we move stuff into scale and how we could start to interact. But the one thing I will say is that I think it's important sometimes for support leaders to acknowledge that there's limited bandwidth on the product side to take this feedback. And so that's why I like to structure the problem solution.

[00:14:47] Kincy Clark: That way I can execute, I can solve problems for customers in a really Defined executable way as opposed to having to figure it out And I again i'm not telling anyone doesn't know playbooks, but the importance of playbooks are critical so that you can retain that knowledge and really the idea My playbook design was like anyone should just be able to walk in and that's like The that team their superpower was creating the playbooks not necessarily executing them.

[00:15:14] Maxime Manseau: Got it I don't know if you're going to tell us a bit later, but how do you move, how do you, how basically do you move I would say a Godzilla issue to a Rubik's Cube issue? What's the process? Okay. So

[00:15:27] Kincy Clark: that, that'll come up. So this is a suit, I'll jump on this and I'll go to the next one really quick.

[00:15:31] Kincy Clark: So I use the standard ITIL tiers and I just map the structure of the problem to them. So my tier three team. Is the Godzilla team and they deal with more technical issues So it's fair to say in my environment tier three stuff is more technical much like it is everywhere tier one Tier two tier three so you can see the mappings here So the way that we move the issues and i'll talk and this is where I start to get in the org structure But the way we move it is the teams have an incentive To move that issue through the tiers So the tier three team is the one that lightly documents the doc the godzilla issues They give it to the tier two team They put more structure around it and then the tier one team ultimately is the one that's responsible for knocking out The playbook but it all starts in the tier three organization

[00:16:21] Maxime Manseau: i'm just gonna move the video like this so we can see the full slide yeah,

[00:16:25] Kincy Clark: so this is where I start to touch on structure, which is I know like I spent a lot of time on the issue stuff, but On the structure side.

[00:16:31] Kincy Clark: A typical support, and I know this is changing, so that's not an accusatory statement, but I think the standard support model is to have a defense in depth, military, right? So we're buying a time with the customer. We're trying to solve as much as we can on the front line. And if they can't solve it, then we'll pass it back.

[00:16:47] Kincy Clark: And I don't, I've never liked this model. My first like big boy job at a support company was running tier three. And I just felt so disconnected from the customers running that team. And what happens is like these tier three guys become high priests. And everyone wants to be a tier three guy because they really don't have to deal with customers and all those things.

[00:17:06] Kincy Clark: So there's just a lot of organizational incentives I don't love. Plus the customer experiences, I think suboptimal. So what we did at Bolt, and this was we were Where, the punchline is that we flipped it on its side. And so we created this thing called the routing layer. We'll talk a little bit more about that, but basically the model here is that all of my agents are in contact with the customer because we route the type of issue to them directly and they have to deal with it and then if we get the routing wrong, we have this thing called empowered rerouting where each team can evaluate an issue and then they can say, Hey, this issue isn't for me.

[00:17:42] Kincy Clark: And as long as they haven't touched it. As long as they haven't touched it from a customer perspective, they can just send it to the other. No questions asked. It's just how it works. And I will say this has worked remarkably well. It exceeded my expectations. And I think even my team okay, I'm the manager.

[00:17:59] Kincy Clark: Like I, I live in my own little fantasy world of management, especially as a director, but So I know the reality is probably a little different, but it's not much different because I can see stats and metrics and things like that to see that we're largely doing this and I don't have a lot of friction between these two.

[00:18:13] Kincy Clark: So this is how I did it. And the routing layer is the key part here because the routing layer gets the issues to the right team.

[00:18:20] Maxime Manseau: And you just mentioned you can rerouting the issue until except if the team has touched it. So Why is that? Because basically let's say this has been first routing to Tier 2.

[00:18:35] Maxime Manseau: So before basically answering, the customer is able to reroute it to Tier 1 or Tier 3, depending on what they think. But basically, if they start answering, it's going to be for them. Is that correct? Once

[00:18:48] Kincy Clark: you answer it, you own it. Okay. So you break it, you buy it, but we have a process for handing off. So we use a different term and that's called a handoff and a handoff, again, like the metaphor here is a relay, a track relay, right?

[00:19:03] Kincy Clark: So like I have to hand the baton. I got to look that guy in the eye and make sure that he has the baton. Rerouting, I can just send it into the queue. That's their problem. But if I've taken control of this issue, and now I want to give it to somebody else, that's fine. But you have to have a manual handoff where you are explicitly required to provide handoff information, and it's your responsibility to make sure it gets into the hand of the baton holder that you're giving it to.

[00:19:32] Kincy Clark: And so that's called handing off. And so I was very specific about that language because I really wanted to make sure because routing is how we get there. And this is just a reroute versus, Hey, I've taken it. It's in my hand. Now I'm handing and words matter, like I correct people and we don't get it.

[00:19:48] Kincy Clark: I'm the language enforcer with this stuff, but I know the team they have their own words and shorthands for this stuff, but the words do matter. And people, when you're documenting this stuff, it. Makes them understand the concepts. It really helps. Yeah,

[00:20:02] Maxime Manseau: definitely.

[00:20:03] Maxime Manseau: Just a quick pause here because I didn't mention to all the people watching. Obviously we'll have a little Q and A at the end, but if you have any question, like along the road, just feel free to ask them sometime it, it makes it a bit more livable. So don't hesitate to ask any question you might have on the comment.

[00:20:22] Kincy Clark: Yeah. Something Sophie said here. A lot of I think intuitively people think people are just going to give the issues to the other teams because people are lazy and they don't want to do work. I know that's how everyone describes other people's teams, but their teams are hardworking. Let's face it.

[00:20:37] Kincy Clark: All of our teams are hardworking. And what happens is exactly what Sophie described, where my struggle was getting people to let go of issues. That was the struggle was the, that getting people to do the handoffs and to do the rerouting, because there was just so much management scar tissue from previous organizations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, where people were really hesitant to provide to give the work away and I had a few people like it was a six to nine month like process of getting them to let go of this and realize no, you're not going to be penalized, like no one's going to care if you get it.

[00:21:12] Kincy Clark: To the wrong, if you get it, if you make a mistake, like mistakes are implied here. So that's really important to know that may be a problem you're having when you have these handoffs. It's not people giving stuff away. It's people holding on. And I, yeah, I was really, it's little, it was surprising.

[00:21:28] Kincy Clark: Again, it's counterintuitive. We do have playbooks around the handoff and it's a basic process.

[00:21:34] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Can you see, we have a lot of questions, so maybe we'll take a few minutes and answer like the five or six, like that just come up. Is that fine with you? Okay.

[00:21:43] Kincy Clark: Answering

[00:21:43] Maxime Manseau: that

[00:21:43] Kincy Clark: one right now. So yeah, we have playbooks around the handoffs.

[00:21:48] Kincy Clark: Yeah. We have a very simple playbook around the handoff. It's basic, but it's documented because it's something I want to make sure that I can go back and be explicit Hey, you need to follow these steps. Here they are. We document all the processes like very clearly. Okay. So that there's no, this is not where I want creativity and this is like a message I would offer is like with this kind of structure, this is not where you want people to be creative.

[00:22:13] Kincy Clark: You want people to be creative and the problem solving and how they're like finding the answers and helping customers. That's where you want the creativity, where you don't want creativity is around established process.

[00:22:23] Maxime Manseau: Around the process. Yeah.

[00:22:25] Kincy Clark: And my team for being a somewhat ruthless enforcer of this.

[00:22:28] Kincy Clark: And again, I'm always willing to change things, but we have to be explicit. We have to communicate it across the organization that we're making a change to process. But I don't like people freestyling these types of processes. So to answer your question, we do have playbooks, but they're very basic.

[00:22:44] Kincy Clark: Go ahead. Yep. Go ahead. I'll

[00:22:46] Maxime Manseau: let you drive here, Max. Yeah, we have a question from Francisca. How do you avoid tickets getting tossed around the different tiers without support agents taking ownership?

[00:22:56] Kincy Clark: We just haven't had that problem. We haven't had that problem where, again, the problem has been too much ownership.

[00:23:03] Kincy Clark: Like people not letting go of things they should let go. So that's not like something that we've experienced here. I think if I was to theoretically manage this problem, I saw a metrics question here, there are some metrics that we track and we, one of the key metrics to make sure that this performance works is we track rerouting and we track handoffs.

[00:23:22] Kincy Clark: So I could see which tickets it wouldn't be hard for me to set up something where if something's been rerouted twice, Like an alarm would fire and then maybe a manager would have to intervene and say, Hey, this I'm evaluating this ticket. You guys have to do it. I'm assigning it to an agent. So I think Metrics would help you resolve that issue.

[00:23:40] Kincy Clark: But candidly, we just haven't experienced that problem. That's not to say someone else wouldn't, but that's just not something we've experienced.

[00:23:47] Maxime Manseau: Quincy I don't know if you're gonna talk about it a bit later, but Yeah, Lina is asking about the metrics and you just said a few words about it. But this was definitely one of my questions too, what KPIs basically did you try to measure the success, I would say, of your revamp support system?

[00:24:03] Maxime Manseau: I don't know if it's something you want to answer right now or after, but I think it's yeah.

[00:24:08] Kincy Clark: It's pretty simple. Like it was initial response times went down because again, they went right to the person who's going to handle it. And we didn't see as much bouncing around the agents. Like those are the key metrics that I was looking for because that's what I was trying to avoid.

[00:24:22] Kincy Clark: And then. I would argue quality went up and agent experience went up because now people were handling the issues that they were well suited for. So we had people that were excited to write playbooks because they're more structured thinkers and that's what they wanted to do. And then we had the more, the technical people that wanted to get in the logs and dig in.

[00:24:42] Kincy Clark: And so the agent feedback was a really key part here, because again, a lot of this was done for agent experience. So just getting their feedback was a key metric, but rerouting. Looking at the handoffs and then the first response times are, I would say the things we looked at.

[00:24:59] Maxime Manseau: Got it. I have a question and we'll go back to the other question.

[00:25:03] Maxime Manseau: How did you do to decide this person goes to tier one, but you go to tier two and you to tier three. Did you do an interview? Like, how did you manage basically? Or did you ask people like, how did you build your tiers with the actual team you had? Because. I can understand once it's set up and you hire people, you know what you're looking for and stuff, but before for the transition, like, how did you manage doing that?

[00:25:32] Maxime Manseau: I would say there was a fair amount

[00:25:33] Kincy Clark: of self selection and then some encouragement because I knew who was like, like a lot of this org was defined by the people. So I didn't like, wake up one morning and say, Hey, this is how I'm going to build my team. This is really informed by the team.

[00:25:49] Kincy Clark: And their personalities and what they brought. So there was some evaluation there. And so I think as I was building this, and again, this is part of task organization in the military. We think about personalities. We think about personalities of commanders and leaders, and we assign certain tasks to them.

[00:26:04] Kincy Clark: So this is a very valid way of organizing your team. And I know some people might say you shouldn't organize around personalities. But I would argue you really need to consider that because people are not robots and they tend to, and you want to balance it, right? You don't want to like completely design it so that if one person leaves it all collapses.

[00:26:25] Kincy Clark: But to answer your question, Max, that was part of the evaluation. And so at the end of the design, I knew where people were going.

[00:26:32] Kincy Clark: just, me talking to them and explaining the new structure. I did a lot of In flight talks with people, Hey, this is what I'm thinking. Some self selection and again, getting people to be honest with themselves.

[00:26:42] Kincy Clark: Again, I want to be technical. Do you really? No, I don't. Okay, great. Hey, I got a path for you. And the last thing I'll say related to this was this did facilitate a change and kind of, and again, this may be anathema to a lot of support leaders, the career progression because I made it abundantly clear that tier one people.

[00:27:04] Kincy Clark: The path wasn't necessarily to become a tier

[00:27:07] Maxime Manseau: three. Yeah, and I like that. I like that a lot. No somewhere else. Yeah, this is I think this is the biggest issue in the I would say the standard, you know Like a cheering model is a progression track because usually like you know Like junior on like frontline and then you go to tier two and on tier three doesn't make sense like first because your customer are gonna deal with like junior people who have the less experience.

[00:27:31] Maxime Manseau: And so their support experience is going to be like, obviously not as good as, if they were like reaching out to tier three with, we're here since I don't know, like years and windows, everything. So I'm not gonna list all the reasons, but like carrier progression track is definitely I would say some things that people, most of the time don't think about it, about like the chairing model.

[00:27:52] Maxime Manseau: But I really like you bring it out because eventually this is why people stay and how you build a player's team.

[00:28:00] Kincy Clark: No, I agree a hundred percent. But I will say this, that's not a design priority for me. Like mine is the priorities, effective outcomes. And then we figure the career path out of that.

[00:28:10] Kincy Clark: But I don't, I never once was like, okay, what are we going to do with these people? That's a different problem to solve. Hey, I know there's a ton of questions, but I just want to get some almost to the end here. So what happened is we did this thing called the great fork and eat. We were going to call it the divorce and some other things, but I decided like forking much more positive way of thinking about it.

[00:28:29] Kincy Clark: So we, stag a GitHub icon here, but what we did is we split the team 18 October, we got t shirts made and stuff like that. So the team went from a big blob that had grown to these three different teams. And then ultimately. This is what it looked like. This is what it looks like in real life.

[00:28:45] Kincy Clark: So we have support engineering, which is tier two, three. And so here's another key like career development opportunity is the partnering because this, that I like technical people talking to tech. So I have learned course of my career when technical people and non technical people try to solve problems under pressure by there's a lot of opportunities for miscommunication.

[00:29:06] Kincy Clark: So this way, my support engineers who were solving. The tier three problems are talking to the engineers who are the ultimately the ones resolving those tier three problems and then merchant support and shopper support were thinking things more experiential and they were thinking and they were the ones building the playbooks and seeing how our customers were going through the problems and so I paired them up with the product team and so that's their escalation paths and I will go deep here, but those relationships are like a key part of this.

[00:29:34] Kincy Clark: Okay. I do want to talk about the routing layer, and I know there's a couple questions there. The routing layer is owned by the merchant support team. They're the router of Last Resort. We use a combination of AI, like a pretty unhealthy number of Zendesk triggers. And then ultimately the merchant support team is the route, routing of last resort.

[00:29:54] Kincy Clark: And I would say, and again, this is something we tracked. So I'd say probably like 40, 50 percent of the tickets are manually routed. They quickly evaluated and they get them to the right place. But we do get a fair amount of routing that happens either through these other layers. But ultimately the merchant support team is the team that's ultimately responsible for the routing to making sure those tickets get everywhere.

[00:30:14] Kincy Clark: When I had an operations person, they were the oversight for that particular function. But when I had to reduce my operations function, I just put the merchant support team in there. But I would, if I could do this perfectly, I would say, I would want an operations person that reported to me to be responsible for the routing layer.

[00:30:34] Kincy Clark: Okay. Because it's common service that's provided to all the teams.

[00:30:38] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. I'm just checking. Ravi, we're asking if all tiers are communicating with

[00:30:43] Kincy Clark: the

[00:30:43] Maxime Manseau: customer. I'm going to answer for you. It's a big yes.

[00:30:46] Kincy Clark: Yes. And that is a huge design priority for me. Because again, I didn't want these like sequestered people that didn't talk to customers.

[00:30:55] Kincy Clark: And I again, I think there's a common bias this person is not good with customers, so he's more technical, then you can't work on this team, like everyone's got to be able to talk to customers, a hundred percent. Yeah. You have to understand the customer problems, but again, like the engineers are typically talking to more technical customer people who have problems and the merchant support and the shopper support people are talking to people who have more experiential, I would say product type problems as opposed to technical issues.

[00:31:21] Kincy Clark: So people are talking to the right people and that's important.

[00:31:26] Maxime Manseau: Definitely. Once again, obviously you can't just duplicate like this, what Kinsey did, right? Because it depends off so in your industry are evolving on your products, the type of people you're talking with. So yeah.

[00:31:40] Kincy Clark: Yeah. That's a great tee up for here's a framework for.

[00:31:43] Kincy Clark: Thinking about like how to like some analysis variables. Think about your organizational values, who your stakeholders and partners are, what kind of product you have really informs this. Is this a B2C, is this B2B, what kind of issues are you having? Is your product mature? That's a huge part of I think, especially if you're early mid stage startup, you've got different problems in a very mature product that has very different types of issues.

[00:32:07] Kincy Clark: And then you really got to think about what are your resources? So not just humans. But what can you use for routing? What do you have for tier zero? And I've deliberately left that out of this, but tier zero is a large part of our strategy. I just, I don't have, I didn't, that would have taken much longer to incorporate in the model, but tier zero is part of the strategy.

[00:32:25] Kincy Clark: And we ultimately, we want to route people to tier zero, but the routing layer. What is tier zero? What is tier zero for you? Tier zero is all like our help site. Okay. Okay. Our help site and online resources that we have. So self help, that's the classic definition of self help.

[00:32:40] Kincy Clark: And when I picked up the education team about six months ago, then we could start merging these concepts. Prior to six months ago, I just had tier one through three, under my management. So I had to work with what I had. And then coverage requirements like that cannot be understated. Like we are primarily North America, so we don't have a follow the sun.

[00:33:01] Kincy Clark: So I can make some different design decisions. If I had to have a follow the sun model, I would probably have done this a little bit differently because there's a certain amount of people you need to make this happen. And I probably would have collapsed into a smaller tier group or maybe have teams that In different time zones that maybe have one manager that manages two different, like a tier one and then a tier three.

[00:33:25] Kincy Clark: So I don't, I'm hypothesizing now, but these are really important variables. So this is the tool I would use to think about evaluating your situation.

[00:33:32] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. That's interesting because obviously you have a bunch of B2B SaaS will provide support, like around the world.

[00:33:40] Maxime Manseau: And I didn't think about it, but actually you will need to adapt your model. So you think the key would be, I'm just like like teasing you a bit here and picking your brain. You think like one of the solution would have been to hide like Like I would say mid layer management.

[00:34:00] Kincy Clark: Yeah.

[00:34:00] Kincy Clark: I'd probably have some sort of regional leader that was responsible for all the outcomes there. And then maybe like functional leads that kind of manage like this tier one. We were starting to get there. We acquired a company in Europe that had a very different support structure and a very different support problem.

[00:34:17] Kincy Clark: So we were starting to experiment with that, but we made some decisions that made that problem not be a problem that I had to deal with right away. Oh, yeah. But yeah, again, I would have gone through this design process again Like I would not have hey, we're gonna stick with this and we're gonna modify it Again coming back to now.

[00:34:33] Kincy Clark: I have a new problem. I'm gonna evaluate it. I'm gonna do a redesign because maybe my priorities have changed maybe my situation has changed. And I think that's the danger that a lot of people have is they tweak and tune existing models when sometimes you just need to do a reboot.

[00:34:49] Kincy Clark: Difficult as that sounds, if you reboot into something that works a lot better, people are generally happier. People like organizational change is only scary because you don't really know what's happening And part of this was involving them in those conversations and telling them like this is how your life's gonna be better And people are looking forward.

[00:35:07] Kincy Clark: No one was like, oh my god You know I might lose my job when all this happens like people are looking forward to this like I just Hey, can we move the forketing data up? Those kinds of things. That was fun. Did you get any negative feedback from like a team member? Nothing that really stands out.

[00:35:22] Kincy Clark: I think this is fairly playbook and process heavy. And I think some people had, maybe they like freestyling a little bit. And again, like getting issues to the right places. I think that was some of the negative feedback was like. Their way of saying I want to hold on to things and do it my way.

[00:35:38] Kincy Clark: But overall I think the feedback was positive that people like everyone just felt better at the end of this, because people got to do it liked and wanted to do, got to prioritize their skills and feel valued. And then work with different teams. And the other thing that we do is like each team has a very different manager and I allow them to have their own processes within their own groups.

[00:36:01] Kincy Clark: I don't dictate. The only thing I manage is interface. So I get involved when, one team has to talk to another, I'll help broker those, but how the teams work within themselves, like I largely don't care. They have they have outcomes that they have to hit, but they can do their own team design.

[00:36:17] Kincy Clark: And I will say like the teams have very different models for ticket assignment. They have very different models for like scheduling and management and it works, but

[00:36:28] Maxime Manseau: they're very different. And in terms, because you said, obviously from the customer side, they also felt the change in a positive way.

[00:36:36] Maxime Manseau: But what, what would be like, I would say like the biggest impact of changing the cheering model to what you did for your customer. Was it like speed? Was it like a response accuracy? Was it like. It was everything.

[00:36:50] Kincy Clark: It just, it got a lot better across the board because the right people were answering the right questions with the right, and we didn't have these awkward handoffs or what happens a lot.

[00:37:02] Kincy Clark: In less structured environments is someone is asking someone for help and they're basically copy pasting what those people are telling them to say, but they really don't understand what it is that they're what they don't understand really what's happening, right? So this avoids that completely. So I can't think of any negative customer outcomes, like everything just

[00:37:22] Maxime Manseau: perfect.

[00:37:22] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I got a question from Arushi asking, does this model impacts the handling overall? No. Okay. No. Okay.

[00:37:31] Kincy Clark: No, cause the rerouting, because the merchant team is on a schedule and they're on a counter. So we have what we call performance standards, which means, so our SLAs are like a day for response times if it's a non urgent issue, but internally, I've got two hour and depending on the team, either two or four hour response time requirements.

[00:37:52] Kincy Clark: Cause what I've learned from the data, if I respond to my customers within four to six hours, I'll get great. They're fine. They enjoy that. We get great positive feedback on feedback times. So I deliberately have set the standard to be much lower than that. So that we're always achieving those handling times.

[00:38:09] Kincy Clark: So again, we have some standards around how long it takes to do different things. But it all leads up to the ticket has to be dealt with within two to four hours.

[00:38:19] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Got it. And I have a very interesting question. From an anonymous user, but whatever is there like a Critical size where you can start doing what you did.

[00:38:33] Maxime Manseau: If I'm five in my support team, does it make sense or not?

[00:38:38] Kincy Clark: Yeah, I think this is, I think in general, I would say you probably need a few more people, but I think this is dictated by volume because I think like you really have to look at so in my case, are you getting enough tier three tickets to keep one person busy, then I would probably do something like this.

[00:38:55] Kincy Clark: I would probably. Do a specialization, but if I don't really have if I can't match my volumes to the individual people on the team, I would probably think about it slightly different design.

[00:39:07] Maxime Manseau: But you can take something from everything you said. I mean imagine like for five, five person, like super team, you mentioned special specialization, like maybe out of those five people who have probably this guy with better than all the others to this, so if you can analyze like the ticket and reroute him directly, like the issue the experience and the KPIs. And when I say experience, as you mentioned, both from the agents and the customer, gonna be definitely much better. So even if you can't like, I would say adapt the full model, you definitely have a great stuff to to grasp from what you said.

[00:39:45] Kincy Clark: And the word, the magic word specialization, right? Like it's and there's a tipping point, like when you start to specialize resources versus keeping them general purpose. And again, I think that's where that variables, that list comes out, because that's really the, at the end of the day, very simply, that's what I've done is I've created specialized And I've just made a setup.

[00:40:02] Kincy Clark: So the issues go directly to them.

[00:40:05] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. I got another question. How often do you edit or revise the playbooks? Did you have a clear process or was it like?

[00:40:12] Kincy Clark: Yeah. So we have, so one of the interesting things we did, and this may be another conversation is on the merchant support team, about 55 percent of their time is given over to what we call programs.

[00:40:23] Kincy Clark: Other people would call them projects. And so one of the programs is the playbook program. So I have a dedicated resource. We're literally half of his time spent editing, revising and keeping playbooks up to date. So I would say there's probably like a monthly, probably a more accurately a quarterly or every half review, like from a management perspective, where me or one of the managers will go in and Give our oversight and kind of look at it, but it's more the playbooks are revised on demand and they're created on demand because I have a dedicated resource for them who is a member of the merchant support team.

[00:40:58] Kincy Clark: So he's also doing tickets. He's also a consumer. Of his product. And that, that really helps. And because he's on the team that does the playbooks that executes them, he gets a lot of feedback.

[00:41:09] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I can imagine. That's great. I have another question here from Travis who's asking, how does the relationship to product work with tier one, two?

[00:41:20] Maxime Manseau: Is it designed as a one on one relationship? Yeah.

[00:41:23] Kincy Clark: So like we've struggled here. And this is such a common topic in support. Like how do you communicate issues back and forth? My kind of like ideal scenario was we had three members of the merchant support team, the tier one, two team, That were assigned to product groups.

[00:41:42] Kincy Clark: And so my idea was I was going to assign them to we had product pods here and the, so they would sit on the product pod and then there are 55 percent of their time was going to be spent on collecting and understanding issues so that they could provide the input to that product team.

[00:41:59] Kincy Clark: That was a good theory. And we're limping our way into that, the product team has, they have their own priorities and they have their own things. So that's just an ongoing. Process of trying to figure out how to work with products. So I wish I had like the magic wand on that one.

[00:42:14] Kincy Clark: But we've done a number of iterations and I think we're slowly getting there. But the original design was one agent, one product.

[00:42:22] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Okay. People are asking if they're gonna be a recording from this. Yes. We share with your recordings. Afterwards. Victoria, we're asking like, but I think we already I mean you already answered this, but.

[00:42:33] Maxime Manseau: From a metric perspective, but I feel you mentioned maybe you can just reset like very quickly.

[00:42:38] Kincy Clark: Yeah. I think our CSAT went up and yeah. Victoria, like I've met Victoria, so I can call her by her first name and be somewhat informal with her. I think one of the challenges I had here on measurement, and again, this is a warning to everybody.

[00:42:53] Kincy Clark: Not only was I changing the organizational structure, but I was changing like a ton of the data collection. So we had, we had a different like set of fields before the forking and then after. And it was a challenge to I just wasn't going to spend a ton of time trying to normalize that.

[00:43:12] Kincy Clark: Duh. But when you implement stuff like that oftentimes you gotta have new fields, you gotta have new metrics and new ways of like how you're measuring things because I had different priorities, so I would say overall, like Better response times. I think CSAT was consistently better and we were doing less work to get those outcomes.

[00:43:29] Kincy Clark: But yeah, I think again, and I'm not super metrics driven. Because for that's a whole different philosophy, but that's a different conversation.

[00:43:36] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Okay, cool. Guys, we have a few minutes left, so if you have any extra questions, this is the right moment. And for you, I have a last question for now from Liz.

[00:43:47] Maxime Manseau: Which I think it's a marvelous question. What are the biggest change management challenges you got? So if tomorrow I need to switch from my classic model to, I would say like your kind of type model, like what do I need to expect as a manager?

[00:44:06] Kincy Clark: Yeah, there's definitely a leadership issue here.

[00:44:08] Kincy Clark: We've got to make sure you have the right leaders. And again, knowing the people before I made this change and talking to people surfaced some leadership, like I was given a leader, but then I had to figure out mine's the leader for the other team. And so that was very helpful to know those people.

[00:44:26] Kincy Clark: And so I think leadership, big issue. And then. Again, just the time to communicate this. I think the more you can communicate this to your team, the better they're going to understand it. And I was just beating the drum every month. We have an all, like a support kind of all hands. And I would talk about like the progress we've made to making the changes, what people can expect, what my priorities are.

[00:44:48] Kincy Clark: That was not a venue for feedback, by the way. If they had feedback, they gave I'm not going to take it in a big all hands meeting, like definitely was open to feedback and think, but I Like if I was to boil it down, I think it was. It's leadership and then getting people's mindset around letting go of issues.

[00:45:03] Kincy Clark: That was so much harder than I thought to get people to let go of issues. Again, I think we all instinctively think people are going to give stuff away, but people were clutching on to stuff that they just, and that was creating a bad customer experience because now they didn't really have any, like in the old system.

[00:45:20] Kincy Clark: They were a little more chummy within the team. And but I had separated the resources. So now I've got one team of, let's say non technical people trying to solve maybe a technical problem. And so they'd have to reach over to another group to get help. So I did create some friction there. So it's really important that those issues got moved to the right place.

[00:45:38] Kincy Clark: So I think those are the two

[00:45:39] Maxime Manseau: main things. But and we're going to finish like with this, I believe is no, I don't see any other question, but in general, in support and like any, like in everything else I suggest to anyway, if you want, if you feel like you need to switch from like your current, like support model, this is probably something you don't really need to be at.

[00:46:06] Maxime Manseau: I'm going I'm, let me reformulate what I'm trying to say here is it's okay if you don't figure out, if you haven't figured out everything, just take action, try to move on to a new model and it'll be fine along the way. Like I've seen so many like support teams, like changing like from support model to another one.

[00:46:25] Maxime Manseau: And trust me they didn't have everything like no, for sure. Figure out.

[00:46:32] Kincy Clark: Yeah, I had some sketches sometimes and I'm like, okay, there's some process we got to fill in here and we'll just figure it out. And this is where like the leaders matter, because I think like a lot of the ICs are like, how do I do this?

[00:46:43] Kincy Clark: How do I do that? They want structure. They want to know what's going to happen next. And I'm like, guys, I don't have time to figure this all out, but your leaders do. And we'll get to that. So I think that's a great point, Max, is don't try to fully bake every single possibility. Just do the very basics around routing.

[00:46:59] Kincy Clark: How do you get issues back and forth? If you have enough people to build different teams that are led, trust them to do some work here, that's a great point. Don't wait to make it perfect. Cause it won't be, it's not like we've refined since then a lot.

[00:47:13] Maxime Manseau: There's been a lot of learning since then. Okay, cool.

[00:47:16] Maxime Manseau: Thank you so much, Kinsey. I think we're going to end up here. We don't have any more questions. If you want to add it. Something in the moment, if not,

[00:47:24] Kincy Clark: if anyone has any if anyone has any challenges, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I definitely love, ideating and, working and seeing what you got, and I try to give advice contextually, like I'm not going to tell you how I did it.

[00:47:36] Kincy Clark: That always doesn't work, but yeah, I think again, feel free to reach out. I'm on LinkedIn, so thank you. Really appreciate it.

[00:47:42] Maxime Manseau: Thank you. No, so much, Kinsey. We learned a lot and I know you don't You don't bite. So please guys, if you have any questions, feel free to ping a Kinsey on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll find a few minutes to answer you.

[00:47:55] Maxime Manseau: Have a amazing day, everyone. Thank you so much again for spending a bit of your time with us and take care. Bye.