[00:00:48] Maxime Manseau: Hi guys. Hope you're doing great. Hi, Steven. How's it going? Good. Good. So we're going to wait 30 seconds to one minute waiting for the different people to join. If you can hear us and everything is working great. I would appreciate like a little message. So we know everything works seamlessly and we'll start super soon.

[00:01:08] Steven Davis: You're ready for this Steven? I am. I am excited about this. Not just ready for it. I'm excited about it.

[00:01:14] Maxime Manseau: Cool. So Steven is based in Las Vegas, the US, and I'm currently in Paris, France. So that's going to be exciting. God bless technology. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're gonna, we're going to start. So if some people are joining later, anyway, then catch up.

[00:01:34] Maxime Manseau: So yeah, as a quick intro, so I met Stephen you, I would say a few weeks ago and we started to chat about support and quickly we were talking about like human support. Which I think it's pretty interesting in this time because we're just hearing so much about AI automation. So I think it's a perfect moment, to to dig out the subject. So Steven, maybe so first, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Maybe you could start with a very quick introduction of what you're doing at Gatesight. So everyone can know a bit, bit more about you.

[00:02:12] Steven Davis: Absolutely. Yeah. So my name is Steve.

[00:02:14] Steven Davis: I've been with Gainsight for about seven and a half years, almost eight years. So I think in SaaS years, that's 28 years, but I am the grandfather of Gainsight support team. My role within the support organization, my technical title is the director, senior director of enterprise support, but I do manage all of our US support team.

[00:02:37] Steven Davis: So we have a tiered system at Gainsight. We have level one and level two analysts. We have a paid support, an enterprise, what we call our enterprise support package. And then we have our standard support, which just comes with the software as well. So at this point in time, I manage all the different products, all the different service levels that we've got within the Gainsight.

[00:02:57] Steven Davis: So yeah, just super excited to have this conversation, to talk about this. As you said before, chat GPT. AI you log into LinkedIn and it's like a, just a rolling chat GPT is all that I have. Which we're not against or anything, just to be clear, like we love automation and I used that GPT.

[00:03:18] Steven Davis: Absolutely. And I think it's great that we're going to, we're going to spend a few talking about, how to make it work for you. And just a quick question.

[00:03:26] Maxime Manseau: How big is a full support team at GateSight just to have a rough idea of what we're talking about?

[00:03:31] Steven Davis: Yeah. When I started years and years ago I can't remember exactly what number I was, but I want to say within the top 10 we're closer to a hundred now.

[00:03:39] Steven Davis: It's hard to keep track because we are such a big team entries and exits come almost every week at this point in time. So it's hard to keep a specific number on it. But I want to say the last time I checked were North of 70 steaming towards the hundred on the agent portion of it, when you start to talk about Managers and ops and all that stuff that we have.

[00:03:58] Steven Davis: It's a pretty significant team that we have. Got it. So guys,

[00:04:04] Maxime Manseau: I'm basically going to ask question to Steven. We don't really know where he's going to go because this is such a broad topic, but if at any moment you have any questions, feel free to ask them and we will pause obviously and be able to answer them.

[00:04:20] Maxime Manseau: So maybe Steven, maybe we could start with your definition What is human first support? So we're sure like we

[00:04:28] Steven Davis: are all on the same line. Yeah, it's a great question. And I do think it's where we start, because I think there can definitely be some misconceptions based on this concept of human first, especially in the landscape of AI and all of those things today.

[00:04:41] Steven Davis: The one disclaimer that I will make is the company that I work for Gainsight. If you go to our website and you look at the top, there's a giant banner, unless marketing has changed it, which they are sneaky like that. They do change it from time to time. It says that we are proof that you can be human first while living in business.

[00:04:57] Steven Davis: So it's an advantage that I have in my opinion, right? Over a lot of people, especially in this space where my company strives to be human first while winning in business and might allow me the flexibilities and freedoms to be a little bit more human first than another organization. So I like to tell individuals that I think as part of we, as we go through this conversation, We'll talk about how important it is to have the team and the organization built in on these philosophies and concepts, because if not, then, you're going to have a problem.

[00:05:27] Steven Davis: So what is human first, right? What human first is not is manual. It's not, Hey, we're just going to hire a whole bunch of people and we're just going to have everybody do everything manual. What human first to me is in the context of support is that I think a lot of people want automation. A lot of people want self service.

[00:05:47] Steven Davis: A lot of people want the. Benefits that come along with those, but a lot of people are overusing them. A lot of people are over processing. A lot of people are shoving AI down people's throats to the point where I think the human concept of the support team gets lost. So my hot take in this is that depending on what product that you have, at least for my product, when somebody hits the submit a ticket button, Meaning that we have exhausted our self service options of them going through the documentation, the walkthroughs, all of the things that we have given them that should be able to support them in this cause.

[00:06:27] Steven Davis: That what they really do want is a human. It doesn't mean that I'm going to give them a human all the time. It means that they want a human. One of the talks that I did a while ago, we worked with Forrester and Gardner on market research, specifically around paid support packages and the willingness of customers to purchase paid support packages.

[00:06:49] Steven Davis: Some of the statistics around those are alarming to the tune, especially in B2B that customers, 80 percent of customers are willing to pay more for the service that they're getting. One of the stats that they threw around as part of that was even in the B2B C space that we don't think a lot about when we live in this B2B world that we're in right now.

[00:07:09] Steven Davis: Discover card. Everybody knows Discover card. Everybody knows Around the World, right? They ran a campaign about 10 years ago and they ran a whole bunch of commercials. A lot of people probably remember the commercials. They had a bunch of not celebrities. They were regular people that were working in the call centers.

[00:07:27] Steven Davis: They were like discover people. And whenever somebody picked up the phone and called discover, they were no prompt. Somebody picked up the phone. As long as you purchase their product. Premier card, right? Wasn't for everybody. It's got a premier card. You call in, you say, Hey, I'm having a problem. You're immediately met with a person that says, hi, I'm Maxine.

[00:07:46] Steven Davis: Thanks for calling discover. How can I help you? Their sales for that card skyrocketed 66 percent when they ran that commercial. Why? Because when people have an issue, what they want is a human. Now we can't deliver that all the time. Again, going back to what is human first? It doesn't mean only human first.

[00:08:05] Steven Davis: So human first just means that in the interactions that you're having with the customers, you're using these automated tools to help give your humans the time to be able to be real, authentic people when in fact you are calling on them to have conversations with your customers in real time. So I know it's a very long explanation there, but I think it's a pretty broad.

[00:08:24] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And it made me think also if just, I like to, I like also to to think about like our customer. See your support, right? Just like from the outside, like, how does it look like? And I feel like somehow the way you built it needs to sweat that if you have an issue or if you have a problem, you'd get a human in front, because in my own experience, like B2B, B2C, when you're trying to reach a human and you can't, I think it's just it's terrible, right?

[00:08:59] Maxime Manseau: So I like to see this way too, like about like how customer perceive, perceive your support teams and be human first would be like, just like if there is like a complex issues or if you're a VIP customers, you'll be able to reach out to, to a human, right? Yeah. If we jump to the benefits, providing a human first support, what would come to your mind

[00:09:22] Steven Davis: first?

[00:09:23] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:23] Steven Davis: Yeah. Along with the topic of telling the tale of two different stories, I'll give credit to the company that I had an amazing experience with, but I'm not going to name drop the company that I did not have a great experience cause I don't want to I'm of that camp there.

[00:09:38] Steven Davis: So as we talked about, like human first to me, doesn't mean that you can't have automation or you can't have intelligence. I'll call it intelligence. I call it automation. I'm gonna call it intelligence, right? Because automation is nothing unless it's smart automation. I have a subscription, the company I had a great, amazing experience with was Disney.

[00:09:55] Steven Davis: Disney streaming services, right? I recently added my wife's email to my streaming services, a backup recovery email. I wasn't thinking anything of it. I got an email one day that said, Hey, make sure your account's secured and you don't get locked out of your account at a recovery email to your account.

[00:10:12] Steven Davis: So I put my wife's email on there. I went on with my life. Two, three weeks later, I get an email in my inbox that says, Hey, You might actually be paying for two different subscriptions based on the recovery email that you put on your account because you, you have a, that one's paying, you're paying, they're paying, click this button and come talk to an account specialist and we'll get this figured out for you.

[00:10:34] Steven Davis: I clicked the button immediately was routed to their chat, which was a real person. Hi, my name's so and so let me look into your account. Let me take a look. Not only did they fix it, but they refunded me six months. Right now, flip that around. Not going to name the other company, but it is a very popular payment processing company.

[00:10:54] Steven Davis: While COVID was going on in the pandemic, my friends and I had an online gaming tournament business that we ran super fun, super successful, had a blast doing it while everybody was locked up inside two days before we ran our biggest tournament that we did. We had a small, stupid little issue with our payment processing company, which had our account, like not suspended or anything, but just locked.

[00:11:16] Steven Davis: So no payments could come in, no payments could go out. And they put like a 48 hour hold on the account. The reason they did that was they said that we didn't submit our LLC paperwork, which we certainly did. We did it like three times, right? So we're urgently on their support. We're calling them.

[00:11:33] Steven Davis: We're emailing them. I'm at Twitter mentioning, I'm help me. I really need your help because you not answering is going to seriously tarnish the reputation of my business. Which is everything that I have is the reputation of my business when you're doing this type of a thing.

[00:11:49] Steven Davis: So the one company had automated everything to death. Nope. We're going to have chatbots. You can't call us. You can't email. If you do, it's going to take 48 hours and the person's going to send you back a templated response that you know is a template of response. And it doesn't even make sense because it's not even referencing the issue that you have.

[00:12:08] Steven Davis: I canceled my relationship with them immediately, right? Flip that around to Disney. And they're going. Nowhere. If I stopped using the product, I'm still probably going to renew with them because of the lady on the phone or on the chat that day. And because of the fact that they were willing and the sake of being a good partner with me and to keep my business as a customer, they were willing to forgo charging me.

[00:12:31] Steven Davis: Think about that. What other company wouldn't just double charge me for my subscription until I figured it out, because who cares? I'm going to subscribe anyway. So it's funny because.

[00:12:40] Maxime Manseau: What you're saying somehow shows the importance of, I would say support because in one case you love the company, you love Disney, in the other case, which is basically, you're not a customer anymore.

[00:12:54] Maxime Manseau: So you turn. I feel this enhance like importance of super of support, sorry in, in the B2B SaaS world, at least, in general, but I like to think B2B SaaS and, like I feel nowadays we get. The company have more and more competition and somehow the product is like great, like everywhere.

[00:13:18] Maxime Manseau: And so two different things that, that really makes a difference. Maybe it's like the branding, so the positioning and like the way like people see your brand and I feel the experience people have with your support team. So in a world where tomorrow you're going to have five company will do exactly the same thing and the support is great.

[00:13:39] Maxime Manseau: You're going to pick one because. Either you love the brand or either you have a real human and real connection with human and you feel deeply connected. So I think this, human support first to me means like competitive advantage, like in the near future.

[00:13:54] Steven Davis: Yeah. Yep. And the study that we did, going back to the stats around the enterprise paid support.

[00:14:00] Steven Davis: There's a lot more research done in the B2C space, but they say again, up to 70 percent of customers will leave an organization over one bad experience. Now, it's not that easy on B2B, there's contracts, there's legal, there's renewal dates, there's politics, there's all sorts of things that go into it.

[00:14:16] Steven Davis: I haven't gotten a handle on what the true stats are in the B2B world, but doesn't that just speak for itself though? Because even if you have an individual that's operating in a B2B space, aren't we preconditioned as individuals at this point to be B2C? And don't you expect a little bit?

[00:14:34] Steven Davis: From the B2C from your B2B partners, just because we're preconditioned in a world of Netflix and Hulu and Apple and all these different things. So I think the lines are becoming a little bit blurred and I agree with you. Like I think what sets you apart these days is your service. There's very rarely do you have a product that's unicorned enough that nobody can emulate the product experience itself.

[00:14:57] Steven Davis: There are a couple that are out there and good for them, right? But the vast majority of it relies on the people that are out there. I think that kind of segues into the next topic as well, which is the, like, how do you use the two together and how we're using the two together. We absolutely use AI and we use AI automated tools.

[00:15:15] Steven Davis: What we don't do is we don't use front loaded AI chatbots. Now, Maxine, we talked about this in the conversation we had when we first started talking about this. If you are doing simple tasks, and some of you are, billing, password reset, Things that you really legitimately can have a bot do. I'm not against that by any means at all.

[00:15:35] Steven Davis: Most of what we get with my organization are error codes, which are not easy error codes. We have to go into our backend system and look them up. And then we got a lot of what I call if and or questions. I'm building a workflow. If I do this, or if I do that, what's going to be the output to the result?

[00:15:58] Steven Davis: Now, I will tell you. There's not an AI in 2023 that we can feed in all of our documentation. We can say, now, here's all the tribal knowledge that we have about our application. Now, here's what the customer high level from a business case wants to accomplish. How do they do it? Your AI is going to go, I'm sorry, I'm not programmed.

[00:16:20] Steven Davis: To be able to do that. So we then in return, use those tools for our agents. We give those tools to our agents to be able to bridge those gaps, right? So we let our agents look at, for example, chat GPT, we'll just use them as the generic example that everybody knows to say, Hey, I'm looking at a 404. I'll use a generic 404.

[00:16:48] Steven Davis: What information do you have for me to be able to do that? Okay. And that has shortened their time to be able to find information by half. Now, the second thing that we do is everything within AI uses natural language processing. I went on 20 demos for AI tools and every single one of them said, we use the most sophisticated natural language processing.

[00:17:11] Steven Davis: We use natural language processing to be able to indicate when our customers are mad or frustrated. Okay. Or when it's an urgent issue. So today, if somebody puts in a ticket is low priority and writes URGENT all over it in caps and puts URGENT, this is a big deal. This is a huge problem.

[00:17:30] Maxime Manseau: You can put them to, yeah, but

[00:17:32] Steven Davis: without NLP, that would just sit there in the low queue until a human being looked at it and said, crap, this is urgent.

[00:17:40] Steven Davis: Make it as urgent. We use NLP for somebody to come in and say, Hey, this is urgent. That will flag the case for a manager. To say, Hey, case says low, but the customer says urgent. You may want to jump in and you may want to take a look at it. And we use the same for the agents too. So if they're working on a case and a customer says this is garbage.

[00:18:02] Steven Davis: This has happened three times in the last two months. That's an indicator that we'll use NLP to be able to pick up on it. So we do absolutely use it. We use AI a ton internally. We use it to sort through docs. We also use federated search. Federated search and AI, I think go hand in hand and I'm wanting to see which one is going to figure it out in the near future of having both of them all at the same place.

[00:18:26] Steven Davis: That'd be great. What I like

[00:18:27] Maxime Manseau: about like I'm hearing is so first, basically you say let's say even the best chatbots today can't help calm an angry customer, can't help investigate a thorny issue, or even build a rapport with high value customers, right? A, like your team can. Yep. But from what I understand, like you guys are using a bunch of intelligence, automation, AI, I don't even know what to call it, but I like to see, let's call it, let's call it the front end, which is basically the customer, what the customer see and experience and the backend.

[00:19:06] Maxime Manseau: Which would be like what your team and your agents use, right? And from what I understand is like at Gainsight, you're using a bunch of like intelligence, but for the support backend to help improve the experience or like just help resolve a ticket faster and provide the right answer, get more context about the issue.

[00:19:26] Maxime Manseau: But at the end, the experience the end user, the customer is having on the front end is like human first.

[00:19:35] Steven Davis: So let me ask you a hypothetical question to frame it, right? The world's greatest chat bot would be the chat bot that you couldn't even tell it was a chat bot. So again, human first doesn't even, if done correctly, have to be done by a human, but you hit the nail on the head is that it's experience, right?

[00:20:03] Steven Davis: You can lead with a chat bot, But what I would definitely use is natural language processing on the back end to where if a customer says, Hey, give me a human, it immediately shuts that conversation down and gets them a human being right in the process of that. You have to like when you're in the frustrated situation with the chat bot and the chat bot says I can't understand your question.

[00:20:25] Steven Davis: Can you rephrase it differently? It seems that you want to talk to a human. Can you provide me just a few more details so I can make that happen? Your frustration level goes from. Man, this is annoying to holy cow. This is funny because

[00:20:39] Maxime Manseau: like true story, every time I'm opening a chat, 95 percent of the time, I just type talk to a human and I enter this always,

[00:20:50] Steven Davis: it's terrible, personal experience.

[00:20:52] Steven Davis: Exactly. Right now, if you, again, had a bot though, that was like super helpful and friendly, and that's where. I do think the personality skills are developing as that to me is what's changing because I'll be honest, like none of what I've seen is new. I would really like to see somebody come in here and say this isn't theory has laid the foundation and Alexis laid the foundation for 10 years.

[00:21:20] Steven Davis: Now it's just getting more and more intelligent. You're being able to train it. More and more. That to me is the difference in why it's becoming all the buzz now, along with the commoditization of it. If we were to address the elephant in the room here, I heard all the time I'm worried that chatbots and AI are just going to report replace me as a support agent.

[00:21:39] Steven Davis: And my response back to that is that if you're getting replaced by AI and a chatbot, you really aren't getting replaced by AI and a chatbot. You should have done a better job of providing more value and more service right to your organization because there may be some organizations that are out there that are literally paying people to just simply do a password reset or to simply do a, this or that, but that's, that is what is going to be changing.

[00:22:04] Steven Davis: And if that's the case in the situation that you're in, my recommendation is to up level skills.

[00:22:09] Maxime Manseau: That's great in a sense that. As a customer, if I have an issue with a password, I don't expect to talk to a human. I just want my password issue to be solved, and that can go on.

[00:22:20] Maxime Manseau: And

[00:22:20] Steven Davis: we do that. Like we have it rolled out. If I had a way to front end filter that and truly get okay, these are the ones that we can do out. Cause like I could do technically, I think password resets through it. But even though we don't have that today, we've automated the process for the agent, at least, for them to be able to come in, click a button, get that done. And boom, we're on our way. That's the time down from asking ops for a request by opening up a JIRA ticket and waiting six hours to a 30 second operation. And we do that with all sorts of stuff like feature flags and stuff too. Again, we probably four or five different automation tools in conjunction with each other.

[00:22:57] Steven Davis: Okay. But each and every single interaction that we have is rooted in the human first nature. And I can honestly say that our team is a hundred percent irreplaceable with AI technology. Yeah, that's great.

[00:23:10] Maxime Manseau: And you mentioned you mentioned that at the beginning and I know it also obviously depend on the type of market and product you have, right?

[00:23:19] Maxime Manseau: And I feel. Like I, let's call it, because somehow like human first support is what we call, what people call eye touch support, maybe. And, I like to see like low touch support, like basically auto automated support to make it very easy. And I feel like if you have like customer who pay 200K like per year obviously like you're going to tend to provide them like with human support.

[00:23:43] Maxime Manseau: But in case where you have a product led growth company, people are Tending to do like self serve. I guess the point is just to be able to provide the most self serve possible for a certain type of request and make sure like a human can just like, when you have a complex issue or when you need like empathy or Yep.

[00:24:05] Steven Davis: Yeah, so I'm not going to lie we do segment, right? I do have a subset of paid customers that are assigned a POC, a point of contact. It doesn't work every ticket. They don't work every ticket for the customer because that's not scalable, but they are assigned escalations, high and urgent priority tickets.

[00:24:23] Steven Davis: They do get white glove treatment. And if I were to tell you that they didn't, I'd be flat out lying. The one thing I will say though, which I thought was a little bit interesting and what you had brought up is our low touch customers and a shift that I am seeing and just the overall customer success market, but in particular can be done for support.

[00:24:43] Steven Davis: We do, in my opinion, as all of this is, give our low touch customers as automated, or excuse me, as human first of a process as physically possible. By running them through what we call customer journeys. Are you familiar with a drip campaign and marketing and how you send somebody some content, you observe the behavior that they have, and then that drives the next piece of content and so on and so on.

[00:25:12] Steven Davis: Mark Marquetto, I believe, probably not the founders, but they're who introduced me to the concept of drip campaigning, our tool Gainsight does something that's similar, multi step email tools. So when we talk about using technology for a human first lead approach, we look every day at number of tickets that are coming in from our customers and where our tickets are coming in within our feature areas within the product.

[00:25:37] Steven Davis: Okay. Step one, how many tickets have customers put in for Workflows, in the last 30 days, fetch me everybody that's put in more than 10 tickets. Step one of that journey is for them to get all of the information, documentation, webinars, links, whatever we have on workflows. Hey Maxime, looks like you've been using our rules product, our workflow product.

[00:26:02] Steven Davis: That's great. It seems like you've been struggling, right? Here's all the documentation that we have. Let us know if you have anything or we can be helpful at all by clicking this link that takes you to a human being. Thank you. They don't click the link, they look through the documentation and let's assume that the situation doesn't get any better.

[00:26:18] Steven Davis: You put in a wait for 30 days, 30 days later, you measure again. If it's gone down, you've succeeded. No need for a human, right? Drop them out of the journey and let them go on their way. But if that ticket volume has stayed the same or go up, you have variety of things you can do. Maybe you invite them to a live in person webinar, specifically about workflows.

[00:26:42] Steven Davis: We have these things that configuration experts at Gainsight do called open office hours, which are twice a week for an hour that they can come in and they can pick these individuals brains. We also have a wide variety of services that we can sell them, including premier support and professional services and education opportunities.

[00:27:03] Steven Davis: So we use the data and use the automation. And the minute that we see a behavior that we're like, we don't like that behavior, we've sent you a warning shot. We gave you all the docs. You're still continuing to blow the support department up in a way that we don't want to see. Now we're going to have a human being reach out to you and say, Maxine, buddy, so glad that you're using workflows.

[00:27:26] Steven Davis: Looks like you're struggling a little bit. More than likely, you're going to be shocked that a person is reaching out to you. Wait, how did you know that? I knew that because Steve told me. Oh how did Steve know that? Because Steve's always watching, but it's not Steve. It's his AI tools that are on the back end that are always watching and saying what's normal and what's not normal.

[00:27:46] Steven Davis: And then again, I always recommend that when you see standard of deviations from standard and you start to see customer behaviors that are in a negative way, that's your moment in time to have a human being in an intelligent way. Come in and say, Hey, I think you want to talk to me. When I'm hearing

[00:28:03] Maxime Manseau: your example, like what comes to mind for me, just like And it's something obvious, but it's really about like at the end is about like putting the agent's time to something that is valuable to the company.

[00:28:17] Maxime Manseau: Cause if we go back, like back in the year, basically, In a world where you don't have any automation, you had a queue, right? And agents were just like answering like tickets after tickets in the queue, like from Hey, I have a billing problem to the most complex issue or like VIP customer.

[00:28:36] Maxime Manseau: And so what we're doing right now with automation, and this is what basically mentioning when you're talking about like the balance between automation and human first and how people, how the two, sorry, can help each other is Automation can help you free time for the agents in order to accomplish like valuable and critical, whatever they have to do to provide like support.

[00:29:06] Maxime Manseau: So they're really like complimentary, right? Maybe I'm thinking out loud, but maybe the big play here is you use AI, use automation, use intelligence. To be able to provide human support every single time it's needed. And by needed, this depends on obviously your product and what you're offering, but I like that.

[00:29:29] Steven Davis: And anytime that you're forward exposing this technology to customers, that's the most important, in my opinion, CSAT that you need to be taking a look at. If you're measuring CSAT and you go to any automation forward facing, make sure you're keeping an eye on it and reading what people say. Again, talk about AI, right?

[00:29:50] Steven Davis: We use AI to follow up on bad CSAT stuff, right? CSAT stuff, yeah. Because when people are mad and they're upset, that, phew, flags the case, for us to be able to jump in and jump in proactively. And like you said you hit the nail on the head. It's, we've seen time savings for agents.

[00:30:08] Steven Davis: And the fact that if you can imagine, customer submits a ticket, that tool is able to find you all of the relevant internal content. That's going to save you. Yeah. The time to be able to put, hopefully all of my agents are using that time to craft a very personable, nice, friendly response back up to the customer, but like managers too, we, Maxine, we used to, every time somebody would put in a ticket, it would go into our general ticket queue and our managers would open up the ticket, read the area that the customer said that the feature of the product that they're using, then he would scan the ticket.

[00:30:43] Steven Davis: Make sure that it was actually for that feature. Look at the priority, use his best judgment to say, yeah, the customer put this in as low, but they probably just didn't fill the field out because obviously they said, this is a really big deal. We need your help immediately. And they would do that for every single ticket.

[00:31:02] Steven Davis: Now the ticket comes in, ticket gets looked at, it gets scanned, it gets routed to where it needs to go. And that frees up. Manager's time to be able to then help the agents whose time is being freed up on the front end as well. And I feel both for manager

[00:31:19] Maxime Manseau: And agents just make your work much more interesting because basically just free up to all the boring shit.

[00:31:24] Maxime Manseau: I'm sorry, but this isn't, this is a reality, right? And just let you do a job, which is much more fulfilling at the end of the day. I believe, shoe port always have been seen to my opinion. Like I'm going to be careful to the word I'm using here, but let's say this way like the shoe port industry has never been like the sexiest of all, and I think actually automation AI and the future of like human for super, like where we are eating, gonna make like the industry much more sexier we're going to need like people with different skills with higher skills.

[00:31:59] Maxime Manseau: So we're probably going to see also, I would say raise of salaries, because like we are looking for different skill sets. So I think there is a lot of things like changing here, but it's for the good, right?

[00:32:15] Steven Davis: A hundred percent. No, and I, one thing that I will say and, I think a lot more organizations can do it.

[00:32:23] Steven Davis: The organizations that I talked to that are like, no, we can't do that. After the conversation, it's maybe we can do that. If you truly want to make yourself sexy, start selling it. Yeah. You want to make yourself sexy. Have the VP of sales know your name. Have the CRO at the organization say, Ooh, wow.

[00:32:44] Steven Davis: 18 percent of ARR get a million dollar customer guys. That's a lot of freaking money, right? We have for about five years now been charging for the service the enterprise service that we have. More than happy offline to meet with anybody. That's a whole different fireside chat that we could have and how to monetize the support department fully.

[00:33:06] Steven Davis: But that is one thing that, that really does help us, especially when it comes to resourcing. When it comes down to the low touch model, we do use low touch resources to solve tickets as much as physically possible. And it speaks to exactly what you just said. Our enterprise agents work a lower case volume than our standard agents do, because we want them logged into our AI tools, 50 percent of their day, watching the customers from the backend to be there.

[00:33:38] Steven Davis: And we got to free up time for them to be able to swoop in. When we tell them if I'm a boss, it says Hey, human first, whenever you see somebody that needs a human jump in and they're like, I can't do that. I got 50 tickets that I'm working this week. It's never going to work. So you have to make sure that if you're going to tell them and give them the directive to be that way, that you have to free up the time and energy for them to be able to do that.

[00:34:02] Steven Davis: The reason that we're able to do that Maxim is because we charge for the service, right? So what we don't, what we don't do internally is I don't run. Like I don't have a quota, I don't have a book of business that I like, I wholly support the sales team and whatever they need to be able to sell this.

[00:34:21] Steven Davis: And we do have goals, but I don't own those goals, but I understand that my place in that is so important to help drive revenue for our organization. And that in turn is what gets you, like you start showing them money. They will start listening to what you have to say. I promise you that, promise.

[00:34:40] Maxime Manseau: Do you think like in the upcoming years we will tend to see like more and more companies who are going to charge for support?

[00:34:47] Maxime Manseau: What's your take on that?

[00:34:48] Steven Davis: Yeah, so in the last two years alone, there's been a 60 percent increase in paid support packages being sold in the B2B space. So that is mind blowing to me to think about the organizations that have been doing it for a long time, like we have. And the fact that just in this short timeframe, 60 percent increase in the customers that are doing it, that those it just, I hate speaks to what we're saying, Maxine is we can automate all day long.

[00:35:14] Steven Davis: When you when my customers know that they have somebody to reach out to, that's going to help them. They renew the package nonstop.

[00:35:22] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. And it makes sense, but I guess you can't do that with all the products. I'm thinking about when you sell some license of I don't know if you sell something 200 bucks per month, that's going to be tough, like to sell support, but in the different pricing, what I've seen, like for, I would say this company where like smaller packages, What they are doing is like, depending on the packaging, they offer, let's say different, like SLA or different, but you can see there is like a different support level or depending on, like the, how critics is the issues kind of thing.

[00:35:55] Maxime Manseau: So there is a bunch of stuff you can play around here

[00:35:58] Steven Davis: And,

[00:35:58] Steven Davis: And I think response time alone, I think sells the package and then dedicated PC. One thing that kind of knocked me out of my chair the other day too, I almost didn't believe it. I told you we, so we've been, I live out in the Las Vegas area.

[00:36:11] Steven Davis: We moved out here in July of last year and I had to get a new internet company. The internet provider that I had back in St. Louis is not the same one that's out here. I pay 40 USD, I think for internet, maybe 50 bucks for internet. I own. A premium support package with my internet. And I, this was the first time in my adult life, and I've had seven different internet companies in my adult life that the person, when I paid that, when I was on the phone and said, Hey we have this premium support package, automatic front of the line on the queue.

[00:36:47] Steven Davis: When you call in, right? No service calls. If we have to send somebody out to your house and very limited, but we can run ethernet. Within reason. I'm not gonna run ethernet through your whole house, but if you need a room wired for ethernet, we'll be able to do that for the low price of $6 a month. I like, yeah, I like set the phone down and I'm like, I'm never in the B2C space ever been offered a premium support package.

[00:37:14] Steven Davis: But if you look at the things that I truly want out of support for my internet provider,

[00:37:20] Maxime Manseau: when it goes down,

[00:37:21] Steven Davis: you want, come on. Sure. When there's an outage going on, you're gonna be number 998. Out of a thousand. And if you have premium support, you're going to call in, you're going to be number 23 out of a thousand because you have the premium support and they guarantee you that you're going to be bumped up to the front of the queue and get the next available caller within reason, that's the same reason that people pay for a fast pass when they go to Disneyland.

[00:37:44] Steven Davis: Yeah, definitely. So the premium services are there. I just, that's why I said a lot of people that don't even know that they could monetize on it. They're losing money. They're missing out on money. That's walking right through. A lot of people churn in the support department. A lot of opportunity money is missed in the support department because support by nature, as you said, are not salespeople, right?

[00:38:08] Steven Davis: We are not, I have a sales background, but 98 percent of my staff comes from a very technical non sales background.

[00:38:16] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So Stephen, maybe to go back to human support, because we remove to pay packages. Anyway, I remember when we had a chat, like to to talk about this this webinar, you mentioned to me how important it is to have a human first culture.

[00:38:34] Maxime Manseau: Internally in order to provide, a human first support. Can you tell me a bit more like what you meant

[00:38:40] Steven Davis: by that? Yeah, absolutely. I think we, like even briefly touched on it earlier. For me, what it starts with is you have to practice what you preach. It's very easy to stand up in the front and say, as I said earlier you got to do this.

[00:38:53] Steven Davis: You got to do that. We got to lead human first. Who does this stuff, but then not give them the time. Not give them the flexibility to be their real authentic selves. We do gifs, gif, whatever you want to call them, memes. We self deprecate. We laugh at ourselves. We let our agents be funny because that's what people be funny.

[00:39:21] Steven Davis: If you don't allow your agents to be their authentic selves, and you think that there's going to be a human first aspect to your business, you're sorely mistaken, right? So it doesn't have to be John Belushi. It doesn't have to be Animal House. It doesn't have to be Will Ferrell and the guys. As a giant party that's going on, you can use humor to bridge an uncomfortable situation.

[00:39:43] Steven Davis: Sometimes you can laugh at yourself over an unfortunate situation that might make your customer be a little bit more empathetic to you. I always tell my folks, the more they see you as a human being, the nicer they are going to be to you. If they see you as a robot, it's somebody that's just copy and pasting texts.

[00:40:06] Steven Davis: They're like, eh, whatever, so I think that's what it boils down to, is that you have to as a leader, I don't want to say force it, but at points you may even have to force it, if it's not taking place. So I think you have to just make sure that the agents really, truly feel comfortable.

[00:40:24] Steven Davis: And that's when they feel comfortable to be themselves, and then if they make a mistake, they're not going to get yelled at. They're not going to get criticized for it. That allows them to be their authentic selves, right? And then you've got to give them the time. Like I said, if you don't give them the time, and you're just, shooting them over 40 hours of ticket work every single week, there's no way.

[00:40:42] Steven Davis: There's no way. By the 20th hour in the week, they're going to be burnt out, even if they do exactly what it is that you've asked them to do.

[00:40:50] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. No, super insightful. Super, super insightful. Yeah, I got it. And I was wondering, do you guys use a specific metric to measure, sorry, the success of your human first support approach?

[00:41:04] Maxime Manseau: Or if we look at really like human first support approach, like how do you track that? How do you measure that?

[00:41:10] Steven Davis: Yeah, no, it's a great question. The two metrics that we look at internally around satisfaction. I think in the organization of support, we focus a hundred percent of the time on CSAT and we let everything else just blinders go off to the side.

[00:41:26] Steven Davis: I am a big believer in CSAT for short term. NPS for long term. Companies are obsessed with sending out NPS, my company included, NPS service for the, or NPS for the product itself. How would you rate my company on a scale of one to 10? If you were to ask a lot of people what their relationship is with their vendors, a lot of them would probably tell you it's complicated.

[00:41:50] Steven Davis: I love them. I hate them. I love to hate them sometimes, but overall I love them. That is not reflected on a, hey, out of one to 10 scale. Make sure that you, so what I would recommend is absolutely send your CSAT on your cases to measure your satisfaction. As I said earlier, if you are doing any exposing of a non human, a chat bot, basically, or any kind of a interface that a person is getting a service from you without interacting with a physical human being. Every one of those should have a survey that goes out, right? You may not be sending them out for every single case that a human's working, Make sure you're sending it out for every single case and you're actually reading them and you're actually taking action.

[00:42:36] Steven Davis: If you see them giving you very critical feedback, make sure you're jumping in, at least reaching out to them, talking to them, right? Having a conversation with them about it, but you should also, at least once a year, be sending out a support specific MPS. It can be embedded in your general MPS question, but you should ask them.

[00:42:58] Steven Davis: On a scale of one to 10, how is it working with your tech support team? And give them a comments box for that. If they're frustrated about it, trust me, they're going to use the comment box and they're going to put the rating in there. And that should give you a general feel of the bigger picture of satisfaction.

[00:43:15] Steven Davis: So we have two metrics that we look at for case volume, two metrics that we look at for sentiment, one CSAT, one MPS, and we roll all of those up together into an overall support score.

[00:43:29] Maxime Manseau: I like that, keep it simple, like just a few metrics and gives a possibility to your customer to just write whatever, like they feel, like how they feel.

[00:43:38] Maxime Manseau: And this really helps you like have a clear idea. Use it almost as a North star about like how to improve like your support services,

[00:43:46] Steven Davis: right? Bingo. Cause you can fake, when you do it like that, you can fake one or two, but you can't all of those. You can't fake volume and sentiment. At the same time, you can fake volume.

[00:44:00] Steven Davis: You can make excuses and justify volume all day long. I could do that too. I could justify one CSAT is just a bad experience, right? Everybody's going to have a bad experience with your org. Hate to say it, but probably going to happen. I wish I could tell you that every experience, every time is excellence, but I get my share enough of escalations to know that's just not the case.

[00:44:22] Steven Davis: And

[00:44:22] Maxime Manseau: I see like the time is running, maybe like to finish do you have any specific advice for the people out there support leaders who are trying to improve their customer support operation and wants to provide a more human first support? Like where would you start? I don't know if you have anything that comes to mind, but what would be like the biggest advice for people who are trying to improve the human first approach?

[00:44:46] Steven Davis: Yeah, it's a great

[00:44:46] Maxime Manseau: question.

[00:44:47] Steven Davis: First piece of advice that I will say, go through A, the data, and B, The sentiment, right? So go back and pull the stats on your feature areas that you're getting. You're like, let's simplify it. Pull in the data of where your tickets are coming from and the areas that it's taking you the longest to service, right?

[00:45:07] Steven Davis: Then take a look at the sentiment and see what customers are actually saying. Now, I know it's not feasible for everybody to follow up every survey. We do because we've automated the followup process as part of this conversation. But you should at least be reading the feedback. That they are giving you another piece of advice I'll give you is as somebody that gets bombarded on LinkedIn by salespeople, don't auto ignore them because there's going to be a salesperson there that could honestly give you what you need.

[00:45:34] Steven Davis: I wouldn't be with the vendors that we're at today. If I auto ignored everybody, I'm not saying answer every single LinkedIn message that you've got, but make sure that you keep your eyes and your ears open to what's out there in the market. To what's going to be available. It doesn't hurt to take a demo.

[00:45:49] Steven Davis: It doesn't hurt to have a conversation with individuals. And after you've had several conversations, you should be able to laser focus in on the questions and on what your customers need to be able to start asking these different vendors to narrow them down into what it is that you need. I'd love to say that everybody could just write it themselves.

[00:46:08] Steven Davis: And if somebody can't, again, good for them, at least for now, you're going to be a vendor. With your

[00:46:13] Maxime Manseau: own problem, like me, I like to see the things. In terms of workflow, saying okay what would be the next flow I need to improve, right? And Eventually obviously people don't have the bandwidth to do that, in an ideal world would be like almost to go back at treating all the tickets like manually.

[00:46:32] Maxime Manseau: And every time you have something either recurring or not important thing, okay, this one, I'm going to automate it. And this is how we're going to automate it the most efficient way, and this way you'd tackle them. Problem. And you have a clear view about what you need to keep human first and what needs to be like automated.

[00:46:51] Steven Davis: Yeah. And I, you gotta measure though, and you can do that through satisfaction, but you can also as well, we didn't, we haven't touched on it today, but like you I'd recommend as a leader, you get you a power group of customers of yours that you can confide in. A lot of customers like to be a part of advisory councils.

[00:47:05] Steven Davis: They like to be able to give their input that they're actually going to be able to be heard, and, I think the way that I would look at it. If I were being asked to start from scratch and come in and consult with an organization on how to do this, I would look at two components.

[00:47:19] Steven Davis: I would look at how well do you feel you're automated and what do your processes look like and what is your sentiment? And I would take it from there. If you tell me that your processes are great, like we have great processes, great automation, but your sentiment is lagging, that's where I'm going to challenge, like you need more humans, right?

[00:47:40] Steven Davis: If you have great sentiment, but your processes aren't great. And you feel like your automation isn't where you need it to be exactly what you said, whiteboard it, think about it, plan it, execute it, but then be like super obnoxious about measuring, make sure every one of those cases has a follow up survey, make sure you're testing it on a beta group of users, make sure you're doing all of those motions to be able to say, if I do this, is it making that worse?

[00:48:13] Steven Davis: No? Okay, great. Do more of this, right? If you do this and this starts to get worse, I've erased processes that have been like, man, this is such a great idea, but then the execution just isn't there. And you got to be able to just, nope, too much automation. Customer didn't think, I asked for an org ID, but customers have no idea.

[00:48:34] Steven Davis: Am I talking production or sandbox? So it didn't work X the whole freaking process start over again, and you gotta be able to do that.

[00:48:40] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, that fancy.

[00:48:42] Steven Davis: Cool.

[00:48:43] Maxime Manseau: So I guess we're like arriving at the end. I don't know if you want to add anything else or if you have anything in mind. Guys, if you have any question in the moment I've seen like a lot of people have been like chatting, but not specific question, like talking about tools and stuff.

[00:48:58] Maxime Manseau: Anyway I guess like Steven is he is will more Would be more than happy to receive a few questions even afterwards. So I guess if you want to reach Steven out via LinkedIn, like you're more than

[00:49:10] Steven Davis: welcome. Most of what we've done up at this point is collaboration. I love having conversations with different support leaders, getting their models, their theories, their philosophies, and all that kind of stuff.

[00:49:21] Steven Davis: In college, it's called plagiarism. In business, it's called plagiarism. Collaboration is what it is.

[00:49:28] Maxime Manseau: I guess we're going to, we're going to, we're going to end up on this wise word, Stephen, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate have a wonderful day. Have a fantastic end of the week and talk soon.

[00:49:39] Maxime Manseau: Guys, thank you so much for following us and take care all. Thanks.