Episode 18: (B2B) Matt Dale, Vice President Customer Support, Illuminate Education

The Customer Support Podcast
  • Illuminate offers several products for teachers, administrators, school districts and for parents
  • Primary folks calling in are administrators
  • Illuminate recently had a 5-way merger and had to integrate several ticketing systems — shared inbox, multiple Zendesk instances, Freshworks, Servicecloud. Done by a 3rd party — Import2.com
  • Incoming tickets — several thousand a month. Volume is double during back to schools months (Aug/Sep/Oct)
  • Matt leads the Support Team which  is part of overall Services Team (Support, Success, Implementation, Migrations, Data Team, L&D)
  • Support Team has 3 directors (focused on different products)
  • Incoming ticket split over channels— Phone - 60% , Email/Web - 40% (rolling out chat as 3rd channel). Focus area -- How to reduce volume on phone (its expensive) and move it to chat or do deflection
  • Support Tech — Centered around Zendesk (ticketing, chat, community ,help), Phone (Talk desk), Maestro QA (evaluate agents work). Big believers in “incremental improvement”
  • Maestro QA — Connects to the ticketing system. Used to grade agents. Manually set certain criteria (people/tickets you want to grade, set certain questions) and then reviewed by human graders
  • Challenge — Running reports across systems like  Salesforce, Netsuite, Zendesk, JIRA  is a challenge. Existing integrations are basic and don't help
  • “No one wants to call support. How can we provide frictionless environment”
  • Products are very customizable and many questions are unique, specific nuances that are not covered by generic help docs. We need to understand the context of customer and case so that our agents can provide prompt service
  • Knowledge Management — Analyze user queries and understand what help docs are being used the most and use that as baseline for up dating knowledge. Roughly 3000 help docs across all systems
  • Top priorities for 2020 — Want to build a tiered support system, revamping help docs, Live agent chat
  • Learning Management System (LMS) — Both for agents and customers i.e., agent on-boarding (human intensive and not only content from general LMS, but also about Zendesk, support style etc.). Customer training — they had in-person train-the-trainer model earlier but that didn’t scale. Focus in shifting to put training in LMS and use that to train the trainer
  • Key Metrics — First reply time & Total resolution time (indicates backlog especially during busy season). Common ones — CSAT etc. Prefer actionable insights e.g., automatic email being sent to agents that gives them actionable data about how they did in a certain period
  • Recommendation of resources in Support — HelpScout Blog (content on Support is really good), Support Driven Community, Radical Candor, The Goal

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