Support Experience

Krishna Raj Raja

Customer support isn't just a cost center—it’s the heartbeat of your brand. Based on the principles of the book Support Experience, this podcast dives into the strategies that transform standard service into a competitive advantage. Voice of the Customer is the lifeblood of every technology business. But most companies lose touch with it as they scale, leading to poor customer experiences and high churn.Some companies, however, have taken a different path. They not only stay in touch with the Voice of the Customer... they amplify it with artificial intelligence and smart automation. Their secret? Building a world-class Support Experience.Support Experience transforms customer support from a reactive cost center to a proactive profit center. It empowers your people to deliver exceptional support at scale. It turns customer conversations into tangible product improvements, fueling the long-term health of your business.Krishna Raj Raja shares the blueprint for building a thriving business in the age of AI while making customer support more human than ever, with examples from iconic companies like Apple, Adobe, Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, VMware, and more. This podcast is for CEOs, Chief Customer Officers, Customer Support Leaders, Product Managers, and anyone looking to leverage AI for better customer experiences.

Выпуски

  1. -10 Ч

    Five Forces Driving the Tech Company Extinction Today

    In this episode, we dive into Chapter 1 of Krishna Raj Raja's book to explore why rapid adaptation is the ultimate survival skill for modern businesses. We take a close look at "The Great Adapter," Adobe, and their bold, industry-defining shift to a SaaS-based model with the Creative Cloud. However, as we discuss, even giants like Adobe face continuous existential threats from nimble startups and evolving markets. Join us as we unpack the five massive, converging forces that are rapidly raising customer expectations and rewriting the rules of the tech industry. Key Topics Covered in This Episode: • Force #1: The Consumerization of Tech: We discuss how traditionally enterprise-focused tools are being redesigned for the everyday user. We look at how Canva disrupted Adobe's market share by offering an accessible, consumer-friendly design experience that significantly expanded the total addressable market. • Force #2: Product-Led Growth (PLG): Discover why the product itself is now the ultimate sales and marketing driver. We explore how Figma's "freemium," collaborative, and self-service model outpaced traditional, sales-led software buying processes. • Force #3: Artificial Intelligence: We examine the existential questions raised by generative AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT. Learn the critical difference between AI high performers—who use AI to create new revenue streams—and AI laggards, who view it merely as a cost-reduction tool. • Force #4: Usage-Based Pricing: From AWS to AI video editor Opus Pro, we break down why paying only for what you consume is becoming the preferred business model, and why it forces companies to battle for customer loyalty every single day. • Force #5: Support Experience (SX): We tie it all together by explaining why the customer experience is the last enduring competitive moat. We discuss why modern Support Experience (SX) goes beyond reactive call centers to proactively identify problems, driving product adoption and supporting a modern product-led, AI-powered business engine. Key Takeaway: Change is accelerating faster than ever. If companies aren't careful, these five forces will fling them into oblivion. Tune in to learn why the company that adapts the fastest to changing customer expectations will be the one that wins.

    20 мин.

  2. -1 ДН.

    How Salesforce overcame its own product limitation and cut escalations by 56%

    In this episode, we explore how enterprise software giant Salesforce revolutionized its customer support experience by partnering with SupportLogic. Join us as we dive into how Salesforce shifted its support operations from reactive, backward-looking metrics to proactive, real-time engagement. Hear insights from Salesforce leaders like Katherine Sullivan (SVP of Customer Success) and Jim Roth (President of Customer Success) on solving the "needle in the haystack" problem: identifying difficult, long-running cases before they escalate. Discover how the integration of AI-powered sentiment analysis and real-time signals empowered Salesforce's swarm leads and engineers to turn negative customer experiences into positive ones, ultimately driving massive operational improvements. Key Takeaways in this Episode: • Massive Escalation Reduction: Learn how Salesforce leveraged escalation prediction to cut its true escalation rate by 56%, dropping it from 3.9% down to 1.7% in less than three months. • Major Productivity Gains: Discover how support managers and swarm leads regained an average of one hour of productivity per day—totaling 85 hours saved daily across the team—by eliminating the need to manually dig through support cases. • Predictive CSAT & Sentiment Tracking: Understand how tracking over 40 customer sentiment signals provided a two-week leading indicator for CSAT scores, allowing the team to course-correct negative experiences before receiving bad surveys. • Data-Driven Collaboration: See how real-time sentiment data allows support leaders to present actionable insights to Engineering teams, highlighting the specific sources of customer frustration rather than just reporting standard case volumes.

    22 мин.

  3. -1 ДН.

    How Red Robin Lost Billions via Spreadsheet Thinking

    In this episode, we dissect the dramatic 96% stock collapse of Red Robin, a restaurant chain that once boasted a $92 share price but plummeted to just $3.61 after management prioritized "spreadsheet thinking" over the customer. We explore the catastrophic 2018 decision to eliminate all bussers and expeditors to cut labor costs—a move that resulted in dirty tables, ballooning wait times, and an 85% increase in customer walkaways. We connect this cautionary tale to the core principles of Krishna Raj Raja’s book, "Support Experience" (SX), which argues that sacrificing the quality of service for better margins is often a "death knell" for a business. While Red Robin treated its staff as an expense to be minimized, the Support Experience is actually a strategic revenue center, representing the sum of every interaction a user has with a brand. Key topics covered in this episode include: • The Race to the Bottom: Why optimizing for quarterly earnings instead of the customer walking through the door leads to a "death spiral". • Chili’s vs. Red Robin: How Chili’s chose to "invest in more" by improving operations and customer experience, resulting in a 50x market cap difference between the two rivals. • The Voice of the Customer: How Red Robin ignored the "thick data" of customer frustration, a mistake the book warns is fatal for companies trying to adapt to the AI age. • The Cost Center Fallacy: Why viewing support as a "necessary evil" prevents companies from harvesting the valuable insights needed to build a 10x future. Join us as we discuss why "doing more" is the only way to survive in an era of heightened customer expectations, and how building a robust Support Experience can turn a potential liability into a company's greatest competitive advantage.

    20 мин.

  4. -2 ДН.

    How Snowflake Engineering Support for Hypergrowth

    This podcast discusses the remarkable transformation of Snowflake, a data management platform that turned its support organization from a liability into a strategic revenue-generating asset. We examine the leadership of Angus Klein, Snowflake's VP of Support, and the specific "People, Technology, and Process" framework used to achieve a net dollar retention rate of 151%. In this episode, we cover: • The Power of Support Enablement: Why Snowflake invests 30% of its team in enablement roles—three times the industry average—and the creation of the Customer Experience Analyst (CXA) role to bridge the gap between support and product. • Technology as a "Copilot": A look at the custom tools Snowflake built, including the HotSpot Program, which provides engineering with data-driven evidence of customer pain points, and the Data Diagnostic Application (DDA), which helps engineers resolve technical cases in one-third of the time. • Busting the Silos: The radical organizational decision to place the support team inside the Product organization. We discuss why this deep integration with engineering is critical for a world-class experience. • The "No Customer Success Team" Model: Why Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman chose to forgo a traditional Customer Success department, instead making "customer obsession" the responsibility of sales, product, and support. • Incentivizing Expansion: How Snowflake’s sales compensation model aligns with usage-based pricing by rewarding reps for growing existing accounts, not just landing new ones. This chapter serves as a blueprint for hypergrowth companies looking to scale their support without losing the "human touch" or spiraling into a purely reactive state.

    24 мин.

  5. -4 ДН.

    How Big Data Blinded Nokia

    This episode explores Chapter 3 : Unlock: Hearing the True Voice of the Customer from the book Support Experience. The discussion centers on why even global giants can fail when they ignore the human narrative behind their data. We look at the "Nokia Paradox"—how a company with a massive market research team missed the smartphone revolution because they prioritized "Big Data" over the "Thick Data" gathered by ethnographer Tricia Wang on the streets of China. In this episode, we cover: • Big Data vs. Thick Data: Why big data is excellent for analyzing existing trends but fails to identify emerging human-driven shifts. • Quantification Bias: We break down the dangerous tendency to value only what can be measured, which often leaves companies "blind to the unknown". • Systems of Intelligence: How the competitive moat has shifted from merely storing data (Systems of Record) to interpreting it through AI to deliver actionable insights. • The 6 Pillars of the "True Voice of the Customer": We define what it actually means to listen to your customers—ensuring feedback is unbiased, timely, captured across all channels, and rich with emotional context. • Sentiment Analysis at Scale: Moving beyond simple "positive/negative" scores to identify nuanced emotions like confusion vs. frustration, allowing teams to respond with precision. This chapter serves as a guide for leaders who want to move past surveys and "read the things not yet on the page"

    20 мин.

  6. -4 ДН.

    How the Yellow State Killed Silicon Valley Bank

    Abandoned: The Insidious Reason You're Losing Customers (and You Don’t Even Know It) from the book Support Experience. The discussion centers on the "Yellow State Problem," a condition where a business performs sub-optimally but hasn't reached a total "Red State" failure yet. While the public saw the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) as a sudden "black swan" event, the author argues that the bank had been in a "Yellow State" for years due to outdated platforms and manual processes that led loyal customers to slowly abandon it long before the bank run. In this episode, we cover: • The Silicon Valley Bank Post-Mortem: Why long-term assets and VC networks couldn't save a bank that ignored the daily friction of its customer experience. • The 7 Blind Spots: We break down the organizational flaws that prevent companies from seeing silent abandonment, including siloed insights, overreliance on lagging indicators like NPS and CSAT, and the mistake of optimizing for case deflections rather than solving root problems. • Adoption vs. Retention: Why simply keeping a customer is no longer enough in the age of usage-based pricing—you must ensure they are actually using the product. • The New Customer Journey: Moving from the traditional pre-sale/post-sale mindset to a "pre-land/post-land" model, where the critical moment is when a customer first signs up, not just when they pay.

    19 мин.

  7. -4 ДН.

    Escaping the CRM Digital Filing Cabinet

    Welcome to the podcast that explores the evolution of customer support from a reactive "filing cabinet" of tickets to a proactive System of Intelligence. In a world where traditional CRMs are often "data-rich but insight-poor," we dive into how the SupportLogic Data Cloud is helping organizations outsmart their legacy systems to drive enterprise growth. In each episode, we talk with experts about moving beyond the "Support CRM Tax" and leveraging AI-enriched telemetry to win the hearts and minds of customers. What You’ll Learn: • The Power of AI Agents: Discover how specialized agents—including the Sentiment Agent, Summarization Agent, and Account Health Agent—extract actionable insights from every interaction to provide a longitudinal view of the customer experience. • Technical Deep Dives: We break down the complex engineering hurdles of data integration, exploring how Snowflake Zero-Copy Secure Sharing eliminates the need for brittle ETL pipelines and ensures high-speed, governed access to a "single source of truth". • Strategic Use Cases: Learn how leading brands like NTT Data build customized enterprise-level dashboards and use "Revenue at Risk" data to shift focus from the loudest voices to the highest-priority business risks. • The Future of AI for Support: Explore the transition to a CRM-less architecture and the use of Snowflake Intelligence to build internal data copilots and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems that translate natural language queries into executive-ready answers. Join us to learn how to transform your support data into a real-time stream of intelligence that informs sales strategy, product development, and executive decision-making.

    15 мин.
  • Выпусков: 7

Об этом подкасте

Customer support isn't just a cost center—it’s the heartbeat of your brand. Based on the principles of the book Support Experience, this podcast dives into the strategies that transform standard service into a competitive advantage. Voice of the Customer is the lifeblood of every technology business. But most companies lose touch with it as they scale, leading to poor customer experiences and high churn.Some companies, however, have taken a different path. They not only stay in touch with the Voice of the Customer... they amplify it with artificial intelligence and smart automation. Their secret? Building a world-class Support Experience.Support Experience transforms customer support from a reactive cost center to a proactive profit center. It empowers your people to deliver exceptional support at scale. It turns customer conversations into tangible product improvements, fueling the long-term health of your business.Krishna Raj Raja shares the blueprint for building a thriving business in the age of AI while making customer support more human than ever, with examples from iconic companies like Apple, Adobe, Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, VMware, and more. This podcast is for CEOs, Chief Customer Officers, Customer Support Leaders, Product Managers, and anyone looking to leverage AI for better customer experiences.

Информация

  • Автор
    Krishna Raj Raja
  • Годы выхода
    2 тыс.
  • Выпуски
    7
  • Ограничения
    Без ненормативной лексики
  • Авторские права
    © 2026 Krishna Raj Raja