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.

Tập

  1. 23 GIỜ TRƯỚC

    How NICE Reinvented Knowledge Access with AI

    Enterprise support organizations face a growing challenge: knowledge is expanding, but access is shrinking. When knowledge ecosystems become too large and fragmented across different systems, both customers and internal teams struggle to find the answers they need. In this episode, we are featuring Chris Romrell from NICE to discuss how NICE tackled the widespread problem of "knowledge sprawl" head-on. Discover how NICE transformed their support experience by moving away from frustrating, keyword-based searches and static link lists, and instead embraced Generative AI and Precision RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Powered by SupportLogic’s Resolve SX, NICE successfully shifted from simply indexing knowledge to intelligently interpreting it. Chris pulls back the curtain on the economics of this transformation, sharing the exact ROI model they used to justify the investment. By aiming to deflect just 3% of their 50,000 annual support cases, NICE was able to generate substantial operational savings. Key Takeaways in this Episode: From Links to Answers: How to deliver precise, contextually relevant generative answers directly within the customer journey instead of making users sift through search results.Measuring True Deflection: Why traditional search metrics fail, and how NICE uses "search sessions" to track actual case deflection and measure resolution success without guesswork.Rebuilding Customer Trust: Strategies for embedding intelligent search directly into the case creation workflow to seamlessly intercept tickets and rebuild trust in self-service portals.Scaling Internal Knowledge: How to stop relying on "documentation heroes" by using AI to automatically extract and summarize solutions from resolved cases.A Roadmap for AI Evolution: Actionable lessons for support leaders on how to start with the right problem, build an ROI model, and make space for experimentation.Tune in to learn how to turn support into a competitive advantage and elevate your customer experience from reactive to proactive

    20 phút
  2. 23 GIỜ TRƯỚC

    The API Trap: Why Direct LLM Consumption Breaks the Enterprise

    In this episode we do a technical deep-dive for ML engineers, data architects, and technical CX leaders. We move past the prototype phase to tackle the hard infrastructure and architectural realities of deploying mission-critical Large Language Models (LLMs). We examine why direct LLM API consumption is an enterprise anti-pattern. By intentionally abstracting away infrastructure complexity, direct integrations introduce unacceptable compliance limitations, fragment governance, and tightly couple applications to individual vendors. We explore the necessity of building a centralized LLM Control Plane to sit between your applications and language models. Discover how this architecture enables deep observability (request-level tracing and token metering), dynamic failover routing, and decoupled prompt management where prompts are treated as centrally versioned application logic rather than static strings. We also unpack how to implement composable runtime guardrails and secure grounding inside a customer VPC to prevent data leakage and mitigate hallucinations. Next, we tear down the misconception that AI summarization is simply about compressing long text. In enterprise support, you must summarize distributed, heterogeneous systems—not human text. We dissect the architecture of the Ambient Decision Engine, revealing why the LLM is actually just the final "narrator" in a complex data pipeline. Join us as we explore the underlying technical stack: Structured RAG: Executing SQL-like queries, aggregations, and cohort grouping over operational databases.Data Fusion Layer: Normalizing, deduplicating, and aligning KPIs to synthesize massive signal sets into an interpretable insight graph.Agentic Reasoning Layer: Running interpretation and inference over operational data to detect behavioral anomalies, evaluate SLA risks, and surface hidden cross-account trends.If you are tasked with building the intelligence engine for your enterprise, this podcast provides the architectural blueprints to move from fragile AI pilots to secure, scalable, and governed infrastructure

    26 phút
  3. 2 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    SaaS at a Crossroads: Will Salesforce and ServiceNow Survive the AI Disruption?

    Are traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies facing an existential threat? With the stock market valuations of many SaaS darlings dropping significantly, it is clear that Artificial Intelligence is massively disrupting how software is developed, shipped, and monetized. The winners and losers of this new era are still being decided, but one thing is certain: SaaS is at a crossroads. In this episode, we explore a talk given by Krishna Raj Raja at Qatar Web Summit, Founder and CEO of the AI-native startup SupportLogic and author of Support Experience, to unpack exactly what it takes to survive the "Intelligence Era". Krishna explains why surviving this disruption requires more than just plugging a Large Language Model (LLM) into your software. As he notes, an LLM is simply a powerful "Ferrari engine" that still needs the rest of the car—wheels, steering, and safety measures—to function effectively in the real world. Tune in as we dive deep into the transition from the legacy SaaS era to the new AI-first world, and discuss why companies must fundamentally rethink their business models, overcome the "Last Mile" problem, and reinvent their architectures to win the race. Key Topics Covered in This Episode: The Four Eras of Computing: How the tech landscape has evolved from the SQL Database and SaaS eras into Big Data and today's Intelligence Era.The Conversational UX Revolution: Why the transition from Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to Conversational User Interfaces is democratizing software and allowing anyone to seamlessly interact with computers.The "Ferrari Engine" Illusion: Why foundation models alone aren't enough, and why mastering rare edge-case data to solve the difficult "Last Mile" problem is the true competitive differentiator.Breaking Enterprise Silos: The challenge of overcoming disconnected Data, Signals, Context, and AI silos to build genuinely intelligent systems.Mastering Context: Why next-generation AI architecture requires long-term contextual memory that spans across time, interactions, channels, people, and systems of record.Beyond Cognitive Automation: Why the ultimate goal of the AI revolution shouldn't just be doing old tasks faster and cheaper, but creating entirely new products, services, and global economies

    20 phút
  4. 2 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    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 phút
  5. 3 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    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 phút
  6. 3 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    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 phút
  7. 4 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    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 phút
  8. 6 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    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 phút
  9. 6 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    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 phút

Giới Thiệu

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.