[Transcript] How Zapier supports 3 million users by investing in customer outcomes

This is a transcript of the podcast: How Zapier supports 3 million users by investing in customer outcomes.

Courtney: Pam, welcome to the show. We’re so excited to have you join us as our first guest for the return of Scale as a permanent series. You’ve had an incredibly impressive career to date that’s seen you work at places like Zendesk, Skilljar and ServiceMax. To get us started, could you give us a quick rundown of your career?

Pam: It’s a lot of years to wrap up into one. The crux of it is that I started working in a call center and a service center when I was in high school. I really started on the front lines of customer service and then more technical support roles really early, just answering customer requests as a start in my career. Then I had roles in training, and I started implementing and selling technology that service centers use. I had roles in product marketing and product management, too.

That was a short stint. I’m not meant to be a product manager; I learned that one fast. Then I was exposed to customer success when I worked at Salesforce, and from there, I jumped into the startup world, using all of those different perspectives that I’d gained. That teed me up for the role I have here at Zapier. When they reached out to me about the role, the values of the company and the mission of the product were the things that sprang to mind. So we made a deal, and here I am having a really good time.

The evolution of customer support and success

Courtney: As you mentioned, it’s been more than 20 years since you first stepped into that call center. From your perspective, what are some of the key changes you’ve noticed in the customer support and success industry since you first started?

Pam: Technology has changed a lot, for sure. But for the most part, I’m starting to see that companies are beginning to understand that their customers’ success is their success, and the ideas around that and how to make it happen are starting to unfold. I’ve seen some acceleration of that in the last year or so, but it’s been a pretty slow progress from my experience.

Courtney: You’ve said before that when you take care of your customers, the revenue comes. And I was curious about how this philosophy has enabled you – and the many teams you’ve led – to navigate some of the big technological shifts we’ve seen?

Pam: It’s really funny. I’m going to go back to a time when I was consulting, maybe close to 20 years ago. I worked with a leader who said: “We’re not going to offer phone support. We’re just going to do email.” And I was really offended when I was involved in convincing companies that they needed to use service portals and help docs and communities, because they were using them for the purpose of cost savings versus what was best for their customers. I was a little bitter about that for years. But what’s really cool about it is that, when I think about those different channels and the ways customers want to communicate with companies now, they’ve actually adopted those things. It’s become a better approach for them, at least so far as it goes in tech.

People just want to use the solution. They don’t want to have to figure out how to use the solution and troubleshoot for the solution. Even thinking about this in terms of your product development, if you’re taking care of your customers and removing the friction for them in their product, they’ll adopt and use your product towards their success. And as for the channels, my experience is that it really needs to be company- and customer-specific. There are solutions that at times warrant a live conversation on the phone or even a conference call or an in-person meeting, sometimes. There’s chat that’s a real-time channel that you have to monitor. And when it makes sense, it’s important to staff for those. But it doesn’t need to be applied everywhere. So learning to figure out, on a more individualized basis, what is going to work best for the customers in the company has been my approach.

Courtney: That speaks so well to something else you’ve also written, which is about customer outcomes and this idea of really attending to your specific customers – whether that’s through your practices and policies or through the right channels. I’d love to understand what customer outcome means to you in the context of support, and why is this something that you hold so dear at Zapier?

Pam: It’s one of the reasons that really made me want to join Zapier. There’s a real passion for knowing that our customer’s success equates into our success. If companies are adopting your software and expanding the use of your software, those are signals for you that they’re being successful in the outcomes that they’re trying to reach. And the best way to keep developing your product and your service offering for them is to understand what those customer goals are. That philosophy just permeates the organization.

I started in late 2018, and we spent the entirety of 2019 focused on efficiency and cost effectiveness, and we needed to do that for the business being sustainable. But no team gets excited by that. No one’s really happy to go through those motions. And I have to tell you: This team was so brilliant, and they put everything they had into it in spite of not being really enthused about it. And they nailed it. They met all of our goals, and yet the team was not inspired. They were literally uninspired. So when we started our planning session towards the later part of 2019, I did round tables in small groups with the entire team to get input on what we should focus on in 2020, and we made customer outcomes the center of that conversation. And you wouldn’t believe the energy that I had coming out of those discussions with them. They were all saying very similar things, and I was just typing feverishly to capture all of it.

There’s one person on our team – his name is Andrew. He’s been with us for a while, and he’s a little bit of a god, if you will, within the support team. He knows the product really well, and the team counts on him. And he did such a good job of summarizing what I think the whole team was saying. He said: “Pam, I don’t want to be measured on our replies per hour. I want to know that when I work on a customer’s app, it’s working 30 days from now.” That was the golden ticket that really opened up the conversation and allowed us to focus on that. We’re building our intelligence now, so that we can look at measuring our success as a support team, based on that first step of whether or not what we’re helping the customer fix is still working.

In addition to that, we’re adding new things to the team. We’re standing up our customer success team now, and we have every intent of taking what we know our customer’s goals to be and incorporating that into how we interact with them. We’re starting to do that early on in onboarding processes and stuff like that. It’s really exciting stuff. And we do believe – within the entirety of the organization – that’s how we will be a successful company: by making sure our customers are successful using our solution.

Courtney: One of the things I’ve heard from support leaders around customer outcomes is that it can feel like you’re one step removed when you end up focusing on things like first-reply time. So what does that dashboard look like for you, now that you’re thinking about the customer success with your product? And what does that communication back to your team look like?

Pam: Honestly, Courtney, we’re still in the midst of building it. Our data team has done the engineering work to pull all the components together. So my team now is starting to build that dashboard. And that will be a first iteration for us. We think that’s the thing to measure from a support perspective, but we’ll probably tweak it. The other thing we’re doing is implementing some software that’s going to give us early warning signals for our customers about if there’s more usage or if they’re adding people or if they’re adding more Zaps. Then we’re really figuring out what are the touch points? Not just those early warning signals, but using them to become proactive in nature.

Let’s take the first 90 days of onboarding as an example, because it’s where we focus first. There’s a lot to learn as you’re adopting a new solution during that time frame. How do we interact with our customers and ask that question? What are the goals? What are you trying to achieve? Then, based on getting that input from them, we’re making recommendations to them. There’s a philosophical approach I take and have shared with the team: I want to think about altruistic proactive outreach. For the 10 times I may interact with the customer throughout a year – regardless of the channel – nine of those 10 times I should be sharing information that is important to them and will help them, whether it’s product based, a use case, a new feature or whatever it might be. And that 10th time might be the renewal. But if you really get into understanding your customer’s perspectives and what they’re trying to achieve, then renewal should not be a huge milestone in the conversation.

Driving customer outcomes at scale

Courtney: Are you using the same teams and the same processes to implement this proactive approach as you’re using for the reactive queries that are coming in from customers?

Pam: No, not right now. And I’ll be honest with you. That’s one of the places where I have a little bit of a bee in my bonnet with the industry. When I think about what we’re doing with customer support and customer success, we’re often taking customer support roles and calling them customer success without really changing anything that makes them more proactive. Maybe you could have monitoring on your customer’s instance and understand that they’re having trouble on the instance, then reaching out to them. That’s a proactive motion that you could introduce to customer support.

On the customer success side of things, I’m finding in the industry that we’re taking what had historically been a technical account manager – someone who was embedded with the company to find other pockets to sell perpetual licenses to – and we’re calling a role like that a customer success manager. We’re not really changing what those roles do, and that’s to meet what I’m calling a new perspective in the subscription model about customers actually being successful. We’re just taking the typical roles and motions we’ve had before and putting different labels on them.

Courtney: What does the reactive side of your support team look like?

Pam: Right now, for the most part, we operate on an email channel. We’ve done some experiments with chat and requests come in from customers, and we will segment them based on which plan that they have. So we’re applying higher priority on one team within support – called Premier Support – based on customers making an investment in us. So we’ll make more of an investment for them.

Then on the longer tail of the business, we have really good response times. We’re just not as hyper focused on a one-hour turnaround, if you will, for them. Those questions come in, and our customer champions do a lot of legwork to be able to answer them. We’ve got this really wide breadth of solutions that we’re offering, because we’re integrating with over 2,000 applications. And so we do our best to not just research what we know about our product, but we’ll even go out and research some of our partner products to really help the customer come to a solution and not necessarily need to go back and forth between vendors. And then we respond to them.

We measure things that are pretty traditional, like what is our response-to-resolution rate, which is pretty good. And then what we want to do is connect the dots of typical support operating metrics to: Is that segment of customers growing with us? Are we retaining them? Are they growing their subscriptions with us? Are they introducing more users? Are they adopting and expanding the solution? Then we’re doing comparisons between what that looks like for customers who come through support and making sure those customer success metrics are staying in line with the efforts we are putting in to help our customers be successful.

Courtney: You’ve mentioned there some of the operational complexity that comes with trying to drive these outcomes. I read recently that you are focusing also on building out your support ops team. I’d love to know a little bit about that and the impact that you’ve seen so far.

Pam: It’s always going to be a good impact. Typically when a support team gets around 20 to 25 people, you want to start introducing the idea of an ops team, because you’ll run into what I’ve run into several times, and you’ll grow past that. Then everybody on the team is doing everything. Whether it’s a project to implement or update software, or get a new channel introduced or a new process built. And without exception, when the folks who are answering your customer inquiries are also responsible for those operational roles, the operational things get put down for the priority of answering the customer, which means that those operational priorities tend to not get done. And that’s how organizations end up in more of a turnaround spot.

So we were definitely ready for an operations team, and we really started it last year about this time. We were really careful, because we had a team that was so used to building automations and defaulting to action, because one of our values is to keep the lights on and keep improving our operation. Yet things kept getting delayed, or you couldn’t get a line of sight to what project was actually going to be implemented, because it was hard to keep up with documenting it for the team. They didn’t have visibility, and then you’ve got duplicate projects going on.

So a really long, complicated story short: by introducing the support operations team, we were able then to have people responsible for the visibility into (and management of) those projects. There were people responsible for the administration of our systems and our automation, and there were people responsible even for our documentation and our training and our quality. We’ve created a team now that I hold accountable for those things getting done, but we still leverage the customer champions to be contributors to those things.

The customer champions might still be administering some of the system for us or writing some of those automations for us, but we’re aware of it, so we keep duplicates down and we haven’t had to have this huge who-moved-my-cheese moment and take something that was important to the team away. The value is we’ve got visibility and accountability built into it, and the entire team still gets to contribute to the betterment of the overall organization.

Supporting a remote customer service team

Courtney: It’s incredibly powerful that you have built those relationships for visibility but also collaboration. One of the things we’re all thinking about as we move into this remote world is how we maintain those relationships when we’re remote and distributed. That’s something that Zapier – which is 100% remote and distributed – has obviously spent quite a bit of time thinking about. What are some of those practices that you’re implementing to help your team keep sharing best practices as a remote support team?

Pam: Sharing best practices is the key to having a good remote team. For anybody who’s just going to a remote model now, based on all the changes that we’ve seen happening, I would make this a number-one priority. Set other priorities down for it.

We definitely live in Slack. When I think about all of the tickets coming in to the team and the diverse set of questions our customers are asking us, we have a channel called #support in Slack where anybody can go in and ask a question, and at all times those questions get answered. It’s almost like you’re just sitting in a room with people and talking across the cube, so that’s been a huge thing for us.

We’re also looking into different tech and a different solution for our knowledge management that we know even ourselves that we need to improve. We implemented a new playbook this year, but we also want to make sure we’re going past the internal documentation and able to look at previous tickets or comments on the community or the help docs on the website. It’s about streamlining the place I need to go to look for those things, so that it’s aggregate. It’s going to bring me all those sources of information.

It’s not even necessarily sharing best practices. It’s about creating an environment where the team feels connected and there’s camaraderie. A lot of that was in place even when I got here. We use Slack as a virtual water cooler. We have fun channels there. We talked about hobbies and different interests. Other things you do to stay connected are pair buddies. Each week, employees are randomly paired for a Zoom call that could be on opposite ends of the functional spectrum within the company, and that helps us build camaraderie too. So it’s best practices, but then it’s also making sure people are humanly connected in regions that may not necessarily be specific to supporting and helping customers.

Courtney: One of the things that you’ve pointed out is that excellent customer support requires a team that’s motivated, that feels connected and that is really excited to help customers. On that front, could you tell us a little bit about your five points of employee motivation?

Pam: The first one that was attractive when I was starting here was all-hands support. Knowing that every person in the company, in one way or another, spends a couple hours every week interacting with our customers. Whether it’s in our queue, riding along on chats we’re having or sitting in on phone calls we’re having with customers, that’s hugely motivating for support team, because it means the entire company understands what the support team’s work looks like, and it helps them make decisions that are best for customers. It’s a different perspective that not a lot of the companies have if they’re not doing something like all-hands support.

Employee empowerment is another big piece of it. Making sure they feel like they can make the calls when they need to in real time and that they’re not micromanaged or that they have to escalate something all the time. Transparency and collaborative decision making have been huge wins for this team. Then in addition to that, we’re really focused heavily on diversity and inclusion, which is always to the betterment of an organization. Then the final piece is also having a strong online connection as a remote team.

Courtney: One of the other points you made about employee motivation was also employee empowerment. I know you have, at Zapier, a policy of not escalating to a manager when a customer is upset. Different support teams have different philosophies here, so how did you arrive at this balance between giving your customer champions the right support internally through escalations and then also giving the customer who’s clearly frustrated the response they need?

Pam: The thing I have to say is that balance was established way before I got here, but it was always completely aligned with my philosophy. It’s something I’ve always agreed with and pushed for. And don’t get me wrong: things will get escalated, but when they do – either by the customer or internally – the team responds as much as possible. The customer champion actually responds, rather than their manager or anyone in leadership. It actually builds in a native accountability to that sense of empowerment, so it’s really important. I’d make recommendations about approaches to this in days when I was consulting and trying to really advocate for that type of empowerment with the clients I had.

If I think about teams that need to adjust to this model, I always recommend empowering the team first. Put a couple of guidelines in that are going to be really important, with the understanding that the team is now empowered and they’re going to make calls that you, as a leader, don’t agree with. That’s going to happen. But when it happens, you can have a dialogue about it. You can get their perspective. You can share your perspective, and based on the outcome of that, use it as guidance going forward. You’re always going to have to stay open to adjusting to that guidance and always to be willing to listen to the team and flex and change where needed.

Courtney: For teams that are thinking about taking this approach for the first time – where they haven’t quite found that balance that you have – what’s some advice you would give them for taking a similar approach?

Pam: Go big the first time out. What would the reverse of that be? The example I gave is to empower the team to make these decisions. Let’s take refunds as an example of that. Often, customers are asking for credits. They’re asking for refunds, and my recommendation would be to empower the team to agree to those refunds or credits – without needing to escalate – at a bigger dollar sum than what you’re comfortable with. Go big. Give the team empowerment. You’re going to watch, and they’ll probably give more money away than you’re comfortable with. If you feel like you need to dial it back, you’ll have specific examples you can point to for the team to explain why a particular decision someone made isn’t good or why you don’t agree with it. You can get their input and understand why they made that decision.

From there, start to dial it back, and just get to an agreement of a level that works instead of trying to say: ”This week, you’re empowered to give a refund up to $100. That didn’t go so bad. Maybe we’ll go to $150.” Because the argument to make that change is very difficult. You really want to make it one time and dial it back in. Hopefully, you don’t have a team that all of a sudden starts giving away the farm. Because what I found is that, when you give them that empowerment, there is a line of accountability that they hold, and they make really good decisions. I asked the team to treat it like it’s their own business. How much money do they want to spend? I also think that having transparency around it and communication are key. What are the financial implications? Having that type of transparency will help those conversations go really well, too.

Courtney: Thanks for sharing that, Pam. It’s really inspiring to see how you’re living that empowerment not just as a philosophy and as a point of motivation, but really all the way down to how your customer champions are empowered to respond to customer queries to find the right solution and to understand what the impact will be on the business. As we head into the final few moments here together, where can our listeners go to keep up with you and Zapier?

Pam: I’m not really that active on social media right now, so LinkedIn is probably the best place for me. For Zapier, we’re on Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram with the handle @Zapier.

Courtney: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Pam, for taking the time to join us today. I certainly learned a lot, and I think our listeners will as well.

Pam: Thanks for having me. It’s been really fun.