How CSMs can benefit from predictive support signals
In this longer edition of Ask Max, Max uses his experience as a CSM to show all the ways the role can benefit from predictive support signals and SupportLogic workflows.
What kind of value can customer success get from the signals that are seen in
support?
And this is obviously given that support talks to your customers more than
anyone else at your organization.
As a result, there's a wealth of information in those interactions.
And the worst thing that can happen to a CSM is to walk into a conversation
with a customer
completely blindsided about the fact that the world is already on fire and not
knowing about it.
And depending on how closely your CSM teams work with your support teams, this
can absolutely happen.
At SupportLogic, obviously, given that this is our whole value proposition,
I work very, very closely with my support team.
However, even then, the last thing I want to do is spend all my time reading
through support tickets.
And supportLogic very much highlights the ones that are important to me for my
book of business
so that I can stay on top of it.
So that's a little bit of a high level of what we're going to talk about and
look at today.
But to give a slight bit more about myself, I've been a CSM for...
[laughs]
Right, Stephen.
Yeah, I've been a CSM for the last, gosh, about eight years now, seven or eight
years.
And I've been working in the support technology space at the different
organizations and companies
I've worked at for about 10 years.
So this stuff is very near and dear to my heart.
So with that in mind, let me...
I'll go ahead and share out my screen and talk a little bit about what we do,
what SupportLogic does and why it's so valuable.
So for those who don't know, and I think most folks have a little bit of an
idea if you had
the pleasure of coming to our booth last week, unless you were playing Space
Invaders and Dig Dug
the whole time, which was certainly an option.
SupportLogic is very much a natural language processing and ML driven, in a
sense, analyzer
of all of your support cases, right?
Reads them end to end.
We're talking every single comment, every single internal note, all the
communications
and reading that and extracting voice of the customer from it.
So distinct signals that we might detect on cases.
And as I mentioned, this is super critical for the simple reason that
Support talks to your customers more than anyone else.
So before I jump into some very specific use cases for customer success,
it's super... it's important to note that some of the types of signals that we
're looking at,
that we're categorizing across your customer conversations, range from very
procedural language
that customers might use, which are things like what you're seeing here.
And let me... maybe I can... I wonder if I can zoom a little bit more here so
we can...
Yeah, okay, there we go.
So very procedural language, something like here, you'll see this is a signal
we categorize as
critical issue.
Customers saying that they have a serious issue, maybe their system is down,
something like that, things like an escalation request when they're explicitly
asking for an
escalation, follow-up requests, they're asking for updates again and again, or
just expressing urgency.
As well as a number of others, right?
We have another one, production issue, and also call requests is a common one
that we see as well.
And the long and short of it is that some of these signals can be super
valuable even to me as a
CSM. And while I'm not going to spend all this time necessarily in this
platform going through
the cases one by one, there are situations where I want to be alerted.
And when I'm alerted, it can draw me into here.
And we'll touch on that a little bit more in a moment.
But so these are some of those procedural language type signals.
I call them procedural language because they're not emotional language.
But your customers express emotional language in support cases as well.
And so we categorize those slightly differently, right?
Baseline negative sentiment, which is kind of a catch-all for relatively
standard language
of a customer saying that they're upset or worried or things of that nature.
Frustration, right?
It's also pretty self-explanatory, but frustration actually correlates
extremely closely with
very, very poor CSAT scores.
More so than any other negative signal that we detect, if one of your customers
is getting
frustrated in their engagement with support, that will typically start us on
the path towards
an escalation, an escalation that will make its way often back to me through it
being surfaced
to say an exec sponsor that I work with at one of my customers.
It's happened on more than one occasion for me.
Though it happens less now that I'm leveraging support logic in this capacity.
So the number of signals there, right?
We look for profanity, right?
We look for impatience, confusion, super valuable.
Confusion is interesting because it's valuable not just, you know, it's
valuable in a number of ways,
right?
Perhaps your customer is confused about how to use your product in certain ways
This creates the opportunity to look at enablement for your customers, which is
definitely
an opportunity, it's a monetization opportunity potentially, or it's simply an
opportunity to
drive more adoption.
And more adoption typically leads to more growth and potentially expansion,
creates
revenue opportunities.
So these signals can be really leveraged in a number of ways to assist in
making these
decisions and understanding these things.
Okay, so that's a very kind of, that's kind of the 20,000 foot view, I would
say, of
support logic, signal extraction, and the individual signals as well that we
look for in our analysis.
So let's take it a step further to think in terms of how do I use this day to
day, right?
I don't need another UI, honestly, to live in.
I live in a lot of UIs already, right?
So the beauty of what support logic does is it allows me to set up alerts to
alert me in some
of these scenarios via my messaging channel of choice.
That support logic we use Slack for this purpose, right?
So you can be very customized in the types of alerts that you build.
There are scenarios here that I absolutely want to be notified.
So if I jump over to say our alerting page, I can configure alerts when my
specific book of business
and cases associated with those customers within my book of business are
showing that the customer
is, are showing negative sentiment from the customer or an escalation being
predicted.
I absolutely, literally need to know these things before I'm getting on a call
with one of my
customers. And so I have some of these alerts set up.
And I'll actually show you a little bit of what some of these look like within
Slack.
And this is obviously, it's not just available in Slack, it's available in MS
teams as well.
And let me, I'm going to switch my share real quickly here.
Here's a few examples of the types of alerts that I can get, right?
So here's a really interesting one. Here's a case for an, can I zoom again here
Yeah, there we go.
Right. So here's an example of a case for, let's say a customer, this Kansas
City Chiefs,
it's a football team obviously, not one of my real customers.
But you'll see here, it's telling me that a case from this customer is likely
to escalate.
And it highlights some of the key contributing factors to that, so that I know
what's going on,
right? It actually is showing me that the account health is bad. And I'll talk
a little bit more
about what that means and how support logic calculates that momentarily. But
the most important
thing to keep in mind is that when we're talking about support signals, account
health is really
the support health of a customer. Super critical, because, you know, as I
mentioned,
our support team talks to our customers more than anyone else.
We have these sentiment scores and attention scores, sentiment scored denoting
how customers
are really feeling about a case, and a neutral sentiment scores about 70. So as
it's trending
down below that, you'll see we color coded as yellow. Yellow isn't, you know,
the worst thing
just yet. But once if it continues down below about 30, it's going to get into
the red, right?
And that usually means that we've detected a number of those negative sentiment
type signals
on it. And then the needs of the attention score is based heavily on those
procedural signals that
I was talking about, but also based on like, is my team responding to this
customer?
So this is just one example of an alert, right? And you can configure these
alerts, obviously. I
don't want to be notified for every single customer of support logic, right? I
need to just be notified
for my book of business. I manage about 14 accounts here at support logic. And
so I can't be reading
all the cases for those accounts. And not only do I not have time for that, it
's not a good use
of my time. I'm a CSM, which means that my activities really need to be those
of action, right? I have
outcomes that I'm trying to make sure that customers achieve. And but on more
than one occasion,
I've worked with a customer over my career. And because of how many support
issues are open,
they don't want to talk about outcomes. They just want their problems fixed,
their problems resolved.
So, okay, so as mentioned, here's an example, right? You'll see some other
alerts here, right?
This one is specifically for a high needs attention score suggesting that this
case needs,
you know, really does need attention. I can always click for additional details
there.
But I think the key thing here, once again, showing me account health shows me
the case owner,
right? Because that can be important because if one of my key stakeholders has
gotten involved
in this case or has even opened a case, I've actually had situations where I've
seen an executive
sponsor of mine open a case, right? And I can have alerts configured
specifically when those
individuals open cases. And I've done that before so that I know. So another
great way for me to
stay apprised of what's going on in support without actually looking at the
tickets, right? I can
just see them, be highlighted, have them highlighted to me from here in the
learning capacity. And if
I really want to know more beyond that, I do have the option to click one of
these and actually go
directly into the case and support logic and see the details. I think actually,
if I were to jump
back here and this is going to take me back into support logic where I can
actually see the details
of the case. Ryan, can you confirm? Are we looking at support logic? And now
did we shift from Slack
to support logic? Yes. Yeah. You're on the Detroit Lions case. Awesome. So this
is just a little bit
of what's possible, right? But I think one of the key things we mentioned,
right, was that I mentioned
just a second ago was account health and how account health is calculated. So
we look at the
support experience as a whole and we're able to generate this support call it
account health, call
it support health score, right, which I think is a little bit more accurate.
That gives me an idea
of the customer's current experience and support. It's more than just the case
sentiment, which on
this particular customer we can see is trending down, has trended down across
their cases over the
last 30 days and it's actually pretty low. 33 is not great, right? But it also
tells me how many
escalations has my customer had opened recently, right? What's their typical
case age? And is that
going getting better? Is it getting worse? How many tickets does my customer
have opened that has
have defects tied to them? Engineering issues tied to them, because that's a
totally different
conversation, right? My customers opening a lot of like cases, asking how to
questions, that's great.
They're engaged, right? But if they're opening a lot of cases that have defects
tied to them,
that's really problematic, right? It means that maybe our engineering team is
not addressing issues
in a timely fashion, not solving for bugs, right? The last thing I want to do
is have a
conversation with my key stakeholders where they're basically telling me, you
know, your product
just doesn't work, right? That's really problematic to me. So a lot of great
insights here that roll
up into this calculation of this account health score and give me that snapshot
that I need.
Also, you know how I also use this to use this for QBRs and I hate the term QBR
, right? Support
logic we typically refer to them as outcome reviews, right? Because the CSM's
job is about
helping a customer achieve their outcomes. But I like to include as a slide in
my presentations
to customers on those reviews, I like to include what I know to be their
support experience with
support logic. I like to validate that with them, right? And being able to do
that with raw,
with like actual data, conclusive data that I can share with them can be super
valuable, right?
And it also allows me not just to, right, ideally, I'm presenting a very
positive health score
with positive results, you know, and positive outcomes that the customers are
having. But
being able to keep track of this and be alerted on it allows me to also pro
actively escalate
situations, right? Allows me to reach out to a customer proactively reach out
to one of my
exec sponsors, which I have done before based on these details, just to tell
them that I know
that there's a serious problem. I'm ensuring that all hands are on deck at
support logic,
working to address this problem. And I can often do this. And in this actual
scenario,
I let my exec sponsor know this before his team let him let him know this,
right? And you could
look at it two ways. Maybe I don't want it to. Maybe I don't want to. Maybe
maybe the situation
would have gotten resolved before he's before the exec sponsor found out about
it. But I'd
rather be proactive. Let them know that we're on top of it, that we take their
business seriously.
So this is I went on kind of a lengthy, lengthy monologue there. But I think
that gives a good
picture of what we do of what we do, not just at a high level, but at a kind of
a more detailed
level, right? Sentiments, alerting, account health, actionable information that
can be passed to a
CSM via Slack, via MS Teams, via email, via any number of other channels, so
that I can very much
take an action based on this information to ensure that my key customers are in
a good spot, right?
Because maybe a renewal is coming up. Maybe I'm working an expansion
opportunity, all these things.
Let me stop there. That was extensive.
Max, that was awesome. Thank you for that tour and sharing these things. We've
got a couple
questions in the chat here. Jordan's got two questions for you. I know Jordan.
Yeah. Jourdan's a customer of ours. That way is the customer of ours and Jordan
, nice to see you.
Absolutely. Jordan, one of the things we were showing and talking about at
Pulse last week
is our gain site integration. We do have a gain site integration that injects
certain of these
signals directly into gain site, into the timeline, so that calls to action can
be created,
right? That account health can be shown in gain site. We're absolutely have
that capability
right now. I think I chatted with your, I don't want to say your boss, but I
think your boss,
Sean, at gain site about this at the Pulse Conference last week about this
specifically,
right? And some of these other key things.
So, yeah, super valuable to your other question, Jordan, about the account
health score alerts.
Still working explicitly on those, right? Expect to have that come together
this quarter fully.
So, yeah, thanks Max. You're right. We have some flexibility with that timeline
custom object. There's different ways that these alerts, these sentiment
signals can come in a
gain site. So, that's a really cool thing that we're doing. It doesn't look
like we have any other
questions going on in the chat. Let me touch on one other thing, right? I know
that not everybody,
and even not everybody at Pulse when we were there last week actually uses gain
site, right? There's
a number of other CS platforms that companies use to tango the tally. There's a
lot, there's a
lot of them, right? I think it's super important to note, while we are working
towards direct
integrations with some of those, I think Tatango is the next one on the list.
But our CS integrations,
our gain site integration, and all these others, they're built off of our
events API,
which is our alerting API. And so, technically, right, and that's an external
facing API that can
be used to generate all of these signals that we're putting into, say, gain
site, for example.
So, there's absolutely the opportunity to, even before these direct integ
rations have been built,
to leverage those and push them into other platforms. I see, Emma, I see a
question from you,
what's the typical timeline for implementation for support logic, right?
And yet, so while it does depend somewhat on the complexity of your CRM
instance,
we can typically do it in 30 to 45 days, right? 30 days, assuming it's not
super complex.
And every CRM instance, every ticketing system is a little bit different, right
Every company I've worked for, like some of them, they have a legacy Salesforce
instance
that's more than 10 years old, that's massively complex. And some, it's a lot,
it's a bit newer, and they're hygiene's a bit better. But 30 to 45 days is what
I would typically
quote to be safe. Susan, good question. Thanks for the question about HubSpot.
Yeah, absolutely, right? So, our underlying architecture is Snowflake, is Snow
flake DP,
Snowflake is a Snowflake database, right? So, case data and case schemas, while
they're a little
different across distinct, across different ticketing systems, they're also
very, very similar. So,
as long as that data can be ingested via either ETL process or any connector
that you use,
which basically means any ticketing system, from any ticketing system,
we can get it into our Snowflake, and then we can map that data to surface
within our UI so that
it can be analyzed by our ML and our NLP to leverage some of these alerts in
this account
health. So, yes, absolutely. Our underlying architecture, it's CRM and ticket
ing system
agnostic. We can work with anything. Yeah, you're very welcome.
We covered so much already in some great questions. Let me show you another
thing, though.
Super valuable thing that I do use in support logic is I have a, basically,
I build a cohort of customers, right? So, this is our My Customers page. It
allows me to see a quick
snapshot of all of my accounts and their current support experience, allows me
to see the account
health, attention and sentiment scores, how many cases do they have open, like
how many escalations
do they have open, just gives me a quick glance at what's going on, right? What
's the distribution
of some of these, right? What's the age of them? This is super valuable just
for me to quickly check,
and I might do this. I don't do this every day, right? But I'll absolutely
check within the platform
and look at this view for my accounts once a week, right? The rest of the time,
I'm often relying on
the alerts to tell me when I need to either pop into our platform and take a
look or just to keep
me apprised of what's going on. And that's happening throughout the week on a
daily basis, right?
But you can configure your alerts to be really targeted. Obviously, if you're a
digital CSM,
right, and you manage 100 accounts or 150 accounts, you don't want to be
getting alerts for all of
those on a daily basis, right? So, you can configure those alerts for very
specific conditions. Maybe
you have some, maybe you have digital CS accounts that are coming up for
renewal, or that you're,
you know, working opportunities on or anything of that nature. The alerts allow
you to be very
focused and just be alerted in situations that matter.
Awesome. Any other questions?
Yeah, if we don't have any more questions, Max, thank you for this amazing tour
. It looks like
Steven's got a question on managing you. Yes, yes, yes, Steven, our product is
built from,
so the support product, the support logic product was built for managers. So,
this is
absolutely intended. These are intended as manager views, but what you can do
is if you're looking
to see a much, in a sense, a higher level view, right, I'm looking at
individual accounts here,
but because I create cohorts, right, if I'm, you know, if I'm a director of CS
or a VP of CS and I
want to see more of a roll-up, I can absolutely do that, right? You see, I
expanded this, for example,
but I could roll it up in this way and just have, okay, here's my, here's my AP
AC, here's my APAC
customers. Here's my, here's my Amia customers, here's my US customers, right?
Or here's my
customers that are using this particular product, right? You can build these
cohorts in any,
in any capacity that you like. And then you can also, obviously, we have
extensive analytics within,
within our product. Very much geared towards geared more towards support, but
also allowing you
to say, look, for example, right? Maybe I have, maybe across the different
products that my company
offers. There's been a spike, for example, in number of cases associated with
that. And like,
it could happen if my, if we had like a release or something, and I can search
for those types of
insights within, within support logic, but also be alerted, right? I didn't
talk about keyword
alerts, but you can absolutely create keyword alerts based on, say, your
competitor names,
right? So if your cohort of accounts, or, or any of your customers, your top
revenue customers,
or ever talking about a competitor in support, you can absolutely be alert in
that scenario as well.
Max, can you show Steven real quick that, that agent view at the top? He's in
customer support,
actually. And I think that view is powerful. Yeah. This one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So Steven, this is the,
this is the my agents view. And what I do with this is I can create a full
entry for my team,
but also for individual agents. And you'll see it's a heat map. And it's
basically looking at my
cases grouped by status, but also grouped by age, also grouped by an inactivity
. So I can know of
my team members, I can know which cases have actually been inactive, meaning no
inbound or
outbound communication for the, you know, for, for in this scenario, greater
than seven days.
And you see these are also color coded by the sentiment. So the ones that are
red, not only
of these cases been inactive, but the customer is not happy. And stale cases
are the bane of any
support teams existence, right? They clog up your backlog, make it, make it
seem like your,
your agents and engineers are like, have more, have less bandwidth than they
actually do.
So there's a ton of great insights that you can derive from that to use in a
tactical way as well.