S2E6: How to Spark Collaboration for Exceptional Support Teams, Part One
In this episode of "15 Minutes with Judi," Chris Warticki, an industry veteran in customer support, shares insights from his extensive career, including his time at Oracle. He discusses the importance of treating customer success as a collective responsibility across all departments, the need for collaboration, and strategies for building motivated teams. Chris emphasizes that understanding individual strengths and celebrating both transactional and strategic victories are key to enhancing customer experience and fostering a positive work culture.
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- Hello everyone, welcome to "15 Minutes with Judy."
Today I'm joined by Chris Warticke.
Chris Warticke is an executive in the support industry
and we've known each other for many years.
Chris, I think you had what, 20 plus years at Oracle,
which is where you and I first met.
Then you spent five close to six years at Epicore, right?
Always in the support industry, the success industry,
always being an evangelist for support.
And that's one area where you and I definitely connected
is support did not need to be and should not be an afterthought.
But also most importantly, treat the people right
and the people will take great care of our customers,
which is so important.
So I wanna talk about that for a moment
with you specifically Chris.
I think you had the title at Oracle,
customer support evangelist, if I'm not mistaken.
Am I doing that right?
- Yes.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
So to me and evangelist, we all get kind of that picture
in our head of what that means,
but you were all about the wow moments, right?
Tell me what you would do in situations
to create wow moments for customers
and why did customers remember you
and why did they ask for you in person?
Tell me about that.
- Yeah, so my career at Oracle,
first of all, started out as a leader in technology
and working with their support teams in our call center.
And it evolved in customer facing roles
that you and I were close to.
And then even more so at the latter end of my career,
just traveling the world, speaking with customers,
sharing with them really the value of the support investment
that customers were making.
And a lot of customers don't really get a full understanding
or complete picture of that investment,
during the presale demo, implementation,
even post go live type of activities that take place today.
And we today look at the whole process of onboarding.
And I would say in the infancy of this role
as an evangelist years ago, it was almost like post go live
onboarding, evangelization was post go live onboarding.
And so these aha moments that customers had
were like, oh my goodness, I had no idea,
I had access to all of these resources
and even more so I call them assets.
What are the assets in the customer inventory
that you have access to that you've already paid for?
I'm not here to sell you something
that you haven't already purchased.
And that too created a big wow factor
because they're like, oh, you're not here to,
how much is this gonna cost me?
I'm like, you've already paid for it.
So those types of aha moments were really fantastic to have
because I could come in there,
whether it was a user group or an individual customer
or engagement and share with them, as I mentioned,
a whole cafeteria style menu of saying,
here's what you bought.
And if they wanted something extra,
certainly there might have been a cost beyond that.
But most importantly, it was about consuming that value.
And first of all, understanding what that value was.
- Awesome.
So Chris, you and I have done this dance together before.
There's a lot of people touching the customer a lot.
And I think we set ourselves up for some,
I'm gonna call it turf war, but you know what I mean.
The customer's mine, no, it's mine, no, it's mine.
What are you doing in the customer space
while I'm in there, things like that?
What are some of the tips and tricks as you navigated this
for all of the people touching the customer?
How did you build collaborative teams?
How did you make it seem that I'm here to help?
I'm not here to hurt, because truthfully,
support and when we were at Oracle together,
service delivery managers,
we had a lot of different titles for it at the time.
But you're here to do something,
maybe it's not what I want you to do,
says the sales team, et cetera, et cetera.
How did you build these teams effectively, Chris?
- Yeah, let me start by just sharing with the audience
that I think lines of business
or whether we call them silos are important.
They actually provide direction,
they provide focus, and more importantly,
those line of business leaders
have the direction for those teams.
Where I have found it to be effective
as a customer success leader
or a customer experience leader,
is that we are the horizontal line
that permeates all of these vertical silos
and bringing them together.
So the one thing that I found effective is
to understand each part of what those business units are doing.
Like, how are they touching the customer?
And by the way, have they ever taken that,
have they ever walked shoulder to shoulder
in understanding what that customer experience
or journey really is?
And the answer is no.
It's kind of like, yeah, we'll tell you what it's gonna be
and don't ask us what you'd like it to be, right?
The other aspect behind that is then engaging that line
of business and saying, hey, where do you see
that things could be improved?
Because they already know where the bodies are buried
and where the stench is coming from.
And I ask them not to point the fingers
but actually look internally at themselves and say,
where in your line of business are the friction points?
And then when those are identified,
they're very, very apt to engage and say,
we can make, we're part of the solution.
And so it's actually bringing the horse to water
per verbally and saying, let's have this discussion.
This isn't gonna be a territory match.
I'm a customer success leader in helping you
really uncover and discover where we can make things better.
And then collaboratively along the way,
yeah, then we can let look externally.
How does a handoff or a transfer of information
take place from one line of business
to the next in that customer journey?
- Chris, something else that is going on, right?
25 years of experience you've had more than that
in the industry.
Customer experience means a lot of things
to a lot of different people.
What shifts are you seeing right now
that either hit your radar, surprise you, delight you?
What do you think going on in the industry
that makes you pause?
- Yeah, so this is a really interesting question.
And as you know me and your audience
will hear and by answer this, I'm pretty provocative.
25 years, nothing's changed.
We're still chasing the same ghosts.
We're still making the same mistakes.
We're still after customer satisfaction
or escalation reduction.
Or what's the KPI or metric of the day?
What's the bumper sticker of the week?
And why are we doing that?
Because we lack ownership and accountability
within the organization.
And we have created success organizations,
whether we call them service delivery managers in the past
or customer success managers today,
it becomes this dump and run team of,
oh, there's a problem, there's a process,
there's a bad customer experience, give it to the CSMs,
let them fix it, right?
That's where I see the big shift in needing,
that the big shift needs to take place
is that customer success is everybody's job.
And I've said this before, it's one of my mantras.
Take your title, whatever it is, today,
put a comma after it and write customer success.
And it'll change the way you view your job.
It's not just some team, not one person, not one title,
it's everybody's job.
That's really what I, over 25 years,
we should be doing things extremely far more advanced
and better.
And so it's not the next fidget or widget,
it's the foundations of responsibility and accountability.
- Yeah.
So people are welcome to email you or LinkedIn message you,
I assume, given that provocative answer there, huh?
- Yes, absolutely, 100%.
Have me come in and then I'll even dissect
the difference for you and everybody else.
What's the difference between customer service,
customer satisfaction, customer success,
and customer experience?
Because the industry has done a huge disservice
in co-mingling those terms and using them interchangeably.
They should be. - I agree with you,
100% on that for sure.
So I wanna go to team building for a bit, Chris.
We had the opportunity, as I've mentioned a couple times
to work together on a team.
And I still look at that team fondly,
even though it's been decades ago,
it stays in my head, what we had built there
and who was part of that team.
And we just were communicating a couple of weeks ago
about a few members and what they were up to in the world.
What do you think some of the tips and tricks
in this industry?
So we've already talked, we have our swim lanes,
people need to kind of stay in the lane.
But building a team who is running up against customers
every day, all day, who's trying to help,
who's trying to keep their spirits up,
because we know if our spirits are down, it oozes out.
Given the kind of personalities that we have,
who are so focused on customers, right?
Customer loyalty, customer retention,
customer satisfaction, customer delight, all those words.
What are some of the tips and tricks
that you've abused over the years to keep your team happy,
to keep them motivated, and frankly, just to build solid teams?
Yeah.
I'll go into some specifics.
I've used different tools in my development career.
And one of the things I do right off the bat for my team
and for any new employee on the team
is I use a Strengths Finder by Clifton.
And that way we understand people's strengths.
Everybody presents what their core five strengths are.
We share them.
And invariably, what's so amazing is that there's always
two people on the team that share at least one
of the same strengths together.
And then invariably, one person on the team
has a core strength that nobody else has.
And it's just so-- or eye opening.
And you learn communication styles.
And that's one thing from just an understanding
of an individual strengths perspective.
The other thing is just meeting frequently.
Meet frequently, meet often, get online.
We have the technology.
You don't have to talk shop.
You can go ahead and play Kahoot Trivia on Fridays.
You can go ahead and have college game day t-shirt
or whatever professional sports team or hobby team
that you want.
Bring camaraderie into the team.
And then most importantly, I think
from a customer success perspective,
moving from transactional victories
to strategic victories is important.
And here's what I mean by that.
Transactionally, we can-- and this will actually
tell you how you operate.
Are you reacting to escalations and tasks and billing
and these little ankle-biter things
to just get a win on the board every day?
Or are you really helping a customer achieve
their business goals?
And when you do, they're going to be big.
And then you celebrate them as a team.
You celebrate the victory in that in a very large and unique way.
And what that looks like is just putting that out
in the company newsletter, sharing that
on whatever internal Slack channel or teams chatroom
to everybody and really evangelize.
Like this is customer success.
We make a big-- another mistake.
The CSM acronym is that C is no longer being called customer.
It's about company success.
And we internalize, how do we make our company successful?
Not so much our customers anymore.
Right?
So for me, team building is important in celebrating
victories, meeting together and understanding
what people's strengths are.
Absolutely.
What's your strength?
Woo is one of my core strengths.
And Woo stands for winning others over.
Got it.
But communication is-- communication's another core one.
Yes, indeed it is.
So what if you could have one superpower, Chris?
What would it be?
To be able to read people's minds would be one.
But more importantly, I'll use a geeky.
I'll star wars out on you and just say, just being
able to do the Jedi Mind Trick and say,
when a customer might be upset or they might share with you
a frustration, you're not frustrated.
This wasn't a mistake.
And they'd be like, oh, yeah, you're right.
There wasn't a mistake.
Almost.
What is it meant in black with the pen?
With the pen.
The pen raises things, right?
Yeah.
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