Introduction

We're on the second show of the Voice of Customer Support.

Just 3 questions and answers to CS leaders, to keep it short.

To learn from the leaders who have been there, done that, to understand what things they have done in past, what they're doing currently, or what challenges they're facing, and how they foresee the future the industry going direction.

So here's is the three questions for today's speaker. We have Ethan Walfish from Linksquare, so he's been in customer support and tech industry for over a decade. He has been in experienced in different roles of CS.

Summary transcript of Question & Answers

Harish --

Welcome today. We have Ethan walfish, so for the voice of customer support, Ethan has been in tech industry, customer support land for more than a decade, and been known to Ethan in support, driven channel and also through know the conference. So had a very good conversation with him. So today, we can now ask Ethan three questions before that, a small intro from Ethan himself.

Ethan --
I'm Ethan walfish. I have been in tech, you know, varying in sort of roles from, you know, support through sales engineering, briefly through implementation, customer success, and now settling back into support leadership.
I've been here at Link Squares for a little bit over a year and a half, and I'm currently basically leading our support efforts here, which has been a lot of fun as a lot of things happening and a lot of change over the last year.

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Full Interview

Loom Video - Voice of Customer Support Ethan

Harish --

First one is, what's one thing which is common way, or, you know, a noteworthy things which you'd like to share? So the way you handle customers, or the way you put up some type of tool or process. So anything you'd like to share after that, we'll go with the present, which is, hey, what's the daily challenges? And lastly, something about the future. So the first question, yes, something you would like to share with the audience on your noteworthy experience, or something you have done in past, which has worked

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Ethan --

I think, you know, I looked at this prompt and I thought about it for a little bit, and for me, one of the things that we can do is be appreciative of the customers that take the time to reach out, particularly when they're reporting bugs. So it's something that, you know, my team here that we've sent really nice notes back to customers when you know they have taken the time to report bugs and thanked them for taking that time to report it, because it's something that we don't always know is happening until someone actually tells us that something is happening, something is going wrong.

At, you know, a previous company over at Alice, one of the things I loved there was that we actually had gifting budget, so we would send Alice gifts sometimes to customers for sending in bug reports to us, which was kind of a fun way to actually thank a customer. And people always really appreciated it, and it incentivizes customers to continue to let us know when things are broken so we can fix it for them and for all of our customers. So I think that's something uncommon to really be thankful for bug reports where I think a lot of people dislike them, I think that they're really a gift when they when they come through to us.

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Harish --

That makes sense. Ethan, I mean, only when there is something either painful or something people really care about, they talk to the support team or raise bucks, it's a way to really form a relation. Then, hey, look, there's one more things on plate to just take it out. So that's a good way, or the angle to see. So honestly, like I come from a developer diagram, right? So, but yet another thing on plate, but putting a lens of customer support. Now, I guess this one opportunity to learn so many things, hey, why it happened, how it happened, what were you doing people to get into this, and what will you do after fixing?
So this ton of information, like qualitative we can get and then improve, then a mere like, code fix or something, configuration change type of thing. So, yeah, definitely. I think that is something very important for the whole company as such, not just the customer support. Makes sense? Ethan, so the next question is, no, yeah, leading the customer support efforts at Link Squares. So general, what's the day to day challenges we are seeing at this present environment, like with respect to customers to link team, just in general.

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Ethan --

At Link Squares right now, our primary customers are lawyers, and I think there's shades of this problem at most of the organizations that I've worked at, but what we really want to do is do our best to speak the language and make the best recommendations that we can for our customers. But we're software professionals, right? We're not lawyers, so one of the things that's difficult for us right now is figuring out what are the best workflows that we can do when we're trying to advise our customers on how to use our software, we have to make sure that we understand how our software fits into their workflows and into a complex variety of workflows, right?
You know, we were working on a Salesforce issue earlier, I think, yesterday, right? And one of things that I don't think we have a solid understanding of at this point in time is how that customer actually intends to use our product within their Salesforce instance in such a way that we can make prescriptive recommendations for them to use our product in a way that might work better for them, right?

They're having some trouble right now, and so how do we make sure that we understand our customers use cases and workflows well enough that we can make those types of prescriptive recommendations that are going to allow them to get more value from our platform than they might be getting today? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges, because it's hard to ramp up on these very specific areas of you know, business that maybe we're not experts in, but we are just software professionals providing that technology, supporting that technology.

Harish --

Ethan, maybe a follow up question, since you mentioned so, because it's a very important one, right? Like prescriptive, because how to think about the prescriptive nature of support? Because always I, as our company, myself, right? As doing we are also looking how to improve, because many times. Is it the domain knowledge as a support professional we had to have, or some technology, or end to end workflow?

How would your team go about being in that nature? Because that's the best way.
What we think is the best way to do the support something, know about it, prescribe and then solve, then a reactive

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Ethan --

I think that part of that prescriptive way is to understand what customers are doing and have to fill in the blanks from their workflows when they reach out to you, right? So I think about a customer reaches out and says, like, Hey, I'm having trouble doing X, right. And the question that you want to train your team to think about is like, Okay, why are they actually doing X, right? Why are they actually doing that thing and then understanding within, like, typical workflows, typical use cases. Okay, if you're trying to do this, you might actually want to do this instead, because I think you're not going to run into that problem. And so, you know, as for us, right, we have to understand those legal workflows.

So if a customer says, Hey, like, I'm trying to tag all of my agreements with this, this, this value, and we say, like, Okay, well, why are you trying to tag those agreements? Is there a better way for you to do this? Maybe it's because we might guess and we could validate that they're trying to create a permission model. Who might say, Oh, what if you used this other permission model within our system? That might be a little bit easier for you to scale and automate without having to go in and manually tag these agreements on a regular basis, right?
So giving kind of a more concrete example for our platform, but it does require that sort of support person to think about like, Okay, why are they doing this? Why are they having a hard time with it? Because it's really easy to say, Okay, you asked me how to do this thing, and here's the information about how to do that thing.
Wash my hands. I'm all done. That's the support case. But that's not really the ideal experience that we want to provide when we think about wanting to continue to provide more value for our customers,

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Harish --

I mean starting with why, understanding, and then that way you can build the full way of like the doctors or any like ask around it no symptoms. I mean, glad to know Link Square, you are spearheading that efforts, and honestly, I think many of the teams have to get to that looks like that is the overall best way to deliver experience and also solve in a long term.

So, yeah, I think the last question we are coming to is Ethan. A lot of things are changing. They always be changing. So new things, which is in the industry for last and this year, is AI, or also their talks about a personalized experience for every case. So that is one or the bots. So how are you thinking in the, say, next 10 years, how the support would evolve, and also the customer experience, right? Hey, their demands changes, and the way they interact changes. So how are you looking next, 10 years into the future and the customer support?

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Ethan --

I think AI is certainly going to have a huge impact on how we handle support, right? You know, a lot of these generative, you know, bots, right, have reached a point where they can answer quite a few questions. And so I think that you know a number of things are going to happen. A lot of the tier one support that we see today, password resets, where's my package, permission, model changes, simple use cases within our products, right? So for us, it might be uploading agreements, right? These types of questions that customers have, I think the answers to those are largely going to be automated via some type of AI bot.

I think at the same time, while these sort of tier one cases go away, we're going to naturally see customer success and customer support coming closer together. And I think that we're going to see more of this type of prescriptive stuff that I was talking about that today might be handled by Customer Success coming down to support and the customer success that is going to really be a big focus. I think moving forward is going to be that more enterprise level, high touch, high involvement, consultative assistant and support is going to handle more of those, those best practices, more of the how tos, more of the day to day kind of stuff as we continue thinking about, okay, how do we operationalize some of the things that customer success does today that are very expensive for them to do that support can do efficiently once we've reached a level of maturity within our organizations.

So I think that those are kind of the things that I see. I think that this tier one support is going to sort of slowly dwindle as we start improving product user experiences, and as we start creating some of those answers and declarative paths for customers to go through. And then I think we're going to see some of CS and support come closer and closer together as they continue to grow and mature, until we reach a point where, you know, each of them become, I think success will become a little bit more specialized, and support will be a little bit of a larger bucket.

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Harish --

Yeah, I think that's a great point. Ethan, I mean, one of the other teams speaking to had a similar thought. In fact, they had merged this year the Customer Success and Support Team. I mean, it looks like this already happening that way, the as such, and yes, lot of rudimentary, or, you know, tier one, nature of repetitive, or, you know, simple lookups is getting automated away, and the human touch, not the high touch, is getting into one bucket saying how we can give that type of why, type of questions, as you are mentioned, right? Hey, understanding the whys, how to give the prescription, it still requires that type of thinking around the problem.

Yeah, makes sense. Ethan, I think that's pretty much the three questions we had. And folks, Ethan is always available, like, pretty helpful, and I always enjoyed the conversation. You can reach out to him through LinkedIn, or he's always on in support everyone and elevate channel. So yeah, feel free to reach out. Thanks again, Ethan for coming in.

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Conclusion

You can reach out to Ethan on Linkedin or Support Driven channels.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-walfish-042a855b/

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