232: Fireside with Ethan Walfish

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and thirty-two of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Ethan Woolfish for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Ethan Wolfish. Ethan, it's been, I think, an it feels like an absolute age, and I'm sure it has been an absolute age since you last joined me for a chat. So, first of all, welcome back. And you've moved around a little since we last spoke, haven't you?

Ethan Walfish: 0:52

I have. Good morning, Charlotte. And I think that um it's been over a year. And last time we spoke, there wasn't as much of a time difference. I think it was only one hour. So I'm over in Boston now, and I'm now um director of support over at Alice. I think both of those things are new since we last spoke. Um so I'm excited to just come back and chat for today.

Charlotte Ward: 1:13

Yeah, um I'm I'm I'm I'm thrilled that you've come back and congratulations on both those moves. Indeed. You were you were in Europe, uh not so very far from me for a little while, and uh and now a bit further away, but nonetheless, I'm very glad we get the opportunity to chat. And on this fireside, you've brought a really interesting topic. Do you want to tell everybody what we're talking about?

Ethan Walfish: 1:36

Yeah, so I was thinking the other day, and and maybe to sort of get started a little bit, is I was speaking with one of our engineering leaders, and he said that engineers were like surgeons. And this sort of sparked a thought in my mind about what are the other things that we can take from sort of the medical world that we can apply to support. And I've seen this sort of talked about other industries, about what we can take from them to bring into support. But I think there's a lot of overlap with the medical field and and particularly probably emergency medicine for support, but that we can take over and think about how we actually work in support.

Charlotte Ward: 2:11

Yeah, yeah, that makes very much sense. And I think there's I I've I've I've um sort of used some medical analogies in the past with regards particularly to incident management. You know, I've I've I've often rolled out this whole kind of road traffic accident scenario where you have an incident manager and you know, these are the things you pay attention to and don't. And yeah, and the idea of support as kind of that emergency care, that primary care, whatever you want to call it, um, is an interesting one as well. People come to you at their point of need. Interesting. Let's talk about it.

Ethan Walfish: 2:46

So I I think, I mean, the most obvious place to kind of start is that when someone reaches out, it's kind of like they're they're stepping into the emergency room and and they're they're presenting with whatever symptoms they might have. And our job when they step into the door is to start understanding how quickly do I need to treat these various, um, these various cases, right? And um, and are any of them, you know, like truly um what other things do I need to know about them, right, in order to treat them correctly. So one of the examples that I gave to someone on my team the other day and sort of was thinking about this for a little bit was actually family history is kind of an interesting one. How do we compare family history to like a single case that comes in? Is that maybe the history of an individual user, or maybe that's the the case history for their account, knowing that, like, hey, by the way, this account has everything custom. So if they reach out, I know that I actually need to stop and take some time to make sure I understand what they're talking about because the rules generally are a little bit different for them.

Charlotte Ward: 3:47

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I I'm I'm already like bouncing around uh like lots of lots of ideas. Uh I'm no doctor or surgeon or primary care facilitator in any way, but but I I recognize everything you're saying there. Yeah, the the family history is a good start. Understanding that context, understanding everything that is in that customer's background. Um, customer health, actually, isn't it? Really, as well. Like it's a yeah, yeah, I think so. Which is a term we use, right?

Ethan Walfish: 4:21

It is, but you also, when you come in, right? I mean, other things too is you take the pulse, you take the um the blood pressure, right? There's some immediate measurements that you take to understand like what is the general health of this particular person. I know for for us, I mean, I have um we have health scores for our customers. And so when a ticket comes in, I do look and understand, right? Is this is this a you know green customer, is this a risk customer, is this a you know customer that is in a potential churn opportunity or potential churn state?

Charlotte Ward: 4:49

Yeah. Do they have particular sensitivities or or any allergies indeed that we should that we should know about at the point of providing care? Absolutely, yeah. Um, and then there's this you touched on a minute ago as well, something else which is very much an emergency room um uh mechanic, which is triage, right? Um, and taking into account that that history, that family, that family history, that customer health, all of that information is part of that triage process, isn't it?

Ethan Walfish: 5:21

Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that's hard when you reach a certain scale to understand what do you, what do you have to take on first and what do you solve first? It's kind of easy when you don't have that much volume, right? And it's sort of like what do we what do you start on? I don't know, one of these three things that are available for me to work on. When you reach a certain scale and you go into a queue and there's, I don't know, 30, 40 tickets in the queue, it's hard to potentially understand what is the most urgent thing. And at that point, then you really do need to start putting on that sort of that uh the triage hat to really understand where do I need to get started for today? What are the first things that actually need help?

Charlotte Ward: 5:56

And you need people in that role as well, don't you? Particularly as you scale, you need a triage nurse, right? Effectively, somebody who's making those judgments, whether they're codifying them or whether they're acting them out. Uh you you need somebody who is responsible for the guidelines within which that triage happens.

Ethan Walfish: 6:16

I think there's a couple solutions for it. I think it's such a necessary evil, or maybe a potentially necessary evil, I'll say, for having a person doing it, because it's a really inefficient role. I would much rather have someone working the queue than just sort of looking through cases, reading them again, and then scoring them. Because that means that the next person still has to read through that case. Um, and so, you know, in some ways I think about this as being you can have customers self-report. So it's kind of like people coming in and pointing at the pain scale, right? Are you a one? Are you a 10? Um, you can have different categories, right? So maybe on your on your support when people submit things, they say, like, um, I have a data loss problem, or maybe I have a reporting problem, right? And those would be sort of disparate examples of like one where like I really need to work on this immediately, and another example where like, well, you know, I this can wait longer, right? This doesn't need that sort of urgent care. Um, so I kind of think about I I don't necessarily love needing to have someone sort of working in that role, but I do think that if you do have someone working in that role, there's another really interesting thing we should take away from the medical community, which is charts. Someone has a clipboard with a piece of paper when you go to the ER, right? And there's they're writing notes the whole time. So when they do determine your family history or they do determine all these interesting things, they take your pulse, they they are writing this information down. And I think that's something that we forget sometimes. And something I tell my team pretty regularly is please write notes, right? Please write more notes on your on your cases, right? Because I don't know what you've been thinking or or what's been going on or who you might have reached out to in a DM to ask a question, unless it's stated there, right? You could ask the customer success manager, hey, like have they told you this was a problem? Are you aware of this? Is it's urgent? But if you haven't written that in the DM or in the in a note, when someone else comes along to work on this ticket, they may not really know what's happened and either skip that step entirely, and then we've missed that triage, or they might redo that work. And again, to that point earlier of like even having a triage person can sometimes be inefficient. We might be adding additional inefficiencies if you're not actually keeping that chart accurate, up to date, and and really complete. And and I mean other things too is this chart's useful later on. If this has to go over to engineering later on, details from that chart are probably pretty useful for your escalation over to engineering or to another team.

Charlotte Ward: 8:43

Yeah, yeah. Which is, I think, without expert knowledge, I assume what happens in hospital. I've seen it as a patient. If I'm being transferred from the ward to the operating theater, the OR, then a chart goes with me on the foot of the bed, doesn't it?

Ethan Walfish: 9:01

Operating theater is such a British term.

Charlotte Ward: 9:05

We like to watch. We we we come with our opera glasses and you know, or a bag of popcorn or something, I don't know.

Ethan Walfish: 9:12

Uh, and I mean, but this comes back to sort of the very beginning where this thought germinated for me. And I think I've other people have made this comparison. So I won't say that this is like my I'm not the first one to think about this. But that one of our engineering leaders said that engineers are surgeons. That is the point at which you're involving a surgeon. And so when you're escalating engineering, it's very important that they know what they're focusing on, right? That they have a clear vision for what is the problem that I'm addressing. Because the person might have three or four problems, right? This is the case, might have several things that are involved in it. And that you need to make sure that the surgeon is going to, you know, uh, I don't know, if if you need, if you're we're really extreme here, right? And it's an amputation, right? That they're operating on the right leg, right? Like that they're, you know, that they're they're actually doing the right thing and not maybe maybe there's a there's uh you know some stitches that need to be done. And maybe we need them not to do the stitches in that moment. We we need them very urgently to do something about the leg though.

Charlotte Ward: 10:10

Yeah. And that's where I mean, I've seen surgeons make their own notes pre-op, you know, going around the ward. And that's definitely something we can we can do, but that validation, just the what you know, when the surgeon comes around and draws a big arrow on you to say it's this arm or it's this leg. Like we as a support team, we can provide at least that level, can't we? I know when it's when it's critical, when there's a leg at stake, the you probably want the surgeon to validate it's the right leg, but we could we should be able to provide that level of detail in good notes.

Ethan Walfish: 10:42

Yeah, absolutely. I I hope. And my mother has um has uh is allergic to the surgical tape. So when she has when she's had a couple of procedures, she's written no no surgical tape, right? And again, I mean, part of that is because we need to make sure that we hold everyone, I mean, to sort of continue on this. We need to make sure we hold everyone accountable to reading those notes. So something that you know sometimes we will tell people is like, hey, all the details in the GR or continuing to update the GR along as we learn more information. That way someone new coming in is able to go and look at that that particular bug report and understand where has this been, where is this going? What are we doing right now?

Charlotte Ward: 11:21

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's important to be like, I'm I could we could just have another conversation, Ethan, about notes because I think the other thing that I'm thinking is I know from a support point of view, you don't want to have uh anyone on the front line have to read every single word. So it's important to be able to surface the right stuff at the moment of need. It's important to get a summary of the current situation, but also any of that contextual information that you might need at the point you read it. So it's it's also, if you get the chance, worth investing time in proper form like structure of those notes, isn't it? Like understanding where the hourly pulse measurements belong versus where the you know the big headline news belongs and current status.

Ethan Walfish: 12:15

And I and I think that's you know really part of this too, because the chart that you know they're writing on isn't a blank piece of paper. It's not just a sheet of printer paper. It's it's you know, it's got a whole bunch of lines and a bunch of pieces on it, right? Where they're writing stuff where you might have, maybe if you actually get get admitted, right, you have the whiteboard where they, you know, the nurse comes in and checks you on a regular basis and goes and puts notes, like what medication are we giving them? What was their last pulse, right? What was their last meal? Um, are there any are there any dietary restrictions? Right. So and these types of notes kind of live with with the patient. And um certainly I think one thing that that I've um tried to implement in the past that I thought was pretty successful was when you do have these cases that are sophisticated enough where you really need those notes, making sure that they're not buried within the thread of your case, that they have a top-level location where they live, and that at various moments throughout, right? And again, to to the point of when is it, when do you update them, at various important moments throughout the lifecycle of that case that you're updating those notes. So the times when I've thought about this in the past is when you first read the case, probably is one of the first things. When you ask for help. So if it gets escalated to someone else on the on your team. Um maybe it's a a weekend, right? So at the end of the week, right? Maybe if if your sort of shifts turning over, you want to make sure that you're you're fresh on this on the on the next week, that anyone understands the looking at this first thing Monday. Um, out of offices, right? Again, being a moment where you're you're doing a handoff, a transition. Um, and that could be end of day two, right? So you're handing off to a team that's in a different time zone. And then I think sort of the last one being that's that comes front of mind is if you're actually handing it off to your surgeon, to your engineers, because at that point it's a good opportunity to also update and and give an idea for what the latest for that particular issue is and where you're where you're at on it.

Charlotte Ward: 14:00

Yeah, yeah. I I would actually add one more to that, which is is that um, in fact, I'm gonna add two more, just seeing it, just seeing it's like seeing it's my show. I can do what I like. The first one I would add is uh when there are, even if you're not moving this case around, is when there are major status changes to it. So the situation has changed. So the headline you you've discovered some new information.

Ethan Walfish: 14:26

And the headline's not what you thought the headline was. Truman Truman. Exactly. Uh Truman didn't lose, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 14:32

Exactly. Uh and then uh yeah, and then uh and then just you know, summarizing long-running notes, conversations, discussions, investigations. When you get to a point where you've done a long piece of work, summarize it.

Ethan Walfish: 14:51

Yeah, I think that's a good one too. I mean, it and I mean another example too might be if you have a call or something like that.

Charlotte Ward: 14:57

Yeah, sure.

Ethan Walfish: 15:00

And that's similarly, I mean, I think it I qualify that the same way as like it's a big chunk of work that you did as you had a call with.

Charlotte Ward: 15:05

Yes, yeah, a lot of detail in there at fast pace. It does need a it does need summarizing. And that benefits everyone. I always use those um like just as a little aside. If I do uh a habit I learned way back in the day, by which I mean the 90s, if you can imagine so long ago, um, was when you have a live call with a customer when you're speaking to them on the phone. It's just such a great habit to drop them an email straight back with a summary of the call. And that's not your verbatim notes, it really is thanks for your time. This is what you said, and here's a summary of what we're going to do next. Uh just something as simple as that, because it serves as your case notes then as well. It just serves double duty. So um I always try and frame my my summaries as something that's customer readable as well and make them visible to the customer if at all possible. They get the constant kind of absolutely um the constant kind of reassurance then that you're on it.

Ethan Walfish: 16:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's that's I mean, another thing I talked to the team about too. I mean, but I also you know we'll joke with them, right? I'm a little more severe, right? If there's no notes, it didn't happen.

Charlotte Ward: 16:09

Yeah.

Ethan Walfish: 16:09

You have a call and there's no notes, call didn't happen as far as I'm concerned. Go have another call.

Charlotte Ward: 16:14

Yeah, yeah. Uh one one on my team has another way of putting it, which is if it's in the air, that then it's not anywhere. Which I really like too. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right.

Ethan Walfish: 16:26

They're gonna be really confused by hot air balloons.

Charlotte Ward: 16:31

I'm not gonna break that to them. I I I like the I like the simplicity of their philosophy. Cool. So we've done we've done uh emergency room, we've done operating theater slash room, depending on what cons continent you're on. What about uh what about the final stages of this? What about the aftercare? What about sending those people home post-surgery? I don't know how far we can stretch this.

Ethan Walfish: 16:58

I don't know. I think there's I mean, if we really want to get into it, I think there's one other element of medical care that that we can talk about. And this is the one that I think I've thought about less. So let me let me pull this up and send you. I'm just gonna send you an image. Give me one second. And we can talk about this on our something in the background here.

Charlotte Ward: 17:21

I will have to describe this image. You will, but it's okay because it's a diagram.

Ethan Walfish: 17:27

It's a diagram, it's okay. So there is something. Oh, this is great. This is at the very top of this page. So there's something called the the spikes protocol for breaking bad news to people. And I've I've thought and theorized with a friend of mine for some time that this is something that we could bring into support when we really talk about delivering really hard messages for um for customers, right? When you have to tell someone like, no, we're not fixing this, or like I've lost all your data. Right. And and we can take this as sort of another part of medical jargon of some of this that we can actually take on in support and learn something from. So just to go through spikes, it is an uh what is this anagram? What is no, it's not anagram, it's an acronym, an acronym. So spikes is setting, perception, invitation, knowledge, empathy, and summary. Now I think some of the ones at the top of this are are a little bit harder for me to kind of get, but I think that um the first thing is setting, right? Is are you in the right place to be giving this feedback? And I think when you think about support, it's probably do you have the right audience for this? Are you, is this from maybe is it the right person to be delivering it? Are you the right person to be delivering this news? Do you have it be maybe the account manager or the customer success manager as you might have them available to you? Um, have you maybe are you at the right stage of the customer lifecycle or the case life cycle to deliver this news? It might become it might have been apparent to you a week ago that eventually you're gonna have to give this news, but was that the right time? And the answer might have been no for other reasons. Um, so I guess Charlotte, along the way here, feel free to jump in because I think this is to me, this is the one that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit, but it's like yeah, I'm I mean, I'm soaking it up.

Charlotte Ward: 19:22

I just for the benefit of people listening, like you sent me an image, but also there's a I I will include this in the show notes, first of all. There's a um there's a lot of description here, and it is it is a medical um uh scenario, as you said, it's a medical approach. So everything in here is talking about the patient and everything, but I'm I'm listening to you, and I I think and I'm I'm I'm drawing lots of parallels in my head already. It's super interesting, isn't it? So I'm thinking about that setting. And in in the link that you sent me, it says make sure you have enough time. That's top of the list, isn't it? So it's just like setting is a is empathy. Really. It's like make sure the appropriateness of the delivery mode is right. And then perception, like make sure they understand the context. Absolutely. Make sure they and you understand, have a common understanding of the context, even.

Ethan Walfish: 20:17

Yeah. And and it's really interesting. And I mean, sort of jump out of this for a second. It's really interesting how this came about because apparently doctors were really bad at giving bad news so that it was it was hurting outcomes. And so they figured out that they could sort of put some structure in place around how to give bad news really well. And I think about um uh I think about the example of did you watch House, House MD, I think it is in over there?

Charlotte Ward: 20:44

I am familiar with House because I absolutely love Hugh Laurie, but I didn't watch the series, but I'm very familiar with it.

Ethan Walfish: 20:52

One of the characters is the one of the gags, one of the jokes is that he will tell people, and I mean this is kind of serious, but also dark humor, is that he will tell people that they're dying and they will thank him at the end of it. Right. And that's kind of what you want in support sometimes, is you want to give bad news to someone and you say, like, I did everything I could, but I lost your data.

Charlotte Ward: 21:11

Right.

Ethan Walfish: 21:11

And you want them to go, thank you.

Charlotte Ward: 21:14

Yeah.

Ethan Walfish: 21:15

And how do you get there? And that's kind of what this is. So setting being that first one, perception being the second one, right? It's making sure that they kind of understand what is going on, right? That that they understand kind of how we've we've gotten here. Um, I think that's that's kind of one of the ones, probably an opportunity to give a summary of of what's happened in your your case at that point.

Charlotte Ward: 21:32

Yeah. Um and then we have invitation, right? Which uh which is an interesting one. It's it's about pacing again a bit, but it's it's making it an open two-way dialogue. It's not just delivery.

Ethan Walfish: 21:46

I know, and I think this one is a little bit less applicable to support in some cases, where sometimes, like, regardless of whether or not someone wants to know the bad news, I have to give them the bad news. Yeah. Right. And and sort of in the medical field, there might be a little bit more of sort of a dialogue about that.

Charlotte Ward: 22:02

Yeah.

Ethan Walfish: 22:02

So this is um really kind of like I think this one doesn't quite work as well. So maybe we skip this one. Um, but there is this moment in for the spikes protocol, whereas um like really making sure how much do they want to know and and having an invitation with them. Is this a good time? Do you understand? Do you want to talk about this further? Um, and maybe, maybe in support, maybe the opportunity here is do they need to go grab other people to have this conversation as well? And maybe that's perhaps the the bit here for that, is make sure that that they have everyone they need from their side. Um and then the next one here is is knowledge, which is really telling them what is going on, what is happening, right? So if we're talking about bad news, right, telling them about that particular piece of bad news. Um, this one seems reasonably straightforward. Um, this one is is kind of the bit that probably we default to as support people, is just sort of dropping this knowledge without kind of thinking about the context around it.

Charlotte Ward: 22:59

Yeah, absolutely. Here's the solution or non-solution in in the case of bad news, right? Yeah.

Ethan Walfish: 23:06

Um, and then I I like the last two here, one being empathy and uh empathy really being um an opportunity to make sure that you are being thoughtful to this to this customer, right? That there is like this may have some serious impact on them, right? Are there other things that you can do? Are there other reassuring things you can tell them? Um what are the other sort of pieces to that, to sort of this? And the last one being a summary, right? So after everything, right, probably putting together that summary similar to what we talked about before is probably an appropriate time because that knowledge dump might have been really dense. So, what is the summary that they might take over to someone else?

Charlotte Ward: 23:45

That makes complete sense. I I I really like this approach. Um yeah, yeah. I uh I I think that there is some overlap between some of these for sure. And I think that the um, for instance, the empathy I think carries through to setting and some of the other considerations. And yeah, but that's that's super interesting. I think there's a lot we can take away from that, and actually a lot we can take away from this whole discussion. Um, so I'm gonna thank you for joining me again today and providing me yet again, yet again, Ethan, after such a long time as well, with a lot of food for thought. Um, and uh I hope our our listeners can um draw some similar parallels because I think that there are such a lot, and uh maybe we should get a surgeon on at some point.

Ethan Walfish: 24:38

Maybe, maybe that might be interesting. Maybe maybe you get uh a support leader and a surgeon on to chat.

Charlotte Ward: 24:43

Yeah, yeah. Or or I think we've just established just an engineer will do, right? It's much the same thing. True, true. Yeah. Lovely. Thank you so much for joining me today again, Ethan. I'll talk to you soon.

Ethan Walfish: 24:54

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

Charlotte Ward: 24:59

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two three two for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.