252: The "Support Report" with Andrew Rios

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 252 of the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward Today. Welcome Andrew Rios to talk about the support report. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Andrew Rios. Andrew, lovely to have you join me for the first time and for one of the very early episodes in 2024. Thank you so much for coming along. First of all, would you like to introduce yourself.

Andrew Rios: 0:48

Yeah, absolutely. And first I want to just thank you long time listener, first time talker, so it's an honor and pleasure to be here, Really excited about this chat. Yeah, I'm Andrew Rios I go by Rios once people get to know me and I'm a long time CX leader. I'm fortunate to play all those positions on the CX team and I'm a builder of future leaders and a very passionate believer in the customer experience. So thank you for having me.

Charlotte Ward: 1:16

Oh, you're most welcome. I love that. A builder of future leaders, that's great. That's kind of you know, I love that kind of. Gives me that kind of visual of like standing on the shoulders of the people who have gone before us, you know making it easier for them than it was for me and us Right.

Charlotte Ward: 1:34

That's kind of oh, absolutely, absolutely Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me. So we have had a little bit of a chat about what you're going to talk about today, but would you like to tell the listeners what we're going to talk about?

Andrew Rios: 1:49

Yeah, absolutely A passion topic of mine besides people building is I'm a big believer in that support leaders, cx leaders, the power of a support report. Having a good, concise support report that drives action, tells a great story, is built on data and so so to be really clear, the support report.

Charlotte Ward: 2:10

Love it, love a bit of alliteration can't go wrong in my book. Now we're already on a good footing. Explain to me and anyone else who isn't really sure. Obviously this is kind of your term for this thing. What is the support report?

Andrew Rios: 2:28

You know it's a report that is nearly all factual, but it's one of the few that are in the organization that are based on history and facts and truth and what's going on. And it's a report that answers the questions for support leaders and the business. To start, the funnel is how are we servicing our customers or clients or partners? How are we servicing them? Kind of answers that and I'm not going into the numbers first, I'm going into the story and then answers that next question that we all want to know, which is why did they contact us? What made them contact us? And then you kind of start creating your categories at that point, based on what the business needs, what metrics they're looking at, what key performance indicators we're looking at. And then what I like to say to kind of what makes a report more than just an Excel file with a bunch of bars and graphs and great colors, is that, why did they contact us and what can we do about it in the future to make their experience easy, so they didn't have to contact us.

Andrew Rios: 3:38

I think I use one of those phrases that I think we all use in the initiative, which is the best support experience has no support experience. They solved it on the road, or it was self-service, or we already predicted it for them. So that's what that support report gives you. And then it's also the people aspect, and that's the other area that I'm really passionate about, which is it's an area to highlight and celebrate your team and the work that's going in behind that support report. So behind you is a bunch of humans that are doing a lot of work to create that data for you, to give you those indicators. So that, for me, is what a support report is, and it will help you drive changing the business.

Charlotte Ward: 4:18

That sounds awesome. And also what I love about this is, I mean, you said some of my favorite things there. You talked about data, you talked about facts, you talked about narrative and relating to the business. We will dive into all of those over the next 10, 15, 20 minutes or so.

Charlotte Ward: 4:34

But what I really love about this, this conversation already sounds like a real natural successor to the conversation I had last week with Matt Dale, where we talked about support data and how you get going, and I think that a lot of leaders, when they step into support leadership or they're getting this going in a startup, like when they're building from scratch, for whatever reason getting going is the hard bit, but also actually knowing where you're going with this data, and that sounds like what we're going to talk about tonight. And the biggest thing I took away from my conversation with Matt last week was really you have to get started. You can't wait. You just have to get off the ground with something. I'm going to guess that the support report doesn't roll out of week one in your first week of support leadership as a complete document, and you have to get started right.

Andrew Rios: 5:26

Absolutely. It's never too late to get started. I think that's where I encourage people, leaders, and to use the word leader too. Maybe it's the person that's responsible for putting all the data together, the program manager that's doing that, the data analyst is doing that. You just got to start, I think in a previous life, when I was building the support team from scratch. It was Zendesk is here. We don't know how to set it up yet, we're still figuring out what the categories are configuring it, but we want all this data.

Andrew Rios: 5:58

As you go in as a leader, you're like okay, I know, eventually I'm going to need these six indicators handle time, wait time, response time, how many touches? But right away, what do I need to know In that world? It goes back to my first questions that I like to keep it simple with, which is who contacted us? Why did they contact us? Let's start small progress over perfection, just starting small, answering those questions.

Andrew Rios: 6:26

I always share the story of that first report that rolled off. The first week of contacts was an email to an alias that said here's how many calls we took and here's how many were presales, because the product was just going, just launching. So that was the bulk of volume. We know that as leaders, but we got to be ready to start funneling it. And then here's how many installs we got, here's how many are calling for administrative, and then here's the spam calls we got and the marketing calls we got.

Andrew Rios: 6:56

And then it just progressed over time and as I shared the story and I'm like three years later, you know, I moved from email, then it became a PowerPoint slide, then it became a couple PowerPoint slides, then all of a sudden we started migrating to Google and finally we were at the point, you know, resource wise, experience wise, knowledge wise. It was the time where we just leveraged the Zendesk Explorer for everything that it had, but the key was continuing to build that data in the right order as best you can, so that when that report comes out there's more automation than going back. And let me copy this. Let me copy that. We know how to answer the questions right.

Charlotte Ward: 7:34

Yeah, yeah, and I think there's. You know, I love it was just an email. You've got to start, you've got to start right, and sometimes you just got to take what data you have and figure out. Does it give you any answers to anything? Right, that's the quickest way to get started, isn't it? And then the next thing is what are the questions that I most urgently want to know the answers to? I think that's the natural successor, Like that's when you're really building.

Charlotte Ward: 8:03

But any support lead or new support first support person in an organization, as you say, whatever it is, could look today at the landscape and find some data points and make an email so that you can get started and there's your support report. But it develops, as you say. So you're adding more data, you're asking more questions. I mean, you talked then about you know evolving it, and I found this quite interesting. Actually, you talked about evolving it through PowerPoint and Google Doc first and then into Zendesk, but Zendesk only gives you also some of the data that you talked about at the top of our discussion here. You went on to talk about people and everything else. So how does it evolve in all of the forms and how are you building it out?

Andrew Rios: 8:52

Absolutely so it was. I love how you brought the people into it, because that's where I'm going to start with it, Because when the first one went out, it was me, your humble servant here. Email. Let's go as the team that's now learning the product, learning the experience, learning how to categorize that, so we know what to categorize are coming and sharing that with me, right, they're like Andrew. Okay, now we know when we get the call on this installation and it's from this region. This is the information we're going to want to capture and the business wants to know, because they were the experts, right, and I was learning from them.

Andrew Rios: 9:25

So then, as you progress, you empower and give the ownership to people to take it over that can do better than you. So by the time you're evolving, three, four months down the road, it was time to scale the team and there was an individual that was ready to step in to take that responsibility for five hours of the week, hour, days, start putting the data together. And then the challenge was like and I always say, never miss an opportunity to enhance, to keep just building a little bit, compounding those goodnesses, right. And I said, hey, it'd be great if we had just one PowerPoint slide that was broken up and I kind of gave an idea of talk about the product, and then what's really important now is the volume, that's all. And then the product team wants to know about why they contacted us for the installation. That was out of the scope of the installation. So let's make an area for that.

Andrew Rios: 10:15

And what I was doing was saying now that's the product feedback, so we're starting to show more numbers, but I also want to highlight the human that was behind it, building that right. So it's like now you send it out right, let me step, I don't have to be there. Extra staff, extra person you send it out now. Then, when you get to the end, the report was because I love how you brought this end-to-end part up was okay, well, now we got all this data here. We got to tell the story, but why don't we tell the story of the people that are in the story? So it became let's celebrate a promotion, let's celebrate the person that found an opportunity for improvement in the product, and that opportunity was now incorporated in the product, starting to see less contacts on that feature because it's done now, right. So that was really important to me.

Charlotte Ward: 11:04

So yeah, yeah, I love that and I love when you can show the effort and then show the outcomes, you know, because you know I mean it's outcomes of what's important, but I think particulars and individual contributor, it can feel a bit like it's the effort, that's the important thing.

Charlotte Ward: 11:26

And I think what you're doing when you're publicly tying those two things together in any forum and I do this sometimes just with Slack messages to our kind of company all hands channel, you know, somebody did this and look at the outcome, right, and it's just, it begins to help your team understand that if they can tell their own narratives in that way and, as you said, like you get out the way of it a bit, once they, once they kind of get it, it's great to watch, isn't it? It's great to watch, you know, and I love nothing more than being able to say this person took this problem, ran with it for six months, produced the data, had the conversations. Here's the before graph, here's the after graph and you know whatever direction, whether you want that graph to go up or down. Look at the impact they've had right.

Charlotte Ward: 12:16

You know, and in this case, obviously, it was like it was a down that we wanted, and it was six months of like really tall columns and then practically flat lined to almost zero, and it's like that's what that one person did and it was a collaboration, but they kicked it off. They had the idea, they followed it through, and you know that, and you know you highlight all aspects of that not just the idea, not just the effort, but the collaboration and the outcome as well. It's important, isn't it, I think, to help your team think like that.

Andrew Rios: 12:48

Absolutely. And then for us, there's that added layer that I, that I always tend to use, which is there's costs behind that right, and that what we're doing is leading, we're communicating with our stakeholders and our our peers and we want to be able to be able to say well, you see in the report why that went down, that's how much it saved us in cost. Do you see, when we didn't resolve it? That's how much it cost us. And I, what I always like to say when I challenge the team is building the report is I share that. Why, with them, I said the report isn't the place where we're going to throw a bunch of numbers around and kind of do one of those. It's where we highlight and tell the story right, With facts and data. And then those who are watching it because we know our audit watching it, reading it, consuming it, we know our audience, we know what they're taking away right, the product leaders going to say oh yeah, we did that big collaboration.

Andrew Rios: 13:40

The CFO might say, oh, that's great, we're seeing 10% less install costs. Okay, good, now we can model that for the future, and I think that's even not even more important. Sorry, but that's another important outcome that comes from that report and I and, like you mentioned earlier, you're not going to start there right away, but, as a leader going in, I always like to say this you got to know your data right, so just start, yeah, and eventually get there. And also what the report says, the way you talked about you know the knowledge and sharing that with the company and celebrating everyone who's been part of it. It also shows how long it takes to do things right.

Charlotte Ward: 14:21

You know, we have a book open.

Andrew Rios: 14:23

We've been investigating it, we've taken the ownership. There's how long it takes. Here's the average. It also highlights hey, when we don't have an answer, we'll wave in the flag for help. Right, partner with me, help me grow, help me understand. Or and this is really important for support teams as well, I really believe is that it helps them understand business decisions. Hey, we're not going to fix that, or we're not going to implement that feature, we're not going to make that change. Here's why. And the data Backstab is an absolute team. Yeah, that's what the facts are, right.

Charlotte Ward: 15:03

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and it's important to have that narrative, isn't it? I mean, it's important to do more in your support report than just put the numbers out there, and whether those numbers are time or efficacy, or ticket numbers or even dollars and I'm a big advocate for getting as much as you can down to a dollar, because nothing talks better to the rest of the business, particularly finance, than dollars, obviously.

Charlotte Ward: 15:34

But the human story is behind it. As we said, all of the effort and everything is important, but there are ways to relate to other parts of the business that aren't so dollar focused, and I think if you can have that kind of ability to all of this connectivity that you're talking about to the business really helps support move more centrally to the business. I think and I think it's a rare business where support is at the center. I think it's at least as a department. I think the most successful businesses have the customer at the center and therefore support is a big constituent part of that in a lot of business. But we're not the only customer-facing team. We just happen to probably be the most communicative, I reckon. But it helps pull us to the center, doesn't it?

Andrew Rios: 16:23

It absolutely does. And sometimes we have to lean our cells into the center, push our cells into the center, and in those cases this is where the report helps. It helps drive opportunities where an example is you know, something needs to be resolved, but business-wise it's just not going to. But the business has now changed, whether it's go-to-market change, reduction in forest change, whatever that might be, a crisis is happening. Now it's a time, as the leader, to say well, we might not have as many technicians in the field waiting for support if we just reduce the one in four calls that I've been seeing the last six months and move that into the development cycle earlier. That's one where they're basically saying we just want to fix this earlier, we want to have it down to the time. Let's fix it Now everybody understands, and then you can show that.

Charlotte Ward: 17:27

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

Charlotte Ward: 17:29

Leaning in and being armed when you lean in with your support report gives you the confidence to be a little bit pushy, but also to speak the language of the business.

Charlotte Ward: 17:41

And, as you say, it's really important to recognize when business strategy changes, business focus changes, what the goals are this month compared to last month, often in startups, this week compared to last week and, frankly, to take advantage of them. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. But if there is anything you can do as a good leader, it is to leverage the things that you have at your disposal that help you achieve your goals and your team's goals, as well as the company achieve their goals. And so if you find that alignment and strategically, this week you ask for one thing and next week you ask for something else, it's so long as it aligns with the business goals, it's win-win for everyone, right, because you have the data, you have the language, you have the whole story to say why this should be done or why this needs to happen or why this helps X, y or Z go, and that allows you to lean in and be part of the conversation.

Andrew Rios: 18:49

Absolutely. And I always said just speak with the facts. And what are the facts? Let me show you my report. What do they mean? Let me show you my report, let me elaborate. What are we going to do about them? And an example that I lived was when we did go through reduction in force. I had to make a decision. It's like, okay, well, the math doesn't work, so I'm going to have to take a change, my service level agreement for email for this business unit. And this is why and I just leaned into my report and it was able to have a conversation that's sometimes just challenging as a leader, a support leader, specifically telling someone no right.

Andrew Rios: 19:24

I got to slow down, but being able to sit there and say I wish there was another answer. I'm open to anything else that one wants to, but here's what I'm going to do, and I always say it that way too, instead of saying no, I can't do that anymore. It's like here's what I'm going to do. It used to be this full, now it's going to be this, and until the data changes or. I'm sorry, and I think that makes it everybody. You know, I kind of want to say a no brainer, but make it work. You can't make the math work right. So that's where the report comes in. You'll see things, and you got to just keep reporting on it and go. Well, the time will come, or it may not come, but either way, I'm prepared for that conversation.

Charlotte Ward: 20:11

That comes through. Oh, I love this. I love. This is the thread I have to pull out because I'm big on preparation and you know I mean. A colleague of mine puts it this way one way to stay out of the spotlight is to get ahead of the spotlight. But I always say, like you can have all of the ideas, and particularly once you have a level of experience, which I'm going to say that you and I have, I agree.

Andrew Rios: 20:41

I don't think-.

Charlotte Ward: 20:44

I mean, I think it's the same. A while you know that you kind of you get a muscle memory for what you need to do and what you need to know. But the time might not be right and I think the important thing is to do it anyway. At least produce the artifacts, and that might mean evolving your support report in ways which today aren't necessarily going to be useful, but you'll be ready when they are useful. So document the ideas that you have for changes, pull together the data, the narratives, and keep it in a back burner. Keep it in a few slides that aren't part of the slideshow yet, you know, but start repping, because you will get to the day that strategy changes and you're ready to hook into. It is a beautiful day, isn't it Like? Oh, actually, when I've been thinking about that for a while, there's nothing I like saying more.

Andrew Rios: 21:36

No, I've been waiting to chat with you about this. This is awesome and you know that's what happens, right, real, real life things. Sometimes we are in support and we're asked to do something and we might say we don't work, asked to do something and we're not. We know what's gonna add, it's gonna change numbers, it's gonna change things experience. Someone's gonna be impacted right, but you have to let it go sometimes, capture it, prepare for it.

Andrew Rios: 22:03

And in one situation a previous chapter I let the team know and it was like look, trust me, someone from X organization is gonna come back and complain about what's happening here and in natural organizations like we are living in. And it's gonna be a support problem, and sure it is, but it's not one that we created. So when that time comes, I will, we will be ready to say yes, we'd love to provide a better support experience. We just need a little bit more training on the product that we just took on, can you help us with that now? And I always like to say this on the sidebar, where someone's like now, do you have the time to help us? And they're like well, it's a fire and I'm like when you could get it earlier, but instead we had to wait for the data to show and then I can say what are the facts, what do they mean, what are we gonna do about it?

Andrew Rios: 22:59

And what I love about support leaders you know folks like you and I it's like we know it and we have to just have that. Well, okay, no problem, well, we'll talk again in a few weeks six weeks, a few months, whatnot and let the team trust us. But when those days come, it is a good day and we gotta celebrate them. And that's where I go back to the team. And then I like to use that example in that support report to again celebrate it. Just say look at the collaboration that we've done as a teams and company. But the people behind the scenes and then the crevices of the notebook go man, that guy's a pretty. That team pretty, pretty humble at what they do. They're customer right.

Charlotte Ward: 23:40

Yeah, yeah, but for me it's.

Charlotte Ward: 23:43

You know, I love building, like documenting the ideas, getting the data together as best I can without it being a burden, for no reason, you know, but but just knowing that the day somebody in product says, ask me a question about something, I can say, well, actually I've been tracking that for six months.

Charlotte Ward: 24:10

Or CSAC, just nose dives one month, yeah, it's these particular ticket types that have been popping up the last few months and we've been tracking them. I love that moment of just like we're armed and we're ready to go. And, as you say, like you know, people will come to you to talk about stuff and it's just great to kind of get it out there when it's needed rather than shoving it down people's throes when it doesn't mean anything to them, right? So I think for me, part of building the support report is knowing how to evolve it, and you can get ahead of the game, like in private almost, or inside the team, but just drip feed the rest at the right moments. Evolve it from that email to whatever it becomes, and I'm guessing your support report is quite a piece of work. Now, what form does it typically take? Now? I'm sure it's not four lines in an email anymore.

Andrew Rios: 25:06

Usually it is the graphs again, but it starts with the story. So it's a PDF, right, I can make it so there, but it's interactive, so it's self-serving. That's my goal. At the end is one report. You can go to any section you want. If you just want to see the metrics and the numbers and the product type, categories and the resolution types, boom, you see that If you want to see issues bugs, I had to use the issues. Then click the two link. I will tell you the top five, but click this link so you can go see our Jiribor, because I believe in self-serving and everybody in the company. We got the same access.

Andrew Rios: 25:38

And there's no secret, there should never be surprises. That's another belief of mine. And then, but it's always starts with the people first. So whenever I work with teams and people about this, it's they're always in shock. When the first slide comes out of the first PDF is like, oh, there's not even a chart or a data. No, it's actually just what happened this week. Right, because everything else is in the flow and you want to tell that story all the way down. But it evolves again, it totally evolves, and usually what I like it to get to at the end is the most work that should go in. After hitting compose is now, what's the story? Right?

Charlotte Ward: 26:19

Here's the story. Brilliant, I love that. You've just got to write some bullet points. Or you know a couple of narratives in key areas Like this graph really changed from last week. I'd probably better put a little text box here to explain it right. There's a few things, but yeah, boom, you click a button and most of it's done. That's living the dream, isn't it? So I mean, it sounds overwhelming. You know, I have built my equivalent. I call it the support overview. Over time it's very similar to your support report. Mine is all on. You know a few slides, very few slides actually, and yours is a polished PowerPoint. How can people get to the polished PowerPoint stage?

Andrew Rios: 27:05

Yeah, you know what? That's a great, great question. I'm actually coming soon. I'm getting ready to share out a one pager collaborating with another peer of mine on a very simple framework, that is, follow these 10, 12 prompts. Start with that, that will get you the story and then go from there. Right, but never too late to start. I hate to say the word template, but a nice little worksheet template flow guide, right, like Gabriel's pro tip that says, hey, go in this order, answer these questions here's a couple examples and then pause and answer the question.

Andrew Rios: 27:44

But I would like to say what does it mean? What does it mean to Bill and CFO, julie and product, you know. Teresa and sales you know what does it. Then. What does it mean to Charlotte and account activation? What does it mean to and our peers? You know what I mean and go from there, cause I and this is why it's so important, it's maybe even a nice bow there is all the decisions that are made in the company are manifested in support, so we have that opportunity to come back and celebrate them and also share with the business that, hey, maybe we want to reconsider this or think about this, or here's another area to focus on.

Charlotte Ward: 28:25

Yeah, yeah. So a template, a guide, a few key questions to get people off the ground. It sounds amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing that when it comes out, Will you please share it with me and I will make sure that when the podcast is out as I'm sure our listeners are aware that there is a webpage If you're not, the address will be at the end of this episode that I'll add it to like after you, after you finish, like the podcast episode to go out. The webpage will go out, but I will come back and update that, that landing page for this episode, and I'll link through to it for you. Would you do that for me?

Andrew Rios: 29:02

Absolutely absolutely my commitment. I want to make it easy for everybody and hopefully this gets people started or even gets a refresh, so you could count on that. Count on me.

Charlotte Ward: 29:11

That sounds awesome. I love that I can count on you. Lovely, Could I please count on you to come back and have another conversation another time?

Andrew Rios: 29:20

Oh, I'd be honored. I'd be honored. As I said, first time. I'm excited you're not a long time listener. I don't want to put you on the spot and embarrass you a little bit, but the first time I met you in Las Vegas to have one of the support driven expos a couple years ago, I was like, oh my God could you, shirley?

Charlotte Ward: 29:36

I listened to your podcast.

Andrew Rios: 29:38

It was looking at me like, is it bad? I was like, yeah, it's a big fat of yours, so it's awesome to be here. It's still weird.

Charlotte Ward: 29:45

I mean, this is a super niche podcast and it's a thing I love doing, but it is a bit weird. When people come up and they know me, it's still weird. I'm tiny bit famous in a tiny small way but it's still weirds me out. But I appreciate that you did that and I appreciate you coming on today. Thank you so much and please come back. I'd love to have another chat another time.

Andrew Rios: 30:11

I will Thank you so much for having me have a great one and do good at everyone.

Charlotte Ward: 30:18

That's it for today. Go to customersupporleaderscom forward, slash 252 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.