Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and eighty-eight of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Simone Secchi to talk about support in high trust environments. Today I’d like to welcome back Simone Secchi. Simone, it’s been an age since we spoke last, and I know you’re um doing something super interesting right now, which is uh something that we had a little chat about pre-record, and I’m super excited to dig into. But for our listeners, old and new, would you just introduce yourself again?
Simone Secci: 0:53
Absolutely. Uh Charlotte, it is uh a pleasure to be back. Um yeah, so my name is Simone. I am based in Berlin and I’ve been uh working in um support and now also success for about 15, almost 16 years uh in different environments and uh yeah, and uh the late adventure brought me to um yeah, help clinical psychologists, which has been a very interesting um challenge and and a rewarding one.
Charlotte Ward: 1:23
Super uh super interesting field. So we’ll dive into that. So you’re freelancing at the moment and have been for quite some time working for a couple of different clients that have really quite, I mean, the word I would use is kind of demanding requirements um based on our pre-show chat. Um could you just give a give an overview of the kind of environment, the what we really mean by that when we talk about high trust? What are the considerations? What are the like the what give us an overview?
Simone Secci: 1:55
Absolutely. Yeah, and um they are in the we would say fields that couldn’t be further from from one another, but at the same time, what what brings them together is the this idea of high stakes and and trust. Because my first experience going back into freelancing was with a company that deals in the in um larger tourism, and their only um clients are billionaires. So the element of of um security and privacy is is paramount, but at the same time uh of convenience and availability for them. So they uh they have to be able to get in touch with uh with support um through any means. So you’re talking about uh WhatsApp, plugins, SMS, emails, and and you’re talking with them directly, or their assistants and people that work for them. And um you have to work with speed and um and yeah, and um privacy and uh and uh discretion at the utmost level. So that was like a very interesting experience. And then I would say with this latest um yeah um client with the working with the clinical psychologist and specifically working with an app that is catered towards clinical psychologists and their and what they define as care pathways, which is like the the um um the path of care that they work with uh when they work with clients. So their their treatment plans, uh for to use like a maybe like a non um clinical word, um that is like also the importance there of security and the importance of privacy and anonymized data and um protecting um personally identifiable informations at a completely different level. So for the for the clients, for for the for fragile uh and uh and often um yeah, at um individuals that are also at security and legal risk or involved in legal proceedings um for a variety of reasons that people can imagine. So very different environments, but brought together by this element of uh security and privacy as paramount, and trust, obviously.
Charlotte Ward: 4:19
Yeah, trust is the word, isn’t it? Uh and I I suppose to your point, very, very different environments, very, very different end consumers, both in terms potentially of like the the people involved and their personality types and everything, but the uh the experiences and the context they’re moving through at any point in time. And yet, as you said, this uh this common thread of trust that’s needed. And on one side with the billionaires, I suppose that trust is it’s flexible, it’s informal, it’s expected rather than regulated. But on the other side, in your current environment with the uh the sort of medical context there, particularly, the there are there are high levels of regulation and compliance that you must have to adhere to. How how do you balance um so so trust is the common thread, but how do you balance uh trust in those two very different contexts, one where it’s an expectation and one where it’s uh regulated?
Simone Secci: 5:27
Yeah, and I would say that um what um is the biggest uh difference I would say is is the idea of uh of speed and and the influence the speed as into the type of of support and and help that you provide. Um very a very high-level um complexity for for different reasons. I would say what the work that I’ve done um with the the luxury tourism company, it was the complexity was not too much into the technological aspect, but in the workflow and and um in the SLAs and aspects like that. So very um I would say technical from like uh our own realm of support and success. So you know, um bridging the gap between different phases of uh of communication with the with the client and making them speedy. So um the anybody that works in tourism has an idea or or odels as an idea of what where I’m going with this, you know, there are um agents that interact with um with third parties, which could be restaurants or hotels and and um situations like that where they have to make reservations and get back to the client after the client makes a certain request. And obviously, being billionaires, their requests are much more vast than the regular tourist. So anything from flying in a helicopter to visit a museum, private visit, like any anything like that. Um and uh you have to read you know the there is to be an understanding of uh and setting expectations as to how quickly that can be done. And and the technical aspect of support as being a support leader is really working on the support operation aspect of it, and um and try to to um to increase the speed of the different steps into this process, being in and in the SLA, being in the in the communications between this this um stakeholders. For example.
Charlotte Ward: 7:40
Yeah, so even though you talk about um speed and I uh the the what you know one impression I got there is it’s very people heavy as well. There’s you’re you’re talking often with uh individual restaurants um and things like that. So so there’s a lot of people involved which might uh hamper the speed and increase increase the flexibility, the the necessary flexibility, but also the implied flexibility because people are people and they don’t operate in the same way as a as a process. Um but but but you did touch on the need to make to sort of highly operationalize this as well, there. And I I I’m I’m interested, I’m gonna draw a thread in a minute to the clinical psychologist because I I definitely want to talk about how this is represented and how it shows up there. But but what does operations and what does operational focus look like then in that kind of environment where you’re talking to a lot of individuals or small businesses, you have that high flexibility, you have you know personalities to manage as well. What does operational like operational excellence and efficiency look like in that kind of environment?
Simone Secci: 8:57
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I talked about support operations, right, for a reason, because the key aspect there, if we want to find one that a North Star was the SLA. Because there were it wasn’t one SLA, there were multiple SLAs working into a single case. And a single case can last um a very long time in that case, because it’s from the moment of the reservation to the moment that the client is actually um taking advantage of that reservation and being on that vacation experience, and you have to serve them in both parts of it. And so for that to work, there’s an um a massive amount of work that needs to go into the operational part in the sense of like optimizing the whole process of the reservation from the moment that the request is made to the moment that the that the request then is fulfilled. And um, and there is very like the difficulty is standardization. Like, let’s say by what I mean by that is that you can’t possibly think to communicate with everyone, let’s say, by only by email or only by chat, because you have to maybe get in contact with a restaurant that can only be contacted by phone. And and and the agent needs to have a recording of that phone conversation so that it can be quality, um, quality managed, quality screened. Right? So operationally you have to think that you’re communicating in many different ways with many different stakeholders and sort of like create um uh an operational standard that brings together all the different ways that um that connect these different um stakeholders via uh via communication. So let’s say email, phone conversations, um, text messages, WhatsApp messages, and create the operational bridges that brings them all together in a way that then can be analyzed and further optimized after the the the you know an experience happened and and increase the the level of um um of care of support provided.
Charlotte Ward: 11:03
So so then this is way more than responsiveness, isn’t it? It’s um you know when I think about SLAs, I think about first response time, job done, you know. Um but but I guess what I’m taking from what you’re saying is that you have SLAs for all of the stakeholders, like SLAs to manage those interactions across multiple channels. And none of responsiveness would be part of it, but also um again, like what I suppose what my parallel would be would be something that represents some sort of resolution, like the restaurant was booked in a certain time. It was success metrics in terms of the interactions as well as quality quality KPIs across those interactions as well. So a lot of numbers actually to improve ops at every stage and at every interaction, which which is many fold, right?
Simone Secci: 11:56
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so you know, if you have your first response time, you are and then you have the you you should measure all the as well all the responses after that that first message and the interactions with the external stakeholders in different ways, depending on the type of communication, and and also uh measuring um, let’s say the the communications with when the client is involved and when the client is not involved. So the like customer wait time essentially as an as an SLA, like how long is the customer waiting between his request and all the internal communication and approvals, and then the moment that you get back to them saying, Okay, everything is is is booked. So three of we’re talking about already, I think, uh three or four different SLAs.
Charlotte Ward: 12:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then at the end of this, ultimately you’ve got your your customer, your customer, the billionaire, who’s dropped dropped some some kind of trusted support person a message that says, I’m gonna be in, you know, uh Antigua on Monday. I need a restaurant for me and all my pals, and and that’s that’s all the information you’ve got, right? And uh I I suppose all of that is in the you know behind that single interaction, and from his point of view or her point of view, the billionaire is just looking at their phone, waiting for you to come back and say, Yep, that’s booked. And they’ll and such such a person will greet you there, or I don’t live a billionaire lifestyle, I don’t know what this looks like, I’m making it up maybe one day, who knows? Um, I’m not sure that’s something to aspire to, actually. But anyway, um maybe in some ways. Um super interesting. So, so how does that lift? What is the common thread then? And what like maybe dive into the context a little bit more so that we can explore it and contrast it on the clinical psychology side?
Simone Secci: 13:58
Yeah, the common thread is trust. You you you have clients that put um you know and their their like very high-level privacy information, and I guess billionaire we’re talking about personal information and uh um and the ways to to reach them and then to um you know and and their and their family um into your ends. And then in the realms of clinical psychologists, you have um in like clinical um like clinics of of where people work to help the most um fragile and and um and defenseless like parts of society and help them get back on on their feet. So and they’re trying to do that in the most efficient way possible and try to help the highest number of people, people that don’t have access to to private um mental health care. Um dealing with with all kinds of like um addiction and traumatic experience and veterans and all all the all these people that really need help. And and um it it first of all it it’s like it’s a huge responsibility, I would say, for them. But also somewhat, you know, you are part of of I like to be to think that I’m part of of this this um circle of of trust. Like you you have to make this you have to help them make this work and you have you have to help the process in which somebody gets help, um, which is very um, I don’t know, from a certain point of view, also rewarding for me. Um I’m not completely new to this, I would say, to to that kind of idea, because I worked in trust and safety at the beginning of my career, so I’ve seen my my fair share of like um you know suicidal teens, for example, uh writing to support or their parents. And and and you know, and it was very I was a uh it’s anxiety inducing and and uh and um like maintaining cold blood type of um uh cool a cool a cool head type of type of like um environment back then I was new to it now um I’m a bit older. I’m a lot older, I would say.
Charlotte Ward: 16:20
We all are.
Simone Secci: 16:21
And um, you know, and so I I would say I wasn’t I I had an idea what to expect, but still it it’s you know sometimes you have to dig in into maybe clinical notes for a variety of reasons, and and it still impacts you uh in a way. It’s hard to to just uh um yeah um be completely focused and and not see what you what you just saw um uh and and that happened to somebody and and not empathize with them, especially as empathetic people as we are in in support. And I think this is the level of trust, right? Um to protect those that those information and that and that path of care um and this very delegate moment of their life.
Charlotte Ward: 17:09
Yeah, yeah. Um so the common tra the common thread is trust. Do you and and lots of stakeholders, you have your clinical psychologists, the the healthcare providers in this case, and beyond them, I suppose, um, or alongside them, the the people who are receiving their care. Um so again, two quite different groups of stakeholders that are um both dependent on the success of your operations. Um so operations is going to be, and I can see a clearer line here than I could for the the billionaire. Um I I can draw a very direct line because we mentioned right at the start of this things like regulatory um uh uh environments, uh compliance, uh, security, all of all of those things immediately scream to me very high, very precise, very well understood, documented support context and operations. So is that having learned about the operational um excellence in delivering a a restaurant reservation in some exotic place to a billionaire, is it is it more now that we’re talking about regulatory environments and everything else? Is is there is is it layered on again for this kind of uh context, would you say?
Simone Secci: 18:44
I it is it more, yeah, absolutely. Um it it’s it’s a much higher responsibility, I would say. From at least I mean it depends on your own on your own point of view on on things, but but it it it’s uh I just it’s a bigger chain of people. Um and um and there is so much at stake um uh rather than just a bad experience. And and there I would say in tourism in general, and and I mean I’m not an expert in tourism support, I would say there’s something called like um a sort of like restorative support, like uh restoring the the level of uh of trust in the in the in the client um at the moment where let’s say I don’t know they got into a room and like an air conditioning doesn’t work and uh and they’re upset, and then and then you make the the um the fixing uh like uh of that being as fast as possible, you re you re you can recover the the experience, right? Here we’re saying that like um if there is a system that the clinical psychologist needs to use, then everything needs to be perfect before the session with the client uh happens. So you have to make sure like there is no restorative support there. If something malfunctions during the the session, the the session is is um um yeah, it will not be as successful possibly. So uh there is no restorative moment after the session happened, and so you really have to be careful to um first of all think proactively to the experience, try to help um the clients be successful uh before the sessions happen. Try to really master all the the information, the data that you have from other providers, and um and with that really try to think of all the anything that can go wrong, any any sort of edge case, and and there’s also like a very, I would say close-knit, and this is different from my other experience, relationship with product as as close-knit as I had in in SAS, for example. What the difference is as as we mentioned a little bit before recording, is that um this work and the and the way that the that these apps um that that help with with um mental health care work is absolutely scientific and needs to be scientifically proven. Um so you know, you have the the common product and design ideas like proving an hypothesis and uh A-B testing and things like that. But they work in a scientific context where you know there is a standard method of standardization from a scientific point of view.
Charlotte Ward: 21:44
Okay. And is that because is that because the um the the people creating the experience, the product people and everyone else inside the organization are from a similar background? Are they clinical psychologists delivering this experience to other clinical psychologists? Is that really what we’re talking about here the application of the scientific process. Well I think one one one concept I had um uh here like in in my notes was also that um uh one main difference with the other experience and all the uh the experiences that I had previously is that support that is not adjacent to the rest of the operation is intertwined with the clinical operation and so is product so both you know me and the product people and then in a way also some of the engineering that is uh team that is working on this we have to to speak the same language as the clinical psychologist we work within the same um uh I would say um operational uh pathway the same roadmap um not parallel to each other there is no like um silos here that are possible um we can’t work separately um we really have to rely on each other um in a way that that’s different from from what I experienced before so I don’t know if that answered your question but I think it does I think it does a little and I think I it makes me wonder if the reason for that is because of like the lack of opportunity for restoration for ri restoring trust after the fact like you have to essentially get everything right before you go in which means you have to front load all of the considerations of the end user the end consumers your end customers um you have to be like hyperaware of all the possibilities which means you can’t have silos you can’t have people experimenting on different things because it has to be absolutely lockstep across all those teams doesn’t it absolutely and I would say your opportunity to to um I mean there is one aspect that from that I was from a sales perspective this contracts because of all the regulatory um aspects of it or the legal involved uh at a at a state government level uh from the moment that something is proposed to the moment that is sold and then there is like a sandbox um environment where you know the prospect clients can can experiment we’re talking about very long time like three months before they actually use the product so those are this is your time to work with product and prepare the onboarding of the client so I’m working a lot success here also um uh directly like thinking about um like resources they can use making loom videos for them to navigate the product the new product and thinking of that um working closely with the clinical team like does this work for providers using this term as okay because they have their own technical jargon so you have to be careful also what you say because for example I don’t know that we had a conversation the other day about the word episode can we use episode to name this feature and the clinical psychologist were like no you can’t because when you use that word in a clinical context that means psychotic episode so people are gonna think of that yeah and they’re gonna think oh this button is just in case that happens so that will create total like UI confusion right and and this is what I mean where like you’re very close knit with the clinical team because you have to try to think like your end customer in and um in a way that it’s not always done right in in other contexts in SaaS and e-commerce where like we aspire to that but let’s be honest it’s not always the the case right yeah here is no other way yeah because it it can lead to the mess yeah does it does it slow down the development process because to to your point like in a SaaS environment you can be more experimental in the non-clinical non-scientific way you could easily put a button on the UI and sit you know see if it gets the engagement or not or you could you know craft you you could experiment with a new support channel without too much worry and if it doesn’t work particularly in startup land okay we won’t do that anymore or we’ll change that after the fact you know based on based on the uh based on the success of that feature or that channel or that you know new support initiative or that new you know screening product or whatever um you can experiment informally like that you can be experimental which means you you have this illusion of moving fast but you also do a lot of backtracking as well which isn’t a bad thing it means you can move fast that’s the very that’s the very reason organizations do it but you don’t have that opportunity I’m guessing yeah and and this is like to go back to the initial team of speed you often often like in this environment slowing down is a much better idea than try to fix an issue fast or or develop something really really quickly.
Simone Secci: 27:02
So fat like fast is n is almost never the answer um and um it and it pays off to to be more thoughtful to to really you know rarely I mean obviously I’ve seen one uh outage in in this seven months that I worked with this company and obviously in an outage it’s an outage you have to respond fast right but outside of that uh really thinking about what to say and how to say it is much better than than try to to get something done and move fast. And then there’s also an aspect that that brings together both the the the larger and the the clinical psychologists that like you’re working with people that are extremely busy. You’re talking about somebody that is working I don’t know as many clients as you can in the clinical psychology environment the other you’re talking about somebody who’s a billionaire and has the in the I don’t know like thousands of people asking him for something and they don’t have time neither one of them and and they and also to go to a very practical support problem they don’t have time to to tell you a lot of about their uh what their problem is so um there’s a lot of context you need to understand and you really have to make an effort to be proactive and under and try to understand what the problem is do a lot of troubleshooting on your side do a lot of uh of um q a testing so working closely especially in the clinical psychology environment with q a try to replicate the the problem on your end because there is the technical clinical mismatch so you’re asking for reproduction steps to a clinical psychologist he doesn’t have time to go through the the steps and he thinks he thinks also in his mental model of this like clinical path is not thinking about I click that button then I click that button which is what you need so you have to bridge that gap. You try to replicate and you try to bridge the gap of step reproduction to then go to an engineering team and say this is what happened or this is what we think it happened and work from there.
Charlotte Ward: 29:21
And and in some ways like there are lessons for us all here in providing good support and and aspirations for us all in providing good support right which is you’re really ultimately what you’re talking about is reducing the number of interactions with customers putting taking you know making customers not carry the burden of your your debugging steps or your you know um having to spend too much time getting the answer uh and by time I mean attention, right? Which which really ultimately comes down to friction reduction in the experience.
Simone Secci: 29:54
If they just want to kind of throw one answer and okay within the boundaries of expectations of that context whether it’s a billionaire or a clinical psychologist now quickly you move um for them um it’s about reducing friction which is all about reducing steps primarily isn’t it absolutely absolutely yeah you you we hit the nail on the head you know and it’s like hitting like uh reducing steps in the in the SLA process on the one end for example and then reducing steps in the in the whole interaction process in the uh in with the interaction with the green evil psychologist where you know I have my standardized sort of um debugging and and bug escalation processes that I perfected through the years and this still applies um in the sense of like first interaction then categorization sorting and and replicating and then prioritization with product team and and then the sort of like the the resolution part with engineering that’s still the same but then at the first level you really have to get it right without you have one maximum two interaction with with one of the one of the clinical psychologists. And sometimes getting their attention is not so easy. So you might have to write many follow-ups to get an answer because you know because they’re like oh sorry I was working with like uh I don’t know 30 veterans that just came out the wall you know like yeah and like uh I’m I work 14 hours a day you know and God knows um so um there is that aspect yeah and and it it just struck me as you were talking there you know that in both contexts again what you’re exhibiting as the support function um is customer understanding like you are the only way you can be more proactive the only way you can reduce steps and reduce friction and get ahead of that so you don’t get put yourself in a position of needing to provide or or you know any kind of restorative care or restorative support afterwards you have to know your customers inside out don’t you? Yeah yeah absolutely absolutely and and the and you know that’s why in the clinical psychology environment you’re so intertwined in any um classic tech process with with the clinical team with people that are that work on the field and know this inside out and they advise every step of the way from the language to let’s put this button here will this work will this not work they’re really your your um internal resource for A B testing because they are themselves the client and there’s no other way yeah yeah super fascinating I think I you’ve really given me some food for thought for my own environment and you know uh parallels from previous roles as well um and I know the same will be true with uh for for all of our listeners super fascinating thank you so much I didn’t imagine when we talked about what we might you know when when we talked about support in a high trust environment I thought we would lean at the start of this conversation very heavily into regulation and trust and safety and all that but really I think what’s been surprising to me is how much of this is about customer understanding and like really investing in operations that work for your customers before anything else.
Charlotte Ward: 33:26
And um thank you so much for those insights there’s there’s a lot of food for thought there. Thank you Simone absolutely it’s my pleasure will you come back and talk to me again soon absolutely perfect thank you so much that’s it for today go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two eight eight for the show notes and I’ll see you next time
