How to Reduce Churn & Boost Growth with Fast, Empathetic Customer Support — Eli Winderbaum, Captions

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Eli WBAL head of customer experience at captions an app that empowers anyone to tell better stories by generating and editing videos with AI on the podcast I talk with Eli about effectively scaling support for an app why time to First Response is so important and why you should treat support more like a concierge experience hey Eli thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today thanks for having me yeah so we both just got back from App growth annual it's good to see you in person yeah still a little jet lagged but I'm enjoying my Revenue cat swag and

0:40water bottle I didn't submit for a Shippy this year but next year I'm hoping to get one and bring one back for the team at captions yeah captions is fantastic probably would have won if you would have submitted also so cool that you had actual Billboards like when you displayed the winners of the shippies there were nine of them you showed up picture of an actual billboard in San Francisco but I thought you would just Photoshop them and then as I was leaving the event I saw one just across the street from the ferry building and I was like damn they actually bought these Billboards for them which was awesome

1:12really unique and uh pretty cool to see yeah we've been doing that for some of our promotions and it's really cool to have like actual Billboards and then be able to go take pictures with them and whatnot we did a uh Time Square Billboards as well which was really cool yes our whole team went there and took a picture together it was really funny one of our iOS Engineers was a hero shout out to roel he was in the billboard and it was pretty cool to see him like like 40t tall roel was pretty cool all right well I want to kick things off with something that you said when we were

1:43prepping for the podcast that that really struck me because I I it's kind of a contrarian take in I think not just a subscription app industry but maybe just like Tech more broadly is that you said don't just reduce and deflect customer support and kind of the topic we're going to be talking about today is customer support but I think that's like an important philosophy to maybe kick off this whole conversation like why not just automate as much as possible like it's just such an afterthought for most people so why do you think it's so important yeah I think especially when companies are just starting there's no

2:17dedicated person to customer support so like when I came to captions one of our Engineers was replying to customers from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and then at the end of her shift and so obviously this is something that you don't want to do but when you're finding product Market fit you want to hear from your customers as as quickly as efficiently as possible and that really worked for us she would see an issue in our intercom and she would immediately just fix it in the code because we were a four-person team but as you get bigger you know you start building out a team you hear from your

2:46customers and you hear from customers both happy and unhappy as well as confused and a number of other feelings that they're feeling but ultimately the customers who reach out to you are the ones who care right customers who churn and cancel and never contact you they don't care or or rather like you can't do anything to help those people so I always say if a customer is going to reach out my goal is that they had a improved experience even if we don't resolve their issue even if we just have a great response time and build somewh before and let them know that we're not a person in someone's basement trying to

3:20trying to steal all their data and money and and and rip them off I mean we're a 60 person team that cares about helping all these people who want to create great content so I like when people reach out to us surely you want to deflect some customers but not all how do you think about that kind of balance between the goal of customer support being creating that great experience so some amount of deflection like get their answer as quickly as possible through good support talks and stuff like that but like where do you think the balance is of like what things should be deflected and then what things can

3:53create a better experience connecting with a real human I think repetitive asks and by the way if the app was perfect and had a great onboarding experience and Tool tips and education you know there would be no need for some customer support but if a customer has any question of any kind if that could be automated whether it be with self-help on our help center with searching or browsing or some sort of AI agent that can just answer those questions in 30 seconds that frees up time for our other agents to actually build those connections with the customers who are unsure if they want to purchase if they're you know fishing for

4:28pricing information and want to know I mean don't forget if a customer reaches out asking for if you have good better best and they're interested in good a customer support agent can also be a little bit of sales and help them upgrade or upsell to a different tier that may be better for them so we like those sort of interactions and yeah not not all of them are built uh equally I love this concept you you were sharing with me about building customers for life and how customer support is like maybe one of the better ways to help kind of reinforce that like you build a

4:59great product but then actually interacting with the customer can be really meaningful I mean you Revenue cat has tens of thousands of customers and all of those customers have competitors including ourselves there's no shortage and the time it takes to actually become a competitor to us is getting shorter and shorter so I think it's actually customer support can be a Moote in the sense that if someone reaches out and has a great experience we're able to answer their question in 2 minutes they find a competitor and out to them and they don't hear back for 48 hours that says something about who they are as a

5:33company and I think people are demanding high quality answers basically immediately I know that when I call a 1800 number for my bank and you know your call is important to us you know I lose it I think customer attitudes have totally changed but customer support could be our competitive Advantage I guess I a little bit more on the customer for Life the c4l we have a slack Channel called c4l and this was kind of inspired by uh Tony Shay who was the CEO of zapo he had this book called delivering happiness that was kind of a framework and a book that I read early on that kind of changed how I think

6:07about support and this customer for life is really important with recurring subscriptions recurring Revenue I want to make sure and every one of my team members everyone at the company how do we make a customer for life and we actually have a slack Channel where we post screenshots of customers who say your app changed my business I have I have more views on my Tik Tok I've been able to do this full-time and we share those customer wins with the entire team so that they understand who they're building our app for yeah that's fantastic and you're right like great customer support can be a competitive Advantage especially when again most of

6:42the industry thinks how can I hire the the fewest number of people how can I Outsource as much as I can how do I shut up these customers who are bugging me you know when you when you have that attitude it comes across absolutely how do you think about the difference between support and success when running customer success and support inside captions this term customer success has been thrown around a lot and I think the definition has changed I think it was originally a coined in Salesforce and they were the first team to have a customer success manager customer success team it was really meant for B2B

7:19products and I think depending on what sort of offering you're providing to your customers you know there's low touch high volume which is what we have and then there is high touch low volume which is usually more of a B2B business so I think I don't know if it's exactly like a lever on customer support to customer success left to right but if you're in a consumer and a prosumer usually low dollar value subscription you're probably more focused on customer support if you're trying to build long- lasting relationships with customers who are spending maybe 20 50 $100,000 a year on a large contract I think customer

7:54success with a dedicated CSM is very different than customer support and those customer still need with a success manager they still need support So support and success needs to really work in concert and that's at least what I call customer experience encompasses both the support and the success right yeah so I think a great way to think about it is let's just say there's you're running a hotel right I think it's the marketer job the co-founders job VC job to build the hotel and get people through the front door then once people were through the front door that's where I feel like I'm the hotel manager and my team is the concierge the

8:28bellhop room service I mean what we're trying to do is we're giving customers a three or sday free stay right during their trial and what we want to do is turn them in into an Extended Stay customer and during that time some customers may come in and want self checkin with a little iPad they may want to talk to someone and ask for a room upgrade when customers get to their room a light bulb may be out and I think it's customer support and success job so that if a customer reaches out to us and asks you know for a new room that there's no hot water in my sh show I need to

9:00empower my team to be able to upgrade them to a different room and I think that's what customer support and success is about is not just like building the product but also ensuring this customer has a really amazing experience and I'd say David when's the last time some someone said to you you got to stay at this airport hotel it's so convenient probably probably never but how many times has someone said you've got to stay at this Boutique Hotel I had such an amazing experience the staff was incredible we had dinner at a restaurant one night the next day the same server remembered my kid's name those are the

9:33sorts of experiences that you have where you're telling everyone you know you got to stay at this hotel and that's basically what I believe support and success is gosh I don't think I've ever heard anybody in tech support big company small company analogize themselves to a concierge that's fantastic though I mean that that's a very customer centered approach again versus like so much of tech like you can't get into touch with anybody at Google if you're having problems with your Gmail account it's like so many people just brush it off but to think about yourself in your customer success or customer support team as coner that's

10:11going to create a better experience for your users it's just fantastic I love the analogy and and just love your approach and do think it's ultimately a competitive Advantage for teams that think about it in that way so thinking about it in that way is great but you you you actually got to like hire a team and like develop processes and I know that's something you've been really focused on going from the four-person team you joined to now I think you said like 70 people at the company how do you build a team and kind of instill that attitude and also like keeping it you know coste effective along the way yeah

10:44I think when I'm looking to hire someone there's like three key things that I look for one is people who Embrace change I think especially at a startup a lot of companies that are moving quickly we just move so so quickly it is one of my big challenges to even learn from engineers and product managers what's launching when it's launching how many people it's launching to and then I need to extend that out update our documentation and our macros and of course train my team so I think people that embrace the change and aren't saying oh I can't believe this this feature is changing again this is an

11:16iterative process so I think I need people who enjoy that and look forward to say wow we're moving so quickly this is this is great and then I'd say curiosity shouldn't be overlooked I think I mean I was very lucky early in my career here my mentor and CEO took me under his wing and said I well for a little backstory I just traveled around the world I I left I graduated college I traveled around the world for a year by myself with a backpack and when I interviewed with this person you know he said tell me about yourself and I said well I've just been you know traveling

11:46for a year and he said the whole interview just turned into me telling him country by country everywhere I went everything I did and I was curious about the world and he basically hired me on that fact in that I figured it out I was ious about it and I figured it out I think you can train for your particular app we're a video editing app we can train on that sure it's great to have someone who was a video editor but if you're curious you'll figure it out and I think that that really again should not be overlooked and then lastly I have this kind of other saying that when I

12:18meet people are these the kind of people that will push the trash down and I know this is a little strange to think about but have you ever been at your office or you you've had been at a party and you see the trash kind of overflow and people just drop by and put a little a little thing right on top and move on with their life you know I want people who are going to roll up their sleeves and push that trash down and make room for others it's not about them right they could have put that on top and walked away they're thinking about the

12:43person after them who want to throw away whatever they're going to throw away to me that's like a huge indicator although hiring virtually it's very hard to test for this but it's kind of it's kind of a Vibe check yeah yeah that's great and then I think a lot of people you know today in 2024 will hear that and think well why not just use AI or AI is going to replace all those people anyway why hire a big team just train a bunch of Agents like work on your your prompt engineering skills you know how are you thinking about the blend of people and Ai and how

13:15to effectively use AI to provide that kind of concierge experience I think you used the exact right word which is blend I don't think AI is necessarily replacing all human jobs especially in customer support I will say as an industry I think customer support agents will be one of the the most affected Industries I mean think about your bank or your airline or your IT company even within within where you work I mean a lot of this is just knowledge Gathering and regurgitation of what is already documented either internally or externally so I think for these repetitive tasks or maybe even easy actions I think about it as a pyramid

13:55where at the bottom you've got let's call it eight agents and above them you've got maybe two escalation people and then maybe a manager and yourself on top I think that bottom layer is already able to be replaced and the question is are all those tier one agents going to be retrained to be able to become tier 2 agents or higher and so I don't think like the tier one customer support is going away I actually think this frees up my team to spend more time with the customers who need it so it's not that these agents are maybe being like fully replaced I think they're serving a

14:31different function where they're not just trying to get through the queue and answer questions they have maybe two or three or four times as much time with each interaction to build rapport and maybe create more of a human connection and then I think I mean all of the conversations so far even some of these characteristics that you discuss and how you hire a person is probably how you want to think about training that those tier one AI agents as well it's like whatever kind of pre- prompting that you're doing whatever kind of scripts you're you're baking in there you should be taking that coner mindset to the AI

15:09agents because I mean what a crappy experience so many of these have been in the past the phone trees and whatnot and like yeah it's finally getting better but it can still be a really bad experience talking to AI so even that probably requires a lot of the kind of similar thinking of what you've kind of been talking about so far yeah I think there's one tool that we've been really impressed with over the past couple months I did a full evaluation of every single AI agent and chapot there is and actually I think there's a slight distinction I think a lot of AI options out there are simply chat Bots where

15:42they're telling you information and it's very clear that they're a bot I think there's a whole new breed that is there will be a wave is is my prediction of true AI agents who can empathize and perform actions and do things like that so basically i' I've went through a full evaluation found a really awesome company called parel they were actually just two guys from Denmark who were part of Y combinator they just graduated this year summer of 2024 and they've been amazing partners because they really understand who our customers are and the amount of empathy and smarts that this has truly knocked my socks off and now

16:19this AI agent is working in concert with the rest of my team to basically Tag Team every single message that comes in if it's fairly easy to answer it tries to answer it if it's too complicated it can hand off and I think maybe I'll put ask you a question for change David you know when you call you know your bank or you reach a chat agent online I mean probably half of them are Bots now how many chances do you give the bot before you give up and ask to speak to a human yeah not many I mean that was kind of what I was saying like it's uh yeah as

16:51you said they're not truly agents this first wave of chat thoughts has been pretty rough it's tarnishing those Brands so like your to your points earlier instead of like building a customer for life you're you're kind of pissing people off and I man I feel that so 100% it's been mostly bad experiences the few times I've had good experiences it is when I have a clear question I ask that question and get the response without having to like read a bunch of docs but it's like kind of a glorified you know rag agent where it's like it's just doing Google but better in pasture yeah I think there's also like a clearly

17:25not every customer who interacts with our AI agent ends with age and they they sometimes get escalated I think just as you know I'm always trying to put myself in the shoes of the customer and so if I reach out to again my bank and I ask a question and the bot did not understand it they us like you know I'm sorry I'll connect you with a human and then you're telling the human everything you told the agent all over again now you're already like you were at zero right you were neutral now you're below so that agent has to do a lot of work to win

17:53back your trust I think the way that we have it set up is the AI agent is quite effective and if it doesn't understand or it can't answer or we've you know I think it's very important to program what not to answer right you know someone says give me captains Max free for Lifetime it can't just you know it can't just do that or right anyway the escalation piece is great because this is a nice transfer and again like it's all about working in concert and at least if you get transferred to a human agent the human agent has full knowledge of everything that was spoken and talked

18:26about before and you've been escalating from a human to another human essentially as opposed to oh this didn't work out we tried to Sho you out the door but you were you were too smart for us now we got to connect you to a expensive human I don't like that I don't like that flow yeah I think there's a a lot of Brands burning consumer Goodwill with these really bad flows that they think is saving the money but it's not providing that concierge experience that we keep talking about as you've been building the team integrating these AI agents and doing all those things how do you think

18:58about scaling up to providing quick support and then if the tier one agent can answer it AI agent can't answer it immediately you know how quickly can you get a two agent on and how do you think about scaling that concierge experience yeah I mean we have again we have like a good better best uh scenario and we've got trials on app store and play store we we're on our web we've got stripe I think what we have is a little bit more customization so if a customer reaches out to us we know whether they're in their trial if they're a canceled trial or if they're a premium customer and we

19:34have rules where those customers can either skip to the front of the line or they can skip the AI agent completely and even get reconnected to the agent they last spoke with so I think it's a little bit moving into customer success it's kind of lightweight one to many but there are definitely things that you can do to kind of impress your customers especially those that are potentially paying more you know more Revenue per year but yeah scaling scaling is hard if were not for AI I think our team would be twice as big so I suppose you know what I was saying about taking jobs I

20:05haven't had to let anyone go I think I always want at least one or two human agents at all again we do 247 support 247 yeah so yeah I'm not sure how many regions there are in the App Store I think there's like 186 maybe you have that stat but we have at least one customer in every country in the world which also means language right so we have an app that translates every customer message into English we reply in English it translates back to their language and I think localization for those that aren't just selling in the United States or North America localization is something we have a

20:39really really big effort on because you need localized App Store and Play Store you need localized website localized help center and localized app we just made a big Improvement to our website Brazil is one of our biggest markets a couple months ago when we launched the website in Portuguese we saw a huge lift in installs in Brazil really really makes a difference yeah so that's localization I think really about 24/7 support I think customers are demanding this even for an app that cost $9.99 a month I think a lot of our competitors don't offer any support or actually what's very common is Discord support or Discord support only I've tried Discord

21:17I have my own issues with Discord but yeah 247 support is for us is super important and if you're not there yet at least what I can suggest is try and get to 5 days a week you know 8 hours 5 days a week and then get to maybe 10 hours 5 days a week add a little bit of Saturday and Sunday and then try and get 12 hour support all seven days and then eventually move the uh make the switch to 247 I will say the only thing is once you start offering 247 especially if you Market that you have to keep your promise but that said if on your website

21:51it says great customer support customers will say okay maybe they have great customer support if you say 247 support and you Market that and you put that on your pay wall you might get an uplift I mean I would I would argue that c companies that are exploring with your with your pay wall feature change one word and just say support to 24/7 support and see if it gives you a lift on checkout I'd be very curious we haven't tested it because we already have 247 support but if you are going to do that contact David or may after and let us know what your results were but

22:22yeah time to First Response is super important even if you're it's saying we got your response we will escalate it to the team once we're back on normal working hours and by the way that's how we first launched our AI agent we kept our normal 8 Hour support seven days a week and we had our AI agent on on off hour support just so customers got a friendly message saying we received this and then when we came in the next day we would reply to them so if you're if you're really afraid of AI or you're not sure it's right for you try it for off

22:53hour support and you could Market 247 support right there it's a quick win are you actually hiring around the world to cover those different time zones now that you are truly offering 24/7 support how do you work that side of things there's a common term called follow the sun support and essentially you just have one person in Americas one person APAC one in emia and that's how we have a set up to we've got agents all across the country and actually two of our agents we found in a really interesting way one of them was a customer who just kept on contacting us and telling us all

23:24the feature requests he wanted and also all the bugs that he found early on which was very helpful and then we eventually said you know would you like a job and then we had another one of my agents who's been with us for almost as long as I've been here a year and a half he was in our Discord and he was super active and off hours people because he was in India people would ask questions and we weren't awake he would answer them and he'd link to our help center and all of his answers were unbelievable we had no idea who this guy was after a

23:52week I DMD him I said who the hell are you and yeah so I mean yeah shout out to shrenik and then we ended up hiring him and he's been amazing I mean he really he was a customer so there was barely any training to do he knew more about the app than I did he was a video editor so again if you have a loyal customer base you're looking to hire support maybe I do have a piece of advice reach out to your community you know tweet we're hiring go to your Discord and say we we're opening this position I think you'll be surprised how many people come

24:21out and either apply or refer a friend for your job how do you blend that the community aspect so is it a Discord or do you have like Q&A like public like kind of forum kind of style like how does that fit into that bigger picture I think if you're just launching and you need consistent feedback and you haven't found product Market fit yet or you're launching so many features you need to keep finding product Market fit I think Discord is amazing I think and again depends who your customers are but at least for us we found a lot of customers love Discord gave us feedback added

24:53screenshots and early on in the company when we were 10 or less people every single employee was in Discord and we would mention each other and answer our CEO garv would reply directly to customers and ask what if we did this what if we added this feature and it's kind of this iterative customer research where you don't need to bother with surveys or or setting up Google meets or even paying people I mean people are I've had plenty of people say you should build this I mean there's no shortage of people that think they can build the app better than you so early on I think this

25:23hord is amazing I think as you get as your product becomes more mature it's much harder especially as as you have more customers because there's a lot of noise and you know there's more features or there's more that could go wrong or more that we didn't do exactly the way for their use case I mean the very common question we get is can you just make a button that does X and it's like well we have this whole strategy you know we've got 70 employees we have a road map I mean sure we need some quick wins and I think actually that again shouldn't be overlooked which

25:55is if customers are really loud about something and they are constantly talking about it and voting it if you just sneak in a little bit of a feature request or a quick win and the CEO goes and says hey guys we listen this is fixed talk about a c forl experience those customers say you actually listen to me I'm just I'm a nobody I'm one of I'm one of all of your customers and to get that sort of direct access to leadership or product goes a really long way so yeah again that's a nice quick win that you can do and create customers for life and Point did you phase that

26:30out and then did anything replace it in the interim and then at your scale now with what tens of millions of of downloads do you still have any kind of community aspect we do our Discord is still active I think it's kind of changed from we were providing customer support before but with our customer base we've got iOS Android desktop we're launching features we do AB testing every feature we launch has a two-e period where we test the variables and make sure it performs better so if we don't know who these customers are it's very hard to support them so we encourage everyone to send us a message

27:02in the app so we basically tried to Route all Discord support inquiries directly to the app and take them offline because it could also become a little bit of a hate Fest where people talk and talk but we manage all that on our side with tagging and things like that so the Discord is still active but I think as you get bigger you can also think about things like slack so I'm a part of a really great Community Our Help Center is built on this company called mint lefi they're more of like B2B but they have a Channel and I think because we're a business and I've got

27:32slack open all the time they've built a really great Community where all of their customers are sharing ways that they're launching their Help Center or Design Elements and things like that so I think early on Discord as you become more mature maybe take it offline and actually maybe newsletter I think newsletter might be a great way to keep customers up to date with what you're doing and then of course inapp notifications inapp popups I can't remember which app it was particular but I opened up an app a couple weeks ago and it said since you last logged in here's what changed and that really that really knocked my socks off because it

28:06wasn't just here's what's new this month here's what's new for you if you logged in a week ago this one thing changed if you logged in three month months ago these 10 things changed and I thought discoverability within your app is a challenge I know for a fact there are customers who've been using our app for a year and a half for two years and they haven't used half of our features because they don't even know they exist so that's something that we can definitely do a better job of but anyone who is you know iterating so quickly don't forget to Market to your existing customers not just new customers yeah

28:35where do docs fit into all this so we talked community and now you do have great 24-hour support yeah how do you think about docs and who manages internally yeah another struggle especially with things moving so quickly so I'm ultimately responsible for documentation but we moved to this great platform which offers a lot of translation services and localization so again if we've got customers who don't speak English you just need to have it all of your content localized and I think another challenge is just keeping up with the the sheer Pace I mean I'm always knocking on my uh product manager's shoulder saying hey did this

29:10feature go out yet or you know when is this feature going out did we actually changed the name of it it used to be called this now it's called that it's really important and I think something that's changed in the 12 years that I've been in Customer Support is I've always written content for humans maybe a little bit of SEO because that doesn't hurt but basically human consumption but again with AI chatbots and agents our AI agent takes two sources when it responds to a customer it takes Our Help Center documentation because that has to be up to date and it takes our most recent human agent responses and then craft a

29:45response so it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds where you've got the source of truth that is your help center and your your documentation and then you've got your kind of human element of how would a human agent reply to this customer and it Blends those two and gives a really solid answer and then one of the best things I heard is that one of the reasons AI agents are better than humans is that it has infinite patience and you know I know David you're a dad I don't think you have infinite patience and I'm sure you'd love Infinite patience but yeah I mean that really goes a long way in helping

30:21customers where you they've got all the Time in the World to reply to these customers but you've got to keep your documentation up to date or else you're AI agent won't be giving the right answers nor will your team right cuz when human agents reply to customers they're verifying on The Help Center that's up to date so it's really my job or someone that you can have on the team you actually want to be a choke point between product and customer support because you need to have the information flowing both ways from product cross to us here's what's updated here's what's fixed and then back the other way from

30:53customers reporting issues and you're reporting issues back through linear or jira or talking to customers so it's really a a two-way street that has to happen that's where I see myself yeah how do you manage that side of things I've been meaning to get into that it's like not only is customer support about you know creating those great experiences for customers and being that concierge but then in building a product some of that feedback from customers can be invaluable for building that next thing so early on it was Discord and you could just chat with the customer but you know now that as you've scaled this

31:25how do you think about kind of getting that feedback tracking frequent issues tracking frequent feature requests and then surfacing that in a meaningful way to the product team or or other teams inside the organization something I always try and advocate for within the company is we're 70 people we're all in New York City we worked here 5 days a week we're a very uh discreet group of people and we're providing an app for millions of people across the world from all demographics and a and all different walks of life so I think reminding yourself that oh I wouldn't use this feature or I would use this feature the truth is you probably

32:06really don't know and so you know it's just really an important thing to remind yourself when you're building these products you do need to continually get feedback from these customers because nothing a customer says is inherently wrong or bad I think you just need to determine who is your core customer if if you're getting loud feedback from one group of people but those aren't the customers you actually care about sure you could ignore them I mean hopefully a product will pop up that will serve their need but you do need to stay focus one thing I struggle with personally is you know early on my career I wanted to

32:39solve everyone's problems and that probably went beyond just customer support I mean you'd be surprised what people what people dipe and ask for I mean some people just you know are you know want to talk to someone or you know they they want to know that they're being heard yeah but all sorts of questions that come in I mean you need to decide what is a priority and you you just need to be aligned with your leadership team and your product team what information do you pass along and what do you keep to yourself a lot of times it's a forcing function of itself once something actually breaks or

33:08actually becomes so loud then you share that with the team and something you have to be careful of as a customer support person is you can't be the sky is falling person I was definitely that person in the past and every time you join a new company there's a new a new chance to you know Define yourself but that is definitely some hard Lessons Learned of you know thinking the app is completely broken works and it turns out like it was only three people right yeah understanding the scale of the problem is is is important yeah so we've been talking about what thingss to escalate or not escalate and how to look

33:41at those things but are there other like specific metrics that you track and and care about in running the customer support customer success work yeah I've hit on time to First Response already which is super important I've definitely spoken with colleagues who have 24hour or 48 hour time to First Response in touch maybe in some Industries that's okay but for us we're currently at 58 seconds as time to First reply and again that may just be hey we received your message or our AI agent gave an initial attempt at an answer but I think that number really matters another one that is interesting is contact rate which is

34:17the percentage of customers of subscribers who reach out in a given month so again if you've got you know 100,000 customers and you've got a 3% Reach Out that tells you something and also really helpful for understanding what your next month's inbound volume is going to be again can help you staff can help you scale but you know right now we're at like a 3% which means 3% of all customers subscribers reach out in a given month which I think is a healthy number I think if they're complaining about the same sort of issues sure you want to reduce that by passing it on to the product team and fixing bugs and

34:50things like that but yeah if you're at a you know one and three or you know 40% 50% definitely a little bit scary but I think any fluctuation is actually probably more important to look at if one month you've got a 1 and a half% Reach Out rate in the next month you've got a 4% you know what happened did did you have a kind of a failure of a release was there outage did your coupon and promotion campaign not work out exactly as expected by the way if you're going to do those things that's fine but if you're not in Customer Support listening to this tell your customer

35:24support people you're about to do a promotion I I can't like the worst I mean this is a common thing more in B2B sales but in SAS which is sales gets the Party Support gets the hangover and I think same goes for marketing if we're going to run a campaign where we're going to put up a billboard in in Time Square or an ad in the Subway or a Super Bowl commercial for God's sakes like you got to tell your support team they may need to make changes they need to staff accordingly may need temporary people to hire so that that's super important yeah funny mentioned that cuz I I'm actually

35:59currently doing support for my little side project up and when we do a big launch like I'm the guy at the keyboard I mean for us a big launch is I get like 10 support emails and I can handle it in like 30 minutes but still it's like that's time out of my week that I have to think about so anytime there's a big launch I know that I'm kind of working on the marketing side of things and and going to be a little busier with that and then I know I'm going to get get some customer support from that launch so I can't imagine you know I mean we're

36:26just talking like thousands of new downloads when when I do a little update to my side project app but I can imagine big launches big new campaigns changes in promotion when you're at you know millions or tens of millions of downloads can really like dramatically swing things so yeah definitely something to be keeping in mind is there any other metrics that you track around like customer satisfaction or things like that yeah so seat's a big one in our industry also really helpful because you want to Benchmark against other similar businesses which is nice to do but often you know a bit flawed we've had CET on for a period of months off

37:02for a period of months it really changes it depends on the workflow and I used to be a huge seat person which is just customer satisfaction how would you rate your you know your customer support experience with the last agent you spoke with one to five I actually don't care as much about that number I mean sure you want it to at least be a four out of five or better what I look for and what has been helpful for me is if you've got a team of 10 and everyone's consistently getting a 4.5 out of five and you've got one person getting a 3.5 then that's

37:34actually an indicator for you as a manager to talk with that person and find out what's going on do they not understand the product are they feeling rushed are is something going on in their personal life so while that number is really important to know it may find its way onto a board deck for your investors I think it's more it's it's a better tool for me as a manager to have an early warning sign of what may not be working for a particular agent and I have found that in the past and sometimes you just find out there's something personal going on in their life and you say okay great now I know

38:04like what can we do to make this better can we make can we make changes to your work schedule whatever it is so I actually think about that more as a comparative number to find out more about your team yeah that makes sense and then customer support is often kind of the last line of defense for churn do you track that or or how do you think about kind of helping prevent churn as a a customer support team cancellation and churn is obviously on everyone's mind especially inside of these walls we you know we want downloads We want conversions we want everyone to become a full subscriber But ultimately it's not

38:39right for everyone something may have went wrong or again like maybe it just wasn't right for the customer I feel that cancellation and churn is on us especially because I came from a customer success background where you can have a world where you have negative churn which is essentially your customers are either renewing at a higher dollar value so it's actually more than 100% of Revenue or it's actually that you've lost some customers but the overall customers have renewed at a higher rate still resulting in negative turn so that's a really important number more for like Enterprise SAS companies but from a customer support perspective for a

39:16mobile app and desktop app I really feel that we are the last line of defense we can have our own many winback campaigns by having interactions with customers where maybe you can do a winback campaign with email or I think App Store just came out with a new winb back campaign right in the app store listing which we still haven't tested I just found it yesterday but yeah we we can win back customers and I'm still trying to figure out a way where I could comp my team you know I'd like to be able to reward my teammates who are not just providing customer support but a little

39:46bit of sales a little bit of customer success I think if you can tie that back in a meaningful way it'll also Empower your agents to really feel like okay I need to help this customer become come back and yeah why not I mean it's a great experience well one thing I've done I don't know if if y'all are doing this because I mean it could potentially be really impactful at scale but anytime I have a good customer experience and support and again it's just me doing it right now I did used to have it hired out but the scale is just so small now it doesn't make sense but after any good

40:19customer experience with with support I pretty much always ask for a rating and or review and Link people right to it is that something yall do as well and you see see a lift from that yes I definitely left that part out when I was talking before ratings and reviews could be the best thing in the world and the most annoying thing because I can't tell you how many customers say if you don't fix this feature I'm going to give you a one star or threaten us and say if you don't fix this in you know in one minute or if you don't give me a free version

40:48I'll give you one star review I mean what do you say to that I mean I think Yelp probably Yelp and Trip Advisor probably ruined the internet in terms of operators being able to it really penalizes a lot of the the good people who are trying I'm like we're trying we you know we've got half a dozen people on support like we're here we're trying but yes I mean asking customers to give us App Store reviews and place reviews is huge I always love it when we get an apps for review and they shout out someone on our team one of my agents and they say Carl did an amazing job or

41:22Marion did an amazing job or medy did an amazing job if that happens screenshot WR and C for make them feel really good it's just like it's a no-brainer and if people start reading about great customer support again another reason why people might download the app in the first place so it goes a long way what a better way to like communicate how much you care about your customers and that kind of conier mindset than to see a bunch of reviews talking about specific support people in the App Store like that's cool people right back and you know a month later and they say hey can

41:54you connect me back to medy I you know like I want to talk to him again you know people asking asking by name to chat with people and that means that my team did their job they built rapport with this customer and I love to see that how do you split or do you split customer support by free versus paid like do you offer the same amount of support to free users this is a tricky one I've thought about it a lot we don't have a premium product we have a minimum tier we have a three-day trial we've tested 7day wasn't as good even though I

42:23remember the report you put out last year said 7day did better but not for us I don't know why but anyway we actually don't have free customers although you can consider our trial customers currently free or non-revenue customers but you never know when you're going to get a free customer upgrade to your to the lowest tier or you're going to have a middle tier customer upgrade to your highest tier or even downgrade to your lowest tier so we treat all customers basically the same I will say that if you're in that experience where you've canceled a trial or youve or you've CH we do bump you up

42:54to like the front of the queue but again we reply to customers so quickly I don't know if it has a huge impact I think as we scale if you ask me that question two years from now I think we will probably have to make some changes I think the really the biggest difference are your Enterprise customers and right now we've got consumer customers we've got prosumer customers and we're building out services for Enterprise customers we've got an API that's launched where you can generate video you know programmatically via API and get do some really cool stuff those customers will definitely be treated differently because dollar value is way different

43:27but 99% of our customers we basically treat exactly the same well next up I did actually want to get into tooling so let's just kick that off with how do you tell because you've kind of alluded to this several times in the conversation that you know when somebody is in their free trial period you know when they're in their free trial period and have already canceled you know when they're an active subscriber but have already canceled how are you doing that what tooling are you using to figure all that out I don't know if this was a setup but the one of the my answers is revenue C

44:00that's no it wasn't a setup I didn't think about that but yeah it makes sense it makes sense yeah and I I'll explain why so there's a lot of customer support platforms out there we use intercom one of the things that we get is that when we install the intercom SDK on iOS Android and desktop it passes along information like their email address what device they're on iPhone 12 vers 14 how many times they've opened the app what iOS version they're on so we can find out this information and if customers have issues we need to know at at least as much as they do we can't

44:28know less so we we get that information from intercom and then the other one that we look at every time a customer messages us on the right nav of the chat there's three Revenue cat fields that are sent automatically when a customer message is us it's the latest entitlement which means what plan they're on it is their expiration date which means when will their trial or their subscription expire and then what's their status are they currently on auto renew or have they cancelled and so those three things tell us a lot about about our customers and we can kind of shift our responses and change our responses based on that information

45:03and of course we've got three answers one for apple one for Google one for stripe as it comes to all of that so that's really cool I actually didn't know that you had all that hooked up that way I think you and I talked about this maybe like two years ago I think we had to like build something for y'all to get that done but I i' totally forgotten that that was the case well this is a great call back I guess because it's an out-of-the-box integration with intercom and revenue cat integrates with lots of other tools but I did suggest that third one that I mentioned of like are they on

45:29auto renew or cancel that wasn't available but your team actually did build it for us so thank you very cool so use intercom any other tooling that's super important to all of this for for tracking for AI agents and everything else yeah I think our basically the three tools is like your core chat platform which we're using intercom and I think is great they're also doing a great job themselves with employing AI both as like a agent co-pilot and they've got their own agents and then I think our AI agent that we use is called parel been super impressed with the team and what they've been able to do for us

46:04and then lastly mfy this documentation tool which is really meant for API docs and API references the same way that Revenue cat has your API docs maybe I'll make a referral for you but it's really clean it's really beautiful it's built on GitHub the team's really great and we have used that because we offer both consumer customer support and we now have API so now it's all in one place which is really nice so if you if you want to see what our our documentation

46:28looked like just go to help. captions. and you can check it out this has been such a fun conversation starting from like the philosophy of tech support and like you know your kind of contrarian views on that all the way through talking about the tooling that like makes that happen and hiring the folks and scaling the team and all that wealth of information for folks who are struggling with this but anything I miss anything else you wanted to share as we wrap up just that it was great to see you last week at app growth annual I've got my bag right here great water bottle but really it was an amazing event and

47:00next year we will be submitting for the shippies and I hope that we'll we'll be presented with a Shippy but I I want to bring one home for the team I don't build this app Engineers product that it takes like an entire team but it would be very cool to reward everyone with some recognition we'll see what happens well it's a fantastic app and yeah it was great seeing you and so many other industry folks last week definitely looking forward to next year we're going to link to captions and to your LinkedIn and other stuff anything else you wanted to shout out for people who wanted to

47:31get in touch or otherwise yeah if you want to download the app and test out our customer support and send your thoughts to me give it a try captions. a and then you can always find me on LinkedIn Eli windbound I'm the only one awesome well so much fun talking to you today thank you thanks David thanks so much thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community