Letting Go of Perfectionism to Master Customer Connections

Embrace imperfection in customer support as Tom Rossi, co-founder and developer at Buzzsprout, joins me to discuss how the quest for flawless customer interactions could actually stifle genuine connection, prevent mastery in your job, and hinder effective customer service.

Learn how the occasional stumble can fortify customer relationships and admitting our blunders not only wins the hearts of customers but also paves the way for a more transparent and humble support experience. We hope to share our company culture where teams are granted the freedom to experiment, leading to revolutionary service experiences that resonate with customers and team members alike.

Plus, we discuss a Support in Real Life story from a viral Twitter/X thread! 

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!

Follow us on Instagram @happytohelppod

To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Priscilla: 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help. A podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today we're talking about how perfection shouldn't be the goal when it comes to remarkable customer support, and how not holding ourselves to a perfect standard may actually allow us to make a stronger connection with our customers. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. Today, Tom Rossi is joining us to talk about perfection and failure. Tom is the co-founder and developer for Buzzsprout. Andy's my boss, so I'm excited to talk about how imperfect I am with you, Tom. That's going to be exciting.

Tom: 0:35

I think, most importantly, I was one of the first support people for Buzzsprout. That's true, you were as the developer.

Priscilla: 0:43

You were.

Tom: 0:44

Kevin and I were the only ones doing support when we started.

Priscilla: 0:47

Yeah, Well, that's a good intro for you. There's a lot of stuff you do outside of like being the co-founder, so can you give us a little insight into what you do for Buzzsprout and then how that interacts with the support team and support in our customers?

Tom: 0:59

I have partners, so Kevin and Marshall are the partners in the company. We all do different things. I'm on the technical side. I work with John Pollard, who really leads that group now, on all the code. I love writing code, so John still lets me do that, so that's fun. I also help with company culture, how we grow as a company, how we treat people and what that looks like. So some of that overlaps with what you all are doing, with podcaster success and all of those things, and so, yeah, I think that's how it kind of intersects.

Priscilla: 1:26

Yeah, so Tom has a unique viewpoint on providing support to our customers, one because he's been doing it since the very beginning of Buzzsprout, but he also usually comes in when something is wrong, when something big is broken, so you're like the highest level of technical support, and then you deal with a lot of the billing issues that we deal with in support, and so it's just, you come at it from a different angle. So I think it's going to be fun to talk with you about these kinds of things, knowing that that's where you're coming from and, like you said, you're also a driver of Buzzsprout's culture, and so I think having you come on to talk to us about perfection and allowing your employees to fail, and those kind of thoughts, is going to be really beneficial for our listeners and then also for the people in Buzzsprout who want to listen, like the employees who want to listen and go. Oh, tom's okay with this.

Tom: 2:11

Sure, so I think it'll be totally okay with failure.

Priscilla: 2:16

That's such a blanket statement.

Priscilla: 2:17

I think we need to clarify a little bit. Okay, so first I kind of want to talk about the problem with perfection and using that as your like end goal. I think we all, to an extent, want to feel perfect or want to be perfect. I know for some of us it's more of a struggle than other people. I would consider myself a recovering perfectionist. It's something that I'm working on a lot as an adult, but in college it was something that I could not handle. If I didn't get an A plus on an assignment, I considered it a failure and it was just a really bad, unhealthy place to be in your brain. And so I feel like, as I've been working post college, I'm getting a lot better at accepting that perfection is not always going to come maybe ever, but also not in the beginning of learning something new. Tom, would you consider yourself a perfectionist?

Tom: 3:07

I would not. We were talking about this topic for the podcast this afternoon at lunch with some of the other members of the bus sprout team, and one laughed out loud when he heard the topic. Perfection is not something that I think I struggle with.

Priscilla: 3:25

Which I think is exciting, then to have two people with very different like factory settings having this conversation about letting perfection, how it plays into our work each day in support, but then also just like as someone who is working a full time job and putting their effort into work, and how that drives us, so I think it's going to be fun, okay. So the question is, should perfection be what we're aiming for, especially when it comes to remarkable customer support and providing these great experiences to your customers? I would argue that it shouldn't be what we're aiming for, and sometimes that desire for perfection actually holds us back from doing really good quality work, because we're so in tune and trying to be perfect that we don't let ourselves do what could be really, really good. But maybe is not hitting that like personal benchmark. So to talk about that just a little bit more, one thing we talk with our users and customers in Buzzsprout a lot is we work with podcasters.

Priscilla: 4:23

So there are a lot of podcasters, new podcasters who delay their launch for weeks, months, years, right, because they want their first episode to be perfect.

Priscilla: 4:33

And so, in our support, we talk a lot with podcasters and encourage them to be okay with that first episode not being perfect, because it's delaying this valuable thing that you have to talk about for however long until it gets to a perfect place, but it's never going to get to that perfect place, so you just kind of have to go for it and allow yourself to grow as you go With that idea.

Priscilla: 4:54

Let's pull it into customer support and what that looks like in customer support. If you're working on an email and you're trying to craft this email in a perfect way so that someone can understand you fully and you give them the best information, you could sit there and work on that email for hours and that's going to delay the support you're giving this person. It's also going to delay any support that you'd be giving anyone else, and so there has to be this balance of am I going for a perfect email or am I willing to have it be 90% a really good email if that allows me to move on to other emails and help more people?

Tom: 5:31

And really to help the person that you're communicating with? Right, because the longer that you wait, are you really adding more value to your response or is it just making them wait Because of your own struggle with perfection? Exactly, I think what you said about, like, what is your goal, is the goal perfection? When we're talking about customer support, the goal is to help someone. Right Is to answer their question, to do something, and if we stay focused on the goal, then I think it makes it easier to recognize when you're getting to diminishing returns, like I can spend another hour working on this, but it's not going to make it any more clear. It's not going to make it better for the customer. I'm just spinning my wheels. At this point. I could recraft the wording, I could do this or that, but at the end of the day, I can help the customer right now. I don't need to do that.

Priscilla: 6:15

Right and maybe writing it. You know, working on the email for another 10 minutes is going to get you 2% better of a clear response. But is it worth it if they have to wait another 10 minutes to get the answer or to log into their account or whatever it is they're trying to do? That they can't do. And now our own need for something to be perfect and our worry around that stops us from providing a quick response or a, you know, time-friendly response.

Priscilla: 6:37

I also think that committing to a perfection standard doesn't value our time as we're working. We, you know, we all have for the most part, 40 hours of work a week, and so you know, if everything you're trying to accomplish you're only going to submit when it's at that perfect standard, then you're probably spending more time than that task requires to get that thing done and then your time is becoming less valuable. We talk about it in Buzzsprout a little bit like working within constraints and allowing yourself to do really good work within this constraint of time, and that way your time stays valuable and you're not working 60 hour weeks in order to meet this perfection standard and then burning out so quickly because you're trying so hard to hit the standard. That is not really achievable.

Tom: 7:26

Yeah, I think that's fundamental is recognizing that you're not going to hit perfection. So, whether it's your first episode of your podcast, whether it's a response to a customer support email, whether it's writing code, you're not going to hit. There is no perfection. You're not going to hit it because we don't see everything perfectly, we don't know everything perfectly. And so, having a clear goal of what it is that you're going to do and embracing constraints of I've only got so much time. If you've got 50 people that are waiting for a response, you've only got so much time and so you've got to work within that constraint to answer people, make them happy, give them what they need, but recognize your own limitations.

Priscilla: 8:02

Yeah, and one other thing that I see a lot in the support team is this idea of trying to be perfect and how that can lead to self doubt.

Priscilla: 8:09

Because if you're not hitting that perfection consistently which you're never going to because you're saying it's not achievable so then when you don't hit it, all of a sudden you're hit with this like massive amount of shame and self doubt, and then the next time you have to do the same kind of thing, it's even harder to get to a place where you're doing it well, because you have this, you know, imposter syndrome, the self doubt sitting in your head telling you you didn't do this right the last time. Why do you think you can do it right this time? And so I think if we aim for perfection, that's going to cripple us in so many other ways. And so I feel like what is then the counterbalance to that? To encourage a culture where perfection is not the goal, but instead you kind of have the freedom to fail. You have the freedom to try things and work really well, but maybe not aim for that perfection, so you don't have that fear of failing perfection.

Tom: 9:00

When we're talking about customer support, it's especially important to be human Right, like that's. If you could sum up how to be a really good support person be a human, you know care about another person, and humans are broken. They make mistakes, yep. And so you hold yourself to a standard that you wouldn't hold yourself to outside of work or outside of this email that I'm crafting or this code that I'm writing or this episode I'm recording. Then you are trying to not be human and that will get picked up by the person that you're responding with. We've seen this before, where we've written emails and support and it's so perfect that they're like are you a bot? Are you a bot? Right, it's AI. Yeah, I think. I think there's something to be human, and that means that sometimes you're going to get things wrong and you just own it just like a regular human would, and you say oh, you know what I misspoke? This is a different way that you could accomplish the same thing, or here's a better answer.

Priscilla: 9:54

Yeah, one of the things we talk about a lot when we're training new people on the team is not getting caught up in being the expert and feeling that kind of like, oh, I can't be wrong. So, instead of telling you, oh shoot, I got it wrong, this feeling of oh, I wasn't wrong, you were wrong, I meant it this way, and kind of like trying to backtrack, and instead, like you were saying, when we make a mistake because we will, because we're human which is such a valuable way to provide support to people because we're going to mess up, taking responsibility and being humble about it and then working toward fixing it in some way is so important in providing kind of a remarkable support experience, because it brings back that humanity of I'm a person helping another person, and then it gives me grace for myself, but it also gives the person who's working with me a little more grace for me too, because they realize that, oh, this is a human person who makes a mistake, just like I made a mistake, which is probably why I'm emailing you in the first place. I also think that allowing your team to fail or allowing yourself to be okay with failure allows you to learn so much more and so much stronger. One of the things I was thinking about this earlier someone on our team who was training this was a couple of years ago now, and when we have someone train with Buzzsprout, we kind of give them a couple weeks of really hardcore training and then we kind of go okay, you have enough information that you're not going to break anything big and so do your best. It's not going to be perfect, we know that. We're okay with you trying your best, go for it.

Priscilla: 11:24

And so this person was newer in the company, newer to the support team, and he accidentally did something where he missed a step and he changed something before it was ready to be done and it caused a little bit of a problem and we had to back things up. But the point of this is that it gave such a great opportunity for me to get on the call with him and to not be like, hey, you screwed up. I want you to know you screwed up. We need to talk about the fact that you screwed up, like that was not the conversation, but it was. Hey, this is why this is in place the way it is, and now he will not make that mistake again. He knows that process backward and forward. Now, because of that failure, it allowed him to like solidify his knowledge in that, and so I think if you don't let people have the space to maybe fail, then it almost keeps them from strengthening those muscles to get better at the stuff they do know.

Tom: 12:13

I think too, we have to be careful of what we call a failure. In some cases, when you make a mistake and then you apologize and make things right, is that even?

Priscilla: 12:21

It's actually a win yeah.

Tom: 12:23

It's not even a failure, right, it was a mistake that got turned into a win and we just had this happen. We just had this last week, I can't remember. There's these scenarios that we run into where I find myself saying if that issue hadn't happened, if we hadn't made the mistake, then they wouldn't be as happy as they are right now. And it's such an interesting thing. I think it's because it's remarkable customer support and they write in they weren't expecting somebody to own anything. And then when they do, and they do something to fix it, they're like wow, that's amazing, that's the way it should work.

Priscilla: 12:55

And you're like yes, that is the way it should work Right and he owns a car dealership and he deals with a lot of reviews online and he always gets very frustrated with these reviews and people will get angry and he never knows how to handle them. And I feel like you have three options. You can either respond to the review and get really defensive and say, oh no, we didn't do this, you misunderstood this. You can ignore the review. Or you can respond, take ownership of whatever the mistake was and then make this customer's experience better.

Priscilla: 13:29

But the thing that's the most important out of all of that is that the other person, this third person who has no connection with this issue at all, who's going to come in and read this review and see the response, they're going to think better of you because you handled it with ownership and grace and humility and you were a real person talking to this person. So he will often come to me and be like oh, what would you do here? And I'll tell him remember this customer you're working with. You want to make them feel better, but they're already so angry that they're going to the internet and leaving a review that you also want to think about prospective customers that are going to look at this and how they're going to see your responses as well. And it's that same thing taking ownership for the thing that we screwed up on because we're human and then working to make it better can be such a powerful tool in strengthening that loyalty with a customer.

Priscilla: 14:19

One other thing that I think the giving your team the freedom for failure allows for is the ability to make the remarkable happen, so to go above and beyond. If you are so worried about failing or making that mistake because you're not 100% sure about something, then you're never going to go beyond what the base level is because you're so scared about it being the wrong thing. And so, tom, I know you encourage our team to like take that leap, to think bigger and to be okay with the fact that maybe this big idea doesn't become the next big idea, right, but like thinking that way and allowing that to happen, even if it doesn't end up coming to fruition and being this great thing, can you talk a little bit about how you try to foster that idea of it's okay to fail, like in order to maybe have this great idea, this great thing, come out of it?

Tom: 15:09

This is just true across the board. In the way that we work, in the way that you build a product is trying different things and learning, and some of the things you're going to get right. You learn and you've doubled down on it and you go more in that direction. Some of the things don't really resonate or work, and so you spend less on those things, and so I think we've learned the value of experiments. We've learned the value of trying things that may or may not work, and there's no difference in how you might approach a support case.

Tom: 15:37

Maybe I've handled the support case the same way a hundred times, but I'm going to try it different this time. I'm going to reword it, or I'm going to log into their account and do something different, or whatever. Take a screenshot, drop a URL, do something that may be a little bit different, and maybe it works, and they write back and they go that was amazing. Or maybe they write back and go wow, you totally missed the mark. But either way, you tried something new and you're learning what works and doesn't work.

Priscilla: 15:59

Right, it may or may not succeed, but the reality is you tried it and whether it provides a remarkable experience for the customer or if it just gives you more clarity on where to go next Hopefully it wouldn't end up being a detrimental failure.

Tom: 16:12

You need the culture of the organization to support that because otherwise, like you said, they're not going to take the risk. I'm not going to take a risk if my neck's on the line, if I'm going to get in trouble for trying something different that may not work. I mean, I'll give you a great example. You and I talked about using gifts. I love gifts. I don't know if it's a certain age, but I love communicating with gifts, like when I text my kids make fun of me. But I love using funny gifts, and you and I talked about including those in support emails. Whenever we write back to a customer and to me, that's a little bit of a you know, it's a little bit of a gamble. There's a chance that somebody could get turned off by that and say you know I'm paying you. I wasn't expecting you to send me a funny office gift or something. This is serious.

Priscilla: 16:52

Yeah, this is. Why are you making jokes?

Tom: 16:54

Yeah, Right, yeah, but I think that's a great example of like taking a risk and it paid off. Like we've we've picked up on that and it's now part of our process is if we can be playful in the way that we interact with our customers especially. I mean we're sensitive to the tone and all those things.

Priscilla: 17:08

Yeah, yeah, but you know we're working with people about their podcasts, so it gives us a little bit more of the freedom to be casual and to use gifts and that kind of a thing, and we weren't using gifts before you had the idea to do it, and I remember you saying it and me being like, ooh, is this going to take away from our professional look to our podcasters. Are they going to stop thinking that we're, you know, a professional group here? But the reality is having that casual connection builds that brand loyalty, and so it ended up being a huge win, and now we send gifts all the time and people absolutely love it. So one thing that I want to make sure we clarify in this conversation is that, while we're not trying to be perfect, I don't want anyone to think that we're promoting failure and promoting mediocrity when it comes to our work.

Priscilla: 17:51

One thing that we believe strongly about at Buzzsprout is this idea of mastery and putting a lot of focus and intention on the way we work in becoming masters of our craft, and so I kind of want to talk a little bit about how perfection and mastery kind of live together and how they don't necessarily cancel each other out, how that works with the support team and how we as a support team because, tom, we were talking about this earlier you said something like well, I don't want it to feel like you shouldn't go the extra mile and look at someone's account and try to get more information for them, just because we don't want to be perfect. And so this idea of being thorough and taking ownership and mastering your craft, but not letting perfection be kind of that roadblock in the way, I think it's very different.

Tom: 18:37

I am a person who's very motivated by mastery. I love being able to know the ins and outs of something, to know it really well and deeply. That's something that motivates me and, I would say, most people in our company. That's something that motivates them is mastery. I really want to be really good at something, and perfection, to me, doesn't come into the picture, but that's because I'm not a perfectionist. I don't think that way, because I can think about when we were running those experiments. When we're running, we're trying different things. Some of those things are not going to be perfect. All those things are not going to be perfect, but they're making us better and that, to me, is mastery. I'm getting better. I'm getting better, I'm learning more. The way I do things today is better than the way I did it a year ago. That, to me, is moving on this path of mastery. So maybe that's the way I look at it, as mastery is moving forward and perfection is.

Priscilla: 19:25

It's the growth. Yeah yeah, Perfection is like an end goal that you sit on. You're like I'm perfect now, Whereas mastery is this always evolving growth over time With the support team. When we talk about mastery, what we kind of focus on is like sharpening our knowledge around the product, having regularly scheduled deep dives into different aspects of the product, always leaning on each other and looking for better ways to communicate. So that kind of a growth over time. Am I doing this better than I was doing it a year ago? Not, is this perfection and always hitting the mark? And am I never making any mistakes? But am I doing this better? Am I working better?

Tom: 20:04

And it's like I know that you do this with your team of being able to take a support interaction, take an interaction from beginning to end and look at it with the team and say what could we have done better. The goal is not shame. The goal is not oh so and so messed up. The goal is we want to get better as a team. Does anybody have any ideas of how this could have gone better? Is there an article that we could write? Is there something that we could have referenced? Is there a word that we could use, or any of those kind of questions which only happens if you're taking the time out of support to sharpen that knowledge and really invest in that mastery Not perfection, but mastery. I really want to get better so that the next time this request comes in I can make it a little bit better than it was last time, based on this conversation.

Priscilla: 20:47

Yeah, absolutely.

Priscilla: 20:49

There's an aspect to this too, where you're leading the team and having kind of like that grace for yourself and the grace for your team when it comes to like processes and things like that. So like leading by example, when it comes to allowing yourself to make mistakes or allowing yourself to change direction, when you review a process that you've had in place that maybe isn't working anymore and going okay. Well, the way we've always done the schedule is this way, but now I'm seeing that maybe it's not working the best that way and so I need to give myself the grace to say it's not a failure, that we need to change it, and kind of being that example to the team that if I'm willing to like acknowledge that this is no longer working the way it should, then we can kind of allow that betterment to work as a team and when it comes to supporting our customers, all right. So what does it look like when leading a support team to allow this like idea of mastery and to give space for mistakes to be made? I think it means communicating grace in failure through words and actions as a leader. So one of the big drivers behind this feel of failure or this feel of making a mistake is shame, and we, as leaders, if we display our own failures to our team and use that as an example for them, then it can encourage them to not be afraid of making those mistakes, because they see you, as the leader, make those mistakes.

Priscilla: 22:07

There was a time when I was training one of our newer support specialists and I was showing her how to this is gonna get a little technical, but I was showing her how to give someone a credit, basically and instead of telling her to hit the credit button, I told her hit the downgrade button, which is wrong. And I just had some kind of a brain jolt and so she downgraded the account instead of giving this credit. And immediately I went oh no wait, what did I just tell you to do? You shouldn't have downgraded, you should have given the credit. I just told you the exact wrong thing. And then she started to stress out and I was like, listen, you are not at fault here. I told you to do the wrong thing. And so now this is a great example of how we're gonna have to reach out to the podcaster and explain to them that we screwed up and get them back into a place of being happy with us and it ended up being a great situation because she learned from my mistake.

Priscilla: 22:58

That happened right in front of her, the podcaster. He responded and was so understanding, which we are lucky to have, you know, a podcaster that was so understanding in that situation. But then I was also able to give him a credit and give him a little bit of a bump as a apology for, you know, putting a little hiccup in his day, and so I think that in that situation I could have been very embarrassed to the fact that I made such a simple mistake, but that would have encouraged this new person that I was training to also feel like when I make a mistake I'm gonna feel embarrassed. But now, because of that experience where I said, oh nope, this was me right off the bat to ownership, immediately she was able to go okay, wait, so if I fail, if I make a mistake and a little, you know, in this way, it's not gonna be the end, I'll be. All of you know my value here, and so I think it ended up being a really good situation. But it definitely was a situation where I was like, oh great, I just made a very silly mistake right in front of one of our brand new hires.

Priscilla: 23:55

I also think that this idea of perfection can apply to how we work and being willing to change course when something that we're doing is not working the way that we want it to be working, and being intentional about reviewing the work that we're doing and the processes that we're doing, and why we're doing them the way we're doing them. And if it's no longer working, if it's not helping, then we need to be open to changing course and trying new things, like you were saying, tom, even if those things end up failing, like finding new ways to work, finding better ways to work, tom, how do you know when something's not working? How do you identify that?

Tom: 24:31

Yeah, I think if you've been doing it for a while, if you've been doing it for a while, you could do it better. Yeah, if you've had the same process in place for a long period of time or I mean the extended period of time depends on you know what the thing is it's probably time to evaluate Is there a better way to do it? Because there probably is a better way to do it, and so you and I have experienced this before of. I have a tendency to just blow stuff up just to find out if there's a better way to do it. You might get to the end of it and go you know what actually the way before was actually a better way, but I learned something and, okay, we're going to go do it the other way.

Tom: 25:03

I think there's real value in that. Again, it's this idea of mastery of what if there's a better way? But I'm so locked into this is the way I've always done it that I'm going to miss out on this opportunity to do something a better way. So I am a big proponent of changing course a lot, trying different things and learning and getting better, and then, you know, constantly reevaluating, because everything changes as well. Right, we've seen it with Buzzsprouts a great example where podcasting has changed a lot in the last 10 years, and so what your customers are looking for might change, and so you're going to have to constantly reevaluate your processes.

Priscilla: 25:39

Yeah, and if you look at that within like a support team, looking at the people who are on your team and how they've changed over the years, one of the things that we have made a big shift of in the last couple well, I guess last year or two is the way that we handle coverage of the support inbox.

Priscilla: 25:56

Early on in Buzzsprout support, we had very little structure around the inbox, which was nice in some ways.

Priscilla: 26:02

But as people started getting married and having kids and needing a little more structure in their day so that they could allow them to be outside of the inbox more, we had to change the way that we built the schedule to allow for that. And when that happened, I know for me, when I realized, okay, we're going to have to change the way we do this If we want to continue, you know, offering remarkable support, there was a lot of fear of, well, what if this doesn't work? What if this idea that we're trying actually doesn't end up solving the problem? And we as a support team tried a handful of different things to get us to a place where we felt like, okay, this is working better, allowing us more flexibility with the schedule while still providing a high level of remarkable support, but if we hadn't been willing to change that a couple of years ago and try something new, we would not be where we are with the scaling of our support team that we have now.

Tom: 26:53

And I think it's a great example of how you can model behavior for your support team as well, because what you're saying is well, I'm scared. What if things don't work out better? If we change the way that we do this and you go, then we'll change it again, then we'll go back, we'll do something like I'm not afraid to make a mistake. You shouldn't be afraid to make a mistake. What you should be afraid of is not taking the risk to make things better. What if this is a better way for us to work and we could tweak this thing and everybody's going to be happier. Wouldn't you want that? And then they're like yeah, yeah, of course.

Priscilla: 27:25

Well, and it's kind of like troubleshooting. When you're working on a complicated email, you might not know the answer right off the bat, you might have to troubleshoot a couple of times to get to a place where you have the information to make the best decision, and if you don't allow yourself the ability to troubleshoot different ideas, you're never going to get to a place where you solve the problem because you're not trying different ideas, you're not trying looking down different roads, and so I do think that that kind of like relates back into the email side of things. You have to be okay with trying something and it not working, because it's going to give you more information to try again and maybe that next time will work.

Tom: 27:59

So one of the things that we learned really probably in the last I don't know five or 10 years, and a lot that we've learned from you, from Priscilla in the way that you lead a customer support, it's not the way a co-founder, it's definitely not the way a developer thinks about support, and I think a lot of the things that we've talked about when it comes to mastery and how we can be human and things a lot of that we've learned really from interactions with you and watching the way that it resonates with our customers. So what would you say to somebody who's listening right now that has the ability to affect the culture of their support team? What would you say are the most important things that they should be thinking about around this concept of how they develop a healthy culture within their customer support for accepting failures and those things and not really shooting for perfection? What would you say to them?

Priscilla: 28:50

I think that's a great question, tom.

Priscilla: 28:52

One of the things that's really important is identifying what your main goal is with your support team, and so if it's always having the right answer at the fastest time, then that's going to give you a culture of stress and anxiety and that's going to be something that your users are going to pick up on.

Priscilla: 29:11

That.

Priscilla: 29:11

If all of your support team is worried about being fast and being perfect and being accurate every single time, I think one of the things that we do is we try to remember that we're humans and we're connecting on a human level with our podcasters, and so one thing we do as a team is we lean into easy conversation, we remind our podcasters we're on their team, so that there's a little bit more of that shared grace when we sometimes aren't perfectly on the right track or when we have to troubleshoot things and it takes a little bit longer than the podcaster or the user might be used to.

Priscilla: 29:47

And so I think, having that support as a team and being willing to like lean on your team member a little bit more and using them as a resource, I think all of those things kind of come together as you define your goals and what really is the goal of your work each day, and for us, we really have defined that it's building this relationship with our users and having that connection and letting them know that we're on their team and feeling like this is their support team that's here to work for them and to connect with them, and so I think that is such an important part of like supporting your support teams, so that they have that freedom to go the extra mile, even if it means maybe they step off the mark perfectly.

Tom: 30:27

What would you say to the person that's listening? They're on a support team that doesn't have those values. It doesn't have that goal. What would you say to that person? Thousands of people listening to every episode. I know and so you have a voice right now to the people that they don't have the option of actually changing their culture. They're living within a culture. What would you say to?

Priscilla: 30:45

them. Yeah, I would say remember what's important. I mean, I worked in cultures that were so tight on being perfect and not having any kind of thing fall off the mark that I didn't do anything more than what was asked of me because I could not go above and beyond. And I would say step out of it. Even if you feel like you're in a place where failure is not an option. Try to do something above that. Try to push beyond that and show the people who are in control of the culture that actually it isn't the end of the world.

Priscilla: 31:16

And if you can't do that, if you can't grow, if you can't lead beyond that, then it might be a place where you need to look for a new culture to be a part of, because there's only so much you can do as someone who doesn't have control of the culture to change it, and so you may end up having to leave. But I really would want to encourage you to remember what's important, and that it's a human-to-human interaction, and whether you're working for a huge support team or a small support team, it's really just two people the person emailing in and the person responding, and so having that person-to-person remembering that that's the root of everything with customer support. Hopefully that allows you to kind of be human and have that connection. And if you end up in a place where the culture doesn't allow for that, then it might be that you need to go somewhere else to do better work.

Tom: 32:03

Your DMs are open.

Priscilla: 32:04

Oh yeah, my.

Tom: 32:04

DMs are open, your contact information.

Jordan: 32:06

Reach out.

Priscilla: 32:06

Yeah, ha ha ha, all right. Well, it's time for our support in real life segment, where we talk about support questions and stories from our listeners. Jordan, do you have a support in real life story for us?

Jordan: 32:22

Yes, I do, and this is an interesting one because it's not a story that was sent in by a listener.

Jordan: 32:28

This is actually a recent viral tweet that I'm going to discuss with you guys. I'm going to read the tweet here from at Trevor Chauvin Wild Story incoming Last month, we had to cancel our Boston trip after I was hospitalized. As a result, I had to use travel insurance to get my money back on our hotel, train and restaurant reservations. Today I got this message from at Table Boston and so, just for a little bit of context, what happened is the customer had disputed a $250 cancellation fee from this restaurant owner and what happened is the restaurant owner then went and found the customer on Instagram and wrote this message to them saying hi, I own the restaurant and basically you screwed over my staff and restaurant and I really hope in the future you have more respect and it's kind of backfired for obvious reasons. But the customer posted this message to Twitter and then it blew up and went viral and now people are finding mean review responses that the restaurant owner wrote and just all these things are getting unearthed by the internet.

Priscilla: 33:41

Yeah, I heard about this on the news, so I read this article too because I was interested in it. It's a support situation in real life. So I did a little research on this restaurant. It's a very small restaurant in Boston. They have 32 seats total Wow, and it's kind of like a big community dinner type of situation so I made me kind of want to go to it. It's very cool. They have dinner at 7.30. 32 people come and sit. They all sit together on these two big tables and there's like a seven course meal and so you purchase your seat ahead of time and your seat is like $125. And so in this situation, this man was hospitalized before his trip and so he called a few hours before the dinner reservation.

Tom: 34:25

He went to the emergency room just to be clear for something that they did not share.

Priscilla: 34:29

Yeah, he went to the emergency room. For whatever reason, he couldn't go on this trip.

Tom: 34:33

He can see where I'm going. I know.

Priscilla: 34:35

But I thought it was an interesting. I'm excited that we're talking about it because I think Tom deals with a lot of our billing disputes and so I thought it was a cool conversation for the two of us to have, because I think there's a couple different things you can take away from this story. I mean, he called and he disputed this $250 charge, or he asked to cancel the reservation and the person on the phone said we can't, you have to pay for this. If you have a problem with that, take it up with your credit card company kind of thing. And so then he did. And then the owner reaches out to him and says you've ruined my business, which is a little harsh for a dispute. So, Tom, what are your thoughts on this as someone who handles the disputes for Buzzsprout?

Tom: 35:18

I hate disputes. I mean I can definitely see what's shaking down, like you can see the writing on the wall. The owner was upset and rightfully so, because they had a policy in place then maybe the table went empty, maybe they had plans for what they're going to do with their business, for their employees and these things. They're a pain to deal with and so I definitely feel for the restaurant, but I also see the way that was handled not great.

Priscilla: 35:47

No.

Tom: 35:48

You've got to have control over yourself. But I've been there, I've felt it. Just the anger when you're like, really, this is just crazy.

Priscilla: 35:56

Yeah, I think there are two big takeaways with this story.

Priscilla: 36:00

The first one is you need to be able to make exceptions.

Priscilla: 36:03

When he calls the restaurant and gets a customer service person on the phone and they are so tied to a policy that means you have to pay this, there are no exceptions period. That backs you into a corner as a customer support person, because you have nowhere to go from there, and so the only option you have is to say, take it up with your credit card company. But you really don't want them to take it up with their credit card company, because then they're going to dispute it and then you run into a situation where now it's a ding on your business from the credit card company. And so I think having the ability to make exceptions even if they're super rare, I think is important to empower your support team. So in this situation I mean, when I was looking up this restaurant, they only have 32 seats, so if two people don't come, I mean that's a pretty big hit on an evening, and so I understand why there's this thing, and it was the day of, and it was like a few hours beforehand.

Tom: 36:57

Yeah. So I can understand why you might not want to have a policy where you tell the person at the front, hey, if they call in, then you can let them go. I can get that, but you should never say take it up with your credit card company, ok.

Priscilla: 37:11

And maybe there's something else you could have done. Maybe, yeah, they can't come that night and so they have to pay the cancellation fee, but maybe instead of that you can get them scheduled on another night in the future. Or maybe you can say I can give you a gift card for a future dining with us, or something like that that makes them feel a little bit more cared for. I mean, regardless of why he wasn't able to, why he was in the hospital, that's something bigger than missing a dinner. And so kind of recognizing that as the person who is in that customer support role, and being able to give them something else as some way to connect with them as a human person and value their experience, I think is important. And when you have these kind of like no exceptions policies in place, it can be really hard, as the customer support person, to give that kind of understanding.

Tom: 38:01

Well, that person had no empathy for the person calling in, right? The support person had no. Like it's $250 if I don't show up and I get nothing for it, right, they're like you should be able to empathize with that and be like man. I know it's expensive, but do you know we only have 32 seats and if you don't come I don't have a wait list. There's not enough time for me to fill those seats. You know I'm so sorry that you're in this situation. Like there is a way to be more empathetic instead of taking it up with your credit card company.

Priscilla: 38:30

Absolutely. Having those kind of really strict policies in place can sometimes make it so you don't have the ability to be as empathetic as you'd want to be because you are so tight in this box. And I think the other obvious takeaway is that you really need to be careful not to communicate with a customer when you're letting frustration do the talking. One thing we talk about in Buzzsprout support is when you start to feel yourself get angry or frustrated. Give someone else the email, Do not respond.

Priscilla: 38:59

You are not gonna be able to hide your tone as much as you want to. It's not gonna happen. It's gonna come across as frustrated and angry. And so not only this owner, who I'm sure is probably a nice person, but has allowed her frustration to take control here not only did she respond to this person, she went out of her way and found them and then sent them this DM, and I think that that's just a really good example of not don't let your frustration do the talking. Let someone else who's calmer handle the situation or wait until you've been able to calm down and are able to like logically, you know, reach out if you're going to do that, if that's even necessary.

Jordan: 39:37

I think a lot of people forget that the internet is public. Yes, absolutely, you know what I mean. I think a lot of people forget that when they respond to reviews in a negative way, when they send a DM, it's not a private message necessarily, because it can be screenshot and it can be distributed to the masses. And, priscilla, I mean, you actually discussed this early in the episode too about like leaving bad reviews and other people can see that and then it informs other potential customers of how you are as a person, even if it is just like a glimpse into, maybe, your bad moments. Yeah, absolutely.

Priscilla: 40:16

And you said, social media is public. Everything is public at this point. Everything can be screen shot. A private email can be screen shot and then shared on X or Twitter, whatever it's called these days. So when you're talking to anyone, you have to be aware of how you're communicating and being so intentional about the things you're saying, because everything can be shared and you wanna make sure that you're presenting something that you would be proud to present in a public forum like social media.

Priscilla: 40:43

So I 100% think that in this situation, while I can understand the frustration from this owner who got a hit for this dispute when their policy is so clear on their website, I can understand that frustration, but I do definitely disagree with their tactic for going and reaching out to the customer. It's a hard balance, because you wanna have empathy for this person who went to the hospital and didn't get to go on their vacation. Now they're having to pay this cancellation fee, but you also have to recognize that the fee is there for a reason it's there to protect the small business that has a very limited table setting in the restaurant, and so I think it's an interesting conversation to go back and forth, for sure.

Tom: 41:26

A big takeaway, as we were talking about was just thinking through. A lot of times when people write into support, they're behind a screen and they write in a way that they would never talk to a person, and that could go both ways right. But, I don't think the owner would have said those things out loud.

Priscilla: 41:44

If you would hope not, you would hope not.

Tom: 41:46

But to put them into a DM, or however she sent it.

Priscilla: 41:51

It's just. It's very important to make sure that when you're responding to anyone whether it's an email, whether it's in social media, even if it's over the phone that you're remembering that the person you're talking to is a human being who has their own set of struggles and issues and stories, and you have to treat them with respect if you wanna have a good relationship with your customers. I think it just comes down to that. Thank you for that story, jordan. I appreciate you sharing that with us. Remember that you listeners can share your stories and questions with us by emailing us at happytohelp, at buzzbrowcom, and we may discuss yours on a future episode of the podcast. So thank you, tom, for joining us today, thanks for having me it was a lot of fun and thanks everyone for listening. Now go make someone's day. Bye.