Should we merge CS and Support roles?

00:00 Welcome to another episode of CSM Practice podcast where we share customer success best practices but today we're going to have such a great discussion with a CEO of a support solution company called Support Logic.
00:18 His name is Krishna Rajraja. We're going to talk about is support and CS roles going to merge what has he been seeing as a trend in the industry in the past year or two, how would those KPIs change which companies are probably going to merge these roles sooner and why is this happening?
00:38 What's the impact of AI on support and CS? And what's important for him as CEO who owns both of these functions at the moment, how did he structure the CS team versus the support team, and so much more.
00:54 If you're not aware of this trend of support and CS merging in some businesses, you should definitely listen to this conversation because it's going to blow your mind and make you think carefully about how the customer success managers team potentially going to change especially in smaller companies.
01:16 Oh, according to Krishna, anything can happen, and even larger companies are going to embrace this approach. And we're going to hear from him why he thinks that way.
01:26 So, Krishna, Rajarajat, thank you so much for joining our show. Hey, we're glad you're meeting you. Super, super nice having you on this podcast, and I think it's a real treat.
01:37 Because it not only allows us to talk about customer success, but also take it from the perspective of how support and customer success influence one another.
01:49 Would you say that since customer success has become more of a mainstream practice for many businesses, we also see how that trickles and impacts the way we perceive and practice customer support.
02:04 Yeah, we're living in that very interesting times. The support and success, it seemed like two completely separate worlds, they're entirely complementary.
02:15 Support issues were often would be discussed in the customer success context, and so they get pulled into a lot of customer conversations, outstanding support issues becomes customer success, same points, because it becomes an app, customers, it affects your renewals, it affects your expansion opportunities
02:33 , so on and so forth. The times come for these two different functional groups to merge. And I think with the acceleration of the AI technology and the adoption and the industry, I think that trend is going to get even more stronger in the coming years.
02:49 And this is what many of us in the industry we believe that merger is happening. If we look at many cutting-edge technology, one of the things they do is fusion of roles.
02:58 Many roles can be now performed by fewer people because the technology allows you to do that fusion. I'm super psyched about that transformation that's happening in the industry right now.
03:07 So, here's one contention that one might say, well, can this happen? First of all, if I'm a support agent and all I do is react to customers ask, meaning they call me because something breaks and I need to fix it, who's responsible to proactively outreach to customers to offer additional value or additional
03:32 use cases. But does that work? Traditionally, support has always been on the receiving end, because you're reacting to things happening in front of you.
03:41 Now with the rise of AI, many of that is going to get automated, whether you're going to put a chartboard in place, or some of the technology in place, some of the low-enging fruit issues are going to get completely automated away.
03:53 So this means, who's the most modest person in the company? If you ask me, I would say they are the support people, because they know more about of product, they know more about how the product is being used in real world, more so than the product manager who's expected at the product or the engineering
04:09 who developed the product. That expertise is going to be reapplied in different ways and the support role is going to transform into more of a proactive outreach role and the other thing is traditionally you look at it, right?
04:21 You say, support is reactive, they're focused on proper and resolution, do they have the soft skills to elevate the conversation, to talk about outcomes, to talk about impact for businesses.
04:34 I guess what again, AI can help you to gain those skills. Soft skill organization is going to be a very big thing in the industry right now.
04:42 I think the wise person friend is also going to happen. If you look at customer sexist professionals today, they are good at managing customer relationships, but not necessarily that great handling technical issues.
04:55 So often they have to divert their questions to technical support team, guess what? Again, AI can augment them to give the right technical answers for the right technical resolution, even though they may not be an expert in that.
05:07 So I think this enabling technology is going to change the roles of this persona. And by the way, this is not something happening for the very first time in the industry.
05:17 This parallelism has been applied for other roles. That walks us into the great example, DevSecopses, and other example, development and operations used to be separate functions that are unified with all the tooling in place.
05:30 DevSecopses is the same thing. So I think that it's a lot of presidents in the industry for this. I think what I'm hearing is that a in terms of skill sets, we can coach technical people to elevate their talk track and also understand the business acumen perspective that CSM's from have and vice versa
05:52 , people that do have a business acumen can learn technical responses using AI. So essentially you can hire more junior people and train them up a lot faster with the AI capabilities.
06:07 And I think I've also heard you say something along productivity. Do feel like this perception that support is purely reactive to coals submitted by customers.
06:21 Those days are going to be long gone within maybe like a couple of years tops where support tickets are actually created automatically based on what is happening in the software based on telemetry.
06:34 Yeah, I mean, a lot of companies have already put telemetry in place. Issues are notified. I mean, you take even consumer electronics like your smart televisions.
06:43 They have telemetry built in. If your hardware is failing in your smart televisions, the company already knows about it. The support trap can make a phone call to you and say, it looks like your hardware is failing.
06:55 I'm going to ship you a new TV because you're under warranty. That kind of thing is possible today. I don't know if you've seen this, even in, again, I'm giving the smart television example.
07:03 Today, if you buy any smart TV, if you have an issue, we can troubleshoot that issue, sharing your screen. What do you see on the screen to the support wrap?
07:12 When you talk to them over the phone, but they can see what's on your screen. So all the technology already exists.
07:17 So this is only going to get accelerated more. Augmentation of scales is going to be the biggest destructor of the AI is going to do.
07:25 People who are not great coders are better coders with AI. People who are not good with language are very good with language now with AI.
07:33 People who don't have the soft skills are going to be good with AI. People who don't have the technical skills are going to be good with AI.
07:40 That means the role of ours is going to get elevated much much higher. I mean, when calculators came, people thought, oh, or mathematical abilities are going to go bad because we're going to do basic math, we're going to do everything with calculators and initially those concerns, oh, we need to ban 
07:56 calculators from schools. Guess what? Every school, love encourages calculators. Same thing happened laptops. When laptops came, oh my god, we're going to do an exosheet came with, oh my god, Like every technology, it is now embraced even by the universities, you have open book, open internet exams, 
08:14 open laptop exams, and it's going to be open AI, including an exams as well. But the level of things we're doing as Ghana significantly, the skills that we're doing, the game that we are playing is elevated.
08:26 I think that's what is going to happen in the, both in the support and the success industry, the traditional way of looking at success, traditional way of looking at support, no longer is going to work.
08:35 I think you're actually the roles it's going to be easier to to wear multiple hats theoretically, numbering bandwidth because maybe AI will help reduce a lot of these manual processes and allow us to elevate our skills a lot faster so we could do more things at the same time.
08:53 However, what about KPIs? Many times we see support teams look at KPIs like, oh how quickly did you close the support take it?
09:02 Where is customer success? We'll look into what's the ROI? we got for the client, what is the gross retention rate, what's the churn rate, what's the upsell rate, do you see in the future support team looking at upsell opportunities and renewals as part of the key performance indicators, or is this something
09:25 that's already happening with some of the clients that you have as a company that sells support. It's already happening. So the foundation of support logic, the company that I founded in 2016, so cutting edge in 2016, because AI was not anywhere in the news in 2016, but not only the technology we're 
09:42 thinking was cutting edge, the vision we had for the company was we foundationally believe that support is not a cost center.
09:50 It is a revenue center. It is a profit center. But if you look at vast measure of the tools that exist today, whether AI-based tools or even non-AI-based tools, They treat support as a cost center, and there's always about how do I reduce the number of cases coming in Improving efficiency and so on and
10:07 so forth. I think it's very short-sighted and I think the industry has broken up to that Support is fundamentally your biggest customer acquisition engine.
10:16 Your cac is going to go down if you provide great customer support If you become a trusted advisor for your customers It is very easy to do cross-sell an upsell when a salesperson comes in pictures it feels very salesy.
10:30 When you're solving a technical issue for a customer, in the process you recommend a solution that customer more likely to listen to it.
10:36 And this is something like experience first time. As a support engineer for a company called VMware back in 2002 to 2012, I was doing that role and I've seen this first time.
10:47 The challenges being, the industry has been seeing support as a cost center and it's more tactical. Let's take cases one case every time in first response time, resolution times, all of that metrics, not looked in other metrics, that is changing right now.
11:04 With technology like AI, with technology like support logic, you can glean insights into what the customer is trying to do and this could become a co-pilot for a support engineer and recommend them to ask the right questions when you're interacting with their customers so you can gently nudge them towards
11:23 a sales opportunity or you can have a monitoring solution in place, support logic is a monitoring solution for any post sales customer interactions that passively monitors all interactions, identifies opportunities and can notify your sales team or your customer sector scene, opportunities and risks.
11:41 I'll just put an account, you can notify, opportunities also you can notify. Those technology exists today, this is not something like a vision we're talking about.
11:49 It's exist today, people are using it, some innovators are pushing the envelope here. You have a support team, obviously, for your company, what KPIs do your support team now has that maybe you wouldn't have thought about having the monitor and look into 10 years ago now that kind of see the influence
12:09 of customer success on your own support team? Yeah, I mean, traditionally, if you look at support organization, they wouldn't do NPS metrics that everybody tells that NPS metrics or NPS is the highest industry standard and then C7 metrics.
12:23 I think those were great metrics, but I think they are outdated now. We are using that metric because that's only metric that we have.
12:31 That's only way to measure the pulse of the customers through surveys. Now we all know in the industry, survey response rates are so poor, fraction of a customer's response.
12:41 And usually the customers who respond are, is that extremely happy or extremely unhappy. So, I call this the red state or the green state customers who respond, the real problem is the yellow state.
12:54 Yellow state customers have abandoned you. When they abandon, they become dispassionate. When they dispassionate, they don't respond to your surveys.
13:02 They are your highest risk. You need to take the yellow state customers and turn them into green in before it turns them into red.
13:09 So, coming back to your KPA question, for us, the KPA is our sentiment score. so support logic has a sentiment score.
13:15 We compute sentiment score for every customer interaction on a continuous basis and you can chart out how the sentiment score is going up or down in the life cycle of a case, in the life cycle of a customer.
13:27 That becomes our key metric to see whether that sentiment score is going up. If you do that thing right, if the sentiment score goes up consistently and you're not letting that decline, you're never letting down your customer experience at any point in time.
13:41 Otherwise, we do a diving catch last minute to win the customer back. That sometimes is too late. This allows you to be very proactive and we predict escalations for our customers using our own technology.
13:54 We predict sentiment of the customer without sending service. That's the cutting edge technology that exists today. And that's what we're using.
14:01 Do you have plans to merge your customer success team with your support team or are they already sort of like under the same head of like a CCO, you're kind of starting to look into having specialized roles, versus completely different teams that are running by different managers.
14:22 Right now, all reports to one person, or CCO in your class. She manages both support, success, and onboarding. Pretty much all post sales.
14:32 We think that is the model. I mean, there's been a lot of debate in industry even for customer success was a lot of debate.
14:38 should customer success report under sales, or should go under the CCL? Should support go under engineering, or should go under CCL?
14:47 We have seen companies which will support actually reports of product teams. In some scenarios, it makes sense because you want to tightly intertwine that with the product feedback loop, with the support issues when you're getting.
14:59 The approach we have taken is that four sales customer interaction should all come under one person. So that's in our case is duty or chief customer officer.
15:08 The approach I've taken is that the job of the GPM function, the sales and marketing function, is only to land customers.
15:15 That's it. Land the customer. Landing for us, I would not consider as winning. In fact, even in the, if you look at the sales force or any of the CR of you would say, close to one, and I don't like the word close to one.
15:27 You didn't close anything. You didn't win anything. You just got a ticket to work with your customers. the winning starts after you land the customer.
15:36 You can't close that relationship. The relationship just starts open. So we need to even change our terminology in how we think about landing customers versus what we do post-land customers.
15:46 It's a very simple, bifurcated model. GDM engine, folks on landing customers, and the CCU office looks at everything post-land. And I expect to be say, land, I'd not say sale, because sometimes sale may not even happen.
15:59 You just landed the customer. Because it didn't bear time to you yet, just given an opportunity to work with you and then you on their business.
16:07 I love that. That's very customer-centric. Very healthy way of looking at things, with a little bit of caution, a lot of affinity to that relationship.
16:17 It almost reminds me how, when we were little, we would go downstairs and go to the grocery shop and we knew the owner and have a cheat chat with them about our family.
16:26 You kind of like know the person and I feel like when you embrace that, Okay, they just give us an opportunity to work with them.
16:33 And we embrace that. We take a lot of care with that relationship and bring a lot of respect to it.
16:40 You get tremendous results when you have this kind of culture in your organization. Yeah, I think the challenge we'll always have, we get fun to different departments, different phone numbers, different phone lines, ones you learn a customer.
16:52 Oh, if you have this issue, it's a support issue. Talk to the support person. Oh, this is a customer's exercise issue.
16:57 Oh, this is a counter-new world. This is a count manager. And it's like so many different personas you're dealing with end of the day customer just wants to engage with a one single chat stream and we're saying figuratively not literally like one continuous conversation is what the customer One all your
17:13 bad-profits complications is company's problem shouldn't be imposed on the customers How you redirect the questions who handles it you just want to make that engagement that simple that's a model we are striving and that some are like, for example, onboarding team members or the ones who also does demo
17:30 for customers. They also engage in pre-salt, so right at the demo, they know exactly what the customer's main points are, discovery, then do the onboarding.
17:38 They also do partial support. So it's like the full continuum experience. And many of our customers love that, because it's feel like, this person knows what I'm trying to accomplish.
17:47 I don't need to repeat myself to a different person. Can you share how big is a CCO's team at the moment?
17:55 If we are fairly small, we have a hyper-efficient team, hyper-efficient startup. I think the entire CCO team would be 10 to 15 people.
18:03 Okay, the reason I ask is because one would contest potentially that this model actually does work well for companies that are emerging or in hyper-growth.
18:15 But as soon as you become a public company or even enterprise, there's some snags in this approach, although it's like great for the customer, it's hard to scale a business that way, and so what companies tend to do is they start creating specialized rules, so it's easier to hire and then everybody specializes
18:34 on a particular process or a particular phase in the customer journey. How do you propose larger companies tackle this? So this is the fundamental reason why the state of both sales customer interaction exists in the way it exists, because we have not figured out a way to scale this.
18:51 See, when a company is very, very small, as a startup, the founder CEO does everything. He builds a product, he sells a product, he supports the customers, he's a customer success manager, who newels on all that.
19:02 And then, as he grow, you assign different people to different roles. How do you do that in a effective way?
19:07 I think the answer to this is clearly technology. The technologies that exist today did not exist before, like even simple things, like case routing.
19:16 Even incoming inquiry comes in from your customers. How do I determine this question needs to go to customer success or to an account manager or to somebody in support?
19:28 And within support, who's a right subject matter expert in this support? It's a very complex process, so we use human beings to filter them out.
19:35 Okay, let's call this number of file this one, choose this option when you're filing an issue. We will direct it to the right person.
19:42 Now, guess what? With AI, can parse that. And direct that to the right person. I was in the company. So when you do that kind of a model, the fusion of roles becomes much easier.
19:52 Now, for larger companies which are using legacy technologies, it's difficult to do it. If they embrace AI, and they take the crawl, walk, run approach of embracing AI.
20:04 This is actually a possibility. This is a reality. This is not a pipe dream in my opinion at all. This is achievable.
20:11 But you need to have the willpower to do it because changing the status quo is not easy to do. I mean, it's a very risky thing.
20:18 If a support leader or a CCU come and say, I'm going to make this transformation. They have to be bold to make this change.
20:25 It's doable. Fear is one of the barriers. I don't think the technology barrier exists now. It's more about the willingness to do it.
20:33 I agree. And I think the secret sauce is sprinkling the AI tools in it because otherwise. I think it's going to be very hard if you think about how these larger companies are structured and the systems they're currently using, it's very hard to imagine emerging rules.
20:50 But as soon as you sprinkle AI in it, a lot of opportunities open up. And I will tell you, Krishna, for my experience, what I have observed so far working with these large enterprise companies, changes very hard for them.
21:04 And when you do the change too fast, sometimes something else gets hurt. So, every move needs to be extremely thoughtful.
21:11 So I think those are going to be the laggers on embracing AI, unless it comes in in a baked solution, like support logic, that kind of gives them an augmented experience of a specific process or a phase in the customer journey.
21:27 Yeah, if the change is too fast, it could be nauseating. It's a web-lash. It's computer disruptive. I think this is why strong, fearless, leaders are important because any change you put together, no matter how trivial you think it will change is our.
21:41 It's not going to go smooth. We have to accept the fact on the first transition period, it's not going to go smooth.
21:47 Existing people will show resistance, but that's what change happens. And as a CEO, this is something I have to battle with every aspect of the business when it comes to change.
21:56 And I think I would advocate that same thing for the CCO leaders or customer sexist leaders. Now, one key element here is, when you're using a technology, it's not the engine, it's the workflows that changes people's behaviors.
22:09 And workflows is not something saying that I'm going to create a process document, make them everybody read and say this is the workflow we're going to do.
22:17 No, the software tool that you are using can foster that workflow. Like one of the fundamental approach we did was, in each case, that is not going right, and that company should be able to read it.
22:28 What are the barriers? Not everyone in the company has access to your support-treating system. And it's too noisy to read every support-treating system.
22:34 The user interface of your train and everything. So what we did in our product is, if a support issue is not going well, we can trigger an alert, sense a Slack message or a machine's message, you click on it.
22:45 It opened the case up here as like a Google Doc. and anyone in the company can look at it, it could be product manager, it could be the CEO, it could be the customer success, and they're all swarming and collaborating, this is essentially fusion of roles, breaking the silos essentially.
23:00 The silos exist from the infrastructure first, if you break the silos from the infrastructure, the workloads will follow. Fascinating discussion, honestly, Krishna, like breaking the walls, breaking the silos, breaking intentions of what a role should be and the traditional concepts of the board versus
23:18 customer success. I think these are trends we're going to see in the next few years continuously unfold and see the impact on AI on these kind of aspects in the company and who knows what would happen to the customer success role.
23:34 It was just so fascinating to hear from someone that's so impactful and a thought leader that's coming from the support perspective and what is your vision and insights around what is happening in businesses today and how is that function is being impacted by customer success and AI truly, truly fascinating
23:55 . Yeah, I read, I would just say this. I believe this fusion of a role is going to happen to every functional group, not just support and success.
24:01 Product an engine is going to fuse with AI. Product management is being able to build products with just giving you a command problem that can build products.
24:09 It's already happening. Design and product is already infused with products like Figma. Support and success is going to happen. Success and sales is going to fuse.
24:18 That's another thing you talked about success. I think success in sales that Oarlab is also getting bigger and bigger because more and more revenue for companies coming from postline sales, not doing line.
24:29 So the success function is taking a lot of revenue responsibilities. So this is very interesting times. It's somewhat disruptive if you think in that way, but also it's very, very huge opportunity to make a big impact for customer base.
24:43 Yeah, I mean, time will tell. In the meantime, I do sign up for the contention that sometimes some companies don't necessarily need a separate CS role.
24:53 I do acknowledge that sometimes it makes sense in certain business models and life cycle of the company to not have CS as a separate role.
25:02 I don't think it's always profitable and I don't think that in certain product lead companies that it even makes sense.
25:08 especially if most of your customers pay you less than a thousand dollars a year. So I will give you that, but the rest I think time will tell.
25:18 All right. Hey folks, if you enjoyed today's interview, you got some insights on how the CEO thinks. And what do you think about these projections for future?
25:29 Love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. And in the meantime, we got a CEO who's ahead of us start up.
25:36 And if you check his solution out. That'll be amazing. Grisno, thank you so much for coming on our show. Yeah, thanks for reading.
25:45 This is a lot of fun. And without it's a wrap and I'll see you at the next video.