Scaling through the pandemic with Stephanie Wohl
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The seventh release of Support Heroes by Kaizo featured Stephanie Wohl – Head of Support at Channable.
In this episode, Stephanie shares the unique challenges she and her team face supporting a deeply complex tool like Channable. Throughout, we touch on best practices for providing consistent, high-level support across multiple industries and languages – all whilst working remotely.
âWhen people are irritated that is not because of you [the agent] theyâre irritated because they can not figure it out or theyâre irritated because they had a busy dayâ
Key TakeawaysÂ
1. Protect your agents and customers from unpleasant, unproductive conversations
2. Change your tone and approach based on cultural expectations
3. Stay connected while working from home and scaling fast
Protect your agents and customers from unpleasant, unproductive conversations
âThe phrase: the customer is king is true. However, it should always be an equal relationship.âÂ
This isnât to say that Stephanie encourages her agents to instantly hang up, itâs about defusing the situation for the betterment of both the agent and the customer, and managing expectations. She would encourage her agent to say…
âIâm sorry but I donât like how youâve been speaking to me. Iâm trying to help you. So Iâm going to hang up on you now and weâre going to talk to you within half an hour because weâre not getting any further with thisâ
Protect yourself, protect your agents, protect your customers from unpleasant, unproductive conversations, âas long as, you speak nicely to the customerâ. However, donât misunderstand. No matter what…
 âWe always have the basics- be friendly to customers & try to help themâ
Change your tone and approach based on cultural expectationsÂ
âBenelux is our the biggest market…and the Benelux team was doing great, so we thought: letâs just copy those processes to the other support regions because it works…â
âBut then we found that [those processes] didnât work out because of the cultural differencesâ
Now, the Dutch are known for being quite direct, but not every European nation has the same persuasion. This may be easy to state offhandedly however itâs not something so easy to predict and account for in the context of a support operation…
âIf a Dutch customer calls, they immediately start telling you, âthis is my problem. I want it fixedâ and you can have a call within six minutes.â
âBut if a Spanish customer calls, first they will ask âhow are you doing?â, âhow is your mother doing?â..then after 20 minutes, they start with their problem.â
Though the team was initially concerned about the time difference, they realized something that quelled these concerns…
âWe noticed our customers are so happy with our Spanish support team because we have interest in our customers, we know them by heart, we know their problems…they donât see us a company they buy a tool from, they see us as their external coworkersâ
Staying Connected while working from home and scaling fastÂ
âWe start every day with a team daily. Itâs 15 minutes to discuss things that happened but sometimes you donât have things to discuss…then itâs a moment to have fun, make bad jokes, etc.â
âFor those 15 minutes, you see each other…itâs nice to have the feeling of âweâre in this togetherââ
This morning daily is like a morning meeting combined with coffee machine chit-chat. Then at the end of the day, the Channable support team have a closing zoom session…
âItâs nice to release all the energy of that day, discuss how people found their day and what theyâre going to do that nightâ
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All those little chats between tasks, at lunch, or on breaks arenât had when youâre working at home. Itâs important to make time to chat and just be people for a while.Â
âEspecially now, the one-on-ones with my team leads are so important. Of course, we talk about how they can improve things, what goals they want to work on but the mental aspect is crucialâÂ
Creating a culture of remote communication allowed the team at Channable to successfully integrate 12 new, fully remote colleagues since March. How? Stephanie put it quite simply:
âPlease, really ask the people âhow are you doing?â, âare you still happy?ââÂ