[00:00:00] Krishna Raj Raja: When we started the company, nobody had this notion of, I need to invest in this product category called support experience management. That's a category we created. People talk about brand experience, employee experience, product experience, customer experience, and they conveniently know the most important, which is support experience and the kind of an afterthought. So we created a category for it. We have grown significantly since we started. We're deployed in some of the world's major technology brands across the world.

[00:00:35] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:52] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest and customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:01:05] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:16] Andrew Michael: Hey Krishna, welcome to the show.

[00:01:19] Krishna Raj Raja: Hey Andrew, pleasure to be on the show.

[00:01:22] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you for the listeners. Krishna Raj Raja is the CEO and founder of SupportLogic, a unified observability platform for all your post sales customer interactions. Krishna is also the author of Support Experience. And prior to founding SupportLogic, Krishna was a founding member of CloudPhysics and a staff engineer at VMware. So my first question for you today, Krishna is what is an observability platform for post sales customer interactions?

[00:01:51] Krishna Raj Raja: That's a great question. So when we look at computing infrastructure, right? We are so used to monitoring our servers, our applications, and we always monitor the issues before it's too late. Nobody wants to deal with a red state, right? We want to catch an issue when it's in a yellow state and then turn that into a green state before it turns into a red state. So we're so used to this concept for infrastructure of our applications but we don't do this for our communications with our customers.

[00:02:27] Krishna Raj Raja: So that's what we solve at SupportLogic. We foundationally believe that every customer interaction matters, and in those customer interactions are a lot of hidden signals that the customers are telling you about your product, about your service, and you need to monitor them and observe them on an ongoing basis. And if you find those conversations are not going in the right direction, which means they are in the yellow state. You want to catch during the yellow state and convert that into a green state before it turns into a red state. And so that's the core idea behind support logic and what we do.

[00:03:08] Andrew Michael: It's very interesting hearing just directly from your background, coming as a staff engineer at VMware, and then using that analogy and approach to how we build products, also then to how we serve customers. Where did the motivation or the idea is clear where it came from, but where did the motivation and how did you connect the dots between building software to actually post-sales customer interactions?

[00:03:32] Krishna Raj Raja: So actually at VMware, I was hired for my operating system expertise. I was an operating system engineer back in early 2000. But I was hired to support our customers in 2002. At the time, VMware was a small startup. I think they had like 80 people. I was their fifth engineer in the support organization. I was their first hire in India. So they had no presence in India. They spotted me and said, hey, Krishna, why don't you come join us? And our customer base is operating system engineers, and we need somebody who has operating system expertise to support them.  So that's why we hired you, right?

[00:04:15] Krishna Raj Raja: So I joined the support team, not knowing what to expect. Always had a deep technical bent. And when I was interacting with customers, I thought about everything in the lens of, hey, what could our product done differently? why this bug slipped through the QA process, why engineering is not prioritizing this, product management is not prioritizing this. I started looking at that lens and I learned a lot about how customers use product in real life. There's one thing about how you build product in vacuum versus how the product impacts in real life with other ecosystem around it. And I was constantly gleaning a lot of insights from these interactions.

[00:05:01] Krishna Raj Raja: And then I realized these insights that I'm gathering are not really sensed by the rest of the company. I'm a frontline support engineer. I'm observing all of this, but it's not really the voice of the customer is dropped on the floor. It never really makes it to the rest of the company. I would literally run building to building in VMware back in those days in Palo Alto because the engineering team and the support team are all separate buildings. And I would run to the engineering team and say, you are prioritizing things wrong. This is a bug. This needs to be fixed.

[00:05:36] Krishna Raj Raja: The customer is very frustrated and they will never understand the customer frustration. Engineers being engineers will say, why can't the customer reboot the machine or something silly like that. And I felt like, oh, this is a huge disconnect between the real customer frustration versus what the rest of the organization is doing. And I felt like that needs to be a better way to bridge that gap. And yeah, so that's what all led me to this path of combining the idea of how we monitor infrastructure, how do we proactively fix issues, and how do we tie that back into customer relationships.

[00:06:14] Krishna Raj Raja: Because I would argue that the most valuable thing a company has is their customer relationships. It's not your infrastructure, it's not an application, they're all important to you, but customer relationship is most important. And we shouldn't be running business flying blind about how your customer relationships are.

[00:06:32] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think it's very interesting. Like you mentioned that also when I spent some time at Hotjar, we used to have like these team meetups where be like 50 to 80 people meeting up in a location. And we always used to have a support day. And I think that support day was like probably one of the most productive days of the year, because it was literally like everyone on the team actually supporting customers and doing the support for the day. And then you'd have engineers like, Whoa, why am I answering this question? Like twice, like this doesn't make sense. Let me go and fix this quickly.

[00:07:00] Andrew Michael: And like the amount of, like small little bugs or UX issues that were fixed almost immediately, just having the engineers interact directly with the support requests was, like, extremely valuable. And I think, as you said, there's quite a big disconnect between, like what we end up building versus what our customers are really doing and care about. And we always come with our own, like perceived biases and we think we have a good understanding of the pulse, but unless you're speaking to customers like on that daily basis and really understanding like the shifts in patterns is very, very hard as you see today within an org.

[00:07:31] Krishna Raj Raja: And also, sometimes when we would, on the engineering side, we would think it was a silly thing to do, silly feature, it's not super important. And for a customer to be a night and day difference to have the functionality. And that is in the backstory of how customer uses a product. It's really a story. Every customer interaction, every support issue is a backstory. And that story is not communicated well back to the product teams and engineering teams, then you're missing the point.

[00:08:00] Andrew Michael: How should that be communicated back well? So you've been in this position, like how do you break those barriers down and make sure, like customers' needs are being prioritized over backlog?

[00:08:11] Krishna Raj Raja: It's a challenging thing to do because traditionally support organizations are seen as a cost center. They're seen as a shield between product teams and engineering teams and the customers. And the notion that, oh, engineering team is doing something very, very important. I don't have time to talk to customers.

[00:08:30] Krishna Raj Raja: I want to talk to customers using the product. And I thought it was kind of backwards because what are you building if you're not listening from your customers? Right? And not prioritizing the wrong things. So there's a balance. Of course, you don't want constant interrupts interrupting your engineering team and affecting their productivity, but you need to keep the pulse of your customers very, very close. So I think the right thing to do here is how do we percolate all the signals that are found in those interactions, and cut the noise and just focus on the signals and only send the signals to the right folks within the company.

[00:09:10] Krishna Raj Raja: And it's actually fundamentally a technology problem. When you're small, you can do this with people. As you scale, you need tools to extract signals from the noise. And so that's what came to my realization because as VMware was growing leaps and bounds, I think right now I believe you have 3,000 people in support. I mean, I can't believe I have the fifth support using it. So then your feedback is coming fast and furious.

[00:09:36] Krishna Raj Raja: And you can't be interrupting engineering for every interaction they're coming in, right? So you need to comb through that and extract the signals, filter the noise. And there are pretty significant advancements in AI, and more specifically in natural language processing that allows you to do it.

[00:09:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah, because I think definitely, like some of the reports and different tools have different, like variables in the Zendesk, [Wendt.com], all the different support platforms, they give you some level of reporting in ways to tag things. But I find also, like, even in this, there's like subjective bias to those that are actually creating the tagging system and the ones who are tagging them. And I think a lot of signals probably get lost or get influenced by specific biases that we have as individuals. What's being done well today that you think that companies need to be adopting immediately?

[00:10:27] Krishna Raj Raja: So first of all, on the tagging comment, tagging doesn't work. I mean, anyone in support will tell you tagging absolutely doesn't work. They're forced to do tagging and so they do pick some tags and call it a day. There are so many dimensions in customer conversation. So even if you come up with an ontology and say, this is what I'm going to tag the system, you're always going to encounter something new where you don't have a tag for it. And expecting your support engineers to target is not the best use of their time, for sure.

[00:10:57] Krishna Raj Raja: So you asked a question about what is working well today that can be amplified, right? So from a support logic perspective, what we have seen is we have the ability to predict customer escalations in advance. And we fundamentally believe customer escalations are precursor to churn. And there's a lot of statistic that shows how escalations leads to churn. And I would say these are preventable churn. There is always non-preventable churn. Company goes out of business, wrong product market fit, whatever it is, those are non-preventable. You can focus on preventable churn. And preventable churn almost always is tied to an escalation.

[00:11:38] Krishna Raj Raja: And it doesn't necessarily mean that you will lose the customer completely, but very likely will have a down renewal or also a flat renewal instead of an expansion which means revenue loss for the company. Right? Yeah. And in support, people tend to assume that escalations are part and parcel of life. Escalations are inevitable. And I, coming from support background, I thought escalations are inevitable too. So when we developed the technology to predict an escalation, I was asking my team, what's the point of predicting an inevitable? Yeah, I can tell you this customer is going to escalate and tomorrow, and the customer escalates, what's the point? There's no value in it.

[00:12:19] Krishna Raj Raja: Then turns out if you can predict that in advance and you create the right workflows for it, you can actually prevent it. Then it becomes a minority report movie. Right? So you can actually prevent a crime before it actually happens, it's not possible. And that's when a light bulb moment for us came through because we saw in production, customers were slashing escalation significantly. They're not talking about 5% reduction of 10% reduction, we have customers reduce escalations by 60%, 80%.

[00:12:52] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[00:12:53] Krishna Raj Raja: And so that's translated into significant revenue impact for business.

[00:12:57] Andrew Michael: When you say escalations, can you define that? Is that like somebody's support, like submitting a ticket to a request? Or is that like that request now is moving up the chain and the severity has been increased?

[00:13:09] Krishna Raj Raja: It's the latter. Somebody already has an issue, they reached out to you and you're going back and forth with the customer and the customer never sees getting any satisfactory answers or not seeing progress in that reported issue. And the issue on the customer side is getting more and more critical. So at one point, they're going to explode and say, enough with this. I'm done with this. I'm going to call you a CEO. I'm going to call you a chief customer officer.

[00:13:38] Krishna Raj Raja: And then entire companies swarms and tries to do a diving catch to save the customer. That's what we define as escalation. It's a loosely defined term. Every customer, every company has their own definition of what an escalation is. It doesn't matter what your definition is. AI can map into your definition and predict it.

[00:13:57] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I'm laughing because it literally happened to me today too. I got to the point where I was like, okay, like I'm done with this. You've lost my business. Thank you very much. And it definitely like, there were signals where they could have avoided like along the way and I can see that. Cause the other side of it though, I think is like, just supporting a ticket and submitting something is actually sometimes like, often people think it's a bad thing, but sometimes it also shows like good intent. The customer wants to figure things out. So they've gone through the effort of actually submitting a ticket.

[00:14:25] Andrew Michael: But like you say, as things start to escalate and then things aren't resolved, I think that's definitely where danger steps in. And yeah, so kind of, yeah, like you've seen significant reductions in these escalations, like what does maybe mean something surprising, like going through this work and figuring this out? Like, obviously besides the fact that you can reduce these escalations, but like what has surprised you the most in building support logic?

[00:14:48] Krishna Raj Raja: So when I started the company, this was almost eight years ago, 2016. AI was not a major story in the technology news. It was barely a footnote even in a technology magazine. Right. But I saw the potential of AI and what it can do. And I knew AI was the right technology for solving this particular problem.

[00:15:11] Krishna Raj Raja: So we became very early adopters of AI. We were one of the very early adopters of BERT, which gave to GPT, which became ChatGPT. So we saw all the potential of what, the revolution that's happening right now. We saw it eight years ago. So that surprised me because I, well, it's sort of a surprise and also not a surprise. Surprise isn't like how the industry has suddenly embraced it in the last few years, that's a surprise part. The technology revolution itself is not a big surprise for me.

[00:15:41] Krishna Raj Raja: So that's one aspect. On particular to SupportLogic, the biggest surprise I realized was this untapped demand for what we do. When I started the company, I honestly didn't think predicting escalations or even sentiment analysis, that's another thing we do, was useful. I really didn't think it was useful. And I come from the support background. Yeah. And the reason I thought it was not useful is I thought every customer who calls support is unhappy.

[00:16:09] Krishna Raj Raja: That is by definition, that's why they're called Support. So what is the point of telling the obvious, this customer is unhappy or whatnot? Then I realized that it's not just a state of happiness or unhappiness, it's a progression of the sentiment over time that's very, very important. And also this visibility of this across people outside of support is also super crucial. It's not just about support, customer success needs to know account managers need to know, product managers need to know, execs in the company need to get involved with that strategic account.

[00:16:45] Krishna Raj Raja: So that visibility into what's happening with your customer relationship is, and the sentiment is the core component of it. I realized the importance of it. So it actually surprised us. It's actually a feature that we didn't think we wanted to build. And our customers, I started paying close attention to the voice of our customer, I realized this is what we want to go. Now, this is the core in terms of what we do at support lines.

[00:17:09] Andrew Michael: No, it's very funny because I think it's very apt. The situation that happened to me, I can describe a little bit today as well, is that it's not an offline case, but it applies particularly to online as well. The same scenario as you could have seen is that we have a water filter at the house. We're busy building a house now. And so I was really happy with the company that we were working with. I basically called them up and said, hey, I'd like a quote from a house I'm gonna put in the same system. And we'll just like somebody to come check it out because we need to make sure that we can put the pipes there and everything.

[00:17:36] Andrew Michael: Didn't hear back from them. So I called again, like three weeks later, I was like, Hey, I'm ready. A customer I want to be. So I said, you need to come to our offices. So like I said, okay, I'll come to the office. I go to the office and tell them, Hey, I just want you to come to the house. Like, so I'm jumping through hoops now and practically telling them that it's like, I want to renew, I want to like upgrade my system. Here's my money. Just take it. But I just need you to help me with this one thing, just to make sure things can happen.

[00:18:00] Andrew Michael: And then it got to a point today where like we booked a meeting, they completely forgot about it. So I was like waiting on site to come in and I was like, okay, like if I'm trying this hard to give you my money and like all I need for you is like to answer this little support thing, like I'm done. And I said, okay, like I'm not going to be obviously installing it in the house and I will find another supplier, but like you can sort of see how this like escalated from like a happy customer.

[00:18:21] Andrew Michael: The first interaction with support was me basically saying like, let me just continue to pay you. And I just want to upgrade my system, but not finding that support I needed at that moment in time led to an escalation. And then eventually today I was like, okay, that's it. Definitely could have been avoided, definitely could have been saved from that first interaction.

[00:18:39] Krishna Raj Raja: This example Andrew, you pointed out is actually, it's also very important for product-led growth companies. If you're a product-led growth company, often your first interaction could be the support team. It's not the sales team or customer success team. Right. Because you're trying the product, you run into a technical issue and you're trying to solve the issue. The issue is not solved. You're not even turning into a customer. You're stuck there.

[00:19:08] Krishna Raj Raja: And if you call support and support just ignores you or support doesn't give you the right answer, the first brand experience is so bad, you're dead on arrival. Churn happens before you knew it happened. Yeah. Right. So I think that's a very important thing that a lot of PLG companies realize the importance of support and investing in support, not just customer success, customer success comes after you landed the customer.

[00:19:33] Krishna Raj Raja: But what are the barriers that exist in even landing the customer? And support plays a very important role. We had one customer who used our product and saw a 25% reduction in Churn. It's a PLG company, a very classic PLG company, simply by fixing the customer interactions before the customer actually becomes a customer.

[00:19:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah, all of that is not, because it makes so much sense as well. Like exactly that point is that, Churn happens before you even know it happens. And especially that activation window, the onboarding experience is so critical for success. And we talk about this on the show a lot of like how much onboarding really influences the overall outcome of retention and Churn at the end of the days. And definitely like that is a clear signal if somebody's coming in and actually reaching out to support to try and help them become successful that those should be the tickets that you give priority to, to make sure you can get them to the States and retain them as customers.

[00:20:24] Krishna Raj Raja: There's conventional view, right? That somebody's going to say, hey, this customer hasn't paid anything. It's a $0 account. I shouldn't prioritize this ticket. But who knows, maybe that's a million dollar account. I mean, I actually, I had this experience too. I was choosing between multiple cloud providers for support logic in early days. Yeah. And one cloud provider had a very bad experience. I was stuck in a technical issue. I couldn't move forward.

[00:20:50] Krishna Raj Raja: I kind of gave up and I went with another cloud provider. Now we're spending millions of dollars in cloud. Yeah. And it's just bonkers that they lost the revenue and they didn't realize they lost the revenue.

[00:21:01] Andrew Michael: And you probably never wanted to go to the other cloud provider to begin with, because you're familiar with the existing one.

[00:21:06] Krishna Raj Raja: Because current experiences are part of such a bad place.

[00:21:09] Andrew Michael:I have a similar experience as well. Nice. And so that was sort of the inspiration then behind like building support logic. You sort of saw the value then in predicting these escalations and figuring out, where is the company today? Like how are you guys doing?

[00:21:25] Krishna Raj Raja: We're doing really well. When we started the company, nobody had this notion of, I need to invest in this product category called support experience management. That's a category we created. People talk about brand experience, employee experience, product experience, customer experience, and they conveniently know the most important, which is support experience and the kind of an afterthought.

[00:21:48] Krishna Raj Raja: So we created a category for it. We have grown significantly since we started. We're deployed in some of the world's major technology brands across the world. The most notable one is Salesforce, entire Salesforce support operation, powered by SupportLogic, including Tableau, MuleSoft, the full Salesforce ecosystem. Then we are deployed in companies like Snowflake, Databricks, Nokia, Red Hat. I mean, all the major, major technology brands.

[00:22:16] Krishna Raj Raja: Pick any one of them more likely to be a SupportLogic customer. So we're really, really proud of that accomplishment. Because as a founder, I would say, six, seven, eight years ago, this was an idea on a piece of paper. I remember distinctly sitting in Starbucks and writing my first manifest for the company. And I thought, now it's just surreal for me that the world's major technology brands are actually using it, not only using it and seeing significant results.

[00:22:41] Andrew Michael: That's awesome. And so from that perspective, maybe give us a little bit more of an overview than of the actual product itself. You're obviously looking for different signals. Like what does that mean? Like how are these escalations being detected?

[00:22:53] Krishna Raj Raja: So we plug into any of your customer interaction infrastructure. So for larger companies, it would be your CRM. So it could be a support CRM, could be Service Clouds, Zendesk, Freshdesk, you name it, whatever it is, we're agnostic with the underlying ticketing system, could be a chat system, could be a telephony system where voice calls are coming in. We plug into all of that. We continuously extract signals from all this interactions. First of all, when you plug in, we have access to all the historical tickets.

[00:23:25] Krishna Raj Raja: So we actually quickly map and rank order all your accounts, saying which accounts are healthy, which accounts are not healthy, analyzing. So day one, you will get a full insight into all your top accounts, right? And then we continuously monitor those interactions, and then we maintain context of the signals that we extracted over conversational boundaries, which is very important, especially for B2B businesses. So in B2B businesses, you have continuous interaction with your customers. So a customer doesn't just call once and never calls you back, right?

[00:23:55] Krishna Raj Raja: They're probably likely to be calling you multiple times or multiple different interaction points and engagement media. So we track all of that and we keep a running sentiment score, running attention score running a probability of what's a probability the customer would like to escalate. What does the overall account health look like? Is account health improving or not improving? All this context is maintained. In addition, we also monitor what are the soft skills that we see with your folks who are interacting with your customers. Because it's bidirectional.

[00:24:31] Krishna Raj Raja: It's not just customer sentiment being bad what did you say or did not say to your customers that led to bad sentiment? So we actually look at the language patterns used by the people who are interacting with your customers and we give soft skills coaching advice as well. So we extract signals, maintain context, we predict escalations, we give soft skills coaching advice. We also can predict who's the right subject matrix, but in the company who can effectively answer a customer question because they're observing everything. So we know who's really good at what. And we can recommend, hey, route this case to this person. You'll be able to answer it very instantaneously. So we built an entire platform with collaboration built on it.

[00:25:12] Andrew Michael: Amazing, amazing. Again, just sort of like triggered the memory from today's interactions and definitely how language could have played a part in like saving the account as well. Just definitely like the response and thing made a huge difference. I think the supporter are 45 minutes late and instead of like saying, sorry, I was late or like we made a mistake on the appointment.

[00:25:32] Andrew Michael: He said, like, I tried to call you four times, which he didn't. And then he's like, I've just been very busy. And like, I was really just trying to be patient as I was like, if the guy came in, I'm really sorry. I was later, I forgot about the meeting and I'm here now. I'm sorry. Like I would have been cool with it even. Like that's how much patience I had. And then after then I was just like, no, this is it. It's like, we'll be here five minutes.

[00:25:58] Krishna Raj Raja: [I was for companies], you know? I mean, I remember when I was five people support team at VMware. I felt like I had rock stars. All five are really good in technical skills, in troubleshooting skills, in language skills, and in soft skills. You need all four to be a really good customer service rep because you can sometimes could be really strong in troubleshooting skills and have no soft skills, right? And sometimes you have technical skills, but you don't know troubleshooting skills. These are different skill sets.

[00:26:28] Krishna Raj Raja: So I thought, have you hired the best team? No problems. But then once you scale your support, you really cannot guarantee that a person is gonna have all four skills, right? That's why AI augmentation comes in really effectively because whatever your skill gap is, AI can come and augment it.

[00:26:47] Andrew Michael: I was literally thinking about this today as well, like I said, because as things start to scale, you become disconnected from each individual interaction. Like at the early days, you can, It's low enough for you also as well as like a CEO or founder or leader to be able to understand what's happening. But then in a certain size and scale, like you just don't know.

[00:27:05] Andrew Michael: And these small little interactions can really kill because it's not that they've just lost my business now, but the word of mouth, it's going to come from it afterwards and somebody asked me about the specific company is not going to be positive anymore. And I think like these unmeasured things that go by like unnoticed. So, uh, definitely I can see like why so many companies have adopted something like support logic to be able to get that sort of observability happening across the board from their support experience.

[00:27:31] Krishna Raj Raja: I will say one phrase here, right? You should treat your customers like pets, not like cattle. And this is again a phrase that is used in the infrastructure world. And I'll connect the infrastructure world here. So when cloud computing came into play, prior to cloud computing, we had big servers and we would even label the servers and have a pet name for it, right? And say, this is so in my Oracle, SAP instance is running or C++ is running, whatever it is, and we took care of that server really, really well because the server dies, your application dies.

[00:28:05] Krishna Raj Raja: Cloud computing comes in and says, you know what, forget servers. It's just a bunch of Kubernetes clusters running somewhere in the cloud or some VMs running in the cloud. Don't worry about it. You basically started treating our infrastructure like a cattle. They're fungible. You can replace them with one, one goes down, nothing really affects.

[00:28:21] Krishna Raj Raja: If you're herding a cattle, it doesn't matter. You just put numbers for cattle. You don't put names for the sheep or goats that you're herding. Yeah. Pets, you treat them with so much care and attention. The challenge is most, when you're really small, you're treating your customers like pets. You really know them by name. You really know what they want, which treat they like and all that stuff. But at scale, you start treating your customers like a cattle. Right.

[00:28:49] Krishna Raj Raja: So with software, you can actually turn this around. You can still do it at scale, but treat your customers like pets and not like a cattle. That's what we allow them to do. This is another way of saying that you turn your customers to pets.

[00:29:02] Andrew Michael: Very interesting analogy. Nice. And then so Support Experience, the book itself just come out as well. Obviously I think inspired then by the company and by the category you're looking to create. Yeah. Explain to a little bit about like the motivation in the book. Like what can people expect from reading the book? Why should they get a copy?

[00:29:19] Krishna Raj Raja: Yeah. The book's inspiration came from actual real world customer stories that we saw with our customer base. So, in this book, I talk about the concept of support experience and concept of why the voice of the customer is so crucial for the success of companies. I take examples of Adobe, talk about Apple, talk about Nokia, talk about why Nokia lost their market share to Apple and how that gets connected to the voice of the customer.

[00:29:49] Krishna Raj Raja: I talk about Snowflake, how Snowflake has the industry's highest net dollar retention number and don't have customer success team. And how support plays a very pivotal role in the process. I talk about companies like Rubrik, how they've gone from a small company into an IPO in a very short span of time and how they're so obsessed about the voice of their customer. So the book is filled with a lot of real world stories about customers of SupportLogic and also even non-customers of SupportLogic, how voice of customer is crucial and how Support Experience plays a very significant role in extracting the voice of customers and how this is actually a cultural change in the organization.

[00:30:30] Krishna Raj Raja: It does not something just software alone can do it. It's an attitude change. You have to do a lot of people, a lot of companies do lip service. Oh, we are so customer centric. And then the actions speak something different than their words. So about the cultural barrier for doing this. How do you make an impact? So this book is meant for, I would say, any C-suite leaders, CEOs, CIOs, CCOs, CROs, and anybody who cares about customers. That's what this book is meant for.

[00:31:01] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. Also surprising that you said Snowflake doesn't have a CS team and they just purely focus on support. How does that impact reality?

[00:31:11] Krishna Raj Raja: It is a very interesting case study, Snowflake. Again, I'm not advocating this for every company. Every company is different. What works for one doesn't work for others.

[00:31:21] Andrew Michael: The premise of the show.

[00:31:23] Krishna Raj Raja: Snowflake, I mean, it's also tied to their name, Snowflake. They are a Snowflake. So Snowflake is one of the interesting case studies because they have the industry's best India number at their scale. I think that our net dollar retention number is close to 120, 130 or something like that, even at their cost.

[0:31:44] Andrew Michael: Maybe a little bit more as well, yeah, I think.  

[00:31:45] Krishna Raj Raja:: A little more than that. And it's also a combination of the product, the pricing model, a lot of this stuff. But they are known, famously or infamously, for not having, customer success team because they foundationally believe that customer success is a concept that everybody should own. It's not a role, it's a concept. And the viewpoint is if it's a role, then you just dump it into that role.

[00:32:14] Krishna Raj Raja: Oh, CSM, it's your problem. Churn is your problem. Adoption is your problem. But in reality, adoption and churn is everyone's problem in the company, from product management to engineering to support and everyone else. So I think we have taken that approach at heart. And so it's a very interesting case that I believe their methodology works for a lot of customers. It may not work for certain industry types, but I believe it works for a lot of industry types.

[00:32:43] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Now I see that argument as well, like the point that customer success is, I mean, I think that's maybe even like potentially a problem with the naming of customer success in general, which we've debated and discussed on the show with a lot of different CS leaders, because as you say, like customer success is a state and that should be the goal of the entire company.

[00:33:04] Andrew Michael: Similar to where like CS teams are normally like the ones cast with owning the metric of retention. But if you have a subscription business, like the only thing that is retaining subscriptions otherwise you don't have a business. So it really should be like a company metric. And I think on the show as well, we've discussed different formations of this, different, like pros and cons. And I think, like, they all have merits.

[00:33:25] Andrew Michael: But as you say, like it's not for every business, but the business that can get it right and within their culture and the way of working, it's definitely, interesting case study to take a look at and see how they get by and get done.

[00:33:36] Andrew Michael: Krishna, I see we're running up on time, so I want to make sure I'll ask you a couple of questions I ask every guest. What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:33:47] Krishna Raj Raja: Wow. That's a pretty deep question.

[00:33:51] Andrew Michael: The next one's deeper.

[00:33:54] Krishna Raj Raja: I mean, I always believe because I started in career in support that every customer interaction I felt like there is a signal hidden where it can tell you whether the customer is going to churn or they're going to expand. And the sooner you can catch that, better for you. More recently, I've been of this Notion and I think it's more tied to what's happening in the industry right now with SaaS consolidation, so many SaaS tools, [Auto.AI] is questionable, especially the AI space and all that.

[00:34:24] Krishna Raj Raja: My recommendation right now is if you don't expand, you churn. So you don't want to go defend and be status quo. Your product needs to deliver more value, it does today, than yesterday. But that needs to be measured in terms of expansion revenue with your customers. So if you don't expand, you churn. I think that's the message I would say for any SaaS company out there right now.

[00:34:49] Krishna Raj Raja: You need to add more use cases, more adjacent use cases that you're not thought about before, the platform needs to show value in places that you didn't think the customers originally bought it for. Because a lot of times what I see is customers buy a product and their memories exchange that. Oh, this is what I bought the product for. And they've been using it for three years and realize the product has progressed so much in three years.

[00:35:14] Krishna Raj Raja: And no matter how much you put on your website, you do webinars and whatnot, the customers don't fully understand the product has changed so much. That often leads to churn. But if you do expansion and you take a conscious effort to do expansion, the churn becomes a secondary concern.

[00:35:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I think especially in CS as well, most of the time, like teams are focusing on retaining customers and like avoiding churn, where some of the best teams that I speak to, like they're really focused on how can they increase engagement? How can they unlock new use cases? How can they expand accounts? Because they're known actually by getting teams to use their product more to discover more of what's available, that ends up making it more sticky in the long-term overall. So I definitely see a nickel at that point as well.

[00:35:57] Andrew Michael: And definitely, I think there is this huge consolidation now. I think if you look at every industry, like every vertical cross in SaaS, like everybody's sort of like spilling to everybody else's domain now. And we just look at like the product analytics space, just sort of like how many companies are offering the same things today that didn't five, six years ago. And it just becomes super competitive.

[00:36:17] Krishna Raj Raja: A lot of companies don't want to deal with all the different [lenders] who try to integrate them. So customers are generally looking for it. Can I have one minute to do most of it?

[00:36:25] Andrew Michael: Exactly. It's sort of like the bundling and unbundling and bundling, like going backwards and forwards, but it definitely feels like a state now of bundling and the all-in-one, especially with AI, like how before it was a lot more difficult to get like feature parity and to build a product that like would be a great all-in-one, but with the speed and the rate in which you can develop new things today.

[00:36:45] Andrew Michael: I think, that's no longer like a challenge or like an excuse to say, we're going to be like the single best thing at X or Y because it doesn't take much to get there anymore. Very nice. And obviously, so then my last question for you, and I think maybe we'll frame it in the context, then of support itself. Like what's one question that you think more people should be asking, but they don't.

[00:37:08] Krishna Raj Raja: In the context of what?

[00:37:10] Andrew Michael: Of support from your side. So from support experience. So like you had say, what's one question they should be asking more about that they just don't, not paying enough attention to.

[00:37:20] Krishna Raj Raja: I think that we get very jaded after some point in time and we don't question the status quo. And I think that's what I would ask. Go back to the fundamentals and ask the status quo. So to give a story behind it, some time back, I spoke to one of the largest companies in the world. So I won't name it, largest company in the world. And they had serious escalation problems. And I was doing a demo of the product and everything, and showed them how we can prevent escalations and everything.

[00:37:50] Krishna Raj Raja: And the customer came back and said, that's all great, but I need a tool for managing escalations. And I'm talking about preventing escalations, you're talking about managing escalations. Why do you need a tool for managing escalations? Oh, because we have a lot of escalations, we need to manage it, that's my, priority, number one. So sometimes asking the right question for yourself, because it's so ingrained in the brain that it's not even preventable. So let's not even go there. It's all about managing it, right?

[00:38:15] Krishna Raj Raja: So you can see, you need to ask the status quo challenging questions. Can this be fundamentally changed? And the answer to most of the time, it can be changed. You have to ask the right questions.

[00:38:27] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I like that. I think it's going back to, like first principles as well. And I think some often now we take for granted the way things are done and the way things they are and just taking a step back a lot of times you might find new interesting ways or challenge things and yeah, like I think I've been trying to adopt an approach that more and more, like, as I’m get getting further into my career, and I was really just like questioning some of the things that I took for granted earlier on.

[00:38:50] Andrew Michael: And like, they were the way they are, because that's the way they've always been. But often, like the most interesting breakthroughs come from people just telling those things that have been done the way they've always been.

[00:39:01] Krishna Raj Raja: In the support, people say the best case is the one that never occurred. Customers need to open a case and therefore that's the best thing you can do, which is also asking the status quo fundamental question. But having said that, I don't like that approach because then it leads you to a different path of just trying to deflect cases. You want to hear more from your customers, make it–

[00:39:22] Andrew Michael: Of the support.

[00:39:23] Krishna Raj Raja: Yeah, make it simple to call support and easy to talk to because when you do that, you're going to hear more from your customers on what they actually want and what they want to do with the product. So avoiding cases should not be the goal. It's about extracting what the customer's trying to do.

[00:39:39] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Well, Krishna, it has been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. Obviously we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes, including a link to the book. Is there any other final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Anything they should be aware of to keep up to speed with your work?

[00:39:52] Krishna Raj Raja: No, not really. Again, if you get a chance, check out my book. I think I covered a lot about that. I'm really passionate about what I wrote there. I think we covered some really good topics today. So thank you for having me, Andrew.

[00:40:03] Andrew Michael: Excellent. Thank you so much, Krishna. I wish you the best of luck going forward.

[00:40:06] Krishna Raj Raja: All right. Thanks, Andrew.

[00:40:07] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:40:15] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:40:41] Andrew Michael: If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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