Future of Customer Support and Transforming Conversations with Declan Ivory
Declan Ivory is a seasoned leader with 30+ years of experience in IT, Telecommunications, and Service Delivery. As the VP of Customer Support at Intercom, he manages technical support for their AI-first customer service platform, leading a global team to provide fast, reliable, and personalized solutions to over 25,000 customers. His core competencies include operations and financial management, IT service management, and a commitment to driving customer success, business growth, and innovation.
Check out this video featuring Declan Ivory our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo where he discusses the evolving landscape of customer support and the integration of AI to improve customer experience, emphasizing proactive and consultative approaches, knowledge management, quality assurance, and optimizing conversation design for seamless interactions in a transformed customer journey. Get a sneak peek of his compelling ideas before he takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Charls Sustaina: Hello Support Driven community and just general customer support community. My name is Charles. I'm the Director of a customer support team at Coastline Academy. And I am a huge fan of customer support, customer success, customer experience. And I have a really humbling opportunity to talk to Declan Ivory. Declan, it's so good to see you.
Declan Ivory: Hi, Charles. Really good to see you and great to have this opportunity to talk to the Support Driven community and other support leaders. I kind of love customer support, so I'm looking forward to a dynamic conversation about it.
Charls Sustaina: So Declan, you are Intercom's Vice President of Customer Support and you're also an experienced senior leader with a passion for building and developing high performing teams and also applying digital technologies to those support organizations through major business transformations. And prior to sharing your operational expertise and strong leadership to support the growth of Intercom's customer support team over the last 10 years, you have held various senior support leadership roles within Amazon Web Services, Tableau Software and Google Cloud. It's great to talk to you and as an emerging senior leader, I'm really glad to have the opportunity to discuss some of these things.
Declan Ivory: Particularly over the last 10 years, I've had the opportunity to really look at scaling support operations, and also looking at how you can apply innovation to really drive a different customer experience, which is really what I'm passionate about.
At the end of the day, everything we do is about delivering a really good customer experience. And, being able to apply technology to that and really think critically around how can we really drive a transformation in customer support is really what gets me out of bed in the morning.
Charls Sustaina: The industry has changed so much in terms of customer experience and putting that forward where, maybe some organizations haven't placed that priority as high on their list. We've built a community, right? Support Driven people there's an Expo, there are conferences that we're creating. Zendesk puts out there, and I know you're at Intercom, but I'm also talking about Zendesk as well, this sort of CX trends, which, is very consumable information as well. And so it's starting to become bigger
Declan Ivory: part of the rhetoric. Absolutely. I think customer expectations are changing, people are demanding better, faster, more expert advice, no matter what the product or service is. There's a real opportunity for support leaders to really, as I say, drive a different support experience. Because, in the industry for a long time, part of my frustration is that in customer support, we haven't really applied the technology as pervasively as we could have done.
And I think with some of the recent advances in AI, all of a sudden there's an opportunity to think differently about how you deliver support, ultimately drive a better customer experience, and think about the shape of your support organization, support operation in a totally different way.
So I'm really excited about the kind of possibilities that were there to really transform customer experience.
Charls Sustaina: This year has been such a game changer in terms of the way we will approach customer experience, customer support, customer success, documentation, just everything that we're offering customers to help them from pre-sales all the way through maintaining their relationship and being actually utilizing to its fullest potential our services, products.
Declan Ivory: Absolutely. It's about really turning support into kind of a very proactive mechanism or motion for our customers, as opposed to the reactive way that support was delivered historically, and also being more consultative with customers as well. So trying to move from the transaction mindset to more of a relationship mindset, so the lines are blurring between support and success and onboarding.
It's all about having that consultative opportunity with your customers. And again, because of AI, all of a sudden it's more complex nuances issues that are coming through. So you really want your team to be subject matter experts. To be very engaged with the customer, understand the customer context.
It's a fascinating change to navigate through and think about the implications of it. That's the exciting part. And hopefully we learn a lot more about this at the Support Driven Expo. I think we're going to be so many people there who are going through this transformation.
It's going to be a great opportunity to learn and really understand the art of the possible in this space.
A whole lot of value that people bring to the table over and above actually answering a customer question and how do you factor that into your capacity plan?
You've got to think about content management in general, right? Everyone in support knows what content and knowledge is pretty key. And particularly if you want to drive self serve, you want to make that knowledge available publicly.
But now that knowledge is the key fuel for an AI engine. And if you don't actually think critically about how am I creating, curating and managing that knowledge holistically across my organization you're not going to get the best out of your investment in AI. So the investment in the knowledge is almost as important as the investment in the AI technology itself.
But again, that's another thing you've got to factor into your support organization. The role of knowledge manager is all of a sudden radically different. They've got to have a different set of skills around thinking about the different knowledge sources, not just about your health center any longer.
There's many knowledge sources you want to build into your AI bot and make sure the AI bot is active to do it. That's another area. Quality assurance is a really interesting one. Historically, people look at quality assurance and quality assuring the agent behavior. And I'm doing the on the sampling basis or a trigger.
I.E. a customer gave us a poor CSAT, and all of a sudden with AI being applied, you can think about it radically differently. I can actually aspire to analyzing 100 percent of my conversations using AI and actually assign a quality score to every single conversation that I have. And that's a game changer, because all of a sudden you're going to generate insight were more difficult to generate in the pre AI world, but really allow you to be the voice of customer into the rest of the organization.
Again, you got to build in that whole kind of mechanism well around a different approach for quality assurance. CSAT is another interesting one, and it begins to lead into the second topic that I'm going to touch on. At the end of the day, you're talking about a slightly different customer journey.
It's going to be a combination of an AI bot, some form of automation and then human support. And today we think of a CSAT, it's generating what was your experience dealing with this agent, etc. And all of a sudden that agent is not just a human, it's an automation flow, it's an AI bot. And how do you actually determine the customer CSAT across that conversation?
Because that's what it is for the customer. It's a conversation and technologies are different, people involved in that. And how do you actually look at CSAT in that world? The term I'm using internally is we have a project called Beyond CSAT. How do we think about CSAT in this new world?
And how do we make sure that we can actually measure the full end to end journey that the customer is on, both from a quality assurance point of view and from a CSAT point of view. But again, you got to think differently about that whole world of CSAT. There are some of the elements that we're going to cover in the kind of, thinking about the support team of the future.
I think it's probably about 10 or 12 critical things that you need to think about, including how do you look at metrics as a whole in this new world. Because all of a sudden kind of resolution rates and deflection rates, they're much more critical in this world than they ever were before.
So I want to touch on as many of those elements as possible in the course of this discussion at the Expo. And then, as you said, I have a second one around designing good conversations. And this is a really interesting one, because the conversation is different. And why conversation?
Ultimately, the human interactions are conversation, right? And that's what people expect. Some level of conversation. What do you mean by conversation? You're building on the experience as the conversation flows. You're understanding the context and maintaining that. You're making it as personalized as you can based on all the knowledge you have of the person you're conversing with.
And all of a sudden, you want to bring all that into play where it's not just a human to human interaction. I'd say the human interacting with an AI bot, then with an automation flow, then with a human. You've got to think very critically about that conversation design, which is what I'm going to talk about.
What does it mean to really think about the conversation design? What you look for, what are the triggers to say that you need to tune it? And the reality is it's an ongoing task. It's not a one and done type task because you'll tune your conversations, but then as maybe your product changes or customer expectations changes, you need to constantly tune the conversation and make sure that you're optimizing.
Even down to how do you think about encouraging customers to interact with your AI layer in a way that they're optimizing what AI is going to do for them. Because we all know that how you raise the prompt into an AI engine can radically influence the information you get back. So even that whole area of prompt engineering and how do you build that into your conversation flow.
So you're trying to encourage or educate the customer to ask the question in the right way. That requires a lot of intentional thought and and work to get that right. As an example, we've actually hired in a conversation designer, brand new role in an organization, and that's all they do.
They're responsible for the intent, customer flow, thinking about the handoff, how can we make sure it's seamless? How do we take out friction. Because you add in an AI bot, it's great for the people where the AI bot provides the answer. Great experience, first time resolution, everyone happy.
If it doesn't resolve it, you've now added a layer of friction into the customer direction. You then gotta make sure that everything beyond that AI bot experience is as seamless and contextual and personalized as possible. So the customer's feeling the value. We've worked that friction upfront because I'm now seeing, the context is maintained, personalization's maintained.
I'm ultimately getting truth to subject matter expert down the line who can really answer my question with deep knowledge, deep troubleshoot. Again, you've got to be very intentional about how you think about that flow and design that flow. That's the second first thing, just really looking at that conversational aspect and how AI changes how you need to think about it and how you need to look at designing those flows as they, not at a one and done, but it's a constant role that you need to actually check.
Am I actually delivering the frictionless experience that my customer ultimately demands? And make sure that as you begin to deploy AI technology in particular, you're not actually building in friction where you don't need to build it in.
Charls Sustaina: Absolutely, and I love this idea about making conversations transformative.
Turning them into something that people will walk away from and say, that was a good experience. Because when you're talking to somebody in customer support, customer success, you're typically not talking to somebody who says, "Declan, great product. Just wanted to call it and tell you that. I've got a question I need you to answer. I need you to look at this and that." CX, the entire concept has changed over time where you've got all of these inputs. Everything can be measurable. And when you move the needle here and there, AI is going to give us, at least from my take on this and what you're talking about as well, is it's going to give us the ability to simplify that conversation.
Declan, it's always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'm really glad we had a chance to talk about this. And again, community, Declan will be speaking on two topics.
So designing great conversations for customer success, then also building tomorrow's support team glimpse into the future. And there's a lot of overlap between the two of these, which is great. I really look forward to to hearing you talk a little bit more and catching up with you. The Support Driven Expo is in Vegas this year, October 9, October 10. I think not only just hearing from some of these industry leaders from all different parts of this customer support or customer experience organization, whether they're senior leaders or people who were on the front lines, really talking to the customer and conveying that voice to the customer every day, we have an opportunity to listen to people talk, but we also have an even bigger opportunity to engage and to have discussions after the fact
Declan Ivory: Absolutely. I look forward to many interesting conversations at the Support Driven Expo.
Check out this video now featuring Declan Ivory our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
