Unlocking the Power of Support Reports: Insights from Andrew Rios
Meet Andrew Rios, Founder of RIOS MGMT, a seasoned Global Customer Experience Support Operations Leader. With a deep passion for customer experience, Andrew possesses extensive expertise in Program Management and product feedback analysis (Voice of the Customer), and adeptly manages global operations, technical support teams, and customer success, fostering outstanding customer experiences and substantial business value.
Check out this video featuring Andrew Rios our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo where he discusses the importance of creating a support report that provides valuable insights to different teams within an organization. Get a sneak peek of his compelling ideas before he takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Charles Sustaita: Hey everybody, I'm Charles. I'm the director of customer support at Coastline. Andrew is a technologist, a runner, and he's a passionate CX leader with 25 years of experience building support teams and startups and fortune 100 companies. Such as Fitbit Cisco, and Turn Technologies. He's also a youth sports coach and coaches his son's soccer and flag football teams.
You are speaking at the support driven Expo. By the way, if anybody hasn't registered, you should register for the expo support driven expo that's in Vegas this year, October nine and October 10. The title of your talk, is building a support report that people wanna read, and I'm all over it, but I wanna learn more. So tell me what is a support report?
Andrew Rios: Second time at the expo, given a workshop. I'm really excited about that talk, that engagement.
A support report ultimately answers a couple of big questions in many ways, It answers who's contacting us, how many times, and why are they contacting us, And then bringing that down, peeling that onion back, and the support report is something that is your truth out of the business. Here's what's happening. Here's how we're servicing our customers, our clients, and here's what they're contacting us for. And then there's that third area that you and I really dived into, which is, now tell us how we could prevent this or what they're saying. What's happening with the product, what's happening with the service? What are they telling us? Dare I say voice of the customer? Oh yeah, absolutely.
Charles Sustaita: There's these like variations of these kind of things that. At different companies, I've put some together; some people call it like a state of report, but that could be something that is, higher level, and sounds like this is something that goes out on a more frequent basis. Is that right?
Andrew Rios: One of the things I found is just consistency, right? Just continuously sending it out and giving folks in the organization an opportunity to self-serve. What's happening in the support side of the house, It's very, what I like to say, systematic in the story framework.
So every week let's just answer the same questions, but then let the data tell the story. For example, how many times did we get phone calls? How many emails did we get? How many chats did we get? Okay. What were the duration of those? Then you have those other metrics that we as leaders look at, but then peeling it back even more, going, all right, so what was the percentage of calls in a certain area?
And what I like to tell people is then start to answer the next question for the business: Was it product-related? Was it service-related? Was it an expectation? Was it something that we're not aware of? And then start to really tell that story. And I think what a support report does for a leader, and I always say this to everyone, is that's one of the only things we have, and we're one of the only business teams in the organization that has the truth."
We're not trying to sell something to the future, we're not marketing an experience or anything. We are dealing frontline with what's happening with our product and our service and the folks that are buying and engaging with it. So we should embrace that. So embrace that with the support report and share it weekly.
Share it. And then you mentioned another one there, Charles, which was awesome, is then it changes, right? Then break another one down quarterly for the business, right? And then break another one down yearly. I think the support report also is serving many people, right? It's for your team also to see how you're servicing the customers, how you're doing, right?
We're either getting better or we're getting worse, but also opportunities for improvement, and celebrate wins. There's a lot of things that come out of that support report. And then the other side of the business is letting them know, are the clients engaging the way marketing was expecting?"
Are we seeing the personas that we were expecting? Is that new feature really resonating the way that we thought it did or, Are we getting another surprise based on the data that we're seeing? Yeah,
Charles Sustaita: "Absolutely. There's always one organization or department that typically stands out within an organization, and that is usually Sales, right? It's, 'Oh, we brought this new customer in, pat on the back to everybody. We're ringing bells. We're doing something that is very team building.' And that is really important, not just obviously within any team, but for customer support, customer experience, customer success teams, because we bring the customer in and we have to make sure that we're supporting them, keeping.
Like you said, celebrate those wins. Get that out there for everybody else because Seattle brings 'em in. We gotta keep 'em here, we gotta make sure that they're happy and they're getting the full experience out of our service or product."
Andrew Rios: Absolutely. I think the other part too that I, that I always say is even, maybe even more important organically in your team from a culture perspective, is celebrating the team that's supporting those customers.
Celebrating either them through that report as well. A great CSAT score, great feedback specifically on a support agent directly from a premier customer. So a big logo customer calls in, and Charles serviced them. Great. And when they got their CSAT survey, they specifically called out the smile that they could feel from Charles on the phone when they were talking to 'em.
That's also part of the support report. I think what happens is when people, I've experienced this earlier in my career, is. People hear support report, they, 'Oh, here comes another Excel sheet, or 37 PowerPoint slides, or 10 pages PDF that I really don't care about. What do I care about this?
Which is a key question we have to always answer in the support report is that's another way to market and brand and sell your team that's out there doing that work. And it's also a way to highlight what I call opportunities for improvement in the business in the journey. Maybe it was an experience that we're seeing that we've created and we're now dealing with it on the front line.
So instead of so we have an opportunity as support leaders with that report to highlight that. And then what I always say, and what a product manager told me many years ago at Fitbit was, 'Now tell me what I can do about it, Andrew. Tell me what I can do about it.' And that resonated with me.
And to this day, I always, when I'm working with reporting or talking to a reporting team, building my own report, I'm always thinking now, okay, what can they do with this though? What can they do with this? So the hockey stick went this way, what does that mean to me? And I think that's the key to the report, I think.
There's a lot of work that goes into the report at first to build it in whatever state you might be in. And that's okay, as long as ultimately you know you're gonna get to that vision, that's gonna be a great story that comes out weekly that different teams will get used to going in and extrapolating on their own.
Charles Sustaita: Yeah. And you said different teams, so you have different audiences for this, right? Yeah. What are some of the audiences who are consuming this?
Andrew Rios: Oh man. So the product team first, right? Let's just, let's start with them. Those who are building the product, the developers, whether it's software, product, hardware, engineers they're the first audience. So how is my product performing out in the field? How is that product doing? The second part, where I like to say, is the operations folks. Because there's a return component potentially in there too, or a churn component in there. So operations and seeing what's happening because those numbers could tie back into a potential new product they might have to buy down the road.
Or, and I like to say, is, and I say this because this is just the way the world operates when we're building products and services, is that they also know a lot more of what could be happening out in the field. Potentially based on where the product was designed or built or things that were cut into the manufacturing line.
So the support team is kinda like that net and if they don't hear from the support team organically, and what I've seen is, 'Oh, that must be good. That resistor retain. Everything's fine. Yeah, it's fine. We're good. Yeah.' So as support leaders, that's where we have to see, that report tells us that might not catch everything right away week one after it shifts.
Now it might take a little bit of time, but then when we see that trend, that difference, What I like to say is one of those indicators are if all of a sudden one week your five-minute call average is now higher and now you're eating seven or eight minutes, what caused that three minutes? That's worth looking at and investigating, right? That's worth taking a dive into, and that's where your support report helps you do. It's just indicators, right?
Charles Sustaita: Yeah, absolutely. And it helps just like you said, right? Connect those two dots. We had an outage or there was a new feature release or a bug patch that went out, and we had people, so many people reached out to us or said something about it that needed something from us. Or maybe it was one of those really big things like a company went public or something like that. And then you've got people flooding you from social media or customer support requests saying, 'Hey, fantastic. This is great.' It all translates to the stuff that we do.
Andrew Rios: Absolutely. No, and that's one that happens all the time. At a recent company I was with, every time we had a round of funding or a great marketing campaign, the support lines flooded, and you're like, 'Wow. All of a sudden, how do we get double, triple the five-minute calls with the quick ones?' And you just, instead of. You see it and you're like, 'Oh,' then you can go back and extrapolate that data too, right?
And then when you, the support report helps you become a great historian in the company. I think that, what I always say is, as support leaders, we have an opportunity to, one of those areas where we can really own our seat at the table is using that report to be the historian, right?
Because if you go back a year now, and you've been putting that report out every week and then a quarterly one, right? And then you go back for the year and you see the spikes, you remember. And not just remember, but the report reminds you, 'Oh, yep, that's right. That's when they released that software upgrade that only worked on Apple.
Unfortunately, the customers we have are all on Android, so we got a bunch of calls that week. Yeah. And it's easy, and I always say that, and I always like to help the support leaders like that is your biggest weapon. To talk down the road, facts and weapon when it costs about facts.
So you can shoot facts out, right? Yeah. And not have to go back in time and go, 'Oh, what was that again? What was that again?' It's no, if you build that history and that culture consistently, it's just gonna be there for you. And then don't set it in. Forget it. I think the key is knowing that the operations team, and I shared with you is that getting them buy-in is it's not my report, it's our report.
And I don't even like to put my name on it when it goes out. It's the manager's report, right? It's the product support specialist team's report. It's the supervisor's report. You send that out. It's the operations team's report, it's the program manager's report, and let them tell that story through. I digress too much. Cause it's, that's what we have.
Charles Sustaita: Oh no. Like I said, we could talk about this stuff forever. But you are, you're passionate about this. This is what you've done at a couple, multiple places before. So how did you start doing this? Why are you so passionate about the support report?
Andrew Rios: "Yeah. I'll tell you how it all started. I was fortunate and lucky that the engineering team that I worked with early in my days when I was a NOC technician at MegaPath here in Costa Mesa as a managed service provider, very early in the game with technology, had a great engineering team.
When I would go share information with them about the calls I was getting and talk with them, they would always ask me for more information. 'Give me more to help with, what about this?' And they would challenge me back. So that kind of set the stage. And then when I landed as a program manager at Cisco, my role was really to interface between the business unit and the support team and tell that story.
The business unit didn't want and didn't care about all this reporting, right? They wanted what comes out of it, give me actions, give me that. And that's when I learned that it's more than just the numbers. You need the numbers, you need the data. So you need your metrics, right? You need capacity planning for forecasting.
You need to know volumes and arrival patterns. So we need that data, of course. But then the key, and I guess, at Cisco, what I learned is how to own your seat at the table and get people to give you respect as a person who is also helping the business run, is to tell the story of what's happening, right?
And tell it in a way, because earlier in my days, I still do it in a witty way because I like to have fun with people's wittiness. But earlier in my days, I was very black and white with it. It was like, you did this and it sucks. So nobody's really and it was bad. I was young, I was this, but then my director at Cisco coached me through that and he said, 'Look, your numbers are gonna tell the story.
You only have 90 seconds with them. What two things would you tell them that they could take action on and go back to their team instead of saying, 'Oh, Rios is just complaining about the calls again. It's not Rios, let us know that, hey, if they had one more day of planning and they understood this change that happened in the router.
They would be able to prepare the content so when the call came in, they would be ready instead of having to escalate the call because that's how it was. Also, one of the things that the reporting helped me do is help reduce escalations. It allowed me to see what's escalating and what's not the truth.
Again, where can we improve as a support team? And earlier at an opportunity I had with Cisco, it was how to reduce that escalation and then raise the level of the escalation team. So it was this teeter-totter challenge that I had. But I had a great mentor that worked me through that, and it was all about the report."
Charles Sustaita: Absolutely. So you've got different, it spans all sorts of different levels, really, like you have it for the product specialists, program managers, you've got it for the people leaders, you have it for the executive team, right? You can synthesize that information in different ways with different action items or call-outs, just depending on who's consuming it.
Andrew Rios: Absolutely. When it was time for the annual operating plan, then the report would tell me my cost per contact. Then it would tell my projected cost. Then it would tell me if I didn't have to take these calls, then this would be the price, right? Or this is my percent to revenue. I think that, as you said earlier, just like you mentioned, there are different folks, right?
That doesn't mean you throw out one big report with all the stuff in it. I think that's how you send it out. When you send it out, who gets it? Who cares about what, when. But then that's where the executives come into play. They think about your audience, yeah, who cares about the product feedback?
Who cares about the cost? Who cares about operational cost? Who cares about the brand? And I think we all should care about it. I think there's a saying out there that folks say, but I spun it a little bit, which is everybody's in sales. Absolutely. When we're out there, we're selling our company. But also equally, and I would even challenge even more, everybody's in customer support.
Because everybody needs support. Everybody's in customer support. So being able to take that mindset and go, okay, what would they need to know in order to be able to give a better customer experience in their world of operations and sometimes they can even go into the accounting team, right? We keep getting calls because this happened at a couple companies ago.
When they get their invoice, it seems to always go into their spam folder, right? And it came down to the service that was sending out the invoices and settings. But the only team that knew that because that's us was us right away. 'Hey, I'm trying to call. Meanwhile, hey.' And it's, 'Hey, we started getting those calls,' and it was like, Thursday, we're like, 'Wow, we took 13 calls this week because it went into their spam folder.'
So yeah. Just, 'Hey, reach out to our colleague over there and see what happened.' And sure enough, they used some third-party, new third-party service to send that out, a MailChimp-type service, right? That needed another setting change so that it didn't get caught in the standard Microsoft spam filter, like it wasn't, it was a standard one, right? You would expect your electric bill to show up.
Charles Sustaita: Yeah, it's one of those things that I've seen happen before where there could be a disconnect, right? When you don't have that information being shared interdepartmentally, there could be a disconnect where, I don't know, maybe there's an email or a memo that goes out from the accounts receivable team and they say, 'Hey, people who talk to customers, for some reason, 50% of our customers haven't paid their bills yet.
Next time you talk to them, go and get that.' And then we're like, 'Wait. Actually, we just got a thousand tickets from people saying, 'Where's my invoice?' Or 'I got this nasty email that says I haven't paid.'' Yeah, there's so much there and there's so much valuable information that can be shared with each department, because everybody can be a stakeholder.
I think that's something that we as CX leaders have to make a priority for other people to understand there is something valuable here. Because we get the email saying, 'We closed this new customer, there's a sale here. We get this saying, 'Hey, here's our profit margin. Here's how much revenue we created. We get these metrics from customer success. We get them from onboarding teams, and we need that same visibility within customer experience teams.
Andrew Rios: We should take the lead in it. And I think that, wearing the shirt, ironically today, is that Fitbit is one of the first places where I'm like, we're gonna send our own report out every week.
And the natural response is, 'Another report people aren't gonna read, probably.' But you know what, we're gonna change it. 'Cause it's gonna market us, it's gonna be our newsletter. It's just gonna start with data, and then it's gonna just, and we're gonna keep working on it. And I always say this too, it should be, and as much as it can be based on your business, right?
It should be owned by certain individuals in the team that own certain parts of it. In a previous life, one individual owned putting the entire data set together in the graphs, in the charts, putting it all the facts, extrapolating it. The second individual owned the operational aspect of answering what does this mean?
What happened this week? That's content, that's training. That's onboarding the ops back-office end. Then I have a product specialist on their part. Feedback. Talk about in the escalations, bugs or features, right? What's happened this week? Either new, and I always encourage them. It's easy to go negative.
It's really easy to go negative. Stay positive. Make it positive because that's how you're gonna get people to come and ask more, get engaged with it, and then pay attention to it. Because nobody wants to hear that their baby's ugly. Instead, be like, 'Hey, look at what recently happened, but how about what if?' And I always introduce the phrase 'EBI.
Even better if, right? Even better if... Yeah. And just keep that in mind and then celebrate the team. Like I always say, make it yours, right? And people will read it. They will. It'll take a little bit of time, depending on where you're at in the life cycle. I've had to go and reinvent them, start 'em up again, start one from scratch right in the middle of something versus start from the beginning.
Charles Sustaita:I catching up in person at the expo. I've gotta finalize my travel plans, but I really hope to see you there and to hear you talk about this in person. And I know a lot of other leaders are excited as well because they wanna learn, okay, I'm not doing this now, how do I start?
Or, I'm doing something like this, but how do I take it to the next level? And also, how do I just continue to build excitement and buy-in? You said if you start it, you've gotta change that culture. And I, I know leaders are gonna love the advice that you give them when you talk about this.
So again, Andrew, you are talking at the Support Driven Expo, Las Vegas, Nevada, October nine, October 10. You're not talking for two days entirely, but that's when the expo is. People haven't registered, they should go register so they can hear you in person. And then Andrew, how can people get in touch with you?
Andrew Rios: Yeah, I'd love to connect with everyone and anyone. Andrew Rios on LinkedIn. Easiest way, you type my name in there and I pop right up. Big smile. Yeah, I'd love to say hi, come by the workshop. I think I'm giving it on Monday, I believe. Bring what, bring your data you have, be ready to be vulnerable, be ready to start anew, be ready to hear from other people.
The whole intent of my workshop is really to be real-time. Hey, what are you working with today? Okay, where can we go next? Okay, here's this. And then I've got some structure, some pro tips, and some things that we'll work through. So come see me, and then maybe we can catch the Raider game that Monday night, Green Bay's in town. So any Raider fans out there? Oh man.
Charles Sustaita: Good stuff. Alright, Andrew, hope you have a good day. It was good catching up with you. See you soon man. You too,
Andrew Rios: Charles, man. Take care. Be well. Do good. Bye.
Check out this video now featuring Andrew Rios our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
