Proactive Support & Client Experience Strategies with Michelle Salatto

Michelle Salatto, the Product Support Director at Entertainment Partners, sat down with us on The Startup Smoothie and shared insights on balancing proactive customer support with customer needs. We discussed the importance of proactive outreach and ensuring customer adoption and engagement with products. On the support side, we talked about capturing data, understanding clients' pain points, and sending this information to the appropriate teams to improve the client experience. Michelle also discussed representing customer needs to developers and engineers, and shared techniques on how to do this effectively. We talked about quantifying the customer's pain and using data to convey this, as well as using objective measurements like NPS and product satisfaction surveys to represent the voice of the customer.

We also discussed the importance of aligning different departments for a successful customer experience. Michelle emphasized the need for relationships with the team to communicate customer sentiment. We talked about training teams on effective communication and cross-functional meetings to discuss client feedback. By taking these measures, it is possible to foster successful collaboration between departments and open up lines of communication.

Timestamps

0:03:23 Representing the Voice of the Customer in a Team of Developers and Engineers

0:05:11 Strategies for Building Relationships and Communicating Effectively"

0:06:42 Opening Lines of Communication and Building Out a Customer Experience Team

0:10:14 Exploring Scalable Solutions for Client Communication and Agent Experience

0:11:45 Conversation on Technology's Impact on Customer Experience

0:17:52 Discussion on the Value of Investing in Client Support Teams

0:23:03 The Challenges of Frontline Support Agents

0:24:59 Retaining Support Team Members: Tips for Customer Experience Leaders

0:27:00 Conversation on Engaging Disengaged Support Agents and Unlocking Their Potential

Highlights

“I think when you have a really diverse team in every sense of the word, you have a stronger team. My strongest teams have had different backgrounds, different experiences, different skill sets, different strengths. And you want to make sure that you're always hiring for who are the value adds, right, not the fit in. And that's really something that I've been really mindful of and on an inclusive side of things, just making sure that we're not just making decisions that impact employees without trying to bring some of those employees into those conversations as well.”

“I think support is such a great department and team because these are problem solvers, they're collaborators, they have great interpersonal skills, they have great soft skills, they're eager to learn. And I'm speaking for 99.99% of all the support people I've ever worked with.”

“Yeah, I mean that's why they're the front lines, right? And you don't want it to be the metaphor of being in battle. You want them to be the advocates and the people who are making people's day over and over and over again because they're answering questions and solving problems and able to own issues from start to finish and they have the resources they need to solve the problem. Not creating silos and friction. If you do that for the agent, if you're creating silos and you're creating friction for the agent, you're definitely doing the same for the client.”