Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Where do you work? What’s your role? And how long have you been in the Industry?
I've worked in the Support and Customer Experience industry in the past 12 years - from big enterprises such as Microsoft and Dell to growing start-ups like Yotpo and HiredScore. Currently, I'm the Director of Customer Experience in Elementor for the past 10 months. I'm managing 60+ people in various positions and locations (Support Agents, Team Leaders, and Regional Managers) in 2 different departments: Technical Support and Customer Service. We provide support to over 10 million websites and their owners around the world, dealing with 50,000 tickets on a monthly basis.
Let’s dive in, what is your current Tech Stack for your support activities?
Besides the obvious things like Slack and Gmail to communicate, we use Kustomer as our ticketing system, Doc360 & Confluence for documentation, For bug reporting we use JIRA, and for shift scheduling we use Humanity.
How do you think an organization can encourage a knowledge-sharing culture?
I believe that knowledge sharing is one of the most important aspects of a successful team. For us, we have a dedicated technical writers and trainers team, which is responsible for all the knowledge-sharing within our department. We use read-and-sign for each new article that is being released, we perform a monthly lesson learned presentation and we are having knowledge-sharing sessions on a weekly basis with all of our agents.
How much of your support content is reusable? Vs. needs to be created?
A lot of our content is reusable and is being used on a daily basis by our teams and is being tracked and monitored by our team leaders and QM analysts. In addition to that, we perform NPI (New Product Introduction) for any new content we release and have a dedicated owner to track the performance of the agents.
What are the top 3 things that you would like to see being impacted by a support enablement methodology/platform?
When we are talking about the scale of tickets we as a B2C organization handle on a monthly basis, our number one priority is Scalability - we are constantly looking for ways to either deflect incoming tickets (so they won't get to a real live agent) or by enabling our agents to have the correct answers as quickly as possible. The second thing relates to Insights - we like to deep-dive and gather data-driven insights based on actual tickets. The last thing is to align the CX performance based on our goals - Evaluate the quality of our agents based on their professional level, communication skills, and knowledge.
What measurements and KPIs do you use today to define your support department goals? How do you measure success?
We track our agents based on a few KPIs: Number of handled tickets on a daily basis, FRT (First Response Time), TTR (Time To Resolution), CSAT, % of unjustified Escalations to the next level, % of Completed Tickets, and the last one - Team Leader Feedback (which is a questionnaire the Team Leader fills on his agents and is looking for professional and personal development that happened during the month). For me, success (for me and for my team) means constantly improving yourself month-over-month, challenging yourself to new heights, questioning everything, and acting upon those questions. It's the feeling that you do something meaningful and to know and see that you are making an actual impact.
Personal Question to close the talk. Since we know sharing the Knowhow is a team effort and we are big sports fans. What is your most memorable team sports moment?
Personally, since I'm a Manchester United fan (In the last few years I'm not so proud of this fact..), my memorable moment was the 2-1 win in the Champions League Final against Bayern Munich in 1999. Being 1-0 down, in the 90th minute of the game, when all odds are against you, knowing that you are most likely facing a defeat in the biggest stage of them all, and being able to come back and score 2 goals within a few minutes, is a truly amazing achievement that shows the in the best way possible a situation where an amazing collaboration between individuals that understand that winning is a team sport.
If someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best way to do it? Social/Email etc?
I use LinkedIn a lot, and you can find me at www.linkedin.com/in/asaf-goldstein. Other than that, my email is asafgold16@gmail.com - Feel free to ping me! :-)
