Unresolved.cx - When Feedback Has To Matter - Paul Tucker

Speaker A: Welcome to Unresolved, the podcast for customer experience leaders. On this show you will hear from different types of companies, how they view and measure customer experiences, how they manage their teams, and then we dive deeper into the unresolved issues that they're facing today. We're specifically calling this podcast Unresolved because so many CX leaders are testing with AI in different areas of their operations. They are rebuilding with AI as their foundation. And every one of us have to reinvent everything that we've known about customer experience, systems and processes. You're not alone. So let's do this journey together. Today we have Paul Tucker, the head of Support Success for Chirocat, a ah, practice management platform built specifically for chiropractors and their teams. Paul, welcome to Unresolved.

Speaker B: Happy to be here Brett.

Speaker A: So I want listeners to connect with you and your story. So I'm going to start with some grounding questions. We'll get into how you're building your team and using AI and then I'm going to dive into what's still Unresolved for you. So first, kind of like let people know, tell me about your team, the size, the structure, what you're responsible for.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, so Cowcat is a small but mighty team. We are uh, I would say in that startup space. So we're small but scrappy and growing. I'm actually actively hiring right uh, for a new seat on the team as we continue to expand. I have five direct reports. I've managed big teams, I've managed small teams. I'm the head of customer success and support which just means that everything on the CX side of the fence or everything customer post sale rolls up to me. Everything from support, success, onboarding, offboarding, that's all in my purview.

Speaker A: Awesome. And also so how people can kind of connect with you as well is let us know what your tech stack is. What is your team using on a day to day basis?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we're currently using Help, uh, Scout for our support. Um, I use Claude for a ton of stuff and uh, MCP all the things. So there's a lot of different automations and tools and things like that going on behind the scenes to augment some of our team's skills or to help them find information faster and things like that. Um, really love Help Scout for its simplicity and speed and kind of putting the conversation first. One uh, of the challenges we're facing though as we continue to grow is the uh, lack of automation or the lack of uh, specifically workflows that will restart we could get a lot more value out of Help Scout, because I love the people there. I've worked with them for years. We've got to have the ability to get creative, to be able to trust the platform, to automate certain things and surface them for us so we can move a little bit faster, um, and make better plays and make sure that things don't fall through the cracks along the way.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And I get the understanding of, like, you need to keep your team lean, and the way to do that in some cases is automate that busy stuff or automate those triggers. And, uh, whenever it comes to Help Scout or Intercom or Zendesk or whatever people are using, you got to find that niche, that thing that helps your team stay lean and stay accurate. So I want to shift over. I want to. I want to talk about how you've built the support team at Kyro Cat, because the decision you made runs counter to what most companies are doing right now. Like, you. You've hired insurance billers with chiropractic backgrounds rather than generalists, uh, like general support staff. So what drove that call?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, if. If you've worked with me for any length of time, you know that I love an analogy. Um, so much so that here at Kyro Cat, they call them apologies, meaning in a sense, of a Paul analogy. Uh, and I think that's probably just more of a testament to the fact that Paul just needs things d down to a level he understands. So I'm constantly working in analogies. But, uh, the analogy here is, you know, Brett, if you and I jumped on this podcast and started talking, um, and let's say we both went to Spanish, um, the language has the tools to get it done, but I don't know how to exercise that tool enough to communicate my emotions, my feelings. We might be able to connect on some level of what we're trying to achieve. You know, kind of, uh, going back and forth with our high school Spanish at each other, maybe we could get there and at least get some basics. Maybe you could help me find a bathroom or something like that. Um, but to really understand Brett, and, like, what makes you tick, to connect with you personally, to connect with you professionally, to understand what you're trying to achieve, we're going to have to be fluent in the same language.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I don't have a chiropractic background. That is not me. I came traditionally from, like, traditional it. Um, and, you know, over the years, kind of grew into the software side of things. Always kind of in that customer facing support success cx, uh, world. Um, so I do come from the more traditional SaaS background, but there's an aspect of that where I just had to admit to myself I don't speak the language. And there is no point. I can go to a native Spanish speaking person and I will never be able to fool them that I can speak their language fluently. They are immediately, immediately going to know I don't get them. And that realization was really core to um, the thought of I need to hire people that you know, air quotes, speak the language.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, and people go to school for years to become a doctor of chiropractic. People, um, go to school or get certifications to become medical insurance billers. And there's so much technical expertise there, um, I'm never reasonably going to be able to master that and a short timeline. So the shift was I need people who speak the language not just for the perspective of I want to be effective, but the other side of it was, is I want the customer to know that they're heard and understood. But it went a little bit deeper than that in the sense that I actually want the customer to jump into that live chat, pick up the phone, send that email and when they get that response back they're like, oh, this is different. Um, you know, this person actually knows what it means to submit their soap notes and their charting. They actually know what it looks like for the front desk workflow for checking in, collecting payment, sending people out the door. They know what it means to collect intakes. They know what it means to um, submit insurance billing and to bill, to secondary to Medicare and all this different sort of stuff that's like massively tangential and um, nerdy and challenging industry expertise that you just don't uh, you don't intuit. Um, it's a different, it's a different level of uh, training and expertise that I can't bring with me.

Speaker A: You and I have very similar stories. Uh, when I started at Frame IO, which is a video collaboration platform, so if you're like making commercials or movies or anything along, along those lines, you need to be able to collaborate. Well, I'm not from the video production industry, but I did hire people from the industry, I mean people that were familiar with video production who had assembled professional cameras on set, specialists in uh, video editing and uh, I mean I was able to teach them customer support, customer experience. I'm not going to be able to teach them how to assemble a red camera and explain uh, the lenses or anything like that. So when they were helping customers, when they were chatting with, uh, our customers, the customers are going above and beyond the frame IO questions. They're like, hey, so how do you do this in Adobe Premiere? And. Or whenever they would say that problem, like, I'm having problem with the, uh, frame I.O. doing this. And we'd be like, what are you really trying to do? Back out. Let's talk through the workflow. Like, not where you're using Frame IO. Let's talk about how it fits into what you're actually doing. And we found that it wasn't a frame IO problem or a feature request. It was actually their workflow problem. We just realized we can't just teach somebody how editing works, how the production works, but we can teach somebody from that world that has actually done the work. We can teach them the playbook, the tone, the empathy, how to manage customers, how to manage a lot of, uh, feedback and such.

Speaker B: Yeah. And like, you're saying that like, you can. We all talk about the SME or the subject matter expert, and that's great, but that's kind of internally focused. The. It shouldn't be discounted. But like, you were just saying in your example that there's something with being like an industry authority where people can come to you and you can touch with authority on a topic that's tangential or adjacent and be like, no, uh, no, like, don't do it that way. Do it like this. Like, it doesn't have anything to do with our product. But if you do it this way, you're going to be set up for success in our product because you kind of walked in the door, uh, this certain way. And that's, um, you know, that, that is just so huge. It's such a value add for the customer on the other end. To have someone not necessarily be prescriptive, but descriptive of like, hey, I get it. This is, you might be doing it like this, you might be doing it like this. Um, and here's what we recommend, or here's how I've seen it work best. And being able to say that with authority, um, man, it just, it earns so much trust.

Speaker A: Um, so quickly thinking about how AI can now scrape information, data and, uh, phone calls. And I would love to be able to like, take that information and be like, what is the retention level now? After giving that feedback, after giving that context. Maybe they're at like a 75% retention rate, but now are they at like a 99% retention rate? I would love to be able to measure that because it's, it's not possible in a human form. How we could measure something like that simply by, hey, we gave them above and beyond. We gave them the workflow, not just the fix to the product that we support. Anyway, a little tangent there, but I really wish we could kind of dive deeper into something like that. But what I want to switch over to is customer appetite. Because, uh, this phrase you used in one of our conversations, I really want to unpack it. Customer appetite. And, uh, every company right now is being pushed to automate customer facing support. You went the other direction. I want to, I want you to walk me through that decision. Like, what drove it? Who did you have to bring along?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, so I guess I should start by saying I'm not anti AI, uh, at all. I'm very tech native AI. Native in the sense that I'm automating tons of stuff, built apps, built internal tools, built slack apps, tons of integrations. What I am though is I'm very

Speaker A: human.

Speaker B: Uh, first, so it's not that I'm not, I'm not anti AI, but I'm very pro human. You know, louder for the people in the back. You can't automate trust. Um, you can't, um, automate relationships. And I say that with the caveat there are a ton of things you can automate, but those two, you can't. And other things. But the human quotant is something that has to be respected and thought about and considered in so many leaders, so many teams, um, that I interact with and talk to, um, just in my circle and whatnot. I just don't hear them talk about the customer appetite to receive AI and namely that is when they reach out for help in some way, for education, for resources, whatever that is. Um, and meanwhile, inside companies we have so many people that are just saying, you know, hey, look, we deflected 45%, uh, with an AI, you know, chatbot that's serving up knowledge, content, blah, blah, blah, um, that. I'm not against that. I, um, think that can actually be really helpful. So I'll use myself as an example with Intercom, or fin, uh, as it's now called that, uh, they have a great implementation of chat inside of their own product where if I'm trying to do something, I could just go bloop, click on it, ask my question, Natural human language. It's searching their massive amounts of knowledge and past conversations and it will give me that information right there just in a few seconds. Um, and for me, who's very comfortable with that, I find great value from it. Like I'm, I'm happy to have that be. 90% of my interactions look like that. And uh, very quick I'm like, ah, uh, there it is. That's what I was looking for. And on my way I go. But one of the things they do well is that I can say, you know, no, that didn't answer my question. And more often than not be connected with a human on the other end because my use case or my specifics that I'm trying to achieve don't match the most standard, uh, workflow. So as we think about this human appetite thing, uh, you have to know your customer Personas pretty well and understand what they actually want to receive. So I can AI all the things and even do a good job at it, uh, where I'm giving good answers. And at the end of the day, the customer on the other end, because their appetite to work with AI is low or extremely low, perhaps that silently we have, their satisfaction is being reduced, their trust is not being, uh, increased and their churn signals are silently, they're starting to wonder. I hate using the word silently now because of AI. It's like quietly this, quietly that. Uh, like stop it, AI. Uh, yeah, I used that word before, AI. Um, anyway, uh, customers are quietly, um, building resentment or just that their trust is being eroded because they're not meeting the face on the other end. And that is such a value add for certain customers, certain Personas. They need to know the voice of the person on the other end. Whether that's the voice through the keyboard or the voice quite literally through Async videos or phone calls or whatever that may be. Um, you gotta build the relationship. And if AI is not going to help you do that, it never will. So if you're not framing around that and understanding the appetite of the customer, you may actually be causing harm to your long term retention rather than saving it or maintaining it.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I was listening to a podcast just this morning, Lenny's podcast. It's a, uh, it's a, it talks about product. They have such incredible speakers.

Speaker B: It's a great podcast. I love it, love this podcast.

Speaker A: The, the premise was engineers used to collaborate. Now they're really working like siloed. They're working with their agents. And so a lot of folks are working separate now. And it's becoming a lonely, uh, role as an engineer because you're just really, you're working on a project and you have your agents that are doing the work. You're orchestrating things. You're not collaborating as much anymore. You're in charge of something that's much bigger than an entire department used to manage. And I feel like with AI being infused into cx, we could also be getting into that, that role of where we're just talking and orchestrating to AI and chats and, um, measuring things and trying to fix things and tweak things. Like how else can we not have to talk to customer? And so I feel like we're losing a bit of an element of maybe we just pick up the phone or maybe we just actually jump on Zoom or teams or whatever your flavor is. Maybe we actually just talk like humans instead of literally try to continuously tweak what the AI chat responded with. Uh, so, yeah, I feel like we're, we're separating, just as the engineers have already done so much to pivot how they operate and we're in the same boat. Like CXS isn't in the same boat of making too much space between us and the customers and literally just trying to create those solutions with AI.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally agree that, that, um, you know, measuring that and looking at it is a challenge because, um, and that's actually one of the reasons that I joined chirocat, um, was talking with our CEO, uh, Chancer, and our cto, Doug Tanner, that immediately knew that I had, um, kind of such strong alignment on this customer appetite towards the AI. Many, um, of the people I talked to would either be in that strongly anti AI camp. And I was like, well, I'm not, I'm not there, right? I, um, do think there's a place for this tool. They shared that same perspective very strongly that like, we're not going to use AI, um, just to use it and just to put a badge on something, uh, or just to cut head count or something like that. Like, it's actually, that's not even our perspective. Our perspective is how can we add value? And if AI isn't adding value, if it's not making us closer to the customer or closer to the need, we're doing it wrong. And, um, that has been like such a joy. Like we're constantly thinking about, talking about. In our next quarterly meetup, we're going to be talking about more so about our AI value values, kind of our AI manifesto, if you will. Um, but right now even our company core values truly motivates how we act, that even now we're bringing our company values to bear with AI, um, and how we implement it, which is both fun, but it's also really Challenging, nuanced stuff, uh, to be that person in the middle. But thankfully I'm surrounded by good folks who share that desire and desire to hold that tension.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, yeah. And so one last thing on, uh, customer appetite for AI, for using AI, Genesis came out with uh, with like the state of the customer experience. What they reported was, I'm, um, I'm looking over here. More than half of consumers say they would rather do almost anything else than contact customer service. However, on the other side of it, 84% will give a virtual agent three attempts or fewer before giving up on it. Mhm. But I'll uh, pause there. And I want to think about like you had to think about who your customer base is. It's chiropractors. They work with people. They're not building software. They like you are working with the software. However, your customers are not. They have teams of people that are picking up the phone right there in the office. They are physically talking to people, adjusting people. So they may not want to go through an AI chatbot maybe to get like informational things. And so the same point of like, think about what your customers are doing. And if they're not spending all day on a computer, like for instance for Frame IO, yes, they may be spending time on the computer editing, but they're not even using our product. They're, they're, it's a tool to be able to edit through Adobe, uh, Premiere or whatever they were using. It's merely a tool. It's not the primary where they're spending their time. So we had to think about that too. How can we get integrated into Adobe Premiere? Or maybe they're going on a shoot, so they're going to be gone for three days. They may, we may correspond and all of a sudden they drop and it's because they literally had no more time to be on the computer. Now they're going to go on a shoot for three or four days or even two weeks and then come back with the same question. Hey, just bringing this right back up from where we, where we left off. So the uh, the thing about Appetite is you got to think about the customer and what they actually are doing. What are they stepping through, what is their workflow? And then match that and think, do they really want to jump on a Zoom call? Do they even have that installed? Or should I just pick up the phone and give them a call? Right.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. The um, thing I'm constantly thinking about is do we meet the customer where they are and do we understand what they need in that moment. And it's so hard to gauge that. But if you try to understand the customer, try to understand their workflow, try to understand what their day looks like, it really helps. Because no one, it's hyperbole. Very few people buy software because they love software. They buy it because of what it enables them to do. And oftentimes what it enables them to do is actually the part of the job they hate. So when you understand that you're. Anytime the customer is picking up the phone or even needs to ask the question, they're not entering that conversation, sentiment neutral. They're actually, whether it's spoken or not, they actually have a negative sentiment, which is, I don't even want to be in this tool. I don't want to be doing this work. I want to go do my trade craft, like what I actually studied. I want to be behind the camera in your example, your frame IO example. Um, they don't want to be in the tool. They want to go do the thing that they love. You know, for the chiropractor. They want to be actually interacting with their patients, making adjustments, changing lives. I get excited about the tools, I get excited about the product. The customer isn't excited about the product. They're like, if you could just get out of my way as much as possible, uh, and let me do what I love and what I'm really good at.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, so like, I don't have the answer to that question other than to say, you can't, you can't quiet that question. You have to sit with it, you have to live with it over and over and over again. Uh, for a product, for the support team, for the CX team, for onboarding, you need to get out of the way and help them do what they love. And man, that's hard.

Speaker A: Yeah. What's the one thing in your CX operation that's still unresolved that you haven't been able to fix yet or figure out yet? Um,

Speaker B: I would say metabolizing feedback while avoiding customer feedback while avoiding two of the most common pitfalls, at least in our case. I've seen this at other organizations too, so I know it's not bespoke to only us, but, um, a lot of times we do get feedback, or however well intentioned or maybe spicy it may be, uh, from the customer that you can do one of two things. One is that you can be like, they just don't understand how great we are. They don't understand like they're, they're just uneducated on how to use our product. You know, you could pull the Steve Jobs they're holding it wrong type um, of thing with the iPhone 4 of like no, like actually if you squeeze the phone wrong the guess it's probably 4G. LTE antennas don't work anymore. Like it basically it loses cell phone reception so they had to put the bumper case around the outside and all this different sort of stuff. It's like. But Steve Jobs approach was they're holding it wrong. Um, that's one side is kind of almost to be defensive of. Like maybe they don't. Maybe you would put it uh, more internalized. Like they don't understand how hard we're working for them. That's one pitfall. The other pitfall is to like over internalize which is just like we can't do anything right and everything's broken and we're never going to get this right. So like uh, for me is I'm really wading into. So one of the spaces that I'm spending a lot of time in with Claude lately is making better tools to identify from customer conversations those touch points, to ingest all those touch points and then to learn from it what is their churn likelihood. So get those leading signals in place. Um, I spent some time building some tools to track churn and kind of keep track of all those different customers that might be likely to leave kind of the remediation of that and kind of manage it more as a project. And that's, that's good. But now I'm trying to think upstream more of like how can we get in front of, you know, the customer's telling us something. Do we understand how to take that voice? But man, I don't know. I'm still struggling with that balance of how do we do a good job at being able to really sit in the space of the customer said this because they meant it to actually take it and metabolize it, but not metabolize it in a harm, harmful way that somehow slows us down or makes us think less of ourselves. Um, so yeah, I'm curious to hear what thoughts you have on that. Like pick, uh, your brain. You've lived in this space as well. Do you have any strong words of wisdom?

Speaker A: For me it is a hard balance because on one end you have that $20 a month client that has the biggest mouth, uh, that has uh, all of the negative things to say. And yet it's just a matter of the way that they're using the product to the point of they're holding it wrong. Well, they're probably doing something wrong in Adobe Premiere or something. And uh, they just wanted Frame IO to do this specific thing, but that's not how it works. They don't understand the whole workflow kind of a thing for sure. And then on the other hand, you have, uh, entire corporations with 1500 seats, uh, in the product paying for each one of them that have no qualms whatsoever. And uh, they may have some feedback of things that we wouldn't have ever expected or ever thought about. Uh, and then that's where it may get on the product roadmap. But at the end of the day, this person wanted more features that we shouldn't because it's not addressing the workflow. The question that I feel like AI may not be able to answer and unless if you pump it full of everything in the industry, uh, is how do you know where in the workflow this actually would be solving and, or should we even consider this? But many times people just have their GitHub repository linked into cloud and then, so it's only actionable based on what the product does, not what it solves for and understanding where it fits in the entire scheme of uh, the entire workflow that the customer, that the industry is using your product for. Back in 2019 we built an airtable database and we linked all of the feedback to what's the overarching request and can we tie it to one of 20 categories? And if we could think about that, we could think about the workflow that that request was actually touching. Super manual. Very, very manual. It was, it was automated to get all the feedback in there from Intercom through Zapier into airtable. But then it was like we had to, we had to take a step back and think what were they actually thinking about? Okay, I'm gonna guess this one. So we, we. It was a, uh, it was an exercise for us to step into their shoes and try to attribute it and then could, could we solve for the workflow not for the individual request? Yeah, that, that was hard. I feel like that piece could be automated at this point.

Speaker B: Just this last quarterly I did essentially that same idea with. But I was ingesting all of that and I said, please, you know, help me. I don't know if I said please, but I asked Claude to help me, uh, thematically go through and show me the core areas of the product, the surface area of the product that we're generating conversations or touch points. And from that, then by percentage breakdown of like, you know, where we Are and you know what are our top uh, conversation starters as it were. And that could be anything from training to broken to whatever the case may be. And that ended up reframing really what we're targeting this quarter as a company which was basically make the workflows better. So instead of looking at a feature first approach, we started looking at it from a workflow first approach. Now that may ultimately result in net new functionality. Of course like that's, but it's again it's kind of that first principles thinking of like what is the workflow? Where are people getting lost? And then how can we uh, address this from a feature? Um, but yeah, I mean it's always tough to know how to ingest that and make sure you hit that right balance. I think I mess it up. I told one of my coworkers uh here the other day where we had a customer that was a non fit like truly uh, what they expected from the product and what they needed from us um, was, was not a fit. Um, and I was talking with uh, one of my reports and I said you know what though? I said the thing that I have to remember is that this customer is going to go somewhere else and they're going to find a product that does meet their need. And I said that's not a problem we solve for today. Right now we aren't the right fit for them. That is the correct answer. We're not the right fit for them right now. But I said we have to let that sting just a little, not too much. Like we have to know what we're good at but it has to still sting a little bit that they left and went somewhere else. And we have to acknowledge that with humility that somewhere out there another product was a better fit for them. And uh, learn from that. Metabolize it the right way. It's like oh, oh, uh, that just, that gets me. I guess that must mean I'm made for CX or something. I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker A: And at the end of the day you're not trying to be the sales force of uh, of chiropractors either. Like that's, that's not the goal.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We can't be all things to all people. So there's a balance to that too. It's another pitfall the other way. If you're everything for everyone, you'll be nothing to anybody. So it's you know, like how do you balance that?

Speaker A: Paul, I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective on building that human first support in a world that really wants to automate what should remain human. And you can connect with Paul on LinkedIn and that link is down in the description. And thanks again, Paul. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Brett. It was great.

Speaker A: Well, that wraps up today's episode. Subscribe to hear more incredible stories in the era of unresolved. Have a great day and a productive week.