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Support operations leader

Musings from the mind of Shaun

Support operations leader

Musings from the mind of Shaun

Welcome

In the last 8 years, I worked for one of the largest SaaS companies, Salesforce and a very successful, rapidly growing SaaS startup, Gong. In both companies, I worked in the Customer Support Operations team. At Salesforce, I was one in a team of hundreds, and at Gong, the sole Operations Manager responsible for everything the Support Team needed.

At Salesforce, I managed a program to analyze cases to find patterns and deliver value to R&D, what we call top case drivers (TCD). I helped with M&As, aligning two unique support operations while ensuring both continued to support their existing customers. I also managed the New Product Introduction program, (NPI) helping our Support Team be ready to support new products at launch. A daunting task with the sheer number of new products and features that Salesforce released each quarter.

When I started at Gong, they had a little over 500 employees, a handful of support engineers, one support leader, two managers, two Technical Account Managers (TAMs) and one tier-3 engineer. They had a basic implementation of Zendesk, with very few routing rules, no way to escalate a case, no global presence, no workforce management or AI tools. The support leader who hired me was exceptional and built a lot of the foundation himself. One of the best support leaders I have worked with (shout out to Josh, IYKYK). But the time had come for him to get some help. He needed an experienced Ops Manager, but not so experienced that they required a huge salary or expected a team of ops reports. For me, the chance to work at an early stage, Hypergrowth startup, was a dream of mine and too good to pass up. Together we built new processes, added an AI chatbot, deprecated the email channel, removed the login wall to our documentation help center, added a global team, built a new process to submit and manage escalations and many other minor improvements that lead to a consistent 98% customer satisfaction rating. I have worked through 3 different support leaders and even spent 10 months with no leader, keeping the operations afloat. It has been an exciting journey.

Over the last 3 ½ years at Gong, I have touched almost every aspect of operations behind the scenes of an award-winning support organization. I am going to share my experiences; the successes, the failures and innovative solutions that led me to two promotions, an industry award and many, many glorious moments with great people.

If you are in the support ops world or just interested in the work behind the scenes of support operations, I hope you enjoy the articles and find something useful to bring back to your organization.

I want to give a shout out to one of our industry's most connected and knowledgeable CX leaders, Omid Razavi, founder of SuccessLab, for encouraging me to put my experience on paper.