Epochal Growth | Empowering Leaders to Create Transformative Change
Welcome to Epochal Growth, the podcast dedicated to transforming the way we lead by embodying the change we seek. Embracing the belief that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for, our mission is to empower leaders to create impactful and lasting transformations in their organizations.
Hosted by industry expert Sarah Caminiti, each episode brings together visionary leaders and change-makers to explore the profound impact of inclusive and intentional leadership. Through engaging conversations and insightful discussions, we reveal how these approaches can revolutionize businesses and drive innovation.
At Epochal Growth, we are passionate about showcasing the transformative power of intentional actions and inclusive practices. Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur, an aspiring leader, or someone passionate about business transformation, our podcast provides valuable insights and practical advice to help you lead differently and inspire growth.
Join us on this journey to unlock the potential for transformative business success. Tune in to Epochal Growth and start being the change you seek in leadership.
Epochal Growth | Empowering Leaders to Create Transformative Change
Mastering Customer-Centric Support with Mat Patterson
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Discover the ageless principles of customer support with our special guest, Mat Patterson, the Customer Service Content Lead at Help Scout. We embark on a historical journey through the fundamentals of customer service, examining how they've endured through time while facing modern challenges. Mat digs into the transformative potential of AI in customer support, offering invaluable insights on crafting effective self-service platforms and integrating AI thoughtfully without compromising service quality.
Next, we tackle the transitional phase companies experience when adopting AI tools in customer support. Learn about the common pitfalls of cheap AI solutions and the crucial role of maintaining high-quality support professionals. Mat shares his perspective on the rewarding aspects of nurturing talent in the support field, emphasizing the alignment of personal and workplace values, and the opportunities arising from market frustrations. We also explore skill improvement and career growth in a refreshing take on leadership within customer service.
Finally, we dive into the essence and mission of "The Supportive" Podcast & Newsletter and it's related content. Mat shares the unique challenges faced by support teams and the vision of Help Scout's founders. We discuss the importance of maintaining core values under financial pressures and the profound learning curve experienced by support teams. Tune in to understand the value of community in fostering growth and alleviating the stresses of support roles, and why everyone, including non-support staff, should appreciate the nuanced skills and emotional labor involved in customer support.
Couldn't make it to Denver? What about London? November 8th I will be there 100% and I cannot wait to meet everyone. Link!
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
- Barack Obama
Welcome to Epochal Growth, the podcast where we explore the powerful intersection of leadership and customer experience to drive meaningful change. I'm your host, Sarah Caminiti, and I'm so happy that you're here Today. We're diving into another transformative conversation, but before we get started, I'd love for you to take a moment to follow Epochal Growth wherever you listen to podcasts, share this with your network and, if you value these episodes and these discussions as we celebrate these leaders, please leave a review. It helps others discover the show and it really fuels our growth. Today I am so excited to announce Mat Patterson, the customer service content lead at Help Scout, is here to chat with us. Mat is an expert in elevating customer service strategies and today we're going to explore the insights that can reshape how we approach the ever-evolving world of customer support. Stick around, because this episode is packed with actionable key takeaways you're not going to want to miss.
Mat Patterson:Hello, I am Mat Patterson. Here just south of Sydney in Australia, I work for Help Scout, where I am, I guess, a customer service educator maybe is how I say it Basically talking about customer service and how we can do it better, especially online.
Sarah Caminiti:I love that and I'm so, so happy that you're here, Mat. You didn't even mention your podcast, which you totally should have name dropped. Mat is the host of the supportive podcast that has so many wonderful gems within it. You just started it recently and I'm just really excited to record a conversation of us talking about things that we could talk about for days and days and days. I mean, you built an entire career off of talking about customer support and how we can think about it differently. Do it better, give it a little bit more respect and space to shine, and thank you for finding some time in your next day, since you're in Australia, to hang out with me over here.
Mat Patterson:Thank you for having me. It's exciting to talk about and, as you say, I have talked about customer support a lot over the last eight years. Eight years I've been at Help Scout, so that's eight years of talking about the doing of support, and then before that I spent nearly 10 years running a support team at Campaign Monitor in Australia. So that's a long time. That's a long time. That's a lot of customers talk to in that time.
Sarah Caminiti:Well, yeah, for sure, man, I didn't realize that you were at Help Scout for eight years, that's so then I have to ask, like, if you are creating content, you're educating, you're learning about the nuances of support as support has evolved over these past eight years? I mean, you even were doing this during COVID, and support was like kind of flipped on its head during COVID, its head during COVID. What have you taken away as like what's something you want to keep talking about over and over again and what's?
Mat Patterson:something that's like totally changed Customer support. I mean I've said this a few times. I think it's a really interesting field in that in some ways it never changes right. You can go right back and I just talked about this on the Supportive podcast which you should download, um. But the very first customer service complaint, which a lot of people will know about, the uh copper trader a and a seer who in his house in ancient mesopotamia had that tablet of a complaint letter. He actually had a whole pile of complaint letters from other customers as well, just saying, like you said you were going to sell me this thing, I didn't like it, it's not great quality, I'm not happy, I want my money back.
Mat Patterson:And I mean, that's 4,000 years. That's not too different than what we do today, is it? So in some ways it's absolutely the same thing, and it's just the way in which things are delivered, the way in which the service can be delivered, that changes over time. But in other ways, we're right now in the middle of a moment where maybe things are going to change. Maybe there will be technology which can not only assist you to talk to your customers and to reach out to them in different ways and in different mediums, but that we'll be able to directly help customers, maybe, maybe with artificial intelligence, of course. So I'm sure we will probably get into that. That's certainly the topic of the year at every support conversation that I have.
Sarah Caminiti:No, it's true, it's when I was reflecting on this, actually, because I listened to your episode about self-service and I have recommended that to every single person that I can find, because you unlock like the actual key pieces to building and like setting yourself up to build. Eventually, if you're not even ready to build a self-service space and do it well and don't you know, cut corners, which you really can't if you're going to actually be successful having a space, that's self-service. But with AI, I've realized probably about half of my episodes of Epochal Growth. The conversations just kind of naturally turned into a conversation about AI, a conversation about AI.
Sarah Caminiti:And it's so interesting because so many leaders within the customer support space or customer experience space and I mean I'm talking to people like over at Zapier or people that are running like call centers are so thoughtful about AI and I love seeing how committed all of these leaders are to not going the shiny toy route and really, really taking the care and the time to understand the benefits and also the negatives about adding this to your space. And that's so different than what we see on spaces like LinkedIn, where there's so much noise about AI, and it's so different from the reality of the people that are actually leading the teams that have to implement it, and what are you seeing? I mean, you're working for a help desk that has to think, add, experiment with AI so that other support leaders can go about AI in the correct way. What kind of conversations are you having about AI within a help desk company?
Mat Patterson:Yeah, we're having lots of conversations. I think everybody's having these conversations. Maybe to take a step back for a minute, it's interesting to me that on LinkedIn, in the world in general, customer service every time there is a new technology, customer service is often where we could use this to like replace customer service. It's nearly always at the front of the line for things that maybe we could stop spending money on, which is suggestive, maybe, of how people value those things. But I think maybe the interesting thing about AI and customer service is that as we start to try and implement it and HelpScout does have AI features in the product with more to come, as does most of the competitors out there as well but as we start to try and implement them, you realize that what our support team does is not something that AI can do. At least, it can't do all of it.
Mat Patterson:There is just enormous numbers of things that the support team does which are really we call support, but really like it's a sort of a form of sales. It's a sort of sometimes it's sort of therapy for a customer, sometimes it is marketing. We're doing all sorts of things in support teams that you wouldn't want an AI to try and do. I think how we imagine that AI is able to do things is well, there's a question and there's an answer, and the AI can match that up, which it can do. It does a pretty good job of if there is a very specific question with a specific answer. It's good at finding those and then rewording them in different ways and that conversational way of accessing essentially a knowledge base and there is definitely a part of your support team that's what they're doing. They're finding the question, they're matching it to an answer that they already have in their head or in their knowledge base or in their internal documentation, and then they're explaining it to that customer.
Mat Patterson:Some part of that the AI will be able to help with or even do in some cases, and certainly different types of businesses might find that easier if there's more repetition. I think internally at Help Scout, the kind of questions we're getting are often so complicated and have so many different pieces that there is no single answer. You can't point anyone to a knowledge base that answers all of the parts of their question or, if it does, you still want to interpret that answer in a way that makes sense for their context, because that's what good service is it's adapting it to this person and this context and what they're actually trying to do, which is often not what they actually asked to do, and all of the complexity are there and we're just going to find out. Oh, actually, support is a lot more than we thought it was once we try to replace parts of it with artificial intelligence.
Sarah Caminiti:Yeah, that's what I'm hoping.
Sarah Caminiti:You're starting to see little bits of it, such an increase in just visibility of people that are talking about the realities of leading or building or just being in a support role and what that career trajectory actually looks like and the skills that are required in order to do this well, and I don't think that, even if everybody was talking about it, I don't think that even if everybody was talking about it, I don't think that people were really in the mood to listen.
Sarah Caminiti:And I think, with AI, it's been highlighting all of these things that we've been doing for years and years and years and years and years that no one would really pay any attention to. But now that they're showing it off as this incredible thing that these AI tools can provide to your company that you've never seen before, now it's like wait a second, like I do that. I've been doing that, we talk about that, I brought that to you and it's changing the conversation slowly, incrementally, but I agree, I think it could provide a little bit more credibility and respect to a space that is a very taxing and it is a profession. It is a profession that you have to be a specific type of person to thrive in, absolutely you do.
Mat Patterson:You know what I wish people on LinkedIn would do, and this is not going to happen, because the reason that I think one of the reasons that customer service is the one that gets thrown at the well, why don't we use AI for that?
Mat Patterson:It's because the people who are deciding to build these AI tools and the people who are excited about them at high levels in company are not the ones who are doing the support, so they don't really understand what the job is, and so their mental model of what that part of the business is doing is very limited and it seems to match up very nicely with what AI can do. But I would like to see and maybe I should just do this is start talking about how we're replacing executive level managers with an AI tool to, you know, arbitrarily make decisions about things, because it feels like to me and certainly in my experience, and no shade to anyone at Help Scout this is, I'm thinking more of previous jobs. There are definitely some people I could have replaced with an AI that just randomly chose what to do on any given week. I could have replaced with an AI that just randomly chose what to do on any given week and we would have the same result.
Sarah Caminiti:Yeah, no, I think that's a really good idea. It could be a fun experiment to just do some hypotheticals of what if we replace marketing with AI. What would that look like? What if we did this? And the end result in most of them will be the same end result that it is with. Customer support in this can do some really cool things, but it cannot replace a person who was skilled in this space.
Mat Patterson:No, and by its very nature, because of the way that generative AI works, it will always tend towards mediocrity, because it is absorbing everything that's out there and then it's generating a kind of medium version of that.
Mat Patterson:It's never going to be the one that does something interesting. I think it will inspire people to do interesting things, but by itself it's always going to be just sort of mediocre, and maybe the best result is that it raises the bar in customer service of like. Instead of really terrible human-powered support, we get marginally better AI-powered support across the entire set of companies in the world, but certainly most of the people that we serve at HelpScout and, I think, most of the people listening to this right now, you already want to be better than mediocre, and you probably already are, and so the AI will be used in different ways there. It'll be used to try and improve the leverage that a person has on the work that they do, and so I suspect that's where we'll end up. But we have to go through this period now of what if we just tried it everywhere for everything until we figure it out?
Sarah Caminiti:Yep, yep, it'll be a. It'll be an interesting journey, but I think that the folks that have made this a career all know deep down, even if things get scary, even if it's just doomsday out there with the way companies are behaving, those companies will realize their mistakes and you won't want to go back and work for them, probably. But there will be other spaces that realized what a special opportunity high quality support professionals provide to a company, and that is where you will shine. This is just a moment to get you there and we just kind of got to hang tight.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, we've got to hang in there. We go through the weird hype cycle that we're in and then we'll come out the other side and it will become a little bit clearer. Hey, this is where these new tools were useful and they could amplify some of the skills that we had and they could help us deliver the type of service that we wanted to deliver to more customers or across more time zones, or we could do it in a way that the self-service is a nicer experience for them. I think we'll figure that out, and in between, we're probably all, as customers, going to have to suffer through some companies trying to do things that AI, it turns out, is not that good at.
Sarah Caminiti:I mean, I think we've been suffering through that now in varying degrees for quite some time. I know, if I call many different places, I mean, first problem is that I'm calling them in the first place, where I could just be hopefully finding out an answer much more easily online. But yeah, and then you suffer through the yelling at the phone. Let me speak to a representative. To stop yourself from going through nine different rounds of press seven, press five, press four the menu changed nothing. You know before works and now you have to start fresh. And then it just hangs up on you.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, all these things are were just pretty representative of how the company really valued the service experience, and so it's not going to magically make those companies care about good service, right? If they had already decided it's not really worth investing money into providing more people so that we can deal with the unexpected, unexpected volume of calls which seems to be every day, every day, then they're not going to do that with AI either. They'll use the cheapest option there and they won't use the most effective tools. They won't pay extra to get the AI that they can tweak to be more performative for their particular setup. They'll just use whatever generic, cheap thing they can and they'll provide generic, cheap service, like they already were doing.
Mat Patterson:It would just cost them less money. But there will be opportunities for other companies who really want to provide good service and who maybe couldn't afford it before. I think there is potential that AI could really help them serve more customers with fewer people than they would have had to have before. So there will be opportunities and companies will come out of that, I think, who are doing more impressive things.
Sarah Caminiti:I think so too. I really like what you said about the value, because that is something that I think about often. If you keep asking why for certain things, you usually end up figuring out the value that the other person puts into either you or a role or a task or a project or whatever it is, and it paints such a clear picture. And once you start thinking about things in that way of okay, this keeps happening. I've done it all these different ways. It's always unsuccessful. Why is this happening? What does this mean? And just keep going. You'll find out. Because they don't value this, there's no value for them here.
Sarah Caminiti:And then you have to start thinking about what are your values and how do you show that you value something? And do your values align and is this a space that you want to continue to be a part of? And I think a lot of people in this field are having these moments, these exciting moments, where they're giving themselves the space to say does this, does this really have to be where I am? And while the job market is nuts and terrible and just horrible, horrible, I think that there could be so much opportunity from all these frustrations and sadness and doubt and anger to make something so much better. Whatever that is, who knows, but it's just. It's been really cool to see people allowing themselves to think about things, and I have to wonder. Like Mat, you found yourself in a career where you are able to share what you've learned, but also be the advocate and the voice to a lot of people that may not know how to articulate things. What have you really loved about getting to shine light on on this career for so, for so long?
Mat Patterson:Yes, well, okay, a couple of things. I think, coming from running a support team before, one of the things I really enjoyed about coming here was I get to do the bits of running a team that I really loved the most, which was identifying, you know, what people want to get better at and helping them improve their skills and helping people figure out what it is that they want to do. So I can do that sort of at a larger scale at Help Scout, where I'm not responsible then, for also for scheduling their holidays and telling people that they have to work on Saturday or whatever. And telling people that they have to work on Saturday or whatever the least fun parts of people management. So I do enjoy that and I enjoy helping people think about the job that they're doing.
Mat Patterson:I think if I had to describe the Supportive, which is a newsletter and which is a podcast and which is articles on the website and videos on YouTube, which I do since that is my job, I do have to describe it it would be that it would be thinking, helping people think through their own jobs. So we all work in this industry and we're all trying to do something and it's easy to just do the job, especially in support, it's such a queue-based, like there is always more to do. You never get to the end and have that time to look up and think where am I going here? What am I doing? Do I want to be doing these same things that I was, or should we be doing things differently? Like, you just don't often get that space, and so I am in a position where I can have that space and can help people to maybe have a perspective on their work, on the industry, on the career that they have, and give them a bit of a framework for them to think through their own things and to come to their own decisions.
Mat Patterson:So that's probably, I think, what the supportive really is for ultimately is can we think about what this is that we're doing, and what do we care about and what do we value and what can we make better? And sometimes it means helping people figure out. This is not for me and actually I'm better suited to do this other thing and I can transfer those skills out to a different role, which I would love to see more people coming out of support into, for example, executive leadership roles. I think that would improve the world immeasurably. Executive leadership roles.
Sarah Caminiti:I think that would improve the world immeasurably. I agree, oh my gosh, I agree so much, and what a cool opportunity to, instead of taking this content that you are producing for a help desk company and have it be operationally focused only and have it be very like regimented in the data or selling pieces about Help Scout, that you instead found a way to make something that is educational and conversation but also is celebratory and honest and connecting to the individuals that are actually working in the queue and not just the people that think that they understand support. That's really cool.
Mat Patterson:It is cool and I think a lot of the credit for that goes to the people who started Help Scout, because the reason that I can do this here and that I am not having to constantly sell the product Help Scout which you definitely should sign up to, but I don't have to do that in the content all the time because the people who started Help Scout Nick and Denny and Jared the three of them always cared about good service and they always wanted to be helpful to their customers, and so they're willing to spend money to be helpful and informative and useful in a way that doesn't directly drive business. I mean, in the long term, obviously we hope that people try HelpScout because they like the way that we talk about customer service and they think that they align with the values that we have. But that value of helpfulness means, yeah, we can be helpful and useful without having to monetize everything. Everything doesn't have to be driving the business, it can just be helpful, because we think being helpful is important and we would like our business to reflect that in all of its aspects, so in the marketing, but also our own support team, who are incredibly helpful even when they're not directly answering a question about the product and the sales people.
Mat Patterson:The sales approach of help scout is also quite different than some sales organizations that I've worked with in the past. I would say there's a different vibe there. It is more helpful and it's okay to say I don't think this suits you. Actually I think you'd be better off somewhere else, like that's okay Because that's a core Help Scout value. So you know, shout out to Help Scout the company for allowing it.
Sarah Caminiti:That's very cool, and that's cool that it's something that's continued because those dreams of how you want your business to run. I think we have all seen founders that go into running a company with the best of intentions and they want to keep the culture, the dream culture, for as long as they possibly can. And then the reality of running a business kind of starts to creep in, or maybe they maybe shouldn't be the CEO of something and they just continue to stay there because they don't really know what else needs to happen and in doing so, that culture just can no longer survive. And so to see that founders came into this space knowing that they wanted to provide an opportunity for support teams to thrive but also feel heard and valued, and then create a company where everybody in the company also feels heard and valued and safe, to be honest with people, which ultimately provides the best support, because you're building trust and a relationship with these people, whether you talk to them once or a hundred times, but that they stuck with it.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, and that's not easy to do, I think, every company. There's so many pressures, especially when you have investors and you need to grow the business, and it really takes somebody who genuinely believes this is important, especially when you have investors and you need to grow the business, and it really takes somebody who genuinely believes this is important because they're going to. Really the only time that values Mat is when you don't do something that would be otherwise good for the finances of the business. Right, if you make a decision like this probably would, in the short term, improve the metrics, make that graph go up and to the right, but it sort of conflicts with our core value and you decide to actually stick with the core value. Well then, yeah, you've shown, yes, we do believe this and we are willing to invest in it, even at some cost, at least in the short term, and that is rare, I would say.
Sarah Caminiti:Especially if you have investors.
Sarah Caminiti:So hard rare, I would say, especially if you have investors. But, like your actions actually speaking louder than your words is what we say to our kids over and over again. It's something that we don't think that is really going to carry the weight that it does, but all of those little things that you really want to try to instill in your kids, that your parents did in you or your teachers, they actually do Mat and it does continue to hold that weight. And in a world where there's so many options of the same thing, at the end of it, for a lot of of these companies, the biggest differentiator is values, and whether or not they're staying true to what they're saying is important to them it is and we should.
Mat Patterson:I think we should also applaud the people that in the companies that make those mistakes and fall off the track, maybe go off on a side path and then figure out oh, we've gone the wrong way, and we come back to that value Because I think that happens in every business as well and the willingness to allow people to question your behaviors and to say is this actually aligned with what we say, we believe, and have that discussion.
Mat Patterson:That's probably what Mat most of all, because you're always going to make mistakes we all do. We do it corporately as well, but you, yeah, you're right, it's so easy to lose that culture and I've been through that before. A few different people come in, a few different leaders come in. They bring their own histories and backgrounds not necessarily a bad culture, just a different culture and it's so easily spreads through a bunch of decisions, especially if they end up hiring some other managers. So it can be very tricky. I'm glad I don't do that job. I quite like my particular level of involvement, but I'm glad that some people can do it and that they can keep things aligned.
Sarah Caminiti:Yeah, I agree, I agree. Do you ever miss running teams?
Mat Patterson:I don't think I miss running a team. I quite enjoy now the creative aspects and the ability to control what I create, which, when you're running a team, you can also be quite creative, but you're so reliant on a bunch of other people's input and you're also trying to keep different groups of people happy in a way, and you're also trying to keep different groups of people happy in a way that I don't have to do in this particular role. So I don't miss that. I do miss sometimes that one-on-one element of you know I hired this person and then seeing them go on to new roles and to higher levels and that sort of thing, like I really enjoyed that part of it and that's something I do miss.
Sarah Caminiti:That's fair. I mean you're doing that, though in a way not one-on-one, but in more of a broader sense of of helping others kind of see their potential. Um, but it must be an interesting space to find yourself in for almost a decade where you're talking about support. You understand support. I mean it's like it's in your blood. I mean once you built a support team. You're kind of stuck in that headspace for life, whether you like it or not. But, uh, but you haven't actually been in the queue and but you're surrounded by the queue. You're surrounded by all of the queues because you work for a company that houses a queue and that must be a very strange thing every now and then to like think about how you got to where you are.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, I will. I think one of the things I enjoy about Help Scout's approach is that everybody does do some work in the queue. So we have regular power hours where we you're like assigned and this is your hour, you're going to get in there and do some support, and a lot of people that might be their only opportunity. That, and when we do whole company retreats, everyone's assigned some times and be like, yeah, you're doing support in this time, which is excellent. Having been on the other end of that in a previous job, where the whole company's in the pool except for the support team who are in a meeting room just banging out tickets, I really appreciate that, and so I always try and get in there and we have a little friendly competition Some of us non-support people about who can do the most support conversations on a retreat, and I think I'm currently I'm on about a four-year streak, so I'm doing okay.
Mat Patterson:My number one competitor who was not from a support background. So impressive work, eli, you know who you are. He has changed. He's left Help Scout now, so it'll just be Nick the CEO. He comes for me every year, but I've got him. You know, when I was a campaign monitor, I think at one point I went and looked how many conversations have I actually done and it was well over 50,000. So I was like you know that stuff is all still in there, even though I'm not a help scout product expert in the way that I was at campaign monitor.
Sarah Caminiti:That's for sure. I understand that so well. It is, uh, it's like once you reach a certain level of having been in support for so long and you get in the zone when you're answering those tickets, you could just fly, you fly and you don't even realize that you're like 40 deep and it's only been like 35 minutes and you don't remember anything that you have sent. But they were all wonderfully constructed answers and the customers were so happy. But you just kind of become this machine.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, it does become a sort of instinctual in a way, and maybe the reason that I can do what I do now, I think, is the combination of all of that background and the ability to actually see it and explain it, because I think some people can do it but could never tell anyone else how they do it, and that is harder to do.
Mat Patterson:And so I've just been fortunate to have enough, have the background and then also have the interest in the communication aspect of it and the external communication, to be able to like think about what is actually happening when I'm in that state and how to maybe help other people get there. It's fun to do. I mean, probably shouldn't tell people, but there's certainly been times in my career in support where it's late at night and you're coming back on the train from an after work function, probably not in an ideal condition to be doing support, but still like if I don't do it now I am going to have to do it tomorrow morning, so might as well try and help them. If you have enough of a background, you can get away with it. I mean I wouldn't recommend it.
Sarah Caminiti:I'm not probably going to write it, but you can do it I mean I definitely have.
Mat Patterson:It can be done.
Sarah Caminiti:Yeah, yeah. No, I've been there too. It is that mindset of why not, I'll just do it now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it really can wait until tomorrow. Like it's fine, they will survive. Everyone will be thriving in their own special way.
Mat Patterson:But if you do want to learn how to do support and you don't mind a bit of pain being the first support person, you have no other option other than to figure out every single question. I mean, that is a way to really deeply learn, uh, the company and the product and your customers. But uh, oh, it's a, it's a real in the deep end kind of situation, though it is, but it's also a really cool time to realize your skills.
Sarah Caminiti:It was, I remember, when I was the first support person in a company and they'd been around for a while. They'd been doing it on their own and the support queue was so, so long. There were so many messages in there. They were doing their best but no one was in, no one was a support person. And I was in there a week. I knew nothing about the product zip, like not an industry that I still. I really don't know much about it. But I was able to just fly through and I cleared the queue and, uh, and it was like holy crap, okay, I'm a week into this thing and I have no idea really what I'm talking about, but I'm able to figure it out. And after you do that and you survive it and you sleep harder than you ever have in your life, you come out of it and it's like, okay, now I can make a game plan because I don't doubt my ability to do the foundational stuff. I know that. That's fine.
Mat Patterson:And I think maybe something that will come out of this whole AI period is people realizing the skills that they have, that they maybe were not aware of what they were actually doing, and the amount of nuance and background and emotional energy that goes into support that is not visible really to anyone outside of it and sometimes not even aware you're not even aware of it yourself about how much thinking goes into what answer comes out, even though sometimes the answers look quite similar to other ones, but there's often a lot of decisions being made in the background.
Sarah Caminiti:Oh, that's such a great thing to bring up, Mat, because it's one of the areas that I learned when I started teaching people how to do support especially people that were not native English speakers how to do support, the nuances and the structure of your reply that was my main focus for a six-week onboarding.
Sarah Caminiti:Before you were able to talk to a customer, I wanted you to be able to understand how to construct a reply, and we would just go back and forth with iterations of it and I would say like okay, I tweaked this a little bit. Can you see why this is different? What are you getting from it? And figuring out where to add information, where to throw in articles to get them to feel confident, to continue to do things on their own, where you need to explain things and how that varies from person to person, and you have to grasp this based on how panicked they seem in their email that they send over to you, because you usually have never talked to them before Like that is a, that is a whole. That is a gift that you develop over time.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, and you can use that. My wife before. Before I was replaced with AI, this used to be one of my jobs in the time. Yeah, and you can use that, my wife. Before I was replaced with AI, this used to be one of my jobs in the home, which was to help my wife write emails, like business emails, when she wants to explain something, you know, something which is a little bit emotionally fraught or risky, Like how do I word this? It's just so ingrained after years and years of like delicately trying to move people towards the thing that they need to do. That is a good skill and it's very transferable to other areas.
Sarah Caminiti:So transferable it is and it's not an obvious one that you would think to lean into and to understand where it fits into job descriptions and how you could use it. But no, being able to just like it's almost like a word vomit too. When you're doing it Like you don't even realize that you're sending out such a thoughtful response and whatever email thing outside of the queue that you're doing, it just comes and uh, and it's true I love how you phrase that that you're like you're inching people towards something, because that's all we're doing. We're trying to get people to see it and maybe on your.
Mat Patterson:If you're applying for a job, don't put word vomit on there. That's probably not going to help, but come on that would be a fun thing. You know in the skills box that sometimes you have to fill out three out of five on word vomit skill. I mean, that sounds like a good description of chat GPT, to be honest.
Sarah Caminiti:It is most of the time. Yeah, it's a word. Yeah, I think people should like.
Mat Patterson:this is a great time. If you're in support right now and you're thinking about like what's, what's the job going to be in a year or two years? Where are we going to end up? It's a great time to kind of do an audit of yourself and what you are good at and what support has made you good at, and which parts of that you enjoy and which parts you don't enjoy, because it might be that the jobs that are out there will look different than they do now. And being kind of self-aware in that way about where you are now, where you want to get to and what you might like to do, you can just make better decisions if you know which direction you would rather go before you get pushed one way or another.
Mat Patterson:This is the time to be thinking about it. So I think that's a great action item for people. Even if you're happy in your job right now, because we just don't know, it's unclear whether that job will still be there in the same shape. I think support jobs will absolutely still be there, but they just might look a bit different.
Sarah Caminiti:I think that it is such an important thing for people to really understand. I, in a roundabout way, defined my core values and kind of started I tied it to business success so that I could really start to see the correlation between the things that I know to be true and what value they bring to a business. And doing so allowed me to be so much more comfortable and confident and articulate in what I know to be true and the way that I go about doing it and the way things are moving with AI folks that are loving their job, that work for a great company that wants to include them in conversations about AI or about the changes that are coming with with the company. More so than ever, this is your time to understand how you can build something like actually take ownership for what allows you to do your job in the best way and what makes you super excited. And there could be so many opportunities in the future sooner probably rather than later where you have a support team, that you've got folks that are handling, leaning more with the, with like the CSMs and working with them, and then you've got the others that are really digitally focused.
Sarah Caminiti:And what is digitally focused? Do you have a knowledge base? Okay, do you love writing? Do you have a knowledge base? Okay, do you love writing? Do you love being able to break things down? Like all of those little things are going to be able to, like, really be built because AI is taking care of the analytics, or the AI is taking care of, like, understanding what knowledge bases need to be, you know, revised, or helping you with maintenance, and all of that brain space is going to be freed up so that you can actually pause and grow.
Mat Patterson:This is the moment to be thinking about that sort of thing, and I think we would much rather have a support person, for example, who is in charge of how do we tweak the prompt on this AI tool to serve our customers better. You don't want that to be left in the hands of an engineer who maybe does not care about customer service at all. I mean, some of them definitely do and if you're lucky, you work with some of those and they can help you. But better to have support people driving what service looks like in the future than to have the technology people doing it.
Sarah Caminiti:And the best way that you can do that is to feel confident in what it is that you're sharing, so that you can go and insert yourself into conversations that you may not even be invited to, but show that there is value in what you have to say. You have a lot of data that backs up what it is that you're saying, and you've got the proof in the pudding for the way that you approach knowledge bases and how they change the way that the customers interact with you. All of those little things you have to give yourself time to look at and think about, and think about what it means for business goals.
Mat Patterson:So how are they going to do that Person who is right now listening, thinking about that? How are they going to find that time?
Sarah Caminiti:That's a great question, because Now it's my.
Sarah Caminiti:Yeah, I like it.
Sarah Caminiti:I like it.
Sarah Caminiti:I mean, when I was like in the thick of it, I didn't have time.
Sarah Caminiti:I didn't even have time to like comb my hair half the time, because you're just so in it, and I think that's why it took me so long to really immerse myself in the CX community. So that is actually what I would recommend you do is, when you're in the weeds, when you have no idea how to find space, go to a CX community, like elevate CX, and pose a question in I need help, I need help. Or reach out to somebody on LinkedIn and use half of your lunch hour that you probably never break, never take, but but please take it and, uh, have a coffee chat with someone that, like Mat or like me, that would be happy to break it down with you and understand if there's possibilities for you to find a more efficient way to do something so you can allow yourself that time to breathe. Because that's one of the biggest things I regret and I wish. I wish I could have realized that asking for help is such a vulnerable moment, but the outcome is just a game changer.
Mat Patterson:Isn't that strange that we're all in support and we are so happy to help people and also so bad at asking for help? We're like I know I would always be happy to help somebody, but I also feel terrible about asking for help and it's a. It's a very dumb thing that our brains do to us, and you should feel okay about just saying you know what? I don't have the answers. I would like some help. I just, or even just sometimes I want someone to talk to me so that I can figure out the answer myself, but I just need to be able to say it out loud to somebody.
Sarah Caminiti:Yep, or just be validated, like just say this feels crappy. Is this actually crappy? Odds are it's actually crappy. And now you can get out of your head and stop trying to convince yourself that it really is great. But for some reason you're just a Debbie Downer and you're hyper-focused on it being terrible, because that's usually not the case.
Mat Patterson:There's usually a light somewhere ahead if you can get your head up and have a look for it. This is just so hard, so true.
Sarah Caminiti:That does bring me to something that we don't have the time that I wanted to talk about, but community. You were one of the key people to have conversations with Sarah Hatter about why we don't have a space for CX people to get to know one another and learn from one another, and you were making your blog and is that correct? And she read your blog.
Mat Patterson:I read her blog.
Sarah Caminiti:Or was it my first? Yeah, you read her blog. That's what it was. That's what it was, and then, so Elevate came to be because of it, and that's pretty cool.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, a long time ago, and I think I was yes, I had just early days at Campaign Monitor. It was a very tiny company. I was the support Sarah was the support for the tech company she was working for at the time, which she doesn't like to talk about the name of and so I won't, but we, yes, I think she, certainly the two companies knew each other. There were some interactions. We were kind of coming up at the same time. I had used her product, their company had used Campaign Monitor as well, and so there was that interaction and I think we had had some support interactions in that way. And then I knew of her also because of the blog, and so I think at some point I just kind of said like it would be good to talk to someone else, like I literally don't know anyone else who does what I do. This is how long ago it was, uh, and then we managed to meet up, yeah, in person in austin for south by southwest I think this was maybe gary vaynerchuk was like a, the key speaker there.
Sarah Caminiti:Yeah, I don't even know who that is. But now I'm going to go Google One of the oldies.
Mat Patterson:He was a big deal at the time, wouldn't necessarily spend a lot of time on him these days, but, yeah, so we were there, we met up, I had coffee, I think Tony what's his name from Zappos, who's no longer with us walked past us and we both were like, oh that's, you know, tony from Zappos.
Mat Patterson:This is how we knew we had found the right person, yeah, and so we just had a good chat about like, wouldn't it be great if there was more of us, if we could, like, talk about this stuff more? And then, you know, I went back to Australia and did nothing. And then she went back to wherever she was and did nothing. And then she went back to, uh, wherever she was and created a support conference out of nothing, um, and I started doing talks there, yeah, long time ago, and out of that came what is now elevate and out of that also support driven sort of started from that same community. And, uh, now literally thousands of people don't have to be alone doing that job, which is, it's incredible, incredible to think about how far it's come in that time, and I'm very thankful for it.
Sarah Caminiti:You should be really proud of it too. I mean just saying out loud hey, we both do the same thing and it would be really cool if we could talk about this more. Wait, I wonder if there's other people that are doing the same thing and just kind of just trusting your gut a little bit and going out of your comfort zone a little bit and, uh, seeing what happens when you try and look at what happens.
Mat Patterson:Yeah, that's been a bit of a pattern for me. I think I can look back now. I used to be a web designer. When I was a web designer, I was like why are all the other designers that are talking about things are like freelancers or they run design agencies and I was working in-house for different companies. Like I was the web designer inside the Australian Stock Exchange and I was like I'm doing a different job even Australian Stock Exchange and I was like I'm doing a different job even though we're both web designers. I wish there was more people. And I sort of just found some on the internet and like started an email chain and we just talked about like being an internal web designer and what that was like. And then I was in email marketing. And then I sort of did the same thing there with Justine Jordan, who many people will know from Litmus in those days, just talking about what it was like to do email marketing.
Mat Patterson:I think I met her actually at South by Southwest the same one, yeah we just met in a bar and we were like email marketing people, and then we had a good chat about that and we sort of bought a domain name the next day together, about to try and start like an email marketing community with less success, I would say, than Sarah had, but still, it was definitely a pattern for me and it remains so. So, yeah, absolutely, find your community and if it doesn't exist, make your community, like those people are out there. You just got to be the first one to take that one step and you'll find your you know equivalent of Sarah Hatter, who can actually do it for you.
Sarah Caminiti:It's true, it's true and really cool things happen when you start to talk to people that are in your space. It's just the opportunities are endless. And this is way far and beyond networking, which is so much easier and more fun when it's in a community, because you're actually seeing people from a personal level, but uh, but just ideas and brainstorming and and just lifting each other up and and yeah, because we feel pain with like it's not an easy department to exist in, to spend all of your time in, and knowing that the stress is not special to you. Yeah, it's not personal. At least for me, that was a weight.
Mat Patterson:It's just the job, and you don't have to just kind of hang out and absorb that all yourself, especially if you're a leader. If you're a leader and you're trying to figure out how to deal with your team going through all sorts of change and chaos, like there are other people out there who are just someone who is six months ahead of you would be so helpful to talk to. That's all it takes. You don't need to find like an absolute veteran of the industry, and that's why these community events are so good, and I know you're going to be in Denver, I think soon as we speak, and in London, where I will also be at Elevate. So there's lots of opportunities out there. Go and find one, find your people. It's very much worth it.
Sarah Caminiti:It's so worth it. It's so worth it. So, Mat, on that incredibly wonderful note, love the little plug for the conferences to get your tickets for both Denver and London If you haven't, and London's free, so no excuses. My entire team, even folks from Asia, are going to be coming over for this one. So it's going to be a part. But I like to end all of these episodes, all of these moments with wonderful guests, by taking a moment to ask you what era do you find yourself in, or what era do you see yourself moving into in the future? So, Mat, what's your era?
Mat Patterson:I would say era for a start Sounds less like a mistake. What era am I in? Oh, constantly in errors.
Sarah Caminiti:Oh, that's very true. Yeah, it does kind of roll up. What era am I?
Mat Patterson:in. That's a good question. I feel like I have been going through a kind of recalculation of, like, what is my job and what am I trying to do? And that discussion that we just had about like what is the supportive actually for, I think has come out of that process of thinking through, like what is the point of what I am doing? Who am I trying to help? And so it's maybe an era of refocusing, I guess, because definitely some parts of that are still the same as they were, but some clarity has come to like what value am I adding there? Which parts of the job do I enjoy doing? Which parts can I maybe find someone else to help with and which parts, as always, just suck it up because it has to get done. You can't always avoid them, but the awareness of that, and so, yes, refocusing clarity, I think that's where I am right now. We'll see where that ends up.
Sarah Caminiti:That's a good. That think is so important to acknowledge clarity and to acknowledge the need to reflect and refocus and think about delegation and take some of the ownership off of your shoulders, and I think many of us could benefit from having a moment of do I need to do this or is there someone else that could learn from this, could grow from this, could help me with this? There we are asking for help again. Could help me with this? There we are asking for help again.
Sarah Caminiti:But we support folk like to wear all the hats. We like to do it all and keep asking if anyone else needs anything else while we're doing it all with all of the hats and holding like 18 coat racks with other hats on them, and it's empowering to be able to say this is where I want to focus my attention, because I value my time, and then making it happen. So that's a really great era to find yourself in, Mat, and I'm excited for you and I'm excited for the supportive podcast and I just it's's such an informative space and and it's fun to listen to and you're a great host and I'm just really excited to see, to see all the episodes that are to come.
Mat Patterson:Thank you very much. Appreciate it, appreciate your time today.
Sarah Caminiti:Thank you. Thank you for your time. I'm going to go to bed because it's very late in my time, but I hope that you enjoy your Wednesday and yeah, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Epochal Growth. It has been so much fun to have Mat Patterson share his wisdom on customer service and leadership. Remember, small things ignite change and you're capable of so much more than you realize. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who are on their own journey of growth. I'm Sarah Caminiti and I hope you have a great day Until next time.
