Jason Viglione, Director of Customer Support Experience at H1, joins the next episode of The Support Automation Show. Jason is a dynamic, senior thought leader professional possessing a 20+ year proven track record of superior performance in the technology solutions space. And today, he shares his knowledge of support automation in the healthcare industry.
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Justin Schmidt: Welcome to the Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity. Join us for conversations with leaders in customer or employee support, who are using technology to answer questions, automate processes, and build innovative solutions to any business challenge. I’m your host, Justin Schmidt. Jason Viglione, good morning, and welcome to the Support Automation Show.
Jason Viglione: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Justin: Where’s this podcast find you?
Jason: I am in Northern Jersey, just outside of New York City.
Justin: Awesome. I haven’t been to New York in a while. One of my favorite places in the world to go with travel opening back up. This summer 1945 vibe we’re getting ready to go into, I might have to make my way back out to the city.
Jason: It’s one of the greatest places on Earth. If you can’t find it in New York City, it’s likely that it doesn’t exist.
Justin: 100% true. Jason, you join us as the Director of Customer Support experience at H1. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do at H1, and the journey that’s led you to this point?
Jason: I’m a technology professional by trade for almost 30 years. I’ve been in some form of customer-facing help and support the entirety of that time. For me, it’s really about having tech be a hobby and interest, something that I do, and understanding a lot of the complexities. I always said that as I grew up, I was going to stay ahead of my kids, for example, on the tech to make sure that they can’t get one over on me. I find that increasingly difficult. I can only imagine what non-technical people go through on a day-to-day basis. Solving the puzzle for them is something that’s always been really exciting and fun for me.
Also, solving the puzzle for me. Not being beaten by the machine. Computers do what we tell them to except when they don’t and then it’s a matter of making that happen. With H1, I’m doing the same thing, except I have a unique opportunity. It’s actually the second time that I’ve gotten to do it, where I’m building it from nothing. I like to go into startup companies that are between that 50 and 100 people mark. They’ve hit their product-market fit. They’re growing, and they’re scaling and now we’ve got to take care of people after they’ve come in the front door. We’ve got to do it efficiently and effectively.
How do you do that when support’s constantly labeled as a cost center, where we’re not bringing revenue into the building, but we’re protecting it from going out, yet, we are making it go out because we’re expensive? How do you do this in a way that helps everybody? That’s such an interesting and fun challenge for me. I’ve done it my whole career and I get to do it again.
Justin: Have you spent most of your career in the health care and health tech space?
Jason: No. I’m actually brand new to healthcare and health tech and all of that. I’m learning a lot about pharmaceutical companies, things that, A, I didn’t know existed, and, B, even more interesting, challenges the norm on what we’ve come to believe about Big Pharma, and whether they’re doing right by us or not. Spoiler alert, they are doing more for us than we’re led to believe a lot of times.
Justin: Yes. That’s one of those industries with an impossible PR problem because it’s expensive to develop their product. It’s literally life-saving for us. The stakes of what they deliver are extremely high. The mistakes that are made in the business or the perceived unfairness or whatever it is, is just amplified to know. It’s interesting from a support perspective, H1, is your team providing support for the doctors and medical professionals that use the product or for the end consumer?
Jason: It’s actually all B2B. It’s the doctors that use the product. These are people within pharmaceutical companies. To give you the quick background on this, we’re solving a problem that has always existed but has been solved in a lot of band-aid ways for the history of pharma and computing. Effectively if I want to launch a new drug or therapy or medical device, there are people in this world that are doing research on the condition, the indication that is being treated by that. Those people are known often and they are key opinion leaders.
How was this done before people like H1? Novartis or any other company would have a spreadsheet that had 20,000 rows on it of all the doctors where they work, what they’re studying. It was woefully out of date. By the time they got through the whole thing, so much time had gone by and a lot of inaccuracies. What we do is we pull public-facing information about Dr. Justin who works at such and such a hospital. He’s an oncologist. All these things and we get that from the hospital’s public website. We get the publications he’s written, the clinical trials he’s been a part of, the payments he’s received. We aggregate that into a doctor profile.
Now, these pharma companies can find these key opinion leaders that are searching within the therapeutic area and indication that matters to them very, very quickly, with up to the minute nearly accurate, robust, comprehensive data. Then above and beyond that, we can rack and stack that. If you do a search that comes up with 100 doctors, who’s number 1? Who’s number 100? We have an algorithm that supports that as well. Our thought process here is that if we can provide this information, pharma can make quicker, smarter decisions, get better products to market, also, more quickly, recoup the $4 billion go-to-market price tag on every drug more quickly, go generic and lower the prices more quickly.
That’s how we create a healthier future. We get better drugs out in the first place, they make more money quicker, and then we help lower costs. We’re one cog in a very big machine. I think we’re a cog that belongs in that machine nonetheless. We are working very closely with these pharmaceutical companies and their medical science liaisons that want to connect with these key opinion leaders to make these smart decisions.
Justin: This is good because we’ve now set the table, I think, for a theme that’s going to carry through the rest of our conversation. That is delivering support using technology, and support automation to cater to a clientele that is busy. Everyone likes to say they’re important people, but doctors are important people. There’s an expectation there that is maybe a little different in some other instances. Before we go there, I want to ask you a question that I asked everybody at the top of the show, and that is when you hear the phrase support automation, what’s that mean to you?
Jason: In a single word to me, it means efficiency. It means letting the tools get out of the way of themselves. I don’t want to have highly trained support engineers, whether they’re technical engineers, or they’re very trained on the medical side of things, spending a lot of time moving through the UX of support. I want to spend that time helping people. That means if they need to click less buttons if they need a robust knowledge base. Whatever it means to let the tools get out of the way, that’s how I like to automate.
Justin: Got it. That’s a common theme in the answer I get to that question is technology automation AI, specifically brought into the support space. Whether support means you’re in the call center at a large consumer brand, or you’re working in IT for a B2B brand, there’s still this impetus to make that person who’s at that support desk, or IT desk, help desk, whatever it is, be able to be as efficient as possible, but also not completely replace the human experience for when it matters the most.
Oftentimes, it’s very easy to think, “Oh, we can just put a chatbot in front of our website and a voice menu on the phone and cover 99% of the problems.” While you can cover a lot of them, you still need to have bandwidth to have high touch relationships with your most important customers. I’m curious in the healthcare space, if there’s any part of that efficiency question, or that efficiency opportunity that you mentioned earlier, that’s unique to healthcare, that maybe those of us who aren’t in the health tech space wouldn’t normally consider.
Jason: It’s a tough question because, from a support perspective, it’s really like any other SAS platform. They log in, they get whatever we provide. I think there is a little bit of a difference because there are certain pieces of information that we are required to have additional levels of accuracy. For example, if Jason T Viglione versus Jason B Viglione wrote a paper, it could drive you down a much different rabbit hole of the results that you’re going to get.
Also, there’s this a certain level of aggregation and anonymization of data along the way, due to HIPAA compliance, for example, or simply looking at how much each person paid a particular doctor by name just makes for useless data where it becomes really important to provide this very quickly anonymously and aggregated, where we can see, is this person important or not important. It can make all the difference between this person being ranked number 1 or number 20 as an important person on this topic.
Justin: Interesting. In terms of the way your group is structured, are you sitting inside of a larger success customer experience type organization, or is support and success two separate teams with different reporting lines?
Jason: I’m inside of the bigger organization, but it does not include customer success. Client services, we can consider that at the top. Then down from that, we have customer success on one side and we’ve got client delivery on the other and then delivery splits out to implementation, integration, support, and some A&I. Even though we’ve got great analytics and the tools, stuff like that, we do have some custom reporting that goes out the door also. Pretty much everything comes into support and we farm it out to other people.
It’s just because I am very firmly of the mind that I never want the customer to guess, “Oh, for this, I go to Jason’s team, for this, I go to Justin’s team.” You come to us, I cast a very wide net. If you have anything, you come to us. We’ll do the handling and the routing internally. We have everything come to us and then we’ll kick it over the fence. It’ll be operationalized. That’s not our true value add support and we send it to those people. Within client delivery, there are several teams. We’re always thinking about client-facing at our level and then as we go up again, we join with customer success under client services for pretty much all commercial outside of sales.
Justin: It’s interesting to have these conversations for me because every organization does it a little differently. Every organization approaches the gray area between sales implementation, support success. If we want to get even further up the funnel, marketing starts to feed in– This is really just a customer journey, right?
Jason: Sure.
Justin: In terms of where you guys use automation and how you use it at H1, what are some examples of some wins that you guys have had by bringing technology into the client services division?
Jason: One thing that’s been really interesting with us is what we call data correction. If you think about there’s roughly 13 million doctors on the earth. We have a significant portion of those. We’ve got a lot of data points between name and designation, whether you’re an MD or a PhD, where you work, what you do there, publications, clinical trials, payments. There’s so many data points coming from disparate sources. That’s what makes H1 so critical to the pharma industry.
It also means there’s a lot of points of failure for data completeness, data accuracy, and both of those play right into customer confidence, which is how we partner with customer success on the journey and the renewal and the QBRs and stuff like that. How do we bring these requests to say, “Dr. Justin’s email address is missing, or Dr. Justin is showing that he works at Mayo Clinic, but it’s the wrong location of Mayo Clinic because they have 30 across the US or whatever?” Then get that to the data team, that does the human side of the research validation updates to push it out to our product.
One thing is by grouping these by like kinds so using a little bit of AI within our support. Ticketing tool, we use Zendesk to say, “Okay, this is about email for a doctor in this project. This is about email for another doctor in the same project, and we can group those together and then we kick them to the data team, ” so now the data team is not looking at ticket one, find an email, ticket two, find the phone number, ticket three, look at a publication.
There’s no context switching that we’re forcing our downstream teams to do anymore. They can, “Okay, let’s rip through this list of embedding email addresses. Let’s rip through this list of ensuring completeness to publications, et cetera.” That sends us a lot of time, both downstream to those teams. When it comes back up for QA before we notify the customer and we can batch those things together. That’s a great example of efficiencies we found over the last 18 months.
Justin: That is fantastic and a really good reminder, I think, to anyone out there listening, who’s in a situation where they feel like they are overwhelmed or their team is understaffed. We all feel this. Pick your job title, pick your discipline, pick your industry. Everyone feels a little overwhelmed at times. There is a lesson to be learned and just looking at where you can reduce switching costs because those are absolutely a killer. It’s not just a death by a thousand cuts kind of deal.
If you switch tasks or switch your point of view 20 times a day, there’s a significant amount of time that is spent recalibrating yourself to give back to what it was you were doing before. I’ve read as far as much as 25 minutes is spent refocusing on a task when you’re interrupted from it. To be able to batch things and for lack of a better word, assembly line yourself through a priority and project kind of thing, knowing the downstream and upstream implications of what you’re doing is incredibly valuable.
Jason: Sure. I think there’s another good one when it comes to knowledge base because finding support agents who have the technical acumen to understand UI and UX have also the ability to have that empathy in customer care and know the healthcare industry is very, very difficult. You can teach the healthcare industry, but you can’t teach empathy. I’m going to lean on the customer care side of things.
You bring those people in and then what happens when they say, “Why isn’t this insurance carrier listed in the payer mix and that data?” Well, I don’t know. How do you have a robust knowledge base? What we’ve done is we’ve done a lot of knowledge capture where either a request comes in, they can look it up right within Zendesk, into the Zendesk knowledge base, and then pull out or pass out the information that’s needed and push it through to the ticket automatically, or mark the knowledge base as necessary and necessary to add, necessary to update those kinds of things so next time we don’t go through this.
Then we’ve got a private stack overflow-like section of our knowledge base, where we create a side conversation with our CSM. I can go, “Justin, you’re on this client.” What do you think about this, that drops into the knowledge base automatically with your answer so now we’ve got this stack overflow between us and CSMs and sales and everybody. We can add knowledge to ourselves, reducing our own gaps as time goes on. Tickets often serve as training for us, but without the need to pause the ticket and have postmortems, we can do it on the fly with this method.
Justin: Knowledge capture, I’m glad you brought this up. This is a thread of a sweater that I don’t get to pull on as much as I would like to in these conversations. Just because we talk about what comes up and I’m not one to force topics in a conversation because it just makes for bad audio.
Jason: Sure.
Justin: Let’s double click on this because I like this. You have built and I assume in your prior experience at Olapic, you took a similar approach here, but knowledge capture is something that you’re building infrastructure and the technology vendor aside. Building infrastructure, such that you can have those conversations and capture that knowledge as it comes up, or do you also have scheduled reviews or try to time something with a product release or whatever it is to have the–
Instead of your ad hoc knowledge capture, you also have the regimented scheduled knowledge capture. I’m curious if there’s value to both or if it’s better to just do it the one way. I’m curious just how you architect knowledge capture and why you do it the way you do it.
Jason: We have both actually. You have to have both, I think, realistically. Having pre scheduled scripted articles going out about releases updates new features, it’s super important. That side we partner with both the product marketing and customer success on that. We’re releasing a new way to search by institutions, not just by doctors. CSMs, what are the conversations you’re having with customers? What’s their feedback? What are their sticking points? We want to write those and I want to write those from a support perspective because the CSMs do an amazing job of value add, the why we should be doing this as a trusted partner. We want to add, how should you be doing it? What should you expect to see? What are the things you might see if things go with skill?
To them when they come to us, it reduces our discovery time on not knowing what they did, or what they were anticipating. We also set up with product marketing so we can put links so when product marketing sends out these blurbs and these blasts that say, “Look, what we can do now is super exciting. Click here to go into the knowledge base for more information,” and that article has a click here for the nitty-gritty on how to click here, click there, do that thing.
That’s important to have. Something that a lot of people struggle with because open rates, read rates, bounce rates on those pre-existing knowledge bases are pretty terrible typically because what do customers do when they get stuck into a hole? I’m going to call my guy, I’m going to call my girl at the place, and I’m just going to get help with it. It’s table stakes to have that. You can not have a repo of knowledge. We have that.
Then as things come in, that are either not captured in that article because customer’s done it this way for the first time or frankly, we’re human and we missed it, then that knowledge capture allows us to answer the ticket very quickly, get the customer train go out, put the bandaid on, and then use that to plus up the existing articles so that information is no longer missed. The knowledge captured on the fly the ad hoc stuff enables the support experience and enriches the existing articles that we have.
Justin: Yes, you have to be careful with us marketing folk because when we describe something, it’s always in the floweriest of language in the vaguest of terms, it’s our job. Then that gets the CSM like the customer success explains things in a closer to reality point of view, but still, to your point value add and there’s more sales and marketing speak than there is technical writing. Then you get to customer support who actually has to live with the reality of you specifically needing to click on this field and you have to hit save before you do this other way, the way the thing actually works.
It’s interesting when you think of the product, use cases, and all of the living with the product that the customer has to do, and how that is perceived along the journey from marketing and through customer support. You articulated that very well. One other question I have for you, and you mentioned this in your intro on customer support and support being looked at as a cost center versus a revenue driver. This is a topic that comes up often on the show.
I think it’s one that’s especially important for people earlier in their careers than you and I getting started. Maybe they get their first leadership or management job in support and they’re going to have to advocate for support as a revenue driver versus a cost center for the rest of their career, unfortunately. What’s the piece of advice or approach that you would give somebody who’s looking at this challenge for the first time?
Jason: I think you just need to firmly believe in what would happen if there is no support. Don’t fall into the trap that we have support because well, I guess you have to. There’s always value that you can bring to your customer, to your organization beyond making sure there’s no people with torches and pitchforks at the door. There are other things you can do.
One example for us is if we have a customer that buys a set of data for pain management specialists, and then all of a sudden they’re saying, “Hey, can you add this podiatrist? Can you add this podiatrist? Can you add this podiatrist?” One or two, sure. Maybe this doctor works in pain also and you want to give care about him. If you’re doing it in large batches, all of a sudden there’s a commercial opportunity here because as a pain management company, you’re looking at podiatrists. It might not be obvious to you. Why? Well, plantar fasciitis is pretty painful, pretty consistently, gout’s painful over time, diabetic neuropathy.
All of a sudden you can see that there is an overlap. Now you can do one of two things. You can solve each of these tickets individually or you can recognize the commercial opportunity in that trend and then go to your account manager and say, “Look, they bought a lot of pain management and now they’re asking for a small percentage but a large raw number of a different therapeutic area. Do you want to have a conversation about this or tell me to ignore it and just add these people?” Whatever you guys think makes sense.
Think about those opportunities to drive that revenue. This is not really support as much as its success but I think it’s a similar customer care and happiness thing. That customer success was born a lot of years ago. Salesforce is having this conference and Dr. Doom as he’s now named stands up and he says, “our churn is 8%.” Everybody applauds and loses their minds. When the crowd goes quiet, he goes, “Per month.” Salesforce has been doubling their revenue, doubling their customer base year over year, but 96% that walk in the front door walking out the back at the end of their contract.
Right now all of a sudden success and support goes, “It’s great to sell them on the vision of the product.” If we’re not keeping them happy throughout that duration, just go in at month 9, we’re 90 days out from renewal, where’s the cash, we’re going to have a problem and support plays a big part in that. I think it’s just really remembering that company A is not putting in a lot of tickets, company B is not a pain in the neck.
It is Joe at company A that’s got 30 minutes to use your product in his schedule that’s frustrated to help this man, whether he’s the economic buyer or a daily user because we don’t want him to get noisy about this. He’s just trying to do his job. If you think about it that way, and we help everybody throughout the day, you recognize that the opposite of death by 1,000 paper cuts. I don’t know what that is, but you help a lot of people in many ways, and in aggregate this company goes, “Every time I log in, it works. When it doesn’t, Jason and team make it work for me. Okay.” Mistakes happen but they take care of it. It’s fine.
Justin: That’s exceptionally important to keep that in mind and understand the value of every, I’m making this up, every three interactions a client has with customer support and things go well reduces the likelihood of churn at the end of the contract by some percentage. Those all add up. You get these opportunities in support. When you don’t get in pretty much any other portion along the value chain where you have so many opportunities to make it very small, but ultimately they add up and it’s a noticeable difference in the experience of a customer and the product that they’re using.
The other thing that came to me while you were giving your answer there, you didn’t say specifically but it was obvious, and just hearing how you talked about it. You clearly understand the customer expectation, the journey, the product, et cetera, with H1. Therefore, your ability to understand ways in which support drives revenue versus being the cost center is just magnified.
There’s also a lesson in there too, and this sounds obvious but it’s been around long enough to know that the obvious isn’t always what happens, really understand the product, really understand the value proposition and the benefits and the pain points that the product solves. That just opens you up to all sorts of different avenues that you can take as you act as the spearhead of support in the meetings that determine if it’s a cost center or a revenue driver. That was fantastic.
Jason: Yes. There’s something else that I tell my team repeatedly. If I’m lucky enough to have any current or past members of my team hear this, they are like, “Yes, we’ve heard this 1000 times.” It’s setting that tone with the customer. I’m very, very big on the first reply. Imagine this, we’re sitting side by side and you asked me a question. You said, “Jason, how do I do such and such?” I go, “Oh, I’m not 100% sure. I know who knows that. Give me five minutes,” and I leave. I’m going to ask this guy to get in this area, and I leave. I come back 10 minutes later, instead of 5. I go, ” Listen, I know it’s been longer but here’s what I found out.”
I’ve set that tone where you go, “All right, he’s not just going to ask everybody till he gets the answer. He’s targeted. If it takes me a little bit longer then so be it.” Conversely, if you ask me a question, and I say nothing. I just stand up and silently leave the room. Then I came back five minutes later with the answer. You’re going to go, “That’s great but where on earth did you go?” Because who just stands up and leaves the room?
By buying some goodwill, not just saying, “Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line and we’ll be with you shortly,” and after three or four times you feel anything but important. You give some context and so you targeted attack on what you’re thinking. You’ve bought yourself the opportunity to go and get it right and come back and deliver this to the customer. That means anything that is a little off-center, not dramatically so, but a little bit. You’re going to have so much goodwill and good faith built up with that customer that it’s going to remove future friction. It’s going to diffuse a lot of the anger that they have along the way.
If you can take from one minute to three minutes for your first response, and that buys you from five minutes to an hour on the resolution, you’re net positive every time because you’ve created a positive rapport at the outset, and that makes all the difference. That’s how when the customer sits down on a QBR and the CSM says, “Look, we know you had 27 tickets this last quarter. We’re shocked by that.” They go, “Yes, but it’s fine. Jason’s team they always come through and they’re always very helpful.”
Justin: There’s another lesson in there and it’s relevant to the theme of this show, which is if you don’t have enough time to be able to say, “I’m going to get back to you in five minutes,” and you aren’t doing good knowledge capture. You don’t have the right KB or ticketing system or the right level zero chat deflection or whatever it is that buys you the time to have those types of moments, you’re never going to have those types of moments, and therefore you’re never going to build that rapport, whether that’s with your customer or your team. It’s very important that CS organizations optimize the ability for their best people to do their best work. I want to close the media portion of this conversation. This has been a great conversation by the way. Thank you so much for your time.
Jason: Love it.
Justin: The one last question for you before we get into the quickfire round. That last question is what excites you the most about the future of automation and AI in support?
Jason: It’s like everything else, I think, in tech that we’re doing right now, and it’s using this information to find insights where they didn’t previously exist. How do we take raw unstructured data from customer conversations, phone, chat, and pull out sentiments from that? How do we know that Jimmy is not aggravated, he just comes in all blustery all the time, but then he comes down very quickly when he knows you’re going to fix it versus somebody who is actually irritated all the time? How do we stop shooting the support messenger?
Because when we say, “Listen, the product team said, no. They’re not going to turn the platform purple for you on Thursday, sorry,” and they go, “I hate my experience with support.” No, you don’t. You hate the bad news I gave you and you shot the messenger. AI is allowing us to extract context from things we never could before. We know how people really feel about support. I don’t get a tone of voice very often. I don’t get body language. Anybody that’s not you right now doesn’t know that my hands have been flailing like a crazy person, this whole conversation, but AI and tech are doing this for us.
It allows us to circumvent that first in, first out. First in, first out, but then we escalate by exception while this customer’s unhappy, this customer is very big, this customer renews at the end of the month. Now we can go, “This one individual really brings up a very good point. They’re very aggravated about this. We didn’t think about it. They didn’t say as much, but the tech has made it very clear.” I’m really excited to be able to do more things by understanding the person coming to me.
Justin: Yes. Absolutely true. The ability to understand sentiment and be able to offer some prediction on what to do next or likelihood of escalation or whatever it is is exceptionally valuable. It’s why you see the big customer data platforms having so much success, why you see companies like Zendesk continue to grow, companies like Capacity get founded and enter the market. There’s a lot of opportunity here, and I share your excitement about being one of the next big frontiers.
Jason: If I could jump in one more-
Justin: Of course.
Jason: -thing about that, you said two words. You said likelihood, and you said predict. Those two words are so paramount in my world because I don’t know what’s going to break before it breaks. If I did, I’d have a lot more money I think, but we use trailing indicators so much. I just had this conversation with some successful friends. NPS, “Are you going to recommend our product?” “Well, let me decide first and let you know.” If it’s negative, we’ve got to change your mind.
How was your experience with support? You’ve already decided, but prediction and likelihood tells me, “Oh, you are going to walk into this dead end. Let me stand and go, ‘Wait, don’t go this way. This is going to work out better for you.’” That sentiment tracking is going to tell us where people get aggravated before it happens based on trends and sentiments pulled out unstructured, emotional data, that sort of stuff and it’s going to make a world of difference.
Justin: Absolutely will. Let’s end with our– I always joke about the famous quickfire round. It’s like when you go to the diner on the side of the highway and they’re like world-famous fried chicken or whatever.
Jason: There you go.
Justin: On the host, I get to call it a famous quickfire round.
Jason: There you go.
Justin: What’s the book that you most often recommend to people?
Jason: Delivering happiness. The book about Zappos. Even though I’m not B2C and it’s got really nothing to do with me and the type of support we provide, the way they care for customers is unmatched. I won’t buy shoes from anybody else after some experiences I’ve had.
Justin: Yes, Tony Hsieh is a real tragedy and a real loss, but that guy absolutely 100% lived and brought the walk to the talk at how Zappos manages customers and everything else. I’ve never talked to a person who’s had a bad experience buying shoes at Zappos. If you did tweet me. I would love to hear it. What’s the best productivity tip, hack, trick, app, the practice of productivity, and helping you get the most out of your day? What’s the best one that you’ve folded into your routine?
Jason: Pomodoro Timers.
Justin: Yes, absolutely fantastic.
Jason: You get a lot of tickets popping in. It’s very easy to get distracted by the new queue versus the recently responded queue versus the time-sensitive delivery queue and Pomodoro Timers, for those that don’t know, 25 minutes, you could set it up as long as you want. If really that makes sense for you. This is just a focus for this amount of time. Do nothing else that expires, stop, recoup, set it again. Then we do that. Hey, set the timer, jump in, and start a new queue. Let’s get first responses out, make people feel heard, do nothing else. It expires. Okay. Take a look at what’s up next and do that, and this hyper-focus that you get on that means that you’re never going to leave a half-written response to a customer when you get pulled away for something else.
Justin: I have one of those Elgato stream decks that all the big streamers use to trigger their whatevers. I’m not a streamer, but I use it as basically a shortcut machine, and I’ve got, I’m looking at it right now, a tomato icon that when I click starts a 25-minute timer, puts my computer in do not disturb, and then after 25 minutes, the timer dings and my computer leaves do not disturb. Then I take that five-minute break to just check Twitter or whatever, and see check sports scores or whatever it is. The Pomodoro technique is one of those things that if you Google productivity tips, it’s the first thing that comes up in most instances. There’s a reason for that. You know what I mean? Absolutely fantastic.
Jason: It’s unique to support Pomodoro Timers because typically support leaders don’t want people going heads down into something because there’s so many inbound requests, but you’ve got the right coverage and the right team and the right flow through things. You can have somebody that’s going to just deliver value in one thing for a while. Also, your thing about your Elgato was the best and worst answer I’ve heard because I’ve had one in my cart for about a month as a non-streamer, also trying to justify it, and you just did that.
Justin: Do it. Set aside a couple of hours on a Saturday, get yourself a cold beer or something, and start messing with it. I’ll send you something after this to show you some of the weird stuff I’ve managed to do with it. Very, very, very cool. If you could recommend one website, blog, slack, community, LinkedIn group, real-life group, whatever for support leaders, what would it be?
Jason: I would suggest you follow Jason Viglione on LinkedIn.
Justin: [chuckles] Love it.
Jason: It’s funny because I’m half kidding, actually. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn telling people how to do things, how to think about things. It’s really because I’ve been in this industry for 27 years, I started with break-fix when somebody said my printer won’t print because he kicked the cable out under his desk all right up to SAS and cloud-based computing now, and there wasn’t a LinkedIn. There wasn’t a me, there wasn’t a you, helping get information out to people. A lot of what I’ve learned and done well is only because I did it really not well for a very long period of time because we were trailblazers.
We’ve got to remember I started in computing when computers were not networked. We’ve learned a lot along the way, some of it from happy accidents. Honestly, I put a lot of content out for people that it makes them feel, “You’re not alone in this mistake that you made. Here’s something that you can do.” Not because I’ve got all the answers to the universe. but I’ve screwed it up enough times to learn from it and I pay that forward. Gain grow routine is a CS featured community.
Justin: Yes, they’re fantastic.
Jason: They very much understand the overlap between CS and customer support. Christy Felter Russo is a close friend of mine, she’s great. Brett and Jay are awesome and the whole community has really come together on that. Christy and I have co-hosted webinars and panels on more than one occasion. As its CS powerhouse in this world, she loves support also and helps weave that in. They’re a great community. Don’t feel overwhelmed by the success side.
Justin: I’ve had both Christy and Jeff on this show and both of them are just wells of knowledge in CS and understanding that relationship between support, success, sales and the whole customer journey and just thought leadership for days. You do have a good LinkedIn profile. You do share a lot of helpful stuff and it’s one thing I really appreciate. We are going back and forth about doing this show.
You said, “What hasn’t been talked about yet?” I was like, “I love it.” Because sometimes people book, I get on here and we have to find what hasn’t been discussed yet but I appreciated you letting us know ahead of time. Jason, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy day to chat with us, to share some insights. If people want to know more about you or H1, where can they find you?
Jason: H1, is just h1.co. Go check it out. It’s awesome. Our tagline is Creating a Healthier Future. I really think that we are. It’s really important work that you don’t know exists because it’s behind the scenes of the pharma industry. Happy to talk about that with anybody to explain what we’re doing. I’m on LinkedIn. Obviously, find me there. That’ll probably appeal to everybody. I’m Jayvig, J-A-Y-V-I-G, on pretty much every platform that you can find out there. If you want to look at the silliness of Instagram, you’ll look at that, or the serious stuff on LinkedIn, I’m there. I’m active on all these things and I’ve found a lot of great value in these social channels. I use them pretty specifically the way that they’re built. You get a different experience wherever you go.
Justin: Love it. Well, I appreciate your time, Jason. Thank you for coming to the Support Automation Show. Have a wonderful day.
Jason: Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was awesome. Everybody out there, support rocks, please be kind to your friendly neighborhood support agent. We’re just trying to make your problems go away.
Justin: The Support Automation Show is brought to you by Capacity. Visit capacity.com to find everything you need for automating support and business processes in one powerful platform. You can find this show by searching for Support Automation in your favorite podcast app. Please subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Capacity, thanks for listening.