Why Tech’s Next Innovation Wave Will Be From Customer Service – Digital CxO Podcast EP106

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today I have Nora Jones. She is the Senior Director of Product Management at PagerDuty.

How are you doing today? I'm great, Amanda. Nice to be here.

Glad to have you on the show. Can you share a little bit about PagerDuty and then what do you do there and what some of your background and experience? Yes, I'm happy to.

So PagerDuty Is the global leader in digital operations management. Um, we help the world's biggest companies and companies all around, anticipate and also respond to disruptions. We are really that critical source you need if and when something happens so that you can mitigate impact for your end users, for your customers, and for your business.

Um, we're trusted by half of the Fortune 500 and nearly 70% of the Fortune 100. Um, and we have a lot of, um, resiliency in our platform that enable customers to use automation, ai, ml, um, all sorts of things to or orchestrate, uh, their operations in the right teams, right subject matter expertise to solve issues before they become, um, customer impacting, headline impacting, things like that. Wonderful.

Thanks for sharing. And so our topic of today is Y tech's next innovation wave will come from customer service. And you feel that, um, that's often an overlooked, um, engine of innovation is the customer service team.

Can you share a little bit about why that is? Yeah, so I think a lot of companies specifically in the tech technology industry, and this is something I've experienced in, in my background, I spend a lot of time in, in, um, engineering and incidents specifically prior to, to doing product management at PagerDuty Now. Um, and what I've seen a lot of the time is after a major incident, uh, teams will go into their respective orgs and do a retrospective.

So like customer service might have a small retrospective, engineering has a large retrospective, um, maybe the board has a retrospective on their own. They're all kind of done in pockets. And I think incidents and operational blunders are really a real opportunity for these teams to learn from each other, specifically customer success in engineering and marketing.

Um, those teams all need to be in lockstep and after incidents. It's this critical situation where all of these teams were definitely impacted internally. So let's talk about how we were impacted internally together, um, so that we can extract the most from it.

And so, um, that's really where we see a lot of this opportunity. I feel like communication is always the key. And we've talked about silos being a problem for so long now, it's such a surprise that it still is an issue.

And I wonder why do you think that is that we still don't see that breakdown of silos? I think it's because we all have like different languages. We speak internally and there's a, there's a lot of familiarity, right?

Like, you know, if I'm in engineering, most of the people I speak to most of the time are my engineering colleagues. And so it's natural that, you know, we hop on a call and we're able to candidly talk to each other about what happened and what went wrong. But we talk about it from an engineering lens, right?

Uh, and same with customer success, I imagine. Same with marketing. You talk about like what you can control and what could have gone differently from your side.

Rarely do we have someone thinking about the bridges between those two worlds and it's, I think it's because it's a language that we're not used to speaking. And so a really great way to, um, to leverage those teams working together is to look at what was impacting them in the middle of an incident and actually look at that raw data. Like how did they communicate with each other?

How did they communicate internally? What dashboards were they looking at? Were they getting customer emails?

Um, and having the ability to understand a customer service agent's perspective or an engineer's perspective or someone in marketing's perspective, regardless of which role you're in, will just help your regular operations in the future. Um, but I think we don't spend a lot of time in it and orgs because rarely does someone own those cross organizational boundaries. And so I just don't think that a lot of the time there is a lot of accountability, um, for surfacing some of that in some of those learnings.

So what do you suggest is a great way for business leaders to start having say, um, maybe monthly meetings or something? Like what's a way that they can start having that better communication? Yeah, so I mean, if you've had an outage or you've had something that people had to drop, like what they planned to do that day and coordinate in a room over, I think that's definitely a good opportunity to retrospect not just with your own team but cross-functionally and not everything deserves this, right?

Like, you know, you mentioned once a month. I think that's like a great start, right? There's probably something that happened in the last month that was unexpected that in involved one or more teams.

And so just having representatives from those teams get in a room together and look through some of the raw communication that happened. So rather than like sharing what your experience was, we get to look at it because raw data doesn't lie. And so when I say raw data, I mean like what was happening in Slack or what was happening in teams.

Um, and PagerDuty has, um, our product actually integrates with these tools so that you can see what was happening, um, live in those channels. Who was talking when they were talking, were there words of frustration mentioned? Were there words of like happiness mentioned?

'cause I think when you have a true emergency and you're just trying to do whatever you can to get the customer back to a good experience, there is a lot of learning to be gleaned from there. Um, and so I think that would be a recommendation is to get in the room together and leverage, um, some of the insights from those raw conversations to drive more conversations. Um, and I think that's a, a great star if you're not already doing that.

So I know some employees are gonna be super confident, very talkative and have a ton of ideas and be really open to sharing, but there's, there's another side. There's other employees who are kind of introverted, not as confident or hesitant to open up and share their ideas. So what tips or suggestions do you have to make everyone there feel empowered to share and give them that motivation and confidence to give their ideas?

Yeah, and, and in these meetings I would really only invite people that participated in the incident or were impacted by the incident, um, because they spoke or took action during the incident. And so a great prompting, um, thing to do in these meetings is to look at the raw data. So if Amanda, you know, said, Hey, I'm coordinating with, you know, MS customer, um, I can just say, Hey Amanda, it looks like you coordinated with MS customer at 2 41.

Um, can you tell us what you were coordinating with them about? And that's like a nice question, right? It's not like gonna put you on the defensive, uh, it's not gonna make you feel called out.

You're just literally explaining what you did in that moment. And so keeping it focused on the facts rather than like what should have happened, um, and also having a good facilitator that can make sure folks are speaking equally not out of turn and not diving into like these fictional lands of like, well, I told everybody that this was gonna be an issue a long time ago. Like, those kinds of things aren't, aren't super productive.

And so that's why we recommend folks actually just look at what, what really happened, you know, what alerts were firing, um, what dashboards were you looking at? Um, what people did you need to pull in to, to the channel? Were they on call?

And like leveraging all that information to have a conversation, but to also pull out those insights to then feed back into the beginning of your cycle so that when and if an issue comes up here again, it just gets easier and easier, um, to resolve. Well we are seeing a lot of technology advancements. Are there any specific technologies that you recommend or that you're watching that would help improve this process?

Yeah, I mean, I, I'm obviously gonna say PagerDuty. We are, we are spending a lot of time, uh, in the space. We also actively use our own product, um, to really coordinate.

Uh, I think there's a lot of power in what gen AI can do for the technology industry, but every time we introduce some sort of new technology to the technology industry, like there's gonna be added complexity as well. And with added complexity there mean there means more unknown unknowns, which means there are going to be new and different kinds of outages that no one in tech expected. And so what PagerDuty is really also trying to lean in on is the fact that we are aiming to be very resilient for you and help you understand these new technologies that, um, may or may not be as known to humans as they once were because they are using more automation.

Uh, and so what I would recommend to folks is to just keep practicing as if, um, as we adopt these new things and, uh, as we're unsure of how they work, like get curious about how they work, leverage PagerDuty to coordinate, respond, and um, and really build some of that resilience, um, with your teams so that you can feel more confident going into these unknown situations. Wonderful. Well, if there was one key takeaway you could leave our audience with today, what would that be?

Um, I think, you know, it's, it's definitely like a, not an if, uh, incident or thing is gonna happen. It's when, uh, and I think practicing, um, but also practicing the coordination outside of your team boundaries and getting everyone, you know, speaking a language that we can all agree upon. Knowing what is worth dropping things and responding over versus what is not.

Um, that is all a muscle that we need to continually practice, especially with all the advancements in generative AI that are coming out and getting adopted. Uh, there really are going to be new incidents, um, that we're not gonna know yet. And so I think it's really important to trust, um, you're, you're provider in those emergency situations, uh, and, and help you get back to the baseline quickly.

Alright, Well thank you so much for coming on our show and sharing your insights with us today. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.

All right. And thanks to our audience too, stay tuned. There's more.