How Patreon Uses Data and Segmentation to Support 7M+ Customers

Meredith Metsker: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Beyond the Queue. Today I'm very excited to welcome Angela Raiford. She is the director of support at Patreon. Angela, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Angela Raiford: Thank you, Meredith. I'm really excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker: And I am really looking forward to our topic today. So as you and I know, Patreon has a lot of unique support challenges. Where you all are supporting a ton of different kinds of users, different use cases, you have interesting billing cycles, and I imagine that that is a lot to handle and interesting to deal with as a support leader. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about some of those challenges.

Angela Raiford: Yeah, we definitely have a number of challenges. I think one of the exciting things, if there were to be exciting things about the pandemic, is that over the course of 2020, we actually did see Patreon blow up a lot more on the main stage of like social media and more creators coming and being like, how do I use Patreon for my members? How can I use this to my advantage as a creator? So it's really helped make some of our uniqueness a little easier to explain. But really when I think about support, I'd break our challenges up into really three pieces, right? We have one, the uniqueness of being a creator first company and having a model that really means that we're working with both B2C and B2B kind of service here, which is difficult in itself when you have that combination.

And then two is that we have a legacy billing model that charges all of our payments on the 1st. So this results in a really heavy load for our support team, and we actually see between 300% to 400% increase in volume over the first few days. Yeah, it's nuts. And that's just within the first few days of the month. So you can imagine really difficult when you have such a drastic difference in the volume of emails that teammates are working through on the first week of a month, compared to the second, compared to the third, compared to the fourth.

And then I think thirdly, and really importantly for me as a manager, is the managing performance across all of those things. So, okay, you've got a unique set of creators and members using our platform and different types of people that are set to handle all those different types of users, and then you've got this really drastic increase in volume, which a lot of customer support managers use ticket volume as a metric of how many emails you're working through.

So really important for us to get performance management right, knowing that we have these challenges.

Meredith Metsker: Awesome. Yeah, that's a great overview. I want to dig into the creator first concept and what it means to be creator first. I know that creator membership is a hot topic these days. Lots of companies are now jumping into the space, and while it's still fairly new for the rest of the market, you all at Patreon have been around for eight years. You were the first in this space. So can you just tell me a little bit about what being creator first means and then how you balance supporting so many different types of users, including B2B and B2C?

Angela Raiford: Yeah, that's a great question. So for Patreon, creator first really means that we lead with creators. So we don't have algorithms, we don't have advertisers that we're beholden to. And in addition to that, when creators choose us, they get full ownership of their content. So when you're on Patreon and you're posting your content, you can take that with you. Your relationship with your members, you can take them with you. You have access to their content details. It's not stuff that we keep hidden or try to hide from you. And in addition to that, we also aim to make sure creators get more. We have a really small cut smallest of every platform. So those things are really important to us when we think about being creator first. And because we give them that extreme ownership of their content of their members, it really means that as a company, we are incentivized to make sure that we're serving them in the right ways.

And when we're thinking of new products, when we're thinking about improving on existing products, we're here really thinking of creators because we are incentivized by the nature of our model to do so. And I think you asked about balancing, like how do we kind of balance having all these member types? And really, it starts with understanding the scope of requests. I've been at Patreon for six years, and so I've really seen the support inbounds go from being about 50/50 creators and their members to now, 70% of our requested a monthly basis come from members. So really understanding that and knowing, okay, what does that mean? What's the average handle time of a member requests compared to a creator request? And is there a different kind of type of agent that we would want to hire to work on those requests? Understanding the nature of those requests is really important to knowing how to balance it. Should we have a specific, a sub team within the member team to deal with those 70% of the requests?

So that's really important to me to make sure I understand staffing, to make sure understand what a stellar experience looks like, is really what are the requests from B2C and B2B customers.

Meredith Metsker: Okay. So what are some of those, I guess, main differences that you see between your B2B and B2C customers?

Angela Raiford: Yeah. I mean, I think in general, B2B requests are more complex. So even though they're only 30% of the volume though, that's the volume where we might have teammates that are responsible for taking phone calls for working closely with our partnerships teams and coming up with more unique solutions for their kind of Patreon world. And I think for a member support, like I said, previously, we do give creators extreme ownership of their members. So there's some stuff that we just don't handle because the creator might be responsible for the benefits, but because that's quite new and for a lot of platforms, members are coming to us and we actually might have just like redirects, right? It might just be us saying like, hey, I don't know the answer to that, but here's how to connect with your creator. And so the biggest difference we see that's most tangible is request time.

So the average handle time of a member requests is going to be drastically faster to get through in the full resolution time as well, rather than creator request where we really, you might work on just 10 tickets or maybe 20 tickets compared to for our member team. They might be going through 50 or 60 emails just because of the nature of those requests.

Meredith Metsker: Okay. I'm curious in your six years at Patreon, how have you adjusted how you respond to those different types of requests? How you kind of assign resources? Yeah, I'm just curious how that's changed.

Angela Raiford: Yeah. It's definitely changed. For people that have worked with me, I'm generally was more... We had a very much more general support team because all the... Yeah, you're right. 70% of our requests come from members, a lot of them are in the same kind of five buckets of request types. Most of that relies on payments, which is our bread and butter. We are a membership platform, but also payments is a big part of that. So in the past, we were a team of generalists. Everyone could do everything, so that meant you might be getting 10 trainings on how Patreon works and how to do billing for a creator and a patron. And only over the last two years have we really segmented the team into a few key areas, one being operations, finally having a team that's dedicated to triage, staffing, making sure our forecasting is up to par and content support.

So for us, content support is really impactful. So our self-service scores, our help center, the macros that our team uses, the L&D programs that we bring to our product support teammates, and then creator support. We actually moved away from having a general team where you could be working with creator one ticket and moved to Patreon next, where now we have like dedicated creator support team and they're a little more autonomous. They don't have as many kind of baseline metrics. We're kind of like do what it takes to deliver a stellar experience, and the performance management is a little bit more qualitative. So that really has changed for me where I've been a little less general and now I'm just like, no, everybody should be more specific. You should have more nuance. You should be the expert of this thing. Even if we're not getting a huge inbound for that specific thing, it's just best to have those experts in house.

Meredith Metsker: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I'm curious what the results have been so far from kind of moving to a more segmented team.

Angela Raiford: You know, I think the best results that I can ask for is that the team is happy. I think we've just seen teammates being more excited about being experts in their field, or even when we first decided to split the team into creator and patron, we said, they're going to be different metrics, you're going to have different conversations. People were like excited to be split up. They were like, well, I love working with creators. So if I could move to the creator team, that would be exciting for me, that would help me be really energized when I wake up in the morning and get to work. So I think one, we just saw a positive impact on the team. It felt like there were more career pathing and ventures for them to take within support and outside of support as well, but it was really exciting to have different paths within support.

And then I think the other thing is positive feedback from our closest partners. So it means having our go to market teams be really excited because okay, now they have a dedicated person that might be able to jump on a phone call with a creator and really explain the dashboards and be responsible for a little bit more handholding than they would in the past. So that combination of things was really exciting, great team feedback, and also great feedback from our partners.

Meredith Metsker: Oh, I love that. Yeah, it sounds like it's going really well so far then.

Angela Raiford: Yeah. It's going well so far. I think the thing that happens with me now is I'm constantly like, wait, maybe we should have just have one person who does that. Sometimes the hiring list starts to grow and grow.

Meredith Metsker: That's a great segue into my next question. I'm curious how you, as the director of support there, how do you go about deciding that you need to hire someone for the creator team, or the member team? Or if you have folks internally, how do you decide who to place on each team? I know you mentioned that some people just express their own interest and moving, but aside from that, I'm curious, yeah, how do you decide how to structure your segmented teams?

Angela Raiford: Yeah, it's a great question. I think that comes down to the performance management piece of things and also understanding the scope of requests. So sometimes you can just look at the scope of requests or think about if we are creator first, that means excelling and reply times, that means excelling and the kind of warm and fuzzy feeling that a creator has when they reach out to you. So we know that there's just a different type of person that kind of can give that and like a written request over anyone else. So sometimes it's just looking at the scope of requests and us knowing like, okay, there's just something about when you read a ticket from certain agents where you're like, whoa, that was the best possible way they could have said that thing to me, even if it's like, hey, there's a bug, we can't fix it. And you're just like, but they made me feel warm and fuzzy about that bug not being fixed.

And that helps us know like yeah, maybe that person is going to be better suited toward the creator team. But I think when it comes to data around it is that we actually have a manager who works really closely with our finance teams, with our data science team to really build out a forecast model that works for both our member and our creator segments and identify what our queue might look like. And so that might mean, okay, we know the member support queue needs people that can work through a lot of tickets in a quick amount of time. So that's going to be somebody who just can go through the queue really, really fast. And there are those kinds of people that they don't miss on QA, they don't miss on satisfaction, they don't miss on any of the metrics where it really counts, and they can go through a large number of tickets. And there are agents that are like, no, they're going to work best with a smaller amount of tickets and be able to have really stellar metrics, but they need to work with a smaller amount of tickets.

And so that's going to be someone who's better suited to a more specific team like creators over members. So that really is something we look at forecasting, what do we need from a business perspective? And then qualitatively, where do we see strengths in our teammates?

Meredith Metsker: Okay, gotcha. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot that goes into that.

Angela Raiford: I think it's something that excites me as performance management and working with the manager team to really have a great understanding of our agents' strengths and weaknesses, and working around them when it makes sense. Obviously, you might have teammates that just don't want to work in support anymore. It can be one of those roles that can feel transitory. I think at Patreon, we're really lucky to have really healthy retention on our support team. A lot of the teammates that work in support have done so for four years, four or five years, four or two years. So yeah, we have a lot of longstanding team members. But also just being really honest, if it's not working out, maybe they're better suited to moving into trust and safety and we can establish those relationships. So I really like making sure that I understand the performance of each teammate and why or why not they might be hitting a metric and will they be better suited somewhere still in our organization or can we help them make a soft landing within the organization on another team?

Meredith Metsker: Gotcha. I love that. And not only is great for people management, but it sounds like that method is very effective when it comes to providing really great support for both your creators and your members, so that's a win-win.

Angela Raiford: Yeah, totally, because if someone's not happy to be there, you can tell on the metrics. At a certain point, you just get so burnt out and you're like, oh, I'm so tired. I don't like working in emails and you just go, okay, well, let's see, is there a business opportunity for you to not work in email? Sometimes there isn't, sometimes you have to be realistic and say, oh, well, all of our volume is coming into emails and not socials or not call. So we just really need this, but other times, you might get a lucky break and say, well, actually we're looking for someone who will be working more in socials and that seems to excite you. Do you want to try out for this role, interview for it? Those kinds of things.

Meredith Metsker: Okay, cool. So on this note of specializing your team and figuring out how to best serve different types of customers, I'm curious, what advice or what best practices would you give to other support leaders who might be in the same boat? Maybe they're serving multiple user types, or they're serving B2B and B2C, and so on.

Angela Raiford: I think the most important thing is running the data, working with user research, working with data science earlier than you think you need to because really you just have to understand what's there. What's going to be the best funnel for the B2B customer? For the B2C side, you really have to look at the data and really understand those funnels, those flows that are going to be most successful for them, and that will allow you to build the stellar internal experience as well as the external experience. So yeah, I think that would be the biggest thing. And then the other thing is yeah, you should look at the market too, right? You should look at where product is going because sometimes your product team might be building an experience for the next year, but looks drastically different for support. Maybe it requires something completely new and different of you, and you need to be aware that make sure you're planning a couple steps ahead of them because of the staffing and all the work that goes into really supporting that experience with training, as well as hiring.

Meredith Metsker: Okay. You mentioned working with user research and the data team. What kind of data, what kind of metrics are you looking at to make some of these decisions about how you serve B2B and B2C?

Angela Raiford: Yeah. So, I mean, there's kind of the core support metrics, right? Average handle time, CSAT, QA. Those are the core things that we look at. When we talk to our partners, we do kind of use those as levers. But then when it comes to user research and data science, for data science, one thing that's helpful for us is just being able to slice our data in new ways. So we use Zendesk as our main CRM, but to be honest, the data reporting tools aren't as amazing or slick as they could be. So we rely on data science and we ask them like, hey, can you help us look at this data in a new way? So that may mean for us using tools like mode and working closely with a data scientist to make sure that anyone in the company, if they wanted to see the split of our tickets, or how many creators and how many members wrote in and who are they kind of supporting on the platform, it makes the data more accessible to everyone. So everyone can kind of do their own due diligence when it makes sense for them to dive in.

So those are the kinds of things we look at with data science. And then for user research, it's really helpful, especially for teams like content support, where do we understand what our creators, what our members want when they look at our FAQ page? And are they being directed to those places? So sometimes, it might be a user research study where they're just going through the flow and they're kind of seeing like, what did you anticipate when you landed on this page? Or what were you looking for? Right? Or how would you want to get in touch with support? Sometimes it's helpful to know. A lot of teams are doing live chat or a lot of companies, or even companies like Stripe or others, they, I think over the last two years, have implemented phone support.

And it's like, I probably came through a user research session where they finally realized everybody wants to use the phone these days, which is kind of a difference from where we were in the past. And so we've also done studies like that, where like, how do you want to reach support? Is that through socials? Is that through a live chat channel? Is that through email? And that will help us kind of plan out who we need to bring onto the team or what career paths might be available for the team fairly soon. If we know we need to get live chat, because that's what will excite our creators and excite our members, then okay, we need to start thinking about that a couple months ahead of time.

Meredith Metsker: Yeah, that makes sense. In that, in your answer, you mentioned self-serve content, which reminded me that I wanted to dig into that a little bit more, too. You mentioned that that was one of the places you've been reinvesting over the last few years in order to better serve these multiple user populations. So can you just tell me a little bit more about what you've doing? How you decide what topics to cover? How you're delivering the help content? Yeah, I'm curious what your process has been.

Angela Raiford: So this is all owned by our content support team, which is an arm of the support team, and they're really dedicated to reviewing our help center analytics. So using Google Analytics, again, we use Zendesk for CRM here to understand like, okay, well when a creator lands on this page, where are they going? Where are they dropping off? What's the bounce rate? So there's kind of a number of metrics we look at just to have a good base. And then really what's important to us, especially as a small team, is how can we enable ourselves to be efficient with our resources? So Patreon has 7 million patrons, but our support team is less than 50 people, which is kind of nuts to think about. And the way that we're able to attain that is by having a really high self service score. So making sure when our members are landing on that FAQ page, that they're getting to the right place and they're getting there quickly, and that it's easy to read.

And so we're looking at the metrics of like, okay, well, how long were they on this page? And does that make sense given the nature of the information? And our content support team has also tested out a few things like we've tried out videos, we've tried out audio, we've tried doing more images, less images. And over the last couple of years, it's also just been making sure helps in our content is accessible. So are we adhering to all the accessibility guidelines to make sure that we're accounting for people that might've easily bounced because they couldn't read the page? Maybe it wasn't screen reader accessible. So there's a number of projects that we work on, but I think the kind of main thing that we do look at is our self-service score and how are we helping the product support team once things go to email, once things go to socials? How are we hoping maintain a good balance of the tickets that come in?

Another thing that we measure manually, which has been a bit of a journey, is that we actually have agents fill out a custom field when they're answering an email where they'll check, like was an agent required to answer this email or could they have found it themselves? And when we think about, could the member or creator find it themselves? We're not saying like, oh, could they have done a five-page research paper and found it that way? We're just like, no, is there like a clear accessible button within Patreon.com or on the help center feed where they could have found this answer? Yes or no. And then we kind of are able to look at that and see, okay, well, is the mix of they could have solved themselves too high, right? Because you want your agents to be efficient. If they're constantly sending macros and all the tickets are the same, that signals a product issue, or it could signal a documentation issue, which is where our content support team could help.

So we'll use that data to work with our cross-functional partners and it's just an input, right? It's never going to be a directive, but giving them those inputs to see if they can help us be more efficient as well.

Meredith Metsker: Awesome. Cool. Yeah, thank you for that detail. It sounds like it's going really well.

Angela Raiford: Yeah, it's going really well and we're actually expanding that team. So again, I think small team is kind of like, I keep mentioning it, but we're getting bigger and that team is actually scaling and now we have a dedicated training specialist who's going to build out certifications, like what if you got certified as a customer support member, like member support person or creators support person, and what does that look like? How does that help us with performance management and also a dedicated QA specialist? So moving that from all the managers, QA, all their teammates to like, okay, let's get some somebody dedicated here so that we can scale this team and managers can have a little bit more breathing room to focus on their direct reports. So yeah, I'm really excited about the content support work that we're doing actually.

Meredith Metsker: Yeah, for sure. It seems like, in general, specialization has been a very big part of your strategy.

Angela Raiford: 100%, yes.

Meredith Metsker: Okay. Awesome. Well, I would like to transition to one of the second things that you mentioned. So you mentioned that Patreon largely does all its billing on the 1st of every month, which means that you have an interesting ticket flow related to a billing issues. So can you just tell me a little bit about that? How do you plan for that? How do you handle and plan around it?

Angela Raiford: Yeah, it's tough. You have to find priorities among the chaos. I won't say we have it fully figured out, but I think the thing that helps the most is forecasting. So just having an understanding of where things might go. Obviously, there's always going to be things that might spike it different than you expected, and you have to kind of bake in some of that unplanned stuff into the forecast. But I think first having a forecast understanding, does that make our SLAs completely unattainable? Because like a 300% increase, that's like 40 additional people for Patreon. So sometimes it's not realistic for us to spin up and spin down and just have teammates working for three days out of the month just to handle that volume. So we try to get really realistic about like, okay, does that mean that this SLA is going to be unattainable for this week, and then we go back to normalcy in the second, third, and fourth week? Or does that mean like, oh, actually it is attainable if we move a couple people from the member support team to the creator support team or vice versa.

So really first having a strong forecast. We have to forecast one that we do internally with our FP&A, and our data science team, and one that we work with a third party provider on just because again, all that uniqueness, it makes sometimes our forecast be wildly off. So we try to kind of have a little bit of a fail safe and look at two different variations of our forecast. And then I think the other thing is just like, you just have to try things out. We've tried a number of things from... I think what's really common is like all hands on deck support, like an engineer, a product manager, they all can do support, but we've found that that didn't really work for us. The product changes rapidly. Ultimately a support person is going to be the best expert, right? And sometimes if you have an engineer or someone who's in a more dedicated vertical come in, you end up taking, we found like twice as long to answer a support ticket. So that didn't quite work for us.

We've also tried kind of overstaffing, and I think the only issues with that is that we found in the pandemic, our forecast was just kind of wildly off because just things are unpredictable in a pandemic. We've never experienced this before, so we're learning new things all the time. So currently what we're trying is that we're working with a few long-term contractors. We're going to stick with kind of the overstaffing route, and this time we're trying to overstaff significantly, we're overstaffing by 10 people. And so that might mean that our team maybe has a little less core support work to do over the kind of third and fourth weeks of the month, but we know that it will ensure our service's more consistent than ever. And that's really the balance that we're trying to find is like, how can we just be really much more consistent and not have a wicked long reply time over the first through the fourth and then it drops down rapidly? We're trying to just achieve consistency. So it's not perfect yet, but we're pulling out all the stops and trying a few new things every month.

Meredith Metsker: And I imagine as you're expanding maybe, the self-serve content topic, again, as you're expanding that, does overstaffing kind of relate to that? Do any of the people that you hired as part of overstaffing, when they have less to do in the latter half of the month, do they start supporting other projects?

Angela Raiford: Yeah. So often the projects can either lead them to content support. Typically, they're working on like submitting help center requests because we really try to have our expert content support team be the ones that are delivering and publishing that content. But they might submit drafts of like, Hey, I think this could be really helpful. Or, hey, what if our auto replier looked a little bit more like this? It gives them a little bit more time to explore those ideas that maybe they think of during the month, but just don't have a moment to breathe and really think about it. But I think where we try to place people is really in the kind of feedback and reviewing our queue more in depth, because it's hard to look at a big bucket of tickets, look at 20,000 tickets and be like, what exactly is in there? What are those trends? How do they align to the business?

So we have a couple projects, one of them is our monthly eagle where we have like a bird's eye view of the queue. So some of the teammates will just take the time to really dive into a few topics. They may think like, I haven't seen if you log in issues and now I can just maybe spend half of my day looking through 500 emails and really trying to assess what the heart of that issue is, and deliver a really great piece of documentation for the organization to look at and get an understanding of what we really been working through on the support team. So yeah, they can go to content support or they can work on these kind of feedback projects. And then I don't know, it's kind of new to us having this much well potentially free project time for the team to work through. So I think the other things that I would hope for them to be able to work on is just like, what would you like to see the support team evolve into? Right?

Constantly thinking about our larger vision, when we think about where we're going in the product, where we're going, and as a support team, I would love for them to kind of think about where they see themselves within the organization and talk to me about those ideas, and so we can start to incorporate them as we do some larger vision thinking. So I'm hoping that they can really think about what does engagement look like for a CHT member, especially because we're all remote now, or have been lucky to be the kind of company that can have teammates work from home. So yeah, I'm excited to hear what they come up with, with this time.

Meredith Metsker: Okay. Yeah, that's the perfect transition to my next question, kind of our next sub topic. So given all of these unique challenges that you face as the director of support at Patreon, how do you go about keeping your team happy, monitoring and managing the performance of all your agents in the face of all this uniqueness?

Angela Raiford: So on a monthly basis, all the managers, we actually get together and we do a performance management monthly. So all of the CH leaders come to this meeting prepared to talk about all of their direct reports. So we'll spend an hour, sometimes less, sometimes a little bit more going over each individual because performance management is always a little bit of art, a little bit of science. So the science comes in from like, we do have core metrics that each teammate might be held to, but then there's always going to be qualitative stuff. Like, was that person working on a project that was really impactful? Were they participating in more QA or maybe they were on a few more creator phone calls with go-to-market than they were in the last month. And this meeting really helps us one, analyze trends, because when we're in this meeting, we're looking at the entire year, and we kind of do a scorecard of like green, yellow, red.

So you can really see as you're scrolling down, like what does that look like for each individual and having an open discussion about it? And because we have all of the managers in a room versus like a one to one conversation, it really allows you to get more nuance because sometimes you realize like, oh no, that your report's been reaching out to me. We've been working on this. I am so sorry, maybe that slipped their mind, maybe there is something going on that one person knew that another didn't. So that's how we assess it right now is through this monthly performance management meeting, and also we have regular touch bases as well. So we have weekly meetings where it's more of a larger KR check-in, but also if we're seeing maybe the creator team SLA is in a rocky place, why is that? Where do you need support from different teammates? We kind of try to have a lot of open touch bases about it.

And then something you said about, how do you keep agents happy and I think support it. I mean, I think number one would be having great managers. So do you have managers that are really reaching out to their direct reports in a way that is not just performance-based. If you're only touch base with someone is to say like, okay, yeah, you hit your tickets all, or you didn't hear your tickets all, what's going on, that does kind of make a sense of dread, and you're kind of like, oh, all we're going to talk about is metrics. But we try to establish relationships with our direct reports so that they have kind of that psychological safety and want to reach out to us about their aspirations within the organization or their frustrations. Maybe there's something that's frustrating that maybe we can provide more clarity on.

And I think that that type of transparency with your reports does help with happiness because as company scale, there's always so much going on and there's always going to be different focus points, right? Like my role as a director, sometimes the things that their direct reports might see as a big concern is not going to be as big a concern for me, or it might feel like something that's light years away, like what? Like oh, that's still a big issue? I didn't know. My brain was somewhere else. And so making sure that the managers are the one making sure that they're addressing those pain points or those frustrations, even if it's not solving it, right? Sometimes it's not solving it, sometimes it's just saying, "Well, here's the honest truth of what's going on there." Or it might be like, hey, that's not going to change, but let's think about all these positive things that are going well, because you always kind of want to take a look at your individual direct reports and see, are there 10 things that are driving their happiness down that are within the organization? Well, then it's probably you're going to have a different conversation than if it's like two things, right? And if those two things are in your control or not in your control.

So it's always going to be individual. We also, we do try to bring in some moments of levity, whether that's having... We started during the pandemic a CH Water Cooler channel. So our team name is Community Happiness, so CH, Community Happiness Water Cooler. And originally I was like, maybe this can be like a fake water cooler conversation channel where you just come in and kind of pretend as if you were in any of our offices. But really it's become a place for people to showcase things that are going on with them that they're excited about, or maybe that they're worried about. A lot of dog pictures go in there. So we have teammates that share their playlist of like, hey, I've been listening to this as I've been working through the queue, it's really firing me up.

So making sure that they have those spaces to communicate with each other in a way that's kind of low pressure, I think really helps. Also, making sure that they're taking advantage of any benefits that might feel hidden. So we have therapy benefits and it's like, well, do you know about those? Is that something that interests you? Making sure that you're having these touch points, and then of course off-sites, or right now, virtual offsites trying to have some moments. And I don't know if everybody does this, but when I schedule off-sites, I'm always like, this is going to overlap a workday. I want it to feel like, yeah, your workday is fun, whether it's making pasta, it's going to an escape room, or we had a Drag Queen Bingo night. Really try to make sure no, this is break up your work day, whether it's at the end of your workday or sometimes at the start, because we have teammates in Portugal, in Dublin, in Berlin, and teammates in San Francisco. So sometimes it's like, you're doing dinner at 8:00 AM. It's just like, it's fine. Just go with it. We're all here together.

So just having some moments where you can break up the work day, I think also help. And again, I'll double down on like being transparent about the things that might be going on. Again, I do really do like to look at an individual and say, "What are the 10 things that are driving your happiness down?" Well, let's be honest, we can't solve 10 things. Is this really the list? If so, let's really think hard about what that means for your career and for your overall happiness, or if there are two things, all right, let's go, this is attainable. Let's start tackling some of these things, whether it's a communication tackling or building out a new system to address those things. So I think that's obviously a lot of stuff that I just said, but there's a lot that goes into maintaining happiness, but as core, it's transparency, it's communication, it's bringing in those moments of levity and the workday.

Meredith Metsker: I love that. Yeah, it sounds like it's a great combination of those things you just mentioned, but also I'm seeing that theme in the changes that you've made to better serve your customers too. Like you mentioned, your team has a chance in the latter half of the month to think big picture, look at patterns, and be empowered to be involved in the vision for the team in the future, and then allowing them to be more specialized and kind of decide what direction they want to go. It just sounds like on the whole, all of those things are contributing to agent happiness on your team.

Angela Raiford: Yeah, I think so. I hope so.

Meredith Metsker: Cool. Well, I think that's a good spot for us to start to wrap up. But before I ask you my last question, is there anything else on this topic that you would like to add that we haven't covered yet?

Angela Raiford: I don't think so.

Meredith Metsker: Okay. All right. Then I'll ask you, my last question is kind of the big one, but just generally speaking, what advice do you have for up-and-coming support leaders?

Angela Raiford: I think the biggest thing that comes to mind for me is embedding yourself within the organization, which is kind of a tried and true thing. But for me, that doesn't just mean only working with other managers. So I think something that's common is like you become a manager, you start moving up in the leadership ranks and you're like, okay, I can only have a relationship with all the directors, and like, that's where I play now. But what I found is that there's so much value in retaining great relationships across the organization. So not just product managers, not just engineering, but finance, data science, and the ICs within the organization. I think it's really great to have a good balance of relationships with both leadership and ICs, because it really will allow you to have a good view on the organization at large, and it means you're not waiting for kind of survey data to be published among managers to really see like, oh, that's going on in engineering or oh, I had no idea that that was top of mind for the workplace team.

And you'll know, you'll start to know those things before they're happening, and maybe even you're able to prevent things from festering in your organization because you have a greater lay of the land. So that's what I would suggest is making sure that you're maintaining good relationships across the org. It doesn't always have to be leaders, it should involve a few ICs. And it doesn't mean just focusing on product and engineering, the orgs that are generally a little bit more visible, it means looking into finance organization because having a really healthy checkbook and having a good relationship with the finance VP will make you more successful. You'll be able to potentially get more resources. And data science kind of, as we talked about over the podcast today, is having the right data and being able to share it out widely is so important. And when you maintain those good relationships, you're going to be able to see things in a new light that might drive you to a better organization, a more world-class organization in my eyes. So yeah, embed yourself within the organization among ICs and leadership.

Meredith Metsker: I love that. It sounds like a really great way to not only learn about your organization and all the different facets of it, but maybe to also keep support top of mind for all of those other departments.

Angela Raiford: That's a great point actually, because I do find that whether it's a relationship I maintain or other people on the support team, you can tell when someone has a good relationship with us or has heard a lot from us, because they'll post an update in Slack or Jira or anything. They'll go, "Well, make sure you touch base with support," or like, "Hey, I actually talked to support and they've actually been seeing this trend." And so they become people that can promote your work across the organization without you having to go through every meeting and pitch at everything. Yeah, you start to get these internal promoters, which can help you be successful. That's totally right.

Meredith Metsker: Awesome. Well, cool. I think that's all the questions that I have for you, Angela. Thank you so much again, for taking the time to do this. This was a really great conversation and I think our audience is going to love it and get a ton of insights from it. So thank you.

Angela Raiford: Awesome. Thank you, Meredith. This was really fun. I appreciate you. The questions that you brought to the table, they're really exciting for me to get to talk about. So thank you so much.

Meredith Metsker: You're welcome. And if anybody listening wants to learn more from you or get in touch with you or anything, what's a good way for them to do that?

Angela Raiford: I guess the best way would be Twitter. I'm bad at LinkedIn. I do have LinkedIn. I'm getting better at using LinkedIn. So yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. But my socials, specifically Twitter, I'm not super active, not like a heavy poster, but that is a really great way to get in touch with me. We also are hiring, so if you apply on our careers page to any of those support roles or any role, you also may get the chance to interview with me. So if things sounded really exciting from an organization standpoint, our careers page is also a great way to get in touch with me in a round about way.