3 Reasons You Need Support Ops to Scale and How to Really Build It with Stripe and Assembled

Hi everyone. Good morning. My name is Jen and I run sales and customer success here at Assemble. We help fast growing teams scale their support by providing forecasting for their volume and their headcount. We help them with their scheduling and improving agent productivity. We're lucky to partner with some of the most progressive support organizations in the world, like companies like Stripe. Notion, Harry's and Looker all use Assemble. Now. Before we get into this talk, I just wanted to get a sense from the room how many of you all have heard about Support Ops before signing up for this talk. That's half heard of it. Yes. Okay, that's good. Like, we'll definitely want to chat about this afterwards, but one of the things that we've heard from other folks is when we talk about Support Ops, they're not sure what exactly it is. And it's true. It's not as established as something like sales Ops or marketing ops or revenue ops. And that's something that we're hoping to change because the best support organizations in the world invest in this early. And speaking of the best organizations, we have Bob, head of operations from Stripe, joining us today to share his early journey in starting out Support Ops and in transforming Stripe's customer support. And in case you don't know what Stripe is, Stripe is building the payments infrastructure of the Internet. Millions of businesses around the world, ranging from startups to Fortune 500, use Stripe software and API to accept payments, send out payouts, and also manage their businesses online. And Bob actually joined stripe in 2015 to start support operations and he was promoted to run all of operations in 2017. And now he looks after all of operations. And full disclosure, I actually worked at Stripe before. Bob was my manager there and I learned everything I know about support and Support Ops from him. So I'm really excited to have this session to interview him and ask him more about Support Ops. Thanks for having us today, Bob.

Thanks so much for having me and looking forward to chat.

Yeah. So I guess the first question I have is how does Stripe think about support?

Yeah, I mean, from the kind of very early days of Stripe, right. Like when the product wasn't even kind of fully fleshed out and there was just a few employees, the customer experience was always a huge priority. And, and there's all kinds of stories of our founders actually kind of going to the physical location of the first users of Stripe to help them with their integration and then have a set up like 24, seven pagers to offer support and advise them on a lot more than just kind of Stripe in general, but, like, give them advice on their website or anything else that might be helpful. And so it's been ingrained in our culture. And that's not only the case, because it, you know, it's kind of like started like that from. From our founders. It also makes a really good kind of business sense for Stripe. Right. Like, for those of you are familiar with Stripe, right. Like our core business model, we obviously take kind of a percentage of the. Of the payment volume that is handled through Stripe, and therefore, our incentives are really well aligned with our customers. Because if, if they are growing their business on Stripe, like, Stripe will grow with them. Right. And if you look at some of our largest customers, they actually started when they were quite small. They started on Stripe when they were quite small, and they've really grown on Stripe ever since. So given that, in that light, it's kind of from both from a cultural perspective as well, from a pure business model perspective, it's an area that we care a lot about and that we're really willing to invest in. And that was already the case when I joined Stripe and even before I did, and that's certainly still the case today.

So let's kind of go back to the circumstances that led to the creation of support ops. Like, what was the situation at Stripe like back then and how did this team form?

Yeah. So for, you know, I kind of mentioned, like, the very early days where, you know, everybody was doing support, but that was actually for quite a while, everybody at the company, irrespective of their focus, whether they were engineers or in business development or anything else, they were supporting our customers. And it was a shared expectation for the whole company. Now, there's a lot of benefits to that, as you can imagine. It makes sure that everyone continues to understand the product really well. Everyone is aware of pain points with the product. This is direct connection with customers. But as you can imagine, it also has, like, downsides as, like, you know, it's nobody's day job, and because of that, it's hard to kind of plan for how many people are going to need and things like that. So kind of that model, we start to outgrow that kind of. Before I joined, so by the time that I joined the company, there was already a small support team kind of, you know, who really tasks to support our customers. But what didn't really exist was anything else. Right. So we had, like, a group of people who were spending their whole day supporting customers and talking to customers and trying to help them with their issues. But what we realized was that, you know, they were actually so busy because Stripe was obviously going through a lot of growth and you know, our customer base was expanding, that it was hard to combine that active day to day support with developing the strategy of support and the programs of the support model. And that's really where the need for something like support ops became very apparent. Because if everybody was doing support directly, then nobody else was actually planning for what was needed in the future.

And I want to just like rewind a little bit to something you had mentioned, like how like back in the early days where support was like everyone's job. I remember like digging this up in Twitter and Christina Cordova, one of the early Stripes, had actually tweeted about this where she had talked about how like seven years ago, like Stripe had like this crazy support ticket backlog and they scheduled like a hackathon at Patrick and John's house and like all the employees of Stripe back then like went there and like worked through it over the weekend. And I think she even posted this photo of just like everyone there with their laptops and like answering support tickets.

Right?

Yeah, Kind of like going back. Go for it, Bob. Oh, I was going to say like so kind of like it sounds like essentially, basically the volume and the growth at Stripe was growing a lot. And the team, you had like a dedicated support team, but then, you know, they're the people responding to customers and they didn't have the bandwidth necessarily to think through like, how do we exactly like scale support and build the processes and the things that you had in place. So I guess when you were. Well, do you remember like the moment when you were like asked to kind of like build the support Ops? Because I think you were joining Stripe in like a slightly different role still in the support organization, but then your role suddenly expanded and shifted. Can you share a little bit more about that one?

Sure, yeah. I was actually like kind of initially focusing mostly on like partner management, working with some of the partners that Stripe is using. And there was kind of like a company wide project being kicked off around our strategy where product was involved. And you know, we had a small kind of central biz ops team that was helping out with that. But yeah, I mean, I was actually like in the San Francisco office, the office that we had at the time in the pioneer of office in the Mission. Right. And Claire, who is our CEO and still actually my boss, she. Yeah, she. We were in like a meeting, we're discussing kind of the forecast and metrics, et cetera. And like she pulled me Aside at the end and saying like, can you help? Right. Can you do some planning in terms of looking beyond what's kind of in the next few weeks, but really help with forecasting what we're going to need, let's say a few months from now and beyond. And I think that's kind of muscled what hadn't been built yet at stripe, right. So we were quite reactive in terms of volume growth and user growth. And I think the team did a really good job of keeping up with that growth over the years. But it was clear that we were, you know, as part of our growing pains, we're getting to a stage where we really had to be a lot more proactive. And you know, that's. I actually do remember like the exact conversation that happened there of like, can you help build what is pretty much the, you know, what we're calling support ops here?

So how did you build it out? Like, how did you think about what types of functions or what roles like was needed in support Ops?

Yeah, I mean there's obviously a few steps there. I think there were a couple of immediate problems that were very clear and specifically about capacity and planning. Right. So the kind of first thing that we started to do was to really focus on forecasting our support volumes based on historical trends and seasonality user growth and formulate things like contact rate. If you know how many users we have and you know how often each or like let's say 100 users contact you, you can kind of extrapolate like what a support volume forecast would look like if you're hurting certain user growth targets. So forecasting was one. The other thing was success metrics, right? Like we at the time didn't really have good success metrics. Like we, I think we actually delivered good support, but we weren't able to prove that we did. Right. Like it was a lot of anecdotal feedback. Like we didn't, you know, send our customers a CSAT survey. We didn't really have a lot of operating metrics around how fast we responded or what the turnaround time was or how many people it took to resolve issues, et cetera. So, you know, in addition to forecasting and capacity planning, one big priority was to come up with better metrics and to actually set a baseline for like, well, how well are we doing today? And like, what does success actually look like? Right? Like where do we want to go to and what would be needed there? So reporting and metrics became a kind of a fast follow second area. And then in addition to that like, yeah, there are a lot of. Sorry, go ahead, Jen.

Oh, I was just going to say just kind of like pause on that one. I think this helps me see the parallel with sales, with sales ops. Usually like the first sales ops hire is someone you have who like partners with like the head of sales and like just understanding metrics. Right. Like what does the funnel look like? Like really understand the levers on like what you measure. So it sounds, it's like pretty interesting that like on the support ops side, like that investment on metrics and like forecasting and planning, which is like the, the most critical step first. But continue in terms of like, what were the other things that you like added in building out this team?

Sure, yes. So I mentioned forecasting, I mentioned kind of metrics and reporting. Other areas of focus were tooling. So we actually did like a migration to a different CRM at the time, which gave us a lot more out of the box functionality which was desperately needed. And then knowledge, training and quality were other areas where we felt really under invested. Right. Like for those of you familiar with stripe, like it's, it's quite complex in the sense that we, you know, we, we offer an API to our users and it's, it's really just kind of like a box of Legos and everybody can build what they want with it and then if they run into issues, right, like we're there to help. So like there's kind of endless permutations almost that we have to support. So getting really good internal documentation and training involved in each of these different areas was another important area.

And so I guess as you think about the hires that you made, I noticed that you mostly hired for people and I guess it's like using my own knowledge in terms of what happened then. But most of them were specialists you had. Toby was very focused on analytics, Nick on workforce management. How do you think about the hiring profile in terms of building out support operations?

Yeah, I think it's kind of to your earlier point that I guess the big takeaway from my experience is this is building out support ops should be its own kind of intentional strategy. Right. And it's additional to building out your support team in terms of like the kind of core group of people who are talking to your customers every day. And why thinking about those two, they're obviously interrelated, but like why thinking of them as two different problems to solve is important is because the people who do well in either group might actually be, you know, have a different skill set or have a different background. Right. And I think a lot of companies, they, you know, they might hire really good customer facing people for the support teams who, you know, know the product, they're very empathetic, they can work with customers. And you know, that profile sounds like great for support team, right. But that's not always the skill set that you need for, you know, things like forecasting, capacity planning, metric development, et cetera. Right. So I think the other thing that many companies do is then kind of like expecting the team managers of the support team to do all of that work. Right. So like the members are working with customers and then like, well, the team managers can do kind of all the other planning. But similarly the team managers might be folks who have been promoted from support ICs into management roles or they are maybe very strong managers, but maybe don't really have the skill set in any of these deep areas. So I think what we try to do is to actually accept that hey, we're going to need different profile skill sets for people to do this. And you can get quite far with the kind of generalist startup profile.

Who.

Can solve a lot of different problems, who are analytical, high horsepower, et cetera. And generally there's quite a few of those type of people at startups. But the problem with that is that they might work on one of these problems for a few months and then they're eager to move off to the next thing. And for instance, with forecasting, that's something that we started six years ago, but we're still working on. It's really an ongoing problem and these are not one off things that you need to do. So that's I think where we said for some of these areas, we early on want to bring in experts who have done this before, who are interested and eager to actually do this for longer periods of time and not just as one off projects and who can really build a foundation for the next phase of growth.

Yeah, it reminds me of that distinction we made at stripe. Like the difference between a project and a program writing people confuse the two where project is one off, but a program requires like a dedicated owner to like maintain it and actually build on it. I guess the last question I have because I know we're running close on time is like, it sounds like an amazing story, like okay, crazy ticket backlog, form support op Stripe support is like really good now. But I'm sure there were, you know, mistakes or like snappings along the way. And so if you had to do this again, what are some like learnings that you had or what Would you do differently?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say that before I kind of answer the mistakes we made or things we do differently. One of my favorite operating principles that we have at Stripe is we haven't won yet. And we certainly feel like that every day. So it's obviously great to hear when our customers are very happy with their support interactions. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of customers out there that get stuck and that need more help. And we feel this huge responsibility because we handle companies payments right. And like there's hardly anything they're going to care more about. So that's really why it's so important to us in terms of things we look, I wish we would have done earlier. One of the things is tying support interactions back to product feedback is an area where, you know, we for a very long time did so, but did very kind of custom analyses and you know, deep dive one off deep dives and let's label a bunch of support cases and you know, like find out kind of what's, what's going on. It's only been kind of in the last two years where we really tried to solve this at the systems level. So to have, you know, a consistent taxonomy of products and issues and make sure that every sport case is categorized appropriately so we can really report on how much users are contacting us about which issue, like what are the pain points, etc. So that's probably an area where I would recommend companies to start very early on.

So I know we're running close to time and I want to make sure we get some of the questions from the audience. Actually we have one from Jason Lumpkin. What are the top three KPIs for support team? This is your favorite question, Bob, like you've drilled this into like everyone in like the support or. That's right.

Well, I actually think it really depends on the company strategy first of all. Right, so like it's dangerous to kind of give this one answer that will work for everybody. And for some companies the customer experience is going to be more important than for others. Right. Like the cost constraints are going to be tighter for some companies than for others. But in general, kind of like with those caveats, I would say that you want to measure how good is the customer experience. There's no better way to kind of measuring that than to ask your customers how happy they are with their experience. And therefore you can choose csat, you can choose nps, you can choose a variety of those. But I think that's most important is that you actually ask your customers how, how happy they are with the experience. And then on the other side, you want to have some type of objective internal bar on how quick should we get back to issues and how fast do we turn around issues. So a combination of first response sla, resolution SLA is going to be really important. And then maybe lastly, you want to make sure you're thinking about your overall efficiency. So companies that are going through a lot of growth, they can very quickly, quickly kind of explode in terms of the operational needs. And looking at things like the contact rate, for instance, that I mentioned of like how many cases do like 100 active users of your product create every week, right. And like over a long period of time, you'll likely want to bring that down because it gives you evidence that you're addressing recurring issues in the product, which is, which is obviously better than like building out larger support teams to answer that. And I think that's the contact rate is probably the more important one, right? Like from a long term efficiency perspective, from a short term efficiency perspective, you, you can look at things like productivity, right? Like how many cases do people handle per hour, per hour or per week. But I actually think that contact rate is the more important one.

So just like Summarize, the top three KPIs are. The first one is like CSAT, getting like measuring it from directly from the customers. The second one would be around like sla, which is like your responsiveness, like first response SLA and resolution sla. And the third one, a metric around efficiency. And the one that you think actually is something like tracking like contact rates and being able to like reduce that over time. Yeah, so I just wanted to close out with just like some of the takeaways from the session. So these are pretty much like the summary of like the things that Bob and I had like talked about, which is like one, like investing early in support ops to help your support team scale. Two is like start with getting your metrics right because you can't improve until you start measuring and having a baseline. Three, don't expect the people supporting your customers to be the ones to build your operations because the hiring profile for support ops would be like hiring people who are like analytical, who are builders, who have like expertise, which would be slightly different profile from like the folks that you would hire to be supporting your customers. Anything else you want to add, Bob?

I think those capture it. Obviously every journey, every company has their own journey. And the things we've gone through with Stripe might not apply to everybody listening, but I do think that these takeaways are hopefully useful and something to think about as each of you are building out your teams. I guess the only other thing is if any of you have follow up questions, I'm bobstripe.com so always interested to connect.

All right. And I think that's a wrap. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Jen and Bob. You guys did terrific for the questions we didn't get answered. I will shoot them over to you guys if you want to address them later. But I really appreciate your time and we're so glad to have you. Thank you for being part of Sastor build.

Thanks so much for having us.

Thank you, Caitlin. Have a good one, guys. Talk to you later.