Episode 14: (B2B) Manny Ruiz, VP Success & Support, InfluxData

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The Customer Support Podcast

Sandeep Jain

24 episodes

4 days ago

Q&A with Customer Support Leaders from both B2B and B2C companies. Hear their perspective on challenges, opportunities and best-practices in setting up a world-class support organization. The podcast is meant for CEOs, Chief Customer Officers, Support Leaders, Support Engineers and even vendors who sell into support. Your host is Sandeep Jain. Write to us at host@customersupportpodcast.com. More info: https://CustomerSupportPodcast.com

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Episode 14: (B2B) Manny Ruiz, VP Success & Support, InfluxData

The Customer Support Podcast

1 hour 14 minutes 38 seconds

6 years ago

Episode 14: (B2B) Manny Ruiz, VP Success & Support, InfluxData

Key Insights

InfluxData - 600+ customers serving from 1-person startup to Fortune-50 companies
Support Organization - non-tiered, roughly 12 people in US and UK. Very remote-friendly. Just started building customer success team. Case volume ~400 per month. How-to / Break-Fix case split 25 / 75
Support Tech - Used to be Zendesk; migrating to Salesforce ServiceCloud. GitHub open source for docs. Discourse for Community Forums [InfluxData being an open source company promotes use of open source products]
Case split across channels - earlier >75% on email. Now shifting towards web.
Knowledge Base - Separate KB doesn’t exist instead knowledge is added to product documentation. Though this will likely change in future
Cool Idea - “Crowd sourcing for support answers” — worked very well at MobileIron (used a vendor called Directly)
What's broken in Support Tech Stack-- Integration between CRM, Case Management and Bug database is broken. One has to throw tools, consulting dollars to fix it!
Focus for next 12 months - Build Customer Success Team
Online Certification/Education - No standard tool that exists; a few open source tools though
Metrics - Success : Customer Health (primary indicator product usage), Support: CSAT
What would you do differently if you were to do this all over again - Focus on Customer Success deeply from the beginning; that way you understand deeply about customer and product-market fit.
Books:

Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup - Book 1 The Company Journey

Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup - Book 2: Change or Be Changed

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business