Live Chat with Jen Weaver
A support-operations interview show: practical QA, CSAT, staffing, and leadership tactics from the people running support teams. Hosted by Jen Weaver, sponsored by Supportman.
Every episode below is transcribed in full, so you can read it, search it, or quote it without watching. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get podcasts.
Ep 24 · 35 min · Nov 25, 2025Holidays on global teams
Kathy Fava
A Thanksgiving-week conversation with Kathy Fava about what the holidays actually feel like when you lead a support team — covering the December shutdown without making anyone give up their plans, the observances that aren't on the default calendar, holiday grief, and how to give back when the budget is zero.
Ep 23 · 37 min · Oct 28, 2025The support report
Andrew "Coach" Rios
Andrew "Coach" Rios has spent 25 years in CX and support operations, from Cisco to Fitbit. He explains why every company decision eventually shows up in support, how to build a lightweight support report that people actually act on, and who to write it for — starting with your own team.
Ep 22 · 36 min · Oct 14, 2025Leading through layoffs
Alisha Joseph · Savvy Service Pro
Alisha Joseph balances a full-time ops role, a consulting business, and caregiving. She talks about planning by assessing risk rather than deadlines, why leading everyone the same is the biggest mistake support leaders make, and how to use AI for framing without letting it flatten your voice.
Ep 21 · 46 min · Sep 30, 2025Raising energy on virtual calls
Anders Boulanger · Engagify
Anders Boulanger spent years as a close-up magician and trade show performer before founding Engagify. He explains the hierarchy of communication, why your camera energy needs to be higher than feels natural, the SAVE-U framework, and how to audit your own one-on-ones for how much you talk about the other person.
Ep 20 · 32 min · Sep 16, 2025The ten-ticket method
Stacy Justino · PetDesk
Stacy Justino spun up a QA program at PetDesk in a few weeks with no QA team and no QA software. Ten interactions a month across two reviews, tickets picked random-recent-representative with a Google Sheets trick, and a four-criteria rubric — plus the story of a bonus system that quietly destroyed the incentive it was meant to create.
Ep 19 · 31 min · Sep 2, 2025Prevention-first QA
Chloé Koers-Bourrat · Smartly
Chloé Koers-Bourrat took a fast-growing ad tech support team from a stuck 97% CSAT past 98%, largely by noticing that the answers were correct but the delivery was cold. She covers the escalation rebuild, the shift from 120 reviews a week to 20, and what happened after Klaus was acquired.
Ep 18 · 29 min · Aug 19, 2025Stop hoarding QA
Amanda Drws
Amanda Drws treats QA as a calming force rather than a compliance drill. She argues for reviewing under 10% of tickets, weighting a stray typo lightly and a systemic error heavily, and pushing what QA finds out to marketing, training, and product — including a trend that produced a 500-person webinar.
Ep 17 · 38 min · Aug 5, 2025Leading AI, not following it
Jen McCorkle
Jen McCorkle has spent nearly 30 years in data and analytics. She untangles the AI acronyms for support leaders, explains why sentiment analysis misreads the word "cancel", and lays out the governance checklist she would run before scaling any AI tool into a support org.
Ep 16 · 48 min · Jul 22, 2025Let go of the Legos
Elyse Mankin
Moving from individual contributor to support leader broke Elyse Mankin's time management. She rebuilt it around a yearly-to-daily planning cadence, the rule of three, and the Eisenhower matrix — and had to learn that keeping every task was taking growth opportunities away from her team.
Ep 15 · 41 min · Jul 8, 2025What makes people stay
Alex Plasket · Paytient
Alex Plasket builds support teams people don't want to leave. He explains why he deliberately spends more time on new hires rather than less, his problem versus concern theory for hearing what a customer is actually worried about, and how he coaches from real conversations instead of training modules.
Ep 14 · 30 min · Jun 24, 2025AI isn't plug and play
Craig Stoss · Kodif
Craig Stoss returns to talk about actually using support data. He covers connecting the half-dozen systems your data already lives in, what current AI can and cannot filter, the difference between searching for what you know and surfacing what you don't, and a crawl-walk-run approach to adopting it.
Ep 13 · 38 min · Jun 10, 2025Metrics to track or toss
Craig Stoss · Kodif
Craig Stoss argues that most support data is not worth keeping, most migrations are not worth doing, and capacity planning is far simpler than teams make it. He walks through occupancy, shrinkage, and the handful of metrics that actually change business decisions.
Ep 12 · 40 min · May 27, 2025Dashboards that get used
Mario Guisado · Global Relay
Answering a listener question, Mario Guisado gives a six-step framework for turning support data into influence — pick one or two keystone metrics, find the supporting data, pressure test whether you can actually move it, and only then build the dashboard.
Ep 11 · 45 min · May 13, 2025From team lead to head of support
Idit Matas · Firebolt
Idit Matas led global technical support at Firebolt and grew from team lead to senior manager at Datadog. She lays out the first three jobs of a new head of support — global coverage that does not burn people out, escalation playbooks engineering will actually thank you for, and one strategic project tied to revenue.
Ep 10 · 43 min · Apr 22, 2025Psychological safety as a system
Alex Armstead · Clever
Alex Armstead went from support agent to head of support to business operations at Clever over nearly a decade. He treats psychological safety as an operating system rather than a vibe — peer QA people graduate out of, anonymous surveys with real action plans, monthly Q&As, and postmortems held while the pain is still acute.
Ep 9 · 40 min · Apr 15, 2025Premier support that pays for itself
Miles Goldstein
Miles Goldstein has built premium support programs at several B2B SaaS companies, most recently running mission-critical support for 35 global enterprise accounts worth over $200m in ARR at 98% CSAT. He breaks the program into four steps and is specific about the trade-offs at each one.
Ep 8 · 40 min · Apr 1, 2025Classes instead of demos
Alison Groves · Help Scout
Alison Groves once did eight one-to-one demos in a single day and decided it would never scale. She now runs Help Scout's live customer classes, which convert at close to 60% and are the company's second biggest conversion lever. She walks through the eight steps, the exact stack, and why every class is scripted.
Ep 7 · 46 min · Mar 18, 2025The tone document
Priscilla Brooke · Buzzsprout
When Buzzsprout's support team grew past two people, tone started to drift. Priscilla Brooke wrote a tone document that starts from company values, defines four things a customer should feel, and turns each into concrete characteristics with example phrasing. It later became the basis of their QA rubric.
Ep 6 · 40 min · Mar 4, 2025Agile sprints for CX
Steph Hardy · Guru
Steph Hardy borrowed the sprint framework from engineering and reshaped it for a customer solutions team at Guru. Logging what the team actually spent time on surfaced themes nobody had seen, which turned into customer workshops — and feature adoption climbed measurably after each one.
Ep 5 · 34 min · Feb 19, 2025From zero to scalable
Brittany Ferguson
Brittany Ferguson has repeatedly walked in as the first and only support hire and built the function from nothing. She lays out the seven-step sequence she follows — absorb, prepare to scale, build feedback loops, automate, prove revenue value, maintain documentation, build a network — and the specific decisions that make each one survive growth.
Ep 4 · 39 min · Feb 4, 2025Automate everything
Rob Dwyer · Happitu / Customer Direct
Rob Dwyer automated new-hire onboarding, training logistics, and QA at a contact center using nothing but the Microsoft tools his company already owned. He explains how VBA turned a full day of setup per class into about 30 minutes, and where the line sits between worth automating and not.
Ep 3 · 32 min · Jan 21, 2025When customers get personal
Conor Pendergrast · CustomerSuccess.cx
Expensify's public stances on political and social issues sent waves of hostile replies into the support queue. Conor Pendergrast built the process that routed them away from frontline agents and onto the senior leadership team that had made the decisions — automatic keyword escalation, a manual tap-out, and the boundary that decides which conversations qualify.
Ep 2 · 27 min · Jan 7, 2025Effortless product launches
Ashley Gutierrez Siler · YNAB
Ashley Gutierrez Siler is a product support liaison at YNAB — half her week in the queue, half embedded with product teams. She walks through the Asana template her team uses to get every support specialist ready before a feature flag is switched on, and the rubric that decides how much preparation a release actually needs.
Ep 1 · 18 min · Dec 17, 2024AI as your second brain
Meg Palazzolo · Stealth-mode startup
Meg Palazzolo built a full customer journey map in 15 minutes by talking a problem through with Claude instead of researching it. She explains how she prompts, how she iterates when the first output is wrong, and why the map mattered most as a communication tool for product and engineering.