The support report

Andrew Rios All company decisions manifest themselves in support.

It's clinical, but the support report and the leader go hand in hand, because that's the truth of what's happening in the organization.

Jen Weaver Hey support leaders, Jen Weaver here. Welcome to another episode of Live Chat with Jen Weaver.

Today I'm so excited to share with you Andrew "Coach" Rios, a seasoned, high-energy customer experience and support operations leader with more than 25 years of experience at startups, scale-ups, and Fortune 100s. He even worked at Fitbit, which is pretty cool. He's also the coach behind high-performing support teams and world-class customer programs, where he does some consulting.

In our chat, Andrew shares a masterclass in how to build a support report that actually works — that's aligned with business strategy, that's self-serving for the customer team, which is important, that gets buy-in from your team, and helps you grow. We talk about what to include, how to roll out the report, and the biggest mistakes to avoid along the way.

I could go on and on, but honestly my favorite thing about this episode is just the inspirational positive energy that Rios brings to everything he does.

Before we get started though, our QA tool Supportman is what makes this podcast possible. Supportman sends real-time QA from Intercom to Slack with daily threads, weekly charts, and done-for-you AI-powered conversation evaluations. It makes it so much easier to QA Intercom conversations right where your team is already spending their day, in Slack.

All right, on to today's episode.

I'm here with Coach Rios. I just want to start out with this "Coach" name. I know you use that to bridge your worlds. Can you tell me how you came upon that and what it means to you?

Andrew From the youth coach perspective, I coach the soccer kids and I coach the youth flag football, and really enjoy it. Keeps me busy.

And the bridge there is, as I would talk to support leaders, work with support leaders, work with my teams out there, I would start talking to them in coach vernacular — which I always did, I'm a sports guy. I'd start talking about playbooks, and hey, let's run this play, and sometimes you have to audible. So they started just coming together.

And then what I really started realizing — and this is after, you know, we all have to be vulnerable and talk about growth, we're always growing — after 22, 23 years of leading teams and grown adults, I started realizing after the last few years that I think I'm becoming a better leader leading these kids, and leading my teams now.

People started calling me Rios a long time ago. Then it became Coach Rios, and now people just call me Coach Rios. And I joke around with people going, you know, my ultimate goal is that five years from now I just want to be a symbol.

Jen That's fantastic, I love it. It makes it really accessible to catch on to your personal brand and who you are, and to immediately have something to connect over.

As a support leader, sometimes we feel siloed and don't really know how other support leaders manage their week, or what their week is even like in terms of meetings and tasks. Can you give us a picture into a week in the life of Coach Rios?

Andrew Let's start a little Sunday evening. Sunday evening I'll take a glance — just a glance — at any messages in our team's chats and channels. Anything in there that might need my attention right away, because I'm starting to plot the Monday.

Monday for me, when I wake up, the first thing I like to do — besides have my water, get some coffee — is read. Just read a fun book. Something non-work related, non-professional-development related. Right now I'm reading a great book about a ship, the Belgica, that went to the Arctic for the first time. Great author, great book. So I start my day with that, at least 10, 15 minutes.

And then there we go, we open up the laptop and look at the calendar for the week, and just start thinking — what do I need to move this week? What's priority? Those are the first things I'm looking at.

Customer escalations — do I have any from over the weekend? What team member one-on-ones do I have? And then I'm going to inventory my weekly agenda for my staff meeting. Do I need to put anything on there right now?

So Monday morning is really about setting the week in motion, prioritizing and planning.

And then I have a stand-up with my installation team. We install fiber here in Orange County. So a stand-up to talk about the previous week's accomplishments, what our goals are this week, where we're allocating our resources.

That's Monday morning — checking in with everybody, pinging my remote folks, how's everybody doing, how'd the weekend go, what are the goals for the week.

And then I take a little break. I'll walk outside, walk around for a bit. Maybe call my mom, maybe try to do something that touches the personal network. Maybe a quick mentor session with someone, maybe a chat with a support leader, maybe a chat with one of my mentors, because I'm looking for some help, for some guidance.

Then lunchtime comes in on the Monday, and that's where it really starts to hit. Everybody's now dialed in, and the priorities start coming my way. Okay, support, we've got this referral program going out this week — are we ready for this? Or how about these tickets? We're working through some IT changes right now too.

So that's how the Monday works. It's really just catching up, setting the stage, making sure everybody on the team knows the direction and where we want to end the week.

And then Tuesday — here we go, meetings. Starting statuses with the marketing team. A lot of asynchronous meetings. I push a lot for "does it have to be a meeting, or can we just talk in Teams on this?" I'm a big proponent of that. So I'm navigating that Mondays and Tuesdays, going — oh, they want to talk on Thursday in the room, but that feels like something we can start doing right now and work our way through.

Right now it's the middle of the year, so the middle of the week takes a different shape. For example, this week I have the whole team in town, and we've been working the last six weeks on some training. What we call back-to-basics training. We've been together for a year and a half now — let's all come together and do some back-to-basics training in some areas where we need to keep getting better, some areas we need to keep getting great on, and some areas we need to improve and unify on for how we want to end the rest of the year.

Then afterwards, I try to get a run in at least three times a week when I'm not in training. I also try to get a coffee chat in once or twice, either on a walk-and-talk. I love a good "let's put our earbuds on and let's just talk." Banter, challenges you have this week.

Jen I need to do that. That's a great idea.

Andrew Fifteen, twenty minutes. And I always tell people it's just one walk around the building, and I get that sun, that conversation in.

So midweek I like to do that. I like to spend 15, 20 minutes during my lunch break usually just reading something professional-development-wise.

And then I like to end the week looking back at what we accomplished. Either me as a leader building my weekly report, or with the teams. I alternate my one-on-ones with my team members, and those are usually at the end of the week, Thursday, Friday, so we can talk about how the week went, build some things into the weekend, and then plan for next week.

So it's a good little cycle.

Jen I don't know quite how to segue into your topic, but I know we're talking about support reports. You mentioned to me earlier that all company decisions manifest themselves in support. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Andrew A lot of teams within the company are making decisions that impact the customer. Whether it's a promotional email, an outbound outreach, a process change internally, a change from one widget to another, a delay in shipping, a move from one partner to another, we dropped our license count on this tool so now this is going to be limited.

They're all manifested in support somehow, some way, by way of the customer coming in asking a question. Hey, what happened? How come I can't do this any more? Why isn't anybody answering my phone call any more? What happened to this feature? Why did billing all of a sudden go up?

So it's always important — now it's critical — that the support report and the leader go hand in hand, because that's the truth of what's happening in the organization.

The other thing I usually sandwich with that phrase is: if you want to know how your product is doing, how your employees are feeling, what your customers think — just go talk to your support team. They're going to say it with passion and emotion, first of all. But what you're going to hear, when you peel back what's being said, is the challenges that they're facing.

That's what I mean by — oh, that decision we made six months ago is rippling and affecting there, and that's why their call volume has stayed the same and hasn't decreased as we thought it would. Or, we decided to roll out a program but we actually don't have a way to execute it. Well, guess where that's going to get solved and identified? In the support team.

How many times do we hear our team say, I didn't know about that? I didn't hear about that? Well, this is brand new to us?

So I always say to support leaders — one of my favorite principles I use with teams is: what are the facts, what do they mean, and what are we going to do about it?

The support report is where you show the facts. And I always say it in a very simple way. Here's who contacted us. Here's why they contacted us — and the why is that important part. Was that self-induced, or was that unknown? And then here's what we did about it.

And then more importantly, is there something we can do to mitigate it? Self-help articles, better marketing, improved communication on the website, a message in the phone system. Maybe that is our first opportunity to implement some automation. There we go, we found something.

So that's why I say the support report yields so much information.

One place I used to work at, one of the interesting pieces of data the very first time that we put a report together was — wow, for every product we install, we send back a technician one in two times. Is that what we want?

I always tell people as a support leader, you don't want an activation, two of them, and then one return call or one RMA or one defect. Something's not right there, we should look into that.

It's the truth of how you're servicing the customer, how you're supporting the customer, what they're saying and what they're not saying. And then the devil's going to be in the details too — why don't we see that? Maybe we're not capturing it. Maybe it's not as big a deal as we thought.

And it also helps you make decisions for staffing and forecasting down the road.

Jen That makes perfect sense. Let's start with — how did this start? What was the genesis of you beginning to do a support report?

Andrew I was a program manager at Cisco, responsible for new product introductions in the consumer division. They had just acquired Linksys.

I was working with the engineering team and the developers of the hardware and the software. And they would always tell me, well, no one's going to call for that. We're going to leave the channel locked at this number. We're going to have this setup wizard be set up like this — because the real answer was, that's how the ODM or OEM gave it to us, and we're not going to develop anything outside of that. So here we go.

And I had nothing to go back to them on except for the feedback from my team members internally.

And then when I looked at our CRM system — if anybody remembers that system made 20 years ago — it didn't pull out a report of any sort. And we didn't even capture information that helped me, as the program manager, understand how the new product was performing after launch. It was just call close, call close.

So it started with: I need this report, but the inputs for it aren't there. So I need to work with the teams to redesign how we capture that support case. That was the start of it, so that I could just get the report that said, here's how many people contacted us for this new product in this time period, and why.

I only wanted to answer a very simple question: did they call us for setup help, or did they call us for post-installation help?

And there was even a bigger play for that, because it's a chess game. A year from now we wanted to start selling services out of our call center as well. In order to do that, you had to start building the scope of support.

So everything came from — wow, we don't have this. But even to get there, I've got to start here.

It was, I just want to know, did they call us for install or post-install? Okay, great, it was for install — why? Because that's what I want to take back to development for our next generation of routers, the dual-band routers. We were also going into a whole other market space with whole-home audio and video on your TV. Early innovations, and that was going to change our consumer type too. So I needed to be able to report on that.

Jen So you had these things coming in the future that you were trying to prepare for, but you also had decisions being made based on data you weren't able to influence. And so you really wanted to have an influence, and also be prepared for the future.

Andrew Absolutely. And the key there was, I also had to go to a meeting where I had to present: this is the anticipated contact-to-ship ratio we expect.

I had no idea. So the first meeting I went to, I remember sitting there with all these big wigs, and I'm just a young guy, early in my 20s, going — uh, I don't know, 25%? One in four?

And they're like, uh, Andrew, what makes you say that? I'm just taking a shot in the dark. But in six months we're going to have our first — and they respected that answer, because they knew.

And then, lucky, our BPO also supported our competitor. So I was able to ask them, hey, can you just give me a little insight on what they see? Just give me a number so I can leverage that. And that's when they gave me the 30%. And I was like, well, I'll make it 25.

Jen Corporate espionage, I love it.

So this report you started running to influence some decisions and deal with the future. I know it's probably evolved since you started it — at this point, what do you feel are the essential components to include?

Andrew Your volume. What kind of volume are you seeing, and what does it look like from an arrival pattern perspective? Right there, just for capacity planning — understand you have the right staffing in place. And then seasonality, so you can start to track that. That's the very first thing.

The type of customers who are calling you. Small business, medium, large business, residential, whatever it might be in your area.

And then why they contacted you. And that's not the 27 trees, three levels deep. No — they called you for installation help. They called you for customer service help. They called you for technical support.

And then, how did you resolve that?

Those main things right there give you a good insight into what you're seeing, and then you can dig down even more.

The other thing is, as you're doing that, you're doing it as a whole — but don't forget to be able to separate it by the individual. Because you also want to be able to measure the team. Is everybody balancing out? Are we seeing it the same way? Are some people working different cases than others?

I always bring it back to — remember when you're writing a paragraph back in elementary school? Who, what, when, where, why. And then what happens next. So it's also that.

The essential part is — and I give a shout-out to when I was at Fitbit — preparing a report, the product manager took me for a walk in San Francisco. Great guy, shout-out Raffi.

He took me and he goes, "Andrew, great report. Great data. I don't know what to do with it, though. What am I supposed to do with it?"

Good thing we were walking, because I was just going — oh. Okay, you don't know what to do with it.

And then he felt the pause. And it was one of those career moments. He's like, "As a product manager, I understood what you were saying, but there was no action for me. You didn't specifically give me a call to action, or tell me what to go work on, or tell me the opportunity to investigate."

And so he really helped me with that. That changed the momentum there.

So everything you present, you have to answer the question to yourself: why do they care? Why does the finance person care? Why does the engineering director care?

And if you can't answer that, that's okay — have a reason why you can't answer it. This is a one-time thing, I just want to show you this, we'll monitor it, we'll see if something's there, we're not quite sure. The next report we should hopefully have a little bit more insight into what that means.

And start small. I always say this too: progress over polish.

Jen That makes sense. Progress meaning, if you start something small and it's not super robust and not super polished, but has some core information, then you can move forward from there and iterate.

Andrew Exactly.

Jen You mentioned the product manager and you mentioned finance. So who is the audience for this support report?

Andrew The first consumer of that report is the team.

That's their work. And I say that because we have a slide in the training we're giving tomorrow about this, which is: take pride in your work. This is our scorecard. This is how we're servicing the customer.

So that's the very first audience. That lets them know the meaning of their work, the impact of their work, what their work is. Things to celebrate, all that.

Then, your boss. Because you've got to let him or her know, this is what we're working on. Here are our priorities based on what you've given me and based on what I'm seeing in the field.

Then I will say the organization is fourth — the whole company. Because I'm a big believer in sharing with the whole company. Nothing secretive in there.

But third is always going to be the partner closest to you, the stakeholder within the organization closest to you. In a previous life it was the head of product. In another life it was the head of engineering. In another life it was the finance person, because I was at an e-commerce company.

So those are your four that you're building that report for. And you don't have to build it in that order — just build it piece by piece for all of them, so each consumer of your report has you thinking of them.

And then last but not least: ask questions. Ask questions of people.

Jen We talked about the audience, and earlier you mentioned who, what, when, where, why, and what's next. What if you don't necessarily have answers to those right away?

Andrew The next question is, why don't we? And how do we?

Peel that onion back a little bit more and go — okay, we don't have the facts. What does that mean? That means we don't have the facts. Why don't we? Is it because the data isn't there in the tool? Is it because we're not capturing it? Is it because we captured it incorrectly? Is it because we didn't know we needed it?

And then once you get there, solve it.

And I'll share a little personal thing here. Earlier in my career — and this is the coach in me, the competitor in me — I took it real personal when I didn't have an answer to a question. I tried to fake it till I made it.

I go back to my director at Cisco, an early mentor of mine, who would tell me in meetings, after we'd watch him present and try to navigate it like a salesperson — he's like, don't do that. If you don't have an answer, tell them.

He gave me this piece of advice that I think helped me in my personal life too, and as a leader: hey man, don't take it personal. If you don't have an answer, tell them. The fastest way out of a disagreement, an argument, a weird unknown situation like that is, "I don't know, but I'll get back to you."

And then that's where he introduced another concept to me, which I still carry with me to this day: I know, I don't know, I can't tell you.

As a leader, you're going to get three things from me any time we have a conversation. I know the answer to the question you're in here for, and it is X. I don't know the answer — you can go talk to this person to get it, or let me go get it for you. Or, I can't tell you.

That last one comes with trust. With certain questions — how's the company doing? Are we going out of business? Are we going to have reductions in force? Maybe I have an insight into that, but I can't tell you that. And you've got to respect that.

So if you don't have an answer — hey, we don't have that, great call-out, we're going to work on that and we'll be back. The most important thing is to close that loop, though. Close it and build from it.

Jen I know this isn't purely the topic that we intended to talk about, but this is really a hot button. That "I can't tell you," especially for frontline specialists — there are a lot of those situations where support leaders need to keep things closer. If we're going to be implementing something in a few months, we can't talk about it yet, just because we don't want to create noise and drama. Or someone was fired, and it's not appropriate for us to say why or what happened. That creates a lot of tension and stress for frontline support specialists.

Do you have tips for leaders on how to handle that?

Andrew First is listen. Listen more than you think you ever have before.

Because in those situations where a co-worker is wondering why they're still here but their other friends and co-workers are not — survivor guilt, sometimes they call it — let them vent. Let them say everything.

And this is going to be a little counter: that's probably not the best opportunity to do a lot of coaching. It's a lot of just listening. A lot of leadership by feeling, by connecting more. And just letting them go.

And then really thinking about what you can say that will help the individual through those feelings.

In some cases it could be — and I'll use one with changing names, using no names — hey, I picked you to remain here, because I believe in you. And you're going to be one that's going to carry us through this next evolution of our company.

And that's actually — I had to use that phrase. As a coach, it's my responsibility at any time to put the best players in the best position on the field or court to be successful and win.

At the end of the day, that's why I like Coach. Because there's coach, director, VP, owner — I kind of like that level right here. Coach.

Jen That's a good answer. It's a real answer.

Andrew I remember it like it was yesterday, doing it from this garage just like this. Just looking at the individual.

Jen You saw someone that you looked up to, and you're like, how did he make that decision?

Andrew And maybe down the road I'll be able to have a talk with that individual and share those professional things — here's why I made it, 10 years ago, this is why.

Jen You're giving an answer that values and reassures the specialist who remained, without giving any real information about the one who left, which is not appropriate to give. But then also — that hit me in the heart. Like, you value me. And then I feel all that much more loyalty. Wow, I feel valued, I'm going to keep working hard.

I think I've had moments where I needed to be listened to and instead I was coached, and ooh, does that not land.

Andrew ...understanding the data you want to pull. I want that data, here's why I need it. If you've got that, then you're ready.

My first thing I always say: use your existing technology. If it's Zendesk, Intercom, whatever it might be, Help Scout — use that technology's native reporting to its full capability. First and foremost.

Then you'll see, okay, they're not giving me natively what I want there, but they are giving me natively what I want here.

And here we go, next. Before you think about buying a tool to start scraping your data or putting it together or presenting it — just Google Sheet it right off the bat, or Excel it, and put it in a chart so you can see it first. Very raw, old school. Get into those formulas just to see it, in the form of, oh, there's my story.

So put your story together in a very rough draft form.

Then the first version that I ever created using just that was — okay, I've got a couple of images from the report, I've got a couple of images from my Google Sheets, here's the story I want to tell. Let me fire up a Google Slide and just build a few slides and paste it in there with the verbiage that I want to talk about. Here's how we service the customer. Here are the KPIs. Here are our actions. Here's a chart, because you want to align that.

And then, because what I always believe in — those first reports you put out, let people comment on them. Let them rip it apart. Take enough pride to know they're going to shred it, and I want to hear it.

So I need those open. Here, add comments. What does this mean, Andrew? What does this mean, team? What about this? And, wouldn't it be great if we had — I would love to see —

You need that, because the key part here is this is part of the next evolution. Hearing from your stakeholders, putting it in the report for the following week that says, we heard you, here are some things we're working on.

Then eventually, PDF it. Once you get to a good state, PDF it, send it out through your Slack channel, in a very general channel for the whole company.

And I always like to say send it out at a specific time. At one company it was Tuesdays at 4:00, to give the previous week — and you're going to hear the previous week, because we built it on Monday.

And then here's where the next evolution comes. Since it's the team report, start to assign ownership even more of the report, and give them the autonomy to pick and choose how they like to build it next.

Some people like Canva — let them. If they're owning it, let them take it and put it in Canva. Some people are great with automations, using Zapier, using Make, all those things. Then let them take it and build it from there.

And then, as you start getting to magnitude and lots of volume, and it starts to take a lot of time — that's when you can start investigating the tools that bring all the data together. Once it's starting to take you a lot of time to put the report together and put all the data together, that's when you look at, do I have a tool, an automation, that can grab it all for me more real time? Rather than once a week or once a month. So you can start seeing it a little bit daily.

And that's when you know you need a tool. Oh, I actually need a voice of the customer tool, or something bigger.

That's the journey that I like to take with the report.

Jen I really liked what you said about having other people comment on it, because it creates buy-in. When someone comments on something and then you make that change the very next week, they feel like they're really participating in it. I think that's really important with a tool like this — that people feel engaged with it.

So you're sorting that out, getting people's input, changing it and figuring out what you want. And when you nail down what you want in that report, that's when you start to automate or look for a tool that will do it for you.

Andrew Absolutely. When it gets to a good 70% of what it is — there we go, now we've got it.

Jen This report is going out to the whole company. Do you have discussions around that? How do you drive alignment for that report?

Andrew One of the keys is to have it also be self-serving.

In one report, in a previous life, we would have a section called customer issues — either a feature request or a top bug of the week. And then we would have the Jira number there, a description of it, and the impact.

But that wasn't the only bug of the week, that wasn't the only feature request of the week. So we would have a link to our specific Jira board, that anyone in the company through that report, through that PDF link, could just click and go right to the board that shows you how many bugs are open, what they're open against, what the current status is.

So have it be self-serving, that's the big key. And make it super personal — because I always like to celebrate the team in that report. We celebrated once that someone's anniversary came at the same time that the yoga ball they sat on in their home office popped. We celebrate lots of different things.

Jen Celebrate someone coming back from vacation.

Andrew Celebrating someone getting great feedback in a case from a customer. That's also a very important part of the report, because it talks about the team that's doing the work.

Jen That makes total sense. I know we're running close to being out of time — just one more question.

If a customer support leader is looking at doing a report and has never done one before, what do you think would be the biggest mistake they're likely to make?

Andrew Assume you know what the business wants to hear.

Biggest mistake is, oh, I know what they want to hear. You know what you want to tell them — and that's true. But you don't know what they want to hear. Don't assume that. Biggest one, right there.

Two, not getting the team involved early. Because the other thing we didn't talk about here, but it's a whole other dimension, is that's also going to help you drive change and behaviours within the team. You're going to see how your team is handling cases, how they're not handling cases, how they're working together, how they're not working together, how they're collaborating with other people, professional growth, personal growth.

So get them involved early, so they know the impact of their work, why you're capturing that data, why the data matters.

Jen That is a fantastic answer. I think the team matters so much in this report, because you're right, it's about them.

I can't thank you enough for being on the podcast. I can't wait for this episode to come out, I wish we could do 10 more. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. I think it's going to land for support leaders so well.

Andrew Thank you so much, Jen. Appreciate the gift of time. It's been an honour and a privilege. Happy to do it again.

Jen That's our conversation with Coach Rios. Before you close the app, here are the seven takeaways I'm putting into practice this week.

One, reset early. Sunday scan, Monday plan.

Two, build a lightweight support report that tracks who called, why, and what you did about it.

Three, share it with purpose. Your team first, your boss next, and then the wider organization.

Four, frame every number with the six W's — who, what, when, where, why, and what's next.

Five, model healthy communication. Schedule those late emails so they hit inboxes the next day, and push asynchronous chat until working hours.

Six, blend reflection with motion. You can have a midweek walk-and-talk, for example.

Seven, choose progress over polish. Ship the draft and iterate later.

If any of this hit home, please pass this episode on to another support leader and leave us a quick review. See you next time.