Brittany Ferguson You don't have a lot of time when you're just one person if something goes wrong. So simplify whatever it is that you can, to do some favors for your future self.
Jen Weaver Welcome back to another episode of Live Chat with Jen Weaver, the podcast where we deliver actionable support ops processes with the people who do it best.
Today I am thrilled to be joined by a powerhouse in the world of customer experience, Brittany Ferguson. Brittany is the kind of leader who doesn't just talk about customer support, she builds it from scratch. I met her years ago and have looked up to her ever since. With over a decade of experience across startups, SaaS, fintech, healthtech, and e-commerce, she has led teams through hypergrowth, slashed response times by 3x, and maintained sky-high customer happiness scores. And today she's here to share with us exactly how she does it.
So if you're at a startup or a small company and you're on the customer team — or you are the customer team — this is the episode for you. This podcast is sponsored by Supportman, which connects Intercom to Slack and uses AI to give agents feedback and surface problems in real time. Let's jump right in.
Brittany A lot of my experience, I have walked straight into the door as the first and only person managing a support team, where it's like, "We have nothing, we need help, come in, take ownership, pick something up and start something from scratch."
Today I'm going to talk about what it's like to walk in that door of the room that you've just gotten keys to the kingdom for, and how you approach where you start building out that process, in order to create that function to run a support team and be able to talk to the customers.
Jen So going from basically zero to 60 — it's my first day, I'm on this new team. What's my first action, what's my first step?
Brittany The very first step is, you've just walked in to this new company, you've got to start from someplace. So understanding what the product is, what the customer journey is like, what is in place from beginning to end of that product.
It's meeting with the right people — whether it's product or engineering — to go through and figure out how the product is set up. Being incredibly curious. Starting to write out some of that documentation if it doesn't exist, or taking what documentation is there.
And then making sure that you know all of the different inputs. Because a lot of times, if there's no support side to it, you don't know where some things can fall off the rails. So you're going to have to sit there and think of worst-case scenario. All customer journeys should be best-case scenario, but if there's a worst-case scenario, what do you need to be aware of, so that you would know where people will be interacting with support throughout that process?
Jen So what are some tools that you would use to build that map?
Brittany I use Google Drive. Figma's one that we've used before. But you can basically just start from any place. When you start in this type of role, you need to move quickly, so don't start with a tool that's a bigger distraction than it should be for what you need to accomplish.
Jen So you're doing this customer journey map, and you're working with engineering and product to understand a tool that maybe doesn't even exist yet. So you need to build deep product knowledge of what's going to be — and that probably involves really good relationships with those teams, right?
Brittany Incredibly, yes. It is just having regular check-ins, really positive rapport with whoever it is on that team, to constantly have new information shared with you. Going to every single product and marketing meeting. Everything.
Jen So not relying necessarily on them to think, "Oh, my customer person needs to know about this slight change or this development," but being there and being the eyes on the ground.
Brittany Yeah, it is your role to make sure that support doesn't take a backseat to anything, to find things out after the fact.
Jen Have you had experiences where you're in a meeting and you're getting this information, but you have a moment where you're like, oh, well actually this might be a bump in the road, this might be a problem for a customer?
Brittany Yeah. When I've been in this position we have typically had a couple of beta users, so we had some feedback loops in place already — people who were trusted to know, "Hey, this isn't going to be the smoothest and most pristine process, there are going to be some friction points, and so we're going to rely on a relationship with you to let us know where you are seeing some issues."
I think that's going to be one of the biggest indicators. Because every person who works within a company, you become too close to the product and services that you offer, and it can be hard to find out about those outlier situations.
Jen So you're working in between the internal teams and the external teams, even as you're building the ship before it's actually ready for the official launch. And hopefully those beta users are really game for providing feedback and working with you on glitches that come up.
Brittany Correct. And then just also having those systems in place for someone to be able to provide you that feedback regularly, and then doing those regular check-ins with them. If somebody's sitting there and they forget, "Oh, I should let them know that this isn't working" — I mean, how many times have you used some software that you're used to using day in and day out and you never reach out to support about it?
So having that extra level of security of being really proactive, especially in the earlier days, is going to be key to helping get a product set up and ready for launch.
Jen And doing that with just regular meetings with that customer?
Brittany I try to set at least a little bit of a cadence, or you could also set out email reminders and things. I'm a firm believer of always providing somewhat of an incentive, whether it is a discount or as easy as a $15 gift card.
Jen So just making sure that you're motivating customers to talk to you. It's almost like a real amplified effect when you have a few beta customers — their feedback has a much bigger effect on the product in those early days than when you have thousands or millions of customers.
So that's sort of step one. You're gathering — it's like the sponge phase, right? You're gathering information from your product team, your engineering team, your leadership, your customers, and you're building out that customer journey map, but also influencing it. So then what's next?
Brittany Then you go through the process of setting something up that's ready for scale. Setting up your department so that you're ready to start interacting with a lot of those customers.
Part of that is you're going to want to set up a really solid support ticketing system. So whether you're using Help Scout, Intercom, Zendesk, whatever have you — that's going to be incredibly key, because those emails are going to need to be tracked. And you're going to want to start, even from day one, to make sure that you are checking those metrics, seeing what the current trends are. Because when you're the one and only person, if you do start scaling a little bit quickly, it's going to be really challenging to do this all retroactively. So making sure that you are good at setting up all the things that you need to from day one will save you a lot of time.
Jen So setting it up right means using a ticketing system and not just Gmail. But I know it can be overwhelming to over-engineer your help center with tags and workflows, and especially now with AI. Do you have tips on how to do the MVP? What of this ticketing system do I need to set up as a single-person customer team for now, but to prepare myself for the future?
Brittany I'm a firm believer in just making sure that everything that you are setting up, as far as how you're importing your emails, you always have a backup. You don't have a lot of time when you're just one person if something goes wrong. So simplify whatever it is that you can, to do yourself some favors for your future self.
I think that whenever you are starting, you can maybe predict some of the saved replies, but that's going to be kind of dicey. So you're going to just know that right up front, you're going to need to create things as they come.
Jen Do you think AI workflows, AI answers — do you think those are useful at this stage, or not so much?
Brittany I think they can be good for first drafts. I'm a much better editor than I am writing straight from scratch, so I do lean on some AI tools to just take concepts in my head — here's four bullet points, create a draft based off of this — then I can at least have something to move forward from. It gives me a springboard to work off of.
Use humans where you can to do the human elements of the job, and then use AI tools where it makes sense to use those.
Jen And that goes back to your step two, which is building a scalable team, which starts with your help desk. It's two parts basically — your help desk and your knowledge center, your external help docs.
Brittany Providing that self-service, it's like adding another person that has no work-life balance to the team. As one person I have been the one who's burned the candle at both ends too many times, and we are only human, we do need some sleep.
So having something be self-service for somebody to just hop on, get the answers to their questions that don't need to be escalated or don't really need to fit the bounds of some kind of nuanced situation — that's going to be a big game changer for the customers.
Jen Do you have a read on, after that point, how you know when you need to bring on a hire, whether that's an operations person or a specialist?
Brittany I don't know about most other people, but you kind of get that gut check of, okay, things are starting to uptick, your response times, it may be harder to get to enough customers.
I've used a capacity model that helps me gauge, based off of all the different channels that people are reaching out to, whenever we hit this critical number and we are at this critical time with how long it takes for us to respond to someone, now is time that we need to start looking into adding to the team.
One of the other things is introducing those feedback loops for your product. How is information getting sent back to the rest of your company? So is there an issue that needs to be addressed first and foremost? Once you've solved the holes of where people are coming in to support — if it's something that can be fixed based off of your product services, or if there's better documentation — plugging those holes first will help you determine, do we actually need to hire?
Jen Right. If you have hundreds of conversations come in about "this widget's not working," and you just hire somebody, then the widget gets fixed, then your ticket volume goes down — that was a mistake. You kind of want to keep an eye on that, especially in the high-turnover product period at a startup where things are changing really rapidly.
That's an interesting point. You wouldn't hire for an incident that holds you out for several days.
Brittany You just know that if you can be as proactive as possible — put things in place like, I can't stress how important this is, communicate, communicate, communicate. Tell your customers what happens if there's some kind of outage, something that's going on where they are used to getting a really quick response time from you. Or you brag about your really short response times because you don't have a huge volume.
But whenever you have something that comes up, either let people know first and foremost what is going on, what you plan to do to address it, and when they should expect to hear a follow-up of whenever that's going to be resolved, or whatever the steps are that come next. That's huge.
Jen It makes me think, too — how do you plan for taking time off, or even being sick, when you're the one customer person on a team?
Brittany I've always kind of had in the back of my head, from the very first time that I worked in a role where I was the one and only person, I was like, if I get hit by a bus, what happens?
Jen Same, same.
Brittany And it's not that things shouldn't be able to progress, but I always approach things like there always needs to be someone else who knows the basics of how to go. So creating internal documentation for your standard operating procedures — have that book. You will be so glad you had it, if you are sick and somebody else needs to step in. I've had CEOs from a company step in and do support, and they had basically a manual that helped them figure out what they needed to do.
The other really important piece about having that in place is whenever you need to make that first hire. You're going to be onboarding someone and you will also be doing support too, so you're going to be wearing multiple hats, two jobs at once. It's going to make life so much easier. And then that way whenever they're ready to take it and run, they know that there's the exact steps and procedures of how you would handle something, and they can just pick things up and do it the exact same way.
Jen That's great. So if you need to take a vacation, and then you need to hire, all those basics are covered. So I can be hiring my replacement for certain things, and also in case I'm out for some reason.
So then after scaling, you mentioned feedback loops.
Brittany This is so important. You definitely want to prioritize any of your feedback loops. As I mentioned, if you've got beta users, they're fantastic, they're so great at being able to test things out, see where there's holes that need to be plugged. But you're just not going to want to sit there and wait for someone to fill out an NPS or a CSAT email.
Jen It feels like a little bit of this is the responsibility of the product team, to do customer interviews and to find out what's in the heads of the customers. And some of it is the responsibility of this customer person on the team. But also, what you're saying is you really have to interrogate people, or offer them money to get them —
Brittany Yeah, to get them — especially at the stage where it's so crucial that you get this sort of voice of the customer motion going.
Sometimes I've been in places where you've had to tag team with product. Or I've been in places where product doesn't exist — it's just more of, you've got engineers and you've got someone who is more of a product or project manager, but they might need some support, or they might need somebody else to create a lot of those conversations. So I've had to do a lot of customer discovery calls.
A lot of times support is really good at just distilling those feedback loops anyway, back to the different internal teams that need to be able to take some action items on some of those things. So I think it's just creating either a regular cadence, or — a lot of us have those superstar customers where you can always rely on them to respond.
I'm sure you can think of different people from every place that you've ever worked where you're like, oh yeah, that one customer. And you know them by name and you know a little bit more about them, and you just know that you can rely on them to be the person to give it to you straight. And it's fantastic, and they are such a gold mine of information. So developing a lot of those really positive customer relationships early on, that's so crucial to establish.
Jen Sorry to interrupt you, but the relationship for some of those really engaged customers is almost the best reward — better than a $20 gift card or whatever. They really value "I have a direct line to the customer team at such-and-such company."
Brittany I've had a couple of those people where you have given them so many freebies or coupons or whatever, and at that point I've had someone say, "You have to offer this to me every time."
I would just say that you're not going to be able to reach everybody, but as much as you can get some of that feedback and information that becomes something that's actionable, hugely helpful.
Jen And that really is doing the job of a product manager in a lot of ways. And that's what this role is about, is doing many different jobs.
This may be an aside, but I think it's perfect for the kind of jack-of-all-trades personality, where I'm interested in so many things and I learn things quickly. I don't really want to become an expert in one thing and do that for my whole life. I want to be interested in all these things, and then get it to a certain level of maturity, and then hire somebody to do the rest of it.
Brittany Absolutely. Whenever you're in a startup, every person's job is so critical and everybody is so incredibly busy.
Being the person who's at the front lines in support, you can quickly have a workflow set up where after so many days you ask them about their customer experience, or you invite them to something. So you can just set things up proactively, save yourself some time by putting these things in place when you know you will need them in the future.
If you've got a saved reply that's like, "Hey, I'm glad that we were able to remedy this for you, would you be willing to chat with us a little bit about your experience further?" — and go from there. There's so many different touchpoints that support has, more than most other teams, to have that engagement. And if you're already in the middle of talking with someone, if you can just ask them, that will help facilitate some of that conversation while you have them.
Jen You're right here chatting with me and I've just resolved this problem for you, why don't you go ahead and just tell me what you think about this widget or whatever. It's really hard for them to say no to that.
And as you're building out this voice of the customer, you have in mind how you're going to scale your team — for example, asking the support team members to ask some leading questions maybe about product issues, engaging support team members as part of that voice of the customer program.
So that's three steps in. Tell me what's next.
Brittany The next thing is — I've kind of had this as a theme throughout, if you haven't noticed — automate any kind of repetitive things that can come up. I keep saying save your future self. Be so proud of yourself in the future: "Past Brittany was amazing to think of this kind of thing, love her for that." Be the anticipatory support for yourself and the needs that you will have in the future.
Are there replies, canned responses, something that you know that you're going to say all the time? How many times at the end of the message have you said, "Is there anything else I can help you with?" If you don't have that as a canned response or saved reply — I love using TextExpander for some of the things that I just commonly put out and say, and I can just two clicks throw something out there.
One of the things that is the first thing that I set up any place that I work at, especially if I'm using Google Chrome: you can create Google Chrome shortcuts. So if I need to go to certain web pages all the time, some kind of backend system that I'm going to need to look up a customer ID or their name or something like that, I love having just these Chrome shortcuts where I can go into an address bar and type in maybe two letters. Using TextExpander then you can paste in their name or their customer ID number, and then it should pop up to the URL that you have designated and fill in that query search space with the person's information, so that you can quickly look them up. It will save you so much extra time.
Jen I just did a whole podcast episode on automating. But I'm thinking, from the wisdom of experience — snippets with TextExpander and URL expansion — what things are so useful that maybe you didn't know beforehand to automate?
I'm stuck on this because I just did this podcast with Rob Dwyer, and he automates all the things, and now I'm thinking, I'm not very technical. How do I automate?
Brittany It can be as simple as just creating a regular cadence of calendar events. Take it a little past the major tech side. I use a lot of those calendar reminders if I know that I need to send reports at a very specific time and just need to keep an eye on things.
When you are so busy and you are so in the weeds, it's kind of hard to look up and take a breath and then say, okay, now what do I need to be doing in this moment that is the most important thing? So just keeping something simple as far as automation.
Jen I love that. Calendar events as reminders. I think you're right, I think a lot of times the basics tend to have the most payoff. So what's after that?
Brittany A lot of times we've heard this so many times before — people think about customer support as a cost center, and actually it's a revenue generator. It's hard work to create customer loyalty and save people from churn, from not purchasing your product, from canceling their subscriptions, whatever it is.
So being able to put the data and those numbers to show how those customer interactions go back towards helping to increase their lifetime value with your products and services. You want to try and track, if someone's had to engage with you, how likely have they been to purchase after they had their very first issue? That could be tracked in a couple different ways, I think it depends on what the tools are that you're using.
But keeping a pulse on what are those names that keep showing up and interacting with the team, is there a way where they are responding to a CSAT score or a customer effort score — and if they're happy and they keep using your services, that's fantastic and you can document that. Being able to really show that positive customer satisfaction will drive a lot of growth, and then having the number to prove it is going to be the best point that you can make.
Jen So a big part of the job of being the only customer person is proving the revenue value of the CX team. But then what's next?
Brittany After you've created some of this beautiful documentation that you're incredibly proud of, and you think, great, check that off the list, all these other things I have in place, I'm set up for success — it's so easy to not go back and update a lot of things that you need.
That internal documentation a lot of times can fall by the wayside. And then you realize whenever you go, "We seriously need some help right now" — and you've worked on the capacity model and everything, and you're like, all right, we're bringing on this person — and then you sit there getting ready to go through everything with them and you go, this stuff isn't relevant anymore, and you have to just take a red line to it.
Do yourself a favor: if the process changes, update it. Again, make your future self really proud of your past self. Or maybe it is creating a Slack reminder that says, "Does your documentation need to be updated?" Setting yourself reminders externally. You can click no on Slack if you want to set up a "remind me in 30 days, does anything here need to be changed?" That could be a pretty good idea.
But being really flexible with how you did things in the past — maybe within your first 30 days something made sense at the time, and then you don't need it any more. So you can keep some archives of things. I like to keep a historical folder of how things had been done in the past, but never let those historical documents create a complete cluttered mess for you later on.
So it's just making sure that you are keeping on top of everything that constantly needs to be updated in some way, or that needs to reflect what the current state of everything is. Just thinking through how to prioritize your workflows a little bit better, so that you can say, okay, I'm going to commit x amount of hours over the next couple of days — whether it's broken up into an hour per day or something where you just slowly chip away at whatever it is that you need to do. Or if that is a thing that needs to take priority, then maybe that's the first thing that you go ahead and take care of, because it really needs to get done.
So I would say you just have to know where that falls into that quadrant of importance and urgency, and where you need to spend your efforts.
Jen And somebody who's never done — yeah, go ahead.
Brittany I was going to say, you can also ask other teams. Other teams are really willing to help out support. I've had many different teams say, "Hey, I know that you're incredibly bogged down because we had an outage or something, let me know how I can support you."
Feel okay with delegating. We're the last people to typically ask for help for things, because we're the first people who go in as the firefighters. So rely on the rest of your teams within your company if you can. That's going to save a lot of anguish.
Jen And I don't know about you, but in startups where I've worked, people on the team were doing the support work — whether that was an executive or an engineer who were answering support emails. So they could go back to doing that periodically, if they have space.
Brittany Absolutely. I've had that happen before where the CEO was like, "All right, everything's really changed, what do I need to do here?" And being able to provide a manual and say, all right, start from this, or I'm going to start assigning you these kinds of tickets.
It is about that trust in those people. But if you set up a pretty decent system and you've got your canned responses or something, then it's kind of hard to truly fail in that way.
Jen It makes the world of difference for someone to be able to step in. And you'll know how well the systems work that you've put in place.
That's something that somebody who's never been the only customer person on a team may not even think is appropriate, but is very standard at a startup, for people to pitch in. That makes total sense, I'm glad you mentioned that.
So I know we're on to your final step now — and obviously a lot of this is circular, you're continuing to do all of this repeatedly, but also continuing to make those processes better as you move forward.
Brittany Being the one and only person can feel really isolating, as many of us know who have been in this position before. Until you're ready to scale your team and add in other folks who can really understand support and talk to you about it, it's very important to make those network connections of other people who do what you do.
Jen So true. It's like when you need that sounding board, you can talk to people in marketing about it, but it's going to be a completely different perspective.
What you said about TextExpander earlier — when I came on to the team I'm on now and I was the only customer person, I was like, "I have to have TextExpander right away." And they were like, "What's that? Why is that such a big deal?" And I felt kind of insecure, I was a little bit like, am I a weirdo? Is it weird that everything I type I need a semicolon before it to type out the snippet? But I confirmed with my support community.
Brittany Right. You won't be able to know other people who have their fantastic tips and tricks who can do these kinds of things. I mean, your whole podcast is celebrating and helping tighten those connections of networking, other people to share their knowledge. So this is an incredible resource for people to go in and listen to and be able to apply what they have learned from other people.
I think the greatest thing is, especially if you're in a very fast-growing company scaling really fast, you won't really know what it's like on the other side unless you talk to somebody else who's also been there. There's just a wealth of knowledge in making those connections with people who have been where you've been. And also sharing that knowledge too — so if there's something that you've gained insights to that you can share, we're just going to create this wonderful, harmonious conversation about how we can continue to grow and just have that continuous learning.
Jen Part of joining Support Driven is how you and I know each other.
Brittany Yeah, fantastic.
Jen And it's been so helpful for me over these years. This has been the community that has grown along with me, and I've been able to celebrate other people and their growth.
Brittany We will never be alone, since we have each other. And there are so many different types of communities that can be a little bit more specific to what it is that you're trying to support. I know that there's a couple different Slack communities out there. If you can improve and think about things from another lens and apply it to what you do —
Everything that I've done for my entire career has been sounded off of everybody else. I have gained such valuable insights from my community, and I wouldn't be where I am today without it. Every step that I've reached out and I've said, "Will you help me with this thing," I've found people willing to just hop on a call and, completely just from the goodness of their heart, walk me through things.
Jen And that's the inspiration for this podcast, right? Somebody sitting down with you and just saying, look, I've been there, this is what works for me.
Brittany And you never know what comes out of the organic conversations. That is just so eye-opening, because if everything's just done by a script, done by a curriculum or a syllabus or something, you don't have that flexibility to have those fantastic candid moments that are just like, "Oh my gosh, that's how you think about something." There's so much to be able to glean from all of that.
Jen I love that, and I'm so grateful that you took the time to talk with us about it. I think your experience will be so valuable. Thank you for being here.
Brittany Thank you so much for having me on here. What a joy it's been, talking about a lot of these things, and for me to be able to finally share my story about starting off as the solo person in support and what that's like — and how to set somebody up for success who may walk in the door and also be given the keys to a blank slate.
Jen Wow. Brittany has done a lot and has huge insight for folks who are the only customer person, or who are just building out the customer function. So grateful for her showing up and sharing her expertise.
If you're stepping into a new support role, here's a quick recap of the process we just went over.
One: absorb everything. This is the sponge phase, with product, customers, and team knowledge.
Two: prepare to scale. Set up your ticketing system and knowledge base.
Three: create feedback loops — essentially building customer relationships.
Four: automate what's repetitive.
Five: prove the revenue value from the very beginning — how support drives retention and growth.
Six: keep your documentation, including your internal documentation, updated.
Seven: build your network. Connect with other CX pros for support and insights.
If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your team. And if you like this podcast's focus on tactical processes and you use Intercom, check out Supportman for instant AI quality review in Slack. See you next time.