Mastering Membership Support Strategy with Piyush Parikh: Insights and Innovations Memberium

[00:00] Micah: Hey everybody, it's Micah Mitchell. Welcome back to another episode of the Membership Site Success Show. Today we have a unique guest, Piyush Parikh, who runs Equinox Agents. And Piyush, we've kind of run in the same circles for such a long time, but recently we connected more. And I'm really excited to have you on. Thank you for joining us.

[00:20] Piyush: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Micah. This is going to be fun.

[00:23] Micah: Yeah, I am really excited to jump into the support area because at Mendarium, for those of you who don't know my software company, we really focus on support. And so Piyush, I feel, is even several levels above that. So Piyush, would you mind telling them what Equinox Agents is and kind of how you got into that world to get us started?

[00:42] Piyush: Yeah, sure. So yeah, thanks for having me again on this podcast. I always like talking about these things. When I do podcasts like this, people ask questions and we normally don't even ask these questions when we are with each other, right? We just kind of learn new things about each other as well. But yeah, I've known you. We've been in the same community for a while. Equinox Agents provides support. That's kind of like we mentioned, it does chat and ticket support for SaaS companies. That's kind of what we're niched into. And we actually started with Keep. And so that's kind of the, you know, I'm a certified partner at Keep. I became a certified partner in 2011. And so it's been, you know, a good decade, over a decade. And one of the things we saw while we were a partner, and, you know, we still see at times is the support lacking at times, especially for folks like us, like, you know, we're power users almost all, you know, everybody in your community too, we kind of go in, we know how the software should work. And then, you know, we just want it to be fixed. And we're not going to turn it on and off like support guys say to make work, right. So that was those were things that led me to work with a client of mine, actually, his name's Ashwin. He's in India. And he was my Infusionsoft client. And I trained some of his guys on Keep. And so we decided that, you know, we decided to turn that into a natural service that I could offer to other companies as well. But the long story short, it was, it's a, Econox Agents is a software support team that we've created, we niched, we support software companies, B2B software companies, like Keep. And, you know, we're finding we can go deeper and deeper into the things that actually work. And, you know, we can cover some of those as well.

[02:31] Micah: Perfect, perfect. And you, Ashwin lives in India, and you're in Arizona, is that correct?

[02:36] Piyush: That's it? Yeah, I'm in Phoenix. I've been here for, you know, saying 10, 14 years. And Ashwin, my business partner, I actually went to India to sell Keep there. You know, Greg Head, the CMO at that time of Keep said, go to India and sell Infusionsoft. And I said, okay, how do I do that? So he kind of helped me with that. You know, I'm tech, and I'm an engineer by training and so on. But I got on and I found, you know, people who need support and who want help are typically on these complex tools are typically business owners, or, you know, they're a little higher up in the chain. And if they see someone there who's in person willing to help them, they're like, okay, now let's, let's do this. So my business partner saw me on stage and said, hey, if you're here all the way from the US to help folks, I want to sign up. And so, you know, he became one of my first few clients there. And yeah, he's in India. He's still there. He, I sold it to him for his company called Equinox Labs. So that's a, that's a lab he's got that has about, you know, it's about 400 people. And he wanted to grow that, you know, get more customers. He was using tools, frustrated with Equinox, with Keep Infusionsoft at that time, because he wasn't getting the support. And that's gonna, you know, when I went there, we helped him really grow and scale that. So he's got that going. But then he's got, we've formed a partnership to have Equinox agents as a subcomponent of that company.

[04:05] Micah: Very cool. So kind of like other entrepreneurs, I guess, myself, at least where it kind of like happened, you know, not a direct line to what you're doing, but you're obviously an expert in it. So let's jump into kind of how this is related to membership sites. And prior to the call, I kind of asked you, hey, if somebody were, because obviously, you deal with lots of support and B2B and all this. But if somebody is, let's say, doing their own support, and they want to get their own, you know, first agent to help them take support away, so maybe they can focus on content creation or kind of higher level things. What should they be thinking about, first of all, before they hire that person, like before we get into the person, what structure do they need to bring somebody in

[04:51] Piyush: to provide good support? Yeah, yeah, no, that's good. And, you know, a couple of things that I look at, you know, we all, we are in the SaaS business together. And, you know, we have seen, you know, I'm just looking at the software piece for now, but this could apply to any company, right? So we have, it's SaaS, it's called SaaS, because it's software as a service, right? And so service is a big component, you believe in that as well. What I've found, and Heap now is coming around to that as well. They're looking at having software to make it successful, like to make Merriam successful or any other company successful. You need to have the software, which is good, which is yours, like you have a good tool, it works. You need to have strategy. So, you know, what is it? What is the membership site you're building? Why do you need one? How is it

[05:36] Micah: going to be set up? What's the structure going to be like? Those kinds of things. That's the strategy

[05:40] Piyush: piece of it. And then the third is service, in terms of, are you able to set it up right? Is your end user getting the full use of the tool? And, you know, those three components will enable you to have lower churn and better usage and all of the things that people are looking for. So, you know, service is a big, big component of that. And to get this service to work, and before you hire someone to support, what happens typically in growing companies is you as a business owner or your dev team or somebody else is kind of, you know, part-time doing support, handling thick-ass. They're sucked into that because they have to write the article and then actually do the development work. Yesterday, I was on a call yesterday with a company that has 25 people in the company. It's a software company. And I was talking to the CEO and he's like, I spent 50% of my time on support. And I was like, wow, that's, you know, that's a, and he's like, I know, I know. And all of us know, yes, I know, we know we should be doing something else. And, and so that's a great example of how to get something going. So typically you have, we have a knowledge-based system, right? All software teams or all software companies have knowledge base. And so I like to have that piece, that knowledge base combined with some sort of ticketing system, you know, that those two make up a very good base. And there's a lot of nowadays it's, you know, Zendesk and any other tool like that has both of those components. Most ticketing systems, most knowledge-based systems have some component of both. And so having pick one, it doesn't matter, you know, Zoho, pick Zendesk, what have you, but pick one. They're not too expensive. They're, you know, 99, 100, 150 bucks a month. Get that set up so that you know how the ticketing system works. And that's, I mean, that's baseline. I'm assuming most people have some version of that, but having the ticketing system, that's one. And then the knowledge base. And so what happens over time, and you may not feel that now, but over time you'll start creating articles and you'll create some in a certain way. Your dev team will create certain ones, your support team, your customer success team, your, you know, you have all these different teams creating articles in all different forms. And then you're trying to put all that together and try to figure out, Hey, why isn't anyone using these? And so one of the things that I like doing early on is just say, okay, guys, this is the format that we should use to write articles and have a, you know, it's like a style guide or something like that, that just like they do for coding, you have a coding style guide for websites. Same thing here for the article. What's the style guide we want to follow and make sure everyone's doing that. And in addition to the style guide,

[08:28] Micah: you have, you know, tag tags and keywords. The whole purpose of a knowledge base system is to allow

[08:34] Piyush: your team as it grows, your support team to be able to access that and answer questions quickly, quickly, as well as your clients to access it and answer questions on their own. So we call that deflection self-serve. How much of the questions that a customer has can be answered by self-serve and deflected from humans answering it. And those that can't be answered by humans or by the self-serve are then answered by humans. And then how quickly can the humans answer it? And obviously there are bots coming in and so on. So the bots and self-serve make up one area and then the humans make the second. And so, you know, what I like to see is if someone, you know, people will be setting it up however they are right now. But if we were to really look at this in a way that's going to scale, I would, you know, start by saying, do you have a system, at least like a Zendesk or similar, and you have a style guide for writing articles. That's step one. And then you, what our team does, we have, you know, support agents. And these guys are humans that also write articles and also set up all these infrastructure pieces for the company and set up the bots that are needed. You have a lot of great AI bots that are needed now to actually answer the questions. And so our team kind of helps with that process. So you don't need to have it all. I used to early, in early days, the customers would say, well,

[09:53] Micah: I need to have everything set up before I can hire someone. And that's actually not the case. That's,

[09:59] Piyush: that's, if you need, if you're waiting for that, you're going to be pulled into all kinds of directions and there's no end to, you know, Hey, I bought it all now. Let's hire someone. It's an ongoing process. You know, having the knowledge base system is an ongoing process. Every time your app changes, you have a new release, your knowledge base has to change. So it's not like I'm going to finish writing my knowledge base. Okay. Now I have, or finish writing my training guide and now I'm going to hire someone. So it's, it's, it's, it's small stages, but the first step is let's make sure we have a tool, make sure you have a knowledge base kind of process going. And now let's hire someone who can actually help in answer tickets, but also make sure that infrastructure is good.

[10:37] Micah: Got to that. So that's a lot you covered kind of the whole, or at least the first part of the journey, which I appreciate let's zoom in on just that beginning part, because, uh, first of all, when he's talking about SAS, um, you know, when he was just talking about SAS here, I think a membership site is basically a form of SAS, right? It's a portal they log into, they use, they have a seat. It's basically the same thing. It just happens to contain information rather than let's say functionality integration. Um, so I think it all applies over. And right at the beginning, I think one of the things, uh, I did that felt early to me, but turned out to be right. And I

[11:14] Piyush: think that's what you're saying is get a ticket system. Like for example, why not just handle

[11:20] Micah: people's emails coming in? Why not just email back and forth? Right. Right. Right. I mean,

[11:24] Piyush: that's kind of like a CRM, right? You're saying, okay, you know, why do we even need a CRM in the first place? Or let's say someone, you know, if someone's looking at keep, for instance, uh, why do I need a CRM? Why can't I just have it in my Rolodex or some on my phone? Uh, it's just not easy to maintain, manage, follow up, track, see how long it takes. You know, the one thing about support is there's some metrics that we need to also look, put in place. So metrics of how quickly did you answer something? What is the customer sentiment in terms of, are they giving me a yay or nay? Most of the times when people don't get value out of a tool, don't get value out of a customer, of a membership site, it's, they're not using it. And why are they not using it? They're not using it because they either didn't know how to set it up right. They didn't follow what's in the membership site. Uh, they didn't, you know, they don't come in and keep improving themselves and do what the membership site says. And so how do we get more usage? The way you get more usage is by making sure that whoever comes in there has a positive sentiment towards the tool or towards the site. And so we need metrics to measure that. So we call it customer satisfaction or other, there are some other ways, but NPS, those kinds of things. And so to be able to even measure that we need a tool and you cannot have a, you know, it's hard to do when you bring it on, on an Excel file or what have you. So to answer the question, you, we do need a tool or a, or some sort of, it's like a CRM, but it's a ticketing system. It just makes life easier. It's all in one place. Uh, you know, you can, you can go in, log in, see who's answered, who's not, or tickets a slope and that kind of thing.

[13:07] Micah: Yeah. And I'll, I'll say for the people getting started bootstrapping, it's kind of a leap between you being an individual answering emails one-on-one that feels kind of okay. But the moment you have a second person in, or the moment that customer opens up two separate email threads, um, and all, you know, basically it spins out of control fast. And so like he's saying that ticketing system for the dollar amount, because it has that specialized functionality just makes a ton of sense. So here's a question for you, Pius, because you did also mention the knowledge base. So let's say I'm an aspiring, you know, I'm, I'm right now a solopreneur and I'm growing my business and I realized, okay, damn, I'm spending more than 50% of my time interacting with customers. Um, I need a ticket system. I need a knowledge base. Like you said, that might be the same thing all in one. Do you feel like somebody should kind of like hire a support specialist and say, will you implement this ticketing system and knowledge base and free me up? Or, you know, do you think that the owner maybe should put in that effort themselves and then get a, a lower level person to work a better system? You know what I mean? Like, do you invest in the system? Do you bring in a person? What would

[14:16] Piyush: be your inclination? Yeah, no, that's great. Great question. And I think, you know, it's always good for the owner to at least vet a few of these systems. It's good for you to see, at least have a general idea. You don't want to hire someone and say, set me a, set up a system for me and, and just kind of leave it. It's, it's kind of, it's almost just like, you know, getting any tool or any system that,

[14:37] Micah: like a CRM that you're getting for your business. You do want to understand a little bit about,

[14:41] Piyush: okay, what are some of the things that it's going to give me? So in this case, I would say, if the, you know, business owner or solopreneur is starting to answer questions and he sees, he or she sees a repetitive kind of question that comes up over and over, that's kind of an indication of, I need an article for this. It'd be so nice to have that. Just write a written article. Now,

[15:00] Micah: you don't need to write it yourself. At least you identify it. You know, if, if those are the kinds of

[15:05] Piyush: indicators to say, I do need a system, but I would start looking at the very easy, simple ones that are out there. There's Zendesk, Freshdesk, you know, some of these, there's Zoho. Some of these, these are pretty common ones that you want to just do a quick view and see what's there. If they have a ticketing system and they have a knowledge base, this,

[15:24] Micah: this typically have, they all have them. And so, you know, you just want to get that.

[15:29] Piyush: Sometimes you have to turn on the module for knowledge base. Yes, no, but it's, the ticketing system is like a baseline and you can get that through one of these tools. I would look at a few and then set it up. These are not hard to set up. And just like you said, you, you, you will be the first person in there answering tickets. So instead of the email, you're doing it now, but you're doing it through this system. And when you add someone on there, whether it's a low level or a mid level, now you can, you know, they can jump in for you and they can see the history of the tickets that were done and what was the answer before and so on. So I think I would, I would recommend at least evaluating two or three of these ticket systems. And I always point people to Freshdesk or Zendesk. Those are really simple, you know, to set up, easy to get going. They integrate pretty well. They scale pretty well. And then once you get that going, try some tickets through there and have, you know, what it gives you is you have a little pop on your, on your website and people can just type it in there and submit a ticket, or you can give

[16:30] Micah: them a link. They can submit a ticket through there. Instead of sending an email, say, Hey,

[16:33] Piyush: we're using this new system now. And what it also allows you to do then is send them a sentiment kind of note. Hey, how did I do? Or how did the support person do? And, you know, you want to start getting the feedback. The interesting part about doing support when you're a solopreneur by yourself, there's a really good positive side. You get to learn about what people are asking for. Right. You don't want to lose that. And so you, you still want to get to be in there yourself. You still want to be answering some, you want to read some, but you don't want to be liable to answer all of them because that, you know, that it's, you don't want to be the bottleneck. And so you still want to be involved, but not doing all the work. If that makes sense.

[17:15] Micah: It definitely does. And I think so as a software company myself, you know, everything you're saying is, you know, it's gospel because of how that works. I think with a membership site, the slight difference is often the, the trainer, the guru, the celebrity, they're kind of trying to protect their time, right? They're trying to gain access to themselves. And so I find that interesting

[17:38] Piyush: when they are doing their own support, it's kind of like they're having to make a judgment call of,

[17:43] Micah: do I charge this person for this? Is this more than they're paying for or not? How do I help them? And so I think that, you know, creating those articles and obviously membership site, people are content creators, but creating specific support articles. I think that you can direct people to is helpful. And then, yeah, having somebody besides you, the content creator doing it. And obviously there are people with, with very big content businesses and big teams, but I always like to start kind of at these basics and build up from there. So let's say that this person is, let's say they've done some of that work. And I imagine for a membership site, some of their knowledge-based articles are probably around basic things like logging in, password, billing, cancellation, right? You know, so they can start there with the basic account management. And then there's probably discussion around, and maybe this is for software companies too, right? There's, there's an issue keeps recurring. At what point does it move from, Hey, this is a support issue to this is actually a development issue. Let's make a change that'll recur, you know, and probably, you know, maybe a parallel for membership sites. But what is your thought on that? Like how many occurrences does it take to say, Hey, let's move this to development and stop this?

[18:55] Piyush: That's great. Yeah. That's, that's a, it's a, it's a moving line sometimes. And so there's two elements to that. One is the number of times something happens. And then the other is the severity of it, right? Like how, how, how does this impact the use, use usage or the experience of your, your customers with you or your team or your, in your software. And so we, we, what we normally do on our site is we have a, and, and, and these systems do that. They have a report that comes out at the end of every week that says, here are your top issues that we saw. Here's the number of times whether we're seeing them. And if there's a sentiment piece to that, which is when people say it's a yay or no, it tells you, here's the sentiment level of people that have accessing this. And, you know, that's when you can make a judgment call. And typically we feed that a lot of times what happens is that the team, the support team feeds these things to either the customer, you know, that says, here's kind of what we're finding. We think it's a issue with having the right information on a knowledge base. So that's, that's one team that gets this because they're asking the question. It is there, but they're still not able to solve it. And, you know, they're still chatting in. So there's something wrong with these articles. So that's one piece. The second piece of this is it goes to the original developers or the original, you know, content producers to say, these are the things that are consistently coming up, where on your roadmap can be put this? Because, you know, development teams, content creators, they have a roadmap. They've got to keep producing things and they have to fix things. They have big issues happening. But, you know, here are things and these kind of fall back on the wayside typically. Look, I don't care. You know, this is it. I know it keeps coming up, but at least it's being solved by some support team, or at least they're reading the article. But what happens is when we see this enough times, we kind of make the business case. And that's what happened, what's happened. Like, hey, I've got these 20 times every week. And if you solve this, here's how I can open up my free time. And if you can give that kind of number, then it makes more sense for the developers or the content creators to actually step out and say, okay, I'm going to raise that up into my priority list. So, you know, that there's a little bit of that analysis that comes in at the end of each month. Typically do it at the end of each month or every end of each quarter. We evaluate all the stuff that's come in and we make some time to just assess all this. Typically, we're just answering questions, don't answer questions. But we set aside some time to say, what has been the sentiment? What has been, you know, items that we found? And can we make a difference

[21:43] Micah: to improve this overall? Yeah, it makes sense, especially from a software perspective. I know developers are kind of like, you know, we have our priorities. We don't want to be, we don't want to switch midstream because you have some sort of emergency, right? Like, deal with it while I'm doing this. Right. And I think from a content perspective, it's kind of the same because creatively, yeah, we're like way down this road. And like you said, it needs to go into a roadmap, maybe somewhere appropriate. Maybe you can mix it into something related and then clip that out and have it as an article. I'll share, you know, we're talking about support here and I'll share how important I think this is because of course you can imagine with software, you need support, right? With an info product or a course or a membership, usually, like I said, the support might be account related. But I'll share a story that I've been recently going through where I joined a group, but even though I thought the content was good and most of the delivery and everything, the support aspect was a little off, which is a shame because, you know, and you could tell it just wasn't getting the attention it needed and it caused me to exit that program. All other things were okay, but support was kind of a breaking factor. And I think membership sites don't,

[22:55] Piyush: a lot of them kind of, they have this idea of I'm going to make the content and people are going to

[23:00] Micah: consume it and it's going to be great, but there's all of these edge cases. Everybody's unique,

[23:04] Piyush: right? And, and dealing with, I think those people, as you mentioned speed before, I think as quickly

[23:11] Micah: as possible is a big deal because every minute somebody sitting there not being answered, they're stewing, you know? So speed's a big deal, obviously accuracy too. And so I think when you have a whole library of articles, like for our software, for example, our thinking was we have an article and then we have a macro or an email template. So when this question comes in, we can edit the template a little bit, the template really has a link out to an article. And for those ones, it's

[23:36] Piyush: so nice, like same question comes in, right? You've solved the problem. There it goes. Maybe you can

[23:42] Micah: talk about tiers of support because maybe that's, maybe that's what's involved here is you might have a front line support agent. But at some point, depending on the customer that might make it up to the content creator or the developer. So how do you look at tiers in support? And I mean, do you add them just when there's too many agents or do you add them based on the complexity of the problem? What are your thoughts?

[24:04] Piyush: Yeah, no, super. And I do want to touch on that. You know, you mentioned you joined a group and you left. That's so common. I've done that multiple times. And just, I'll get to the tier in a second. But you know, what I found also when I joined these membership sites for people, like I just recently joined a site, which was on AI and it's a small membership group. And, you know, he's teaching, he's teaching, he's showing how you can create these AI bots and agents and all of that. So that's great. I joined it. And then he had, you know, he's got a lot of volume now. So he's got a lot of people coming in very interested. And, you know, he's, he's a guru, obviously he knows what he's saying. And so we, you know, he put out there, he's like, guys, I want to give you a lot of attention each one-on-one. That's what he wants to do. He wants to give you one-on-one attention. He wants to make sure you succeed. And so he's like, sign this form, fill out this form and I'll get, you know, get you on the list. And so there's, you know, 600 people on here. I think 400 people probably signed up. You know, you know, I've heard nothing since then. You know, he's just overwhelmed. And what I've, you know, just to get to the piece you said, which is get to them quickly, the support quickly. That's three things that I look at when we're doing support, whether it's for individual or for a company or for a guru, it's, can you do it fast? Can you do it accurate? And can you do it friendly? He said the first two, fast and accurate. And it has to be friendly as well. Right. And so those are three things that I, we, we, we kind of keep going, you know, we've got 150 people that provide support to all these companies. And so I tell every single one of our employees, we're here to get fast, friendly, accurate answers. And that's what we need to do. No, you know, bouncing around, sending people here. Let me wait, wait, I'll get the answer. I don't know yet. That kind of thing. You know, we need to, so we measure the speed. So speed is a big deal. And just like, you know, you said, you don't want to be waiting around for this, these kinds of things. What we do set up tiers for some of this. So there's normally a, there's normally the basics are tier one, two, and three. Those are the three tier system that we normally set up when you're in a big team. Tier one is I hear you. And so I know you're here. I've got your information and it's not like you just sent it to someone and we're just going to wait. And I hear you're there. And so just like your example in the membership group or in mine, you know, he got 600, but if I had, if he had one person as an admin or something that says, hey, thanks, man. You're amazing. I see what you're doing. Some cool stuff. Just give me a second. We're overwhelmed right now because it was so popular, you know, and, and, you know, we might be considering maybe a group thing, what do you mean? You know, something else, right? So a tier one is just reflecting a little bit, kind of letting them know that we're here and just acknowledging that piece. So that's a tier one. Tier two is then trying to solve the problem for you. And they're, they're not going to fix a bug, at least in the software world, or they won't give you the strategy answer, but they're going to at least see where you stuck. Let me take a look. What happened? What did you try? In our case, it's okay. You, you took the module, you signed up. That's great. But before you continue on, did you finish doing these other courses or whatever? There's a, there's a secondary, the tier two kind of thing. And then tier three is where you either you're meeting the, you know, the guru or you're, you're looking at the dev team or what have you. That's the third tier. And that's been nice when we send it off and say, this is a bug. I mean, we've tried it in work or, Hey, this guy really needs some help. He's like, you know, he's got a lot of things going. I think it'll be a valuable asset to us long-term. We want to move this guy up the chain and, you know, you need to help them. Like, you know, it could be an enterprise customer or a high ticket customer or what have you. Right. And so you have different tiers in our, in our world. We have, when you have a large enough team, you have, you know, a perfect one or two people dedicated to tier one. And sometimes tier one could also be a bot, you know, so that, that could be it. It's just, it's, it's getting there. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting really close where tier one can take all tier ones can go with a bot. And then tier two is your more friendly, you know, just sitting, you know, waiting and answering very specific custom answers to you and making sure that you at least getting, you know, the, the first piece is solved before we move you to tier three. So those are different tiers. If you're doing this as a solopreneur, you just have one, you know, you would start with tier one and at least get the first contact out and make sure that

[28:36] Micah: every person who asks a question has been heard. They, they feel acknowledged. They know that,

[28:42] Piyush: you know, that they're spending money with you, whether it's $5 or $500 a month, you know, they, every one of these guys is important and you want to make them feel good because if they're not your target or they're not spending as much, they know someone who is. And so, you know, we just want to make sure that every single person, our goal is to make every single person kind of feel just like the owner would feel right towards them. So that's, that's kind of the sentiment we want to build with our support team.

[29:13] Micah: I love that. Make them feel like the owner would feel toward them because that, that was on my list of questions and we'll get to it later is kind of like, how do you get other people to care as much

[29:22] Piyush: as you, but to some of the specifics there with the tiers. I love that general formula, basically

[29:29] Micah: like, Hey, here's almost like a concierge to be like, Oh yeah, we got you. And then they ask it up to somebody to troubleshoot or manage or who has a higher level of understanding. And then maybe from

[29:38] Piyush: there it goes up to the product level of, of any sort. But yeah, that even when you were saying fast,

[29:44] Micah: friendly and after it, what's interesting to me is we came upon those same things ourselves kind of independently, meaning just in, in doing the support and saying like, Oh, people really respond and thank us for, for responding quickly. Let's try to respond quickly. Right. Cause we would get a ticket and this still happens today. Someone will send a ticket and we'll respond. And they're like, Whoa, weird. I didn't expect a response like for at least a day, you know? Um, and speed is, I found it almost disruptive to be quick, uh, cause they're just not expecting at least from our company. And I think, you know, anybody can get a lot of brownie points that way from the get go, just answering quick, even if you're not, even if you're not accurate yet. Uh, and your second thing about being friendly, I think if you're quick and friendly, you can say, Hey, I don't have your answer, but like you said, I recognize you're there. You asked a question. I see you're one of our, you know, gold members or you bought our whatever program. Thanks for being a customer. Let me get the right person for you. I'll, I'll be in touch. Right. That's fine. I mean, you can like, somebody sends me that I'm chill for three, four or five days, you know, depending on the issue, not like, I hope they get back sooner, but I feel like they're doing their best, you know? Um, and then the accuracy piece, the way we talk about it is, and Ben's on here. So you can correct me if I got this acronym wrong, but I think of it as like fast, friendly and full. Um, so just for the Fs of like, Hey, it's a full answer, you know, it's not just like a try X by, you know, some people get that kind of stuff where we're saying, Hey, if it's this, try this, if it's that, try that, you know, let us know if you have any questions trying to be as, and we'll even go look at other things in their system. Um, and the only reason I'm going into this is to say, um, there's a, I'm sure you've heard of this. There was an article Ben on my team sent, I'm pretty sure it was Ben. And it basically said when the customer has an issue, it's like a stick and you can choose to pick up the overreaction or the underreaction. If you underreact, they'll

[31:40] Piyush: overreact. If you overreact, they'll underreact. Uh, and I found that to be so true. And even if

[31:45] Micah: people don't mean to like my issue, you know, in this group previously, it was kind of like, they just didn't take it seriously and swept it under the rug. And to me, that was indicative of, of everything in the experience to where I'm like, Oh, maybe not. Whereas had they, even if they didn't solve it the way I assumed they would or wanted them to a different attitude,

[32:03] Piyush: like fast and friendly would have gone so far. Right. But without it, even if they're eventually

[32:08] Micah: accurate, it's like, yeah, no, I'm good. You know? No, absolutely. I love it. I love it. I love

[32:13] Piyush: that, uh, the stick analogy. And I think, you know, one of the things that we did early on that we learned, uh, the hard way really was, uh, we had, we had metrics that talk, not just speed of answer, but number of tickets or number of solutions per day, per week, per month, you know, what's our efficiency, that kind of thing. And, you know, um, we used to have, try to get our agents to say, come on, man, you got to keep taking more of these. We can't have this big queue coming up. You got to take more. Let's answer it quickly. You know, hurry up and answer

[32:42] Micah: the question. And, uh, I switched that around and I said, it doesn't matter. Take as long as it takes

[32:50] Piyush: to answer the question because the people who ask questions, they don't have one question. And typically it's not the question that they had. The answer is not about the first question. You know, they, they'll have a question. Then it's actually, Oh wait, by the way, I have also this problem. And then after this, and Oh, you know, it's this. And then you, you tell them something and it, it leads them down to a, to a completely different answer, but it takes 30, 40 minutes to get there. And, you know, we, we call it, uh, you know, what's your average handle time is, is a term use. And so we used to measure our handle times and try to put people against or, or pit people against each other on, Hey, who can do it faster? But we turned, we took that off and said, you're just going to stick with them till they're satisfied. Now there are certain, you know, not everybody's going to come in and just hang out with you. There are some people who just want to come and chat like, Hey, how's the weather? And you know, that kind of things, but you know, we, we try to like, okay, uh, you know, move that along, but if they're having serious issues and if they, they, they need, need help, let's, let's get them. So we, I got a comment back. I get comments back. I asked my team to send me the comments that people send our teams, the positive and negative, you know, from time to time. And I love seeing some of these comments that say, you know, John was like saint, like, like, you know, he was just saint, like in terms of his patients and, you know, it's like, great. But I don't know what, if he answered it or not, but he had saint like patients, you know, and what I, what I found actually was the client answered it himself and, you know, but this guy just stuck with him and gave him another answer. No man, it's working. No man is working. And just, you know, I like to see that. And so it's, and, but you, you know, you can get that only when you have enough, you know, capacity to take it on. Uh, what I like to see is dedicated people. That's why we, we created this company. It's let's have dedicated people on dedicated areas, whether it's phone dedicated for chat, dedicated for ticket, like dedicated in that space. So they are fully involved in that area. When you're doing a chat, that's why guys do chat tickets, emails, phone. When you're doing a chat, you can do one chat here. You can put up another chat and you can talk to two people at the same time. You know, that kind of thing. While you're waiting for the answer, you can start another one. So you can do, we call them queues, two chat queues, three chat queues. So, you know, with chat, that guy sitting there, he's got two or three windows open and he's conversing with three people. Uh, when you're doing phone, it's only one at a time. When you're doing tickets, you can do, you know, multiple and so on. So, but I like to keep it dedicated. And, you know, that way, when, if you're doing social media, you're dedicated and you're answering, you know, things, you're reading people's comments. Uh, you're not only just waiting for response, you're actually proactively going in and saying, man, these guys are really upset. Hey, what do we need to do here? And so, you know, our support person will go in and find someone, you know, the manager or the owner and say, we need to respond to this. I know that kind of thing. So I like having dedicated just to say that, give it enough time, you know, don't rush support. It's, it's not a nuisance to have,

[35:46] Micah: like people may think. Right. It reminds me of that idea of how expensive it is to get a new customer versus keep an existing customer. So if you think it's expensive to pay that agent for an hour to keep that customer, you know, you've got something backward because it's much cheaper. And I love what you said about letting them spend their time, because if you think of the alternative, an agent where you feel like they're trying to get rid of you, like, Oh, it's a, did I solve your problem? And it's like, no, you did not solve my problem, you know? Right. And I don't want to wait on hold again to get the next guy kind of a thing. Um, yeah, I mean, I think we're, we're very much in sync on a lot of this stuff. One interesting thing that came to mind is that when we got into this, I was kind of like a support newbie really, but because we picked Zendesk, which you've brought up a few times, we just kind of went with their flow. I just kind of figured, Hey, they know what they're doing. And for example, first reply time was one of their metrics that kind of stands out. And they, you know, I would even get emails that say, Hey, you're ahead of 90% of companies and first reply time. And it was interesting because I initially didn't know how important it was,

[36:54] Piyush: but just because the tool guided me, um, you know, toward a best practice, I should say,

[37:00] Micah: we've seen that come back so much in feedback, as far as we have a lot of, uh, five-star reviews, which, you know, to your point also about support being, it's almost like an opportunity. We get a support call. We want to turn that into a five-star review, which we may not have ever gotten the chance to interact with that person and ask them for that review if they hadn't reached out. So it's, I feel like it's a huge opportunity. And then of course, you know, for us, we don't have a lot of things to upsell currently, but if we did, those people who are ready to give you a review, they're probably also ready to buy more. Oh, absolutely. Upsells, you know, I look at support,

[37:35] Piyush: people look at it as an expense on the line items on a P&L, right? It's like, hey, support, there's an expense. I like to say it's, it's just to your point, it's, it, it, you know, take some of your marketing dollars and put it over here and you'll see a much bigger ROI. And we've done that with some companies, lower your marketing here, put it onto the support. Let's measure that for a while. And let's see what your LTV is. How long do these guys stick with you? Do they stick longer or not? And, and we do that for six months. And, you know, that those are, you know, actual metrics that you can measure in saying your support is not, you know, an expense on your P&L. It's actually part of your sales and marketing strategy. And the upsells are huge. We, you know, we had, we have things called, there are two bells, there's bells of churn and bells of opportunity. And so, you know, before they churn out, we will churn is when they, when we lose them, right? So if a customer cancels or what have you, or someone drops out of a membership program, we will want to know ahead of time if someone's potentially going to drop out of a membership program. And so, you know, that's a bells of churn that we want to know. And a bell of opportunity is we want to know if someone has a chance. It's like you said, five stars, a bell of opportunity. There's a great conversation that they've had on a chat. The sentiment is very positive. That's a bell of opportunity. So, you know, just going into their system and saying, here's their business, where they are today, go to their website and say, they just got funding. That's a bell of opportunity, right? So you do a bit more research to see who's on your customer list. So all of these things are done by support and they get to know your customers. They get to filter them out. And then you can go after the bells of opportunity. You can go after the bells of churn, become a bit more proactive and then reaching out to these guys and use some of the marketing

[39:14] Micah: dollars. I love that term, bells of opportunity, bells of churn, because there are, if you're listening, there are indicators, right? Before you end up in that position. And I like the idea too, of moving the marketing dollars into support because it is, you know, marketing to me is so holistic, right? Like even the way you cancel someone, if they cancel, is marketing. I feel because we've had so many people who come back or, you know, so-and-so used it and they had to move here, but they said, you guys were great to them. And so I'll come over here. And it's, yeah, it's just such an overlooked opportunity. If you've, if you actually calculate what you'd have to do to get those inbound phone calls from like a sales call center perspective, you'd have to spend money to get that, you know, and you have your paying customers reaching out to you. It's such a cool opportunity, especially, I like to flip it where sometimes they come in and they don't understand what's going on. So they're upset. That's almost more exciting because it's like their problem. And then they're going to feel this huge shift on the spectrum and feel great. You know, it's, it's very satisfying.

[40:18] Piyush: Sure. No, absolutely. And, you know, and in software, I assume in any, you know, membership program, you know, those moments of truth that if they, if they consume this one module, or if they consume, if they set up the software in this one particular way, and if they see this one thing happen, they're stuck, there's with us. Right. And so in keep, it would be if we threw in the contacts and we had a landing page and they saw, you know, some sort of, and I mean, we did some ads and they saw the leads come in and they actually bought without somebody touching it. That, you know, that's a moment of truth to say, wow, okay, I got it. I get this now, you know? And so, and now I'm like waiting to, so what we look at in support is have they done that yet? And did they not do that part? Even as they asked another question, we go back and look at, did they hit the moments of truth? And if they haven't yet done those, this is fantastic. You have a problem. Let me solve it for you. And let's talk about this piece. Are you, are you going to be working on this? And, you know, agents don't need to be experts in strategy. They just need to know that, look for these two things in the tool or look for these two things on their journey and have they done that? Or even just ask them the question. That's all we need to do. And so, you know, bringing those moments of truth into your, you know, that you do that as part of your customer journey, right? Mapping, you may do that in software. You may do that in your program. You have different modules. Have they've gone through these, each of these modules, did they get the result? You know, Tyler Garns, you know, Tyler Garns, he's, you know, he's, he is still part of Keep. He has a program. It's, it's on marketing strategy school and he's got, you know, modules that they go through. I think he's, you know, used membership site for that. And, you know, he, he made sure that we, he would not go to the next module until we finished that. And we got the result of that module. And he would personally come on and send a message. And I obviously maybe automated part of it, or some of, you know, his staff may be coming on and saying, Hey, it looks like you, you jumped to this module. Like you haven't gotten to this yet. You know, why did you jump to this? You know, that kind of thing. And so someone's looking at that. And those are triggers that are popping up on somebody. No one's going into every single account and looking at it. You know, those are, those are triggers that come out that those are the bells that we talk about, the bells of opportunity.

[42:34] Micah: For anybody listening, there is another episode where we have Tyler on and we go into depth about what Pius is talking about, if that piques your interest. So Pius, let's, let's talk about AI a little bit more in depth. We kind of like touched it here and there. I guess simple question. Is it, you know, here in the spring, early summer era of 2024, is it time for them to have an AI agent? Should they plan on that in six months? What, what do you think?

[43:03] Piyush: Yeah. So AI is definitely here. It's going to stay. Obviously, you know that, especially in support, it's one of the easiest places people, it's the most talked about use case in the AI space. It's support. And, you know, that's why our team is deep into it, into, we've been doing it for a while, but, you know, now that it's really come out there, most of these tools have an AI piece to it. So that's the good news. You don't need to do anything new to get AI. It's, it's already there. Zendesk already has it. Zendesk has a bot. You can enable it. It took, it's a click of a, it's a checkbox. I was going to, you know, we talked about me showing you some of this in there, but it's, it's basically a, you know, you open up Zendesk, the help desk, and then there's a, you want to enable a bot on your website and gives you a little snippet of code. I mean, literally that's all it is. And so you put it on there and what the bot does now using, it's called LLM, you know, that, you know, large language model thing. So it's more natural, natural topic. So it has an option now in Zendesk. Do you want to, it to use some natural language stuff, or do you want it to use very specific only articles, like only pop up the articles that you have? And so if you only have 20 articles, you're not just going to show those 20 every time. And so you, you know, we want it to be natural talking LLM. So it goes in and just has a conversation. And if it runs out, they'll say, don't know this, let me get you to someone. And it translates and translates to someone. And so having a bot is just, it should be done. You should have it. Everyone should get it on their website and just pop it on there. Even if you don't have anybody to answer that question yet, you don't have anyone to, you know, look at that. It's an easy ticketing process that someone will go in and put in their information. And so I would highly recommend everybody to go in and get that little box. Everyone's used to it now. We're all used to having a little thing there pop up and we're not, you know, many times we were not live. That's okay. I can submit a ticket. And you will get not only support, but it's sales. You'll have people visiting the site, your website, you don't need to log in even. It's right there. And people start chatting with it and asking questions. So you can capture some leads through that. And I, you know, that's, that should be the baseline. It's like having a website. You have a website and you have a bot. I mean, that should be the, you know, that's where I would go.

[45:22] Micah: Gotcha. Okay. So maybe I should have started there, but I love that. I love how strong you're

[45:26] Piyush: just like, yes, put that bot on there, let it be that frontline, build something behind

[45:31] Micah: it. Very clear. So everybody listening, if you don't have that bot, sounds like it's time. So what are some of the things that I guess you see coming in AI for support? What are some gotchas or things they maybe shouldn't do that they've heard about? Because I think you've had probably a lot more experience than most of the world, especially as it pertains to support. So what is some advice when dealing with AI?

[46:00] Piyush: Yeah, no. Yeah, no. And I think what, you know, I think it goes back to the original. That's why I started with the knowledge base because all the bots today are all based on data, right? Every, every knowledge, every, every chat system you see, open AI's chat system, whatever, you know, they all are based on a piece of information or lots of pieces, lots of data. And so what we're trying to do for the humans, for the bots, for your dev team, for everybody, for your clients or your customers, it's create a really good repository of knowledge. And this is, you know, normally in the, prior to this, we would, we'd be kind of dependent on two people in the company who know all this stuff. It's all in their head is what we would say. Right. And then, oh man, we lost the guy and it's all, it was all in their head. We got to start from scratch. So we're, we're doing a data dump. That's what the knowledge base system is. It's a data dump from people's heads, from the conversations, from different people in the company as well, from your clients. So getting that knowledge base is key to making any of this work. And so that's why I put that on there. The bot will only get better as your knowledge base gets better. So having, it's a circular loop in that you put a bot on there and you have just three articles. It's going to be really not so good. I mean, as in, in terms of answering the question,

[47:22] Micah: they'll still take it, they'll still talk to you, but very quickly, you'll say, hold on,

[47:26] Piyush: submit a ticket, we'll get back to you. Right. Now, if you have a pretty good, you know, list of articles, it's not only knowledge base in terms of, you know, the one we talked about, which you have articles and you write it, you can feed it all kinds of things. And today, before we have to kind of make sure it's in the right format and all that. These days, you can put Excel files, PowerPoints, you can put anything, a website, you can put everything on there and then it'll try to figure it out. Now there's a term in AI called hallucination. I don't know, you may have heard it, but you know, that's, that's an AI, that's an actual term, which is the bot is hallucinating, meaning it just makes it up. If it doesn't know something, it'll make it up. And so, you know, for example, I was on the bot the other day, the best language model out there, which is open AI is, you know, 4.0. And I said, all right, I, you know, Hey bot, what's 12 plus three. And you have only three choices to pick from 19, 45 and a hundred. And it'll say 19. And, you know, it's just, it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's, it's doing what you're telling it to do. It's, it's, we call that listening. So, you know, it's basically, it's not that clever yet. It's, it's trying to predict what to, to write, to say based on the data it has and the instructions it's given. And so all that being said, these tools, the ones that we just mentioned, they have the AI capability in there. I would get the bot. So the steps are, get the, get the tool, get the bot on your system, get the ticketing set up and put knowledge-based articles in there and get that process started. And then the whole point of this is keep improving the knowledge-based system. And that, you know, as you keep doing that, all three aspects will improve.

[49:13] Micah: Okay. So to simplify that, if you get the bot on there, it's basically all dependent on your knowledge system. Like the bot, I guess, if you're using something like Zendesk, it'll upgrade itself as they upgrade it. That's not your job. Your job is just to give it the context, right? Hey, here's my website. Here's some articles I wrote to answer these particular questions. Can you tell it like what not to answer? Yes. Okay.

[49:37] Piyush: No. So you can tell it if it's at, if people ask these 12 questions, here's what you answer. Do not answer anything other than this. So it has that capability to block it. It also will look back at all your tickets. So it automatically reviews your tickets. So it's not like you don't have to go it and then say, Hey, from all the tickets, I see there were these kinds of topics. It does that for you now. And so your bot that you have in Zendesk, you can limit it to certain answers. Like let's say there's a, you know, you've got a special going on. And so if someone asks you for the special,

[50:12] Micah: here's the answer. Don't answer anything else. And you know, it'll feed that up. Now, typically for

[50:18] Piyush: sales, we will say, here's the specials, here's what we see, but it's best that you talk to someone. Yeah. And, you know, so we, we guide them towards calling NSDR.

[50:28] Micah: This is so clear to me as I'm listening to you, like you're, you're putting light in all these little corners of everything, which I really appreciate. And I hope people listening are, you know, gathering all this and taking it in. What are some things that I haven't asked maybe that you feel are important when considering support?

[50:47] Piyush: Yeah, no. So there are a couple of aspects that as your team grows, I mean, that's, that's one piece that gets a little fuzzy where, okay, I've got this initial piece going. I got this set up, but how do I maintain this? How do I grow it? When do, how do my people, I think we touched a bit, but how do my people talk the way I do or talk the way my, my, you know, my company is what it's known for? How do I ensure that it's consistent? How do I make sure that what are we continuously improving? You know, those, those are things that are additional layers on top of this. So we we've covered the core, the center getting started right now. It's, I've got, okay, I've got a knowledge base. It's getting

[51:31] Micah: there. I've got two or three people now, and they are, they don't always stick. The people are leaving. You know, that's a common issue. Churn off your people. And okay, now I've got to retrain them. What do I do

[51:46] Piyush: now? Okay, now I have four people, and they're all talking differently. How do I make sure that they all talk the same way? So those are some aspects, that's management. That's where we get into some of the management pieces. The core element that has worked for us, just to get to that point is core values. And, you know, we just like keep has taught us the elite forum, Brett Gilliland, he runs that. And, you know, that has been a amazing program for us. We did that seven years ago, when we were starting out, we didn't even think we had four employees. And Brett came to us and said, you need the elite forum, because we're going to talk about core values. And I was like, I have four people. What are you talking about, man? I don't have time for this. And, you know, he's like, you will thank me later. Because I see you growing. And, you know, we were growing fast. And so we took the class, it was me and my business partner, we flew down from India, we went, we came to Phoenix, we did the three day core value setup. It's more like core values. It's, you know, it's a strategy, you're planning all that, right. But the piece that really stuck with us has been core values, we still use them. We have 150 people, 140. Every one of them lives and breeds by those core values. And, you know, the fast, friendly, accurate is part of our core values. That's just one. You know, it's, you know, second is making sure that we deliver outstanding results. You want to make sure we do that. You know, third thing is we have continuous improvement, how are we going to continuously improve? So we have, you know, five of these. And so we just breed that all day long. We talk about that every meeting, we bring it up, and, you know, we have awards for it. But the whole point of all that being it's, that's what keeps us consistent. It's core values that I believe in. It's core values that my business partner, Ashwin believes in. We've combined all that into one, we put it into words. And for the first four people, it was easy. I just told them what it was. But when we got our 30th person, 40th person that I didn't even know, I don't know some of their names, you know, that, and, and they're, they're telling me the core values. And they're like, you know, we do this because we want to continuously improve. I was like, Oh yeah, we do. And so, you know, that's, that's the, those pieces, those are the softer elements, which, you know, your listeners will have, they'll have set up some of this stuff, but to actually codify it and do it the way that, you know, Brett teaches is, has been magical.

[54:08] Micah: Yeah. I've experienced that as well. So I second that. In fact, over there in the corner is a little thing from, yeah. There's so much, I guess, when you talk, when you go into the whole thing,

[54:20] Piyush: you just open about your team and how do you get them having a similar voice? How do you get them

[54:25] Micah: with the knowledge? What do you do about turnover and all of these things? I've had an interesting run of that where we got really good. I feel at bringing on and, and up-leveling support people, but then it was interesting to then say, okay, like this person's kind of outgrown support. Um, they've been with us a while. They're great. Let's, let's move them here. Let's move them there. Let's, let's try them in these different avenues. And it was good in a way because everybody had done support. So no matter what job they were doing, they weren't, didn't feel above the support people. Right. And they understood the customer issues. Um, but it was an interesting, you know, I'd almost call it a chore of continuously filling up on, you know, starter agents in the training process in order to, to keep it healthy and, and chore might be a hard word, but it's, it's kind of hard when you invest so much in somebody, right. And then you pull them out of there and now somebody else gives like an

[55:22] Piyush: answer that's just a little off to the customer. And it's like, no, right. Right. No. And, and agreed, you know, it's, it, it reminds me of some, you know, some of the conversations I've had with my clients. So, uh, most of our customers are in a U S based and, uh, you know, they have teams that they've started with hiring here. Uh, my team, uh, most of them are in India and some of them are in Philippines. And so, you know, that's, that's a different dynamic there, but the culture piece is pretty common. Uh, one thing that I see when I'm, when I would deal with people in the U S, uh, what I found is they starting soft support, like you said, they, you know, they, they, they entry level, but they consider that truly entry level. That is not where they want to be. And, you know, uh, they, they, they want to keep growing. Now I'm not saying our team doesn't want to keep growing as well, but what, you know, what I've found and where we've been able to fill the gap has been what happens exactly what you said. People are eager to move to the next level from in the U S. So now we have a gap, you know, what do we do? I have to hire someone else. They start over here. So what we call it staff augmentation, which is we have our teams in India and Philippines, they fill in that initial role and we have team leaders. We have trainers who kind of help that process in terms of training someone again on a position that may have been, uh, you know, vacated. What I found in India, interesting. I'm from India, but you know, what I found that I've lived in the U S all the time, but what I find in India is these guys want to do support. That's all they want to do. And they love it. And, uh, and they're dedicated. They just, they, they want to make sure that they do well. And it's our team. We've done the core value stuff, but other teams, other people too, all over, you know, just that's the thing. It's, we want to be really good. We have teams that work 24 seven. And so we have overnight guys. And I asked them, Hey, are you sure you want to stay up all night and do this? And they're like, we love this. Like, all right, man, keep going. That's what they do, but they love doing that part. So in India, they're, you know, doing support. Now I keep them and they do the,

[57:28] Micah: ticket and backend chat and sort of thing. People in Philippines, very similar, same kind of mindset I want to keep doing. They're really good on the phone. That just happens to be, they've got the,

[57:36] Piyush: you know, they got the, the smooth voice and accent and all of that going. They've been trained by U S universities over there, that kind of thing. So I just, that's how, that's their culture. They're good on phones. Uh, so, you know, we have a mix of that. Whenever a client wants a phone support, you know, I picked from some of my Philippines folks. Uh, but you know, we, we have this, we have different types of people in different countries wanting different things. And so, you know, a line keeping that in mind as you, as you, as you hire people here, knowing that these guys want to keep moving and they want to move up. They don't want to move laterally. They want to move up. They want to, you know, do much more different things than support. And so that's been the reason we've continued to stay in business. It's just like, okay, people here just want to move to a different place. Let us help them, you know, uh, fill that gap at least for now. And, you know, and, but it's still, the culture still stays. I mean, we want to make sure that, you know, our team to be adhered to the team's culture that they have here. And we all talk good, you know, the same way.

[58:37] Micah: That's so interesting to me, uh, everything you just said, because I think I missed that nuance of the cultural difference. I think I kind of projected my American mindset because I would have, um, support agents in India and I'd be like, Hey, do you want to move into marketing? Hey, do you want to, you know, like trying to pull them out of support all the time. And because that's what I would think I would want. Right. And anyways, I agree with everything you just said in hindsight. I'm like, Oh, uh, yeah, I was probably pushing people way out of their comfort zone and maybe they got comfortable with it or whatever. Some of them, you know, they wanted to move and shake, but others were kind of like, I guess if, if you need that, I'll, you know, they almost saw it as an extension of support. Sure. Oh,

[59:16] Piyush: support you with your marketing. Right. Exactly. I mean, I had some people who very similar. It was like, you know, we have support and sales. We've got, uh, we are more heavy on support. We have, you know, 70, 75% support, 25% sales. And some of these support guys are really good at sales. I mean, they just, you know, they're, they're good. They get it out. And so I'm like, all right, man, you're going to get into sales. Let's get you over there. And man, they get upset. That's like, you know, what do you mean? Am I being demoted? Like, no, man, you're going to get like double the amount of money you're going to get in that, in that role. Like he's like, no, that's an emotion. And so it is different. Uh, my business partner kind of coaches me on that sometimes because he's like, why did you offer them sales? Like they were pretty upset. Uh, you know, and, or even moving, they do want to move up. They want to become a leader. And so that's, that's good. They want to become a leader of support and then they want to become leader of multiple teams and that kind of thing. So that part is good. But if you want to move them to a different division, get them out outside what they're really good at, at the moment, uh, that doesn't work for them. So, you know, okay, you know, that that's fine. And then on the flip side over here, uh, you know, we, we see that movement happening a lot more. And so we're encouraging these guys, like our, our clients. And we were like, Hey, you know, you have these two, they're really good. Uh, we can take over those two and you can just move them to a different position, which, you know, they were going to hire our team for two, a different position. I was like, why don't you take your internal team, move them there. They're really good. We'll backfill with these in our team here. Uh, so, so we have some of that happening as well.

[1:00:47] Micah: The, um, people in the Philippines, do they have any issue moving from support into sales while they're already on the phone? Is it less of an issue or similar?

[1:00:56] Piyush: It's, uh, it's less of an issue there. Uh, they're, they're just, they want to be on the phone. So they do not like text stuff. Uh, at least the, you know, people we work with, uh, you know, they're doing text and they just prefer being on the phone. They, they, at least the people I work with, they're pretty used to that. Uh, when I put them back on text and say, okay, for the next two weeks, you're going to be doing, you know, chat support. And, uh, they, they're just like, no, man, give me some phone stuff. And so they're a little bit more progressive. They, they, they may be more aligned to the U S style. And so, you know, they, they want to move, they want to come visit here and, you know, meet with folks. And I was like, all right, we can work that out. Uh, so it's just, that's just the way it is in India. They want to, you know, be in that community, stay there. Uh, you know, they have a bit more, uh, family kind of thing. And so, uh, they, they want to cater to their family. Don't want to be too far from them. And, you know, they, the finances that come in, they're supporting their whole family. So we have some other, we have different things they're doing with the team. You know, I want my, my goal for my team is go is to make them financially and physically fit. That's what I want them to do like financially and physically fit. And so how do we get that? How do we make that happen? And every team that I have is slightly

[1:02:07] Micah: different in the way they're going to achieve that. So I'm, I'm not the only one telling my support agents, they need to like lift weights or something.

[1:02:16] Piyush: You know, I've always wondered that someone said, are you going to get sued for this? If they don't measure their blood pressure every time they walk in, I was like, no, no, I'm not going to measure the weight and all that. But, uh, you know, yeah, maybe, yeah, you're not the only one. I mean, I truly, I want them. I said, if nothing else, guys, you know, we were on a team meeting last week and we had, you know, 80, 90 people on there. I was like, look guys, thanks for being on Equinox agents. You guys are great. If you get nothing else out of this company, you got some money that we're giving you, paying you, but I want you to take two things. I want you to get physically fit. And I want you to get financially literate and fit. Like don't spend all the money you're getting, because I've seen some people take lavish vacations, uh, you know, that they got a little bit of funds as like, you know, there's some savings on, but physically fit, like, you know, that I want you to get good and better mentally and physically. And so, uh, yeah, and I'm putting in place, I mean, it's going to be part of their bonus program. I'm going to, I want to see our company being, you know, just a better place in a good, good physical place for people to come in and work.

[1:03:19] Micah: I agree. And I think in tech, it's easy to, I think the alternative to that, if you don't do anything about it is you can have someone who's, who's unhealthy and they have lower energy and then they might have an issue and then they're not on the team anymore. And so it's, it's obviously good for anybody to be healthier. Right. So I think we're doing nice things by encouraging people to be healthy, but then there's never made a business, you know, benefit to it all. Right. Just as far as

[1:03:44] Piyush: like, Oh, people are, they just have better energy. Um, so yeah, this is interesting. We're kind of

[1:03:50] Micah: all over the place here in support land, which I absolutely love. Um, let's jump kind of segue into a related topic. So you mentioned, you have a little bit of interest in building some, I'll call it, you know, information, information products or whatever around what, you know, and putting that out. Uh, and I think that's, you know, it's interesting to me because we're talking support, but I want to kind of pivot into a membership site. So what, what is your initial idea on that membership site? What do you want to provide first? What problem do you want to solve?

[1:04:23] Piyush: Yeah, no, thanks for asking and offering to help. I think, uh, it's something that I've been wanting to do for a bit. Uh, you know, we, I started off as a, like I said, a keep certified partner, providing keep support, all of that. And as you were part of that as well, I mean, we, we learn a lot of things on business strategy. And then, uh, we, we, a lot of times we know a lot of stuff, but we're spending time selling and then we're implementing and then we're selling again and then we're implementing. And so, you know, there's not much time between those. And so, you know, with this company now, I've, you know, for the last six, seven, five, six years, I've got some time that I've created to think beyond, you know, getting customers and servicing them. I mean, that's, that's what obviously we want to do that. I want to do that. Well, you want to do more of it,

[1:05:05] Micah: but what I found an area just like maybe it could be, you know, similar to your, your audience.

[1:05:11] Piyush: It's, you have these solopreneurs, you have smaller companies that have one person, two people,

[1:05:19] Micah: or the person themselves who are trying this out and don't know some of this stuff. Just what we

[1:05:25] Piyush: discussed, whether it's Zendesk setup, uh, knowledge base management, or it could be as, you know, bot creation, uh, metrics to be used. And, you know, level one is set this up and level two. The thing for me is how do you become, the thing that I'm, I really want to get to is how does one have a world-class support company? And that's, that's, that's what I want. Every company from the start till the end,

[1:05:53] Micah: they need to be world-class in support. And, and, you know, what does it mean to be world-class?

[1:05:59] Piyush: I believe we provide world-class support for our software, you know, clients by the way we set things up, why the way we evaluate it. We've not talked about quality. It's a QA piece. There's a, there's a whole, a whole, you know, we have a division in our company where there's 20 people that all they do is quality. They evaluate the quality of our conversations, of our clients' conversations, and then they score it. And then there's a whole dashboard for it and all of that. So, you know, that, that's how you measure quality to improve it. But all of these pieces, quality training, hiring, you know, dashboards, all of that could be a consumable learning program that, or implementation program. You know, I like, I like programs, the best programs that I've used and consumed are the ones where they tell you, go do A, then come back, go to B, then come back, go to C, then come back, go to D. If you haven't done D, don't move. You know, it's just like Tyler Garns program. So I would like to have created something like that, where it's, if you're here, go do these things. If you're already here, go do these things to get

[1:07:01] Micah: to world class. Gotcha. To what extent is this program for you scratching a creative itch versus you're trying to build a funnel for your, you know, your other business? Where does it fall between

[1:07:13] Piyush: those two things? It's probably a bit of both. I'll tell you the creative part for me is on the AI bit. The creative and interest is, is the AI piece, which is fascinating to me. We just, I just hired a guy on our team. He's doing Python code and he's writing me an AI. He's creating a system of agents, AI agents. And we call it Equinox agents. We are agents, we're humans, but he's creating a copy of that. And so he's got a team leader bot. He's got an agent bot. He's got a quality bot. He's got a trainer bot. And they all talk to each other. And in, in, in, in AI world, and they're all creating, they're looking at knowledge systems and they're creating knowledge base articles. Like in, you know, without anyone touching anything. And so it's kind of, that's fascinating to me. It's just, it's just, it's such a different world now with the LLM stuff. But anyway, that's, that's my creative interest piece that can fit into this. The other piece is more, it is more of a lead gen, but also providing, solving a problem, which I see over and over. The knowledge management system to me is, is one that has got the most attention that I've seen so far in my conversations with companies, with people. And that's why I kind of bring that together. It's like, there's a, there's a whole program called knowledge centered service KCS. KCS. And that is something that one of our clients introduced us to. You can go online and you can, you know, search for KCS, but it's a program or it's, it's more of a system that someone has created or a consortium has created on how to deliver great quality support. And it's all based on knowledge management. And so I've taken that, we've learned that for the last two or three years, and I've, I've seen how valuable that is and people, everybody shouldn't do this. And that's kind of, it's, it's, it's to answer the question of, was it an itch? It kind of is, it's something that I see is of value that people want. You know, when we're building anything, we want to see product market fit. Is there enough people wanting it? Is there demand for it? All that kind of stuff. So to me, I've seen all of those pieces in this area of knowledge management. And especially for the startup, small company growing quick, it very much applies to the large company because they've got knowledge management chaos. But you know, that's, that's, that's a separate thing. This is just even getting started on how do we create the right flow so that all of our team members can, can use it.

[1:09:43] Micah: What does your perfect, you know, version of this look like? Meaning let's say you, you record some videos or some content. Do you want to be doing group coaching? Do you want to be doing one-on-ones? Do you want to be like mentoring within this? Or do you just want to create the info product and stay focused on your current business?

[1:10:02] Piyush: It would be, it's almost like, I mean, if I was to look at the way it flows in my, it'd be almost like a funnel. I think it would be, you know, here's, if you don't have this, start here. And, you know, it would be, get some, get people to start using it or doing a self

[1:10:18] Micah: kind of implementation. And then if you need help, I mean, I'll be there to facilitate part of it,

[1:10:26] Piyush: but it's going to be our team. I've got a team of people, experts who will get you and get you set up right. Cause these guys have been doing it for years and you know, they will, they will make sure you're on the right path. So it's part of the business. It's part of growing it, but I almost imagine our team morphing into that, which is I'm providing humans right now to do support, but it's going to be a human knowledge team that understands knowledge management and takes, you know, we bring that to the, to the company. So, you know, when I sell, I look at this as, you know, when I'm selling our services to companies, I currently go in as, Hey, do you have, what's your size? And do you have a need for extending your team? Do you have overnight coverage? Do you have a lot of volume that you want to help alleviate your internal team? That kind of thing. It's as a human play. I want to get to a human plus bot plus knowledge play that, you know,

[1:11:19] Micah: here's value that we bring more than just humans. Yeah. And I'm sure that would be a great mix because you can have that bot frontline, the human backend, you know, make them specialized. We like, you kind of touched on a quality assurance a little bit there. I wonder for a smaller, let's say a solopreneur. Is that just the owner? They like checking on the tickets and they train

[1:11:43] Piyush: the person and so on, I guess at first. Yeah. At first, I mean, the quality piece there is, it'll be the owner. And what I look at is there's normally, so let's say the owner has one person that they've hired and they're looking at their quality, let's say. So from moving from answering questions, you're now evaluating someone's, right? That's kind of the change in your role. What do you evaluate? How many do you evaluate? And how do you know it's working or not? That's the quality piece. And so what I like to look at is if you measure between six to 7% of all conversations, that gives you enough of an insight of whether how good or bad this person is in terms of, not bad the person, how good or well the conversations are. And so if you go do any more, that's diminishing returns, you already know what the answer is. So, you know, if let's say they do 20 tickets a week, so, you know, 12, you need 6% of that, let's say even 10%. So you do two or three tickets, that's all you need. And you evaluate those, you look at the answers, you'll know by two or three, whether this is good or not. So that, and that's the, that's a very bare bones, you know, numbers in terms of how many you do. And then what do you evaluate? We normally have a sheet. It's a, it's a sheet, which has, you know, 20, 10 parameters, 20 parameters, whatever, but we, we created a sheet that says, did that person do this, this, this, this? So it's how it's the three factors, faster and be inaccurate. You know, was it fast? Did they answer quickly? Was it a lot of hold time? Was it, you know, friendly? Was it crazy comments that you made, just like we talked about? Hey, quick, you know, here's the answer or, and was it accurate? Are they giving proper answers or are they just trying to deflect it to, because they don't know the answer? So, you know, those, you look at those three big categories and then you have sub elements of that who measure these people. And then you create, you know, in our team, you, you have a number or value at the end. So when you're doing large volumes, we didn't have a dashboard for that, but for solopreneurs, five or six tickets, you do a week, you'll evaluate it, you'll get us idea. You then do a quick one-on-one and say, hey, here are some issues I'm finding. How about next week? Let's work on that. Look at it again next week. So instead of answering the 20 tickets, you're looking at two or three,

[1:13:54] Micah: just to make sure it's working right. That's a super practical tip because, you know, part of me, I think initially when I first started bringing in people, I'm reading every word they're writing, right? So I'm almost like redoing the work, which may be at first, maybe while they're training, sure. Training's fine, yeah. Yeah. But I like that metric, you know, six, seven percent or so, you know, in the long run, just kind of keeping an eye on part of it without overspending on that. Piyush, you've been amazing to come on to answer all of these questions. If people are interested in connecting with you or learning more about you, what's the best way they can get in touch with you or connect with you?

[1:14:33] Piyush: Yeah, yeah. So I'm, you know, I've got equinoxagents.com. Equinoxagents.com is a website with a plural. That's where you'll see information about us. You'll see me and my business partner and some of the stuff we do, a lot of things that we talked about. I'm on LinkedIn, huge Parikh. And so that's, you know, that's a good way to see, you'll see some of the things that I've done there. I'm very active on the support side of things in LinkedIn. And so, you know, we have, I get into, I get into, I personally get into some of these conversations and submit my stuff and, you know, like I think so. You'll find me on there. And yeah, I think it would be great to connect with anyone who's even just looking at this and may not be looking to hire us, but at least, you know, get some ideas on next steps. What would be another tool? What about this tool? What about

[1:15:22] Micah: that tool? And I can, so happy to do that. Awesome. I appreciate your generosity and kind of sharing your time and wisdom with people. So Piyush Parikh with equinoxagents.com. It'll also be in the show notes here, but thank you again so much. This has been really enlightening, really, really fascinating

[1:15:40] Piyush: and interesting. Thank you. No, thanks, Mike. Super questions. These are great. You know, I was going to, I was wondering where we would go with some of this stuff, but I appreciate all the questions. I mean, they're very, very on point and I appreciate you guiding me towards, you know, some of the solopreneurs and the membership side piece, which I think is amazing. I mean, if we could, if you could have that button on there, that, you know, if you do nothing else, get that little bot on there, get a little chat thing and just start getting information. And if no one picks it, that's fine. But at least you have it as accessible. At least you, they'll know that you care about, you know, their questions. I would highly recommend it, but thanks for having me, Michael.

[1:16:17] Micah: Yeah. Thank you. And for everybody out there, just to recap his tip just now, go do that now. And then when he comes out with the program, you can follow along his stats. Thanks again, Piyush. Thanks. All right. So we'll cut it there.