Recap: Support Driven Leadership Summit 2024

Firstly, we must say a thank you to Scott, Lizzie and all the Support Driven team for another awesome event and providing us the opportunity to connect with our peers. And a big shout out to Reagn Helms and all the team at Planning HQ for your incredible hospitality. We couldn’t have wished for more friendly and welcoming hosts!

This year’s event was focused on the theme of: Transforming Customer Support from a Cost Center to Value Driver; and helping Support Leaders own their seat at the executive table. This is a topic we are truly passionate about. Customer support is a value driver! And recognizing this can provide businesses with an opportunity to leverage the customer interactions its support team is having every day.

Our COO and Co-founder, Josh, was fortunate enough to be one of the speakers providing a talk on How to Win Friends and Influence your CFO: Changing the Perception of Support in your Business. He shared some useful tips and recommendations from his days as a CFO on how Support Leaders can influence decision-making at the executive level.

There were many great speakers, and panels, throughout the two days but we really loved the talk from David Kay; Self-Service: It’s not a deflection strategy, it’s an engagement strategy!

David used his years of experience as a knowledge management expert to challenge how we’ve been thinking about deflection in connection with the knowledge base, and provided a thoughtful framework for how we can present and measure the impact of our knowledge base through the lens of value creation.

This is a space we care deeply about so this really struck a chord with us. Today’s customers are savvy, self-reliant and overwhelmingly prefer to use self-service support tools to resolve issues for themselves. And your knowledge base remains the cornerstone of self-service support with a study conducted by Forrester indicating it is the preferred self-service channel for customers. So investing into your knowledge base is so much more than a deflection strategy. It is also one of your most important elements in providing your customers with a great overall customer experience.

David also provided several great tips and recommendations for best practices to keep in mind when developing your knowledge base strategy. Including the importance of making your knowledge base publicly available, as much as possible, to allow it to be indexed by search engines to ensure your help content is easily accessible and easy to find for your customers. This can sometimes be a tricky conversation to have with your leadership team, and it is not uncommon for there to be some reluctance to making your knowledge base publicly available. Check out the blog we wrote with our friends at Learning Outcomes to explore some of the pros and cons of making your knowledge base public or private.

If you are interested in more of the great knowledge management insights from David and the team at DB Kay Associates do you can visit: https://www.dbkay.com/

And if you missed this year’s Leadership Summit you can sign up to see all the recordings from the event from the Support Driven Vimeo page.

If you have any follow up questions for Josh, or just want to geek-out on screenshot automation feel free to reach out!