Episode 14: (B2B) Manny Ruiz, VP Success & Support, InfluxData

Description

Key Insights

InfluxData - 600+ customers serving from 1-person startup to Fortune-50 companies
Support Organization - non-tiered, roughly 12 people in US and UK. Very remote-friendly. Just started building customer success team. Case volume ~400 per month. How-to / Break-Fix case split 25 / 75
Support Tech - Used to be Zendesk; migrating to Salesforce ServiceCloud. GitHub open source for docs. Discourse for Community Forums [InfluxData being an open source company promotes use of open source products]
Case split across channels - earlier >75% on email. Now shifting towards web.
Knowledge Base - Separate KB doesn’t exist instead knowledge is added to product documentation. Though this will likely change in future
Cool Idea - “Crowd sourcing for support answers” — worked very well at MobileIron (used a vendor called Directly)
What's broken in Support Tech Stack-- Integration between CRM, Case Management and Bug database is broken. One has to throw tools, consulting dollars to fix it!
Focus for next 12 months - Build Customer Success Team
Online Certification/Education - No standard tool that exists; a few open source tools though
Metrics - Success : Customer Health (primary indicator product usage), Support: CSAT
What would you do differently if you were to do this all over again - Focus on Customer Success deeply from the beginning; that way you understand deeply about customer and product-market fit.
Books: