Fireside Chat with Stacy Justino from Wistia

Welcome to Fireside Chats with Klaus and Valentina – our brand new video series where we discuss the hottest topics in the world of CX with support leaders from around the world. Fireside Chats are hosted by Valentina Thörner, Empress of Product at Klaus, and Mr. Klaus the Cat itself?

In the first episode, we’ll be talking to Stacy Justino, Director of Customer Happiness at Wistia – the creators of the video marketing software we all love to use. Improving remote work experience was one of the goals Wistia’s team set for themselves at the beginning of the year. Little did they know they’d get an intensive crash course just a few months into the year.

Enjoy the full Fireside Chat and check out our key takeaways below.

Here are the 10 most important lessons from Wistia that you can put into use right away to manage remote work, socialize at a distance, and deliver superb customer service while working from home:

Schedule standing time slots for social Zoom calls as an alternative to watercooler conversations and after-work drinks at a distance.
Wistia’s customer champs have voluntary social Zoom meetings scheduled for every Monday, Wednesday, Friday – and they haven’t just been chatting away. They’ve learned to bake bread, enjoyed a tour of one of their coworker’s tractor fleet, and lots more.
Communicate how you’ve organized your work so that, for example, your team knows when you’ve started your morning and are ready to answer customer calls, or when you’re having a lunch break.
Slack statuses are an easy way to keep everyone informed about what you’re doing. However, to ensure that everyone is on the same page, let your team know what you’re up to in the chat as well.
Give updates about customer happiness and other relevant topics to other teams in between your regular demos and meetings.
Luckily, Wistia has built the perfect tool to facilitate updates like this – Wistia Soapbox has proven to be one of the best hacks during #wfh times.
Spend 1:1 time with your colleagues by, for example, letting Donut pair you up with people you haven’t had a chance to get to know very well.
Now that you’re away from the office, you might want to use it to stay in touch with your closest colleagues, as well.
Do conversation reviews and discuss the results with the team. If you’re used to having face-to-face feedback sessions, switch to video calls, and share the screen to discuss the feedback left on Klaus.

“Klaus makes it easy to continue doing quality reviews even if we’re not in the same room,” explains Stacy.
Make use of peer reviews. At Wistia, each champ (that’s what they call their agents) reviews five of their colleagues’ conversations at least a day before they gather for a review meeting to discuss the results.
Read more about how Wistia conducts conversation reviews in groups of three, what their quality criteria are, and why they started doing support QA in the first place.
Explain your support quality criteria during onboarding. At Wistia, they go through the topic and explain how peer review processes work at around week four.
By the way, they’ve hired three new people to the customer service team during the lockdown and are in the middle of another hiring process. Remote hiring is totally a thing!
Let newcomers review their own tickets and talk through them. This way, you won’t put your new hires in an awkward position where they’d have to review some of the old-timers’ tickets on day one if you’re doing peer reviews.
Also, it’s a good thing to mention that you have a peer review system in place early on to avoid any surprises later.
Send follow-up emails on the most important topics discussed in your chat channels. Keep your team in the loop of what you’ve been talking about in Slack and make all the relevant information easy to find in everybody’s inboxes.
At Wistia, the teams also use Quip for internal documentation. It allows people to collaborate on documents, highlight texts, comment, and edit them, as necessary.
Continue with regular one-on-one meetings. Even though you probably had to switch to remote work for a while, there are still things happening in your company that your team members want to discuss with you. Keep having dedicated face time with your agents as you did before.
At Wistia, the team managers hold weekly half-hour one-on-one meetings, just like they did at the office.

These are just a few snippets from the a-meow-zing chat we had with Stacy Justino from Wistia. Watch the entire video and get to know how industry-leading customer service is done.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask Stacy? Join the discussion in our CX quality community Quality Tribe.