#154 - Justin Winter, CEO of Boostopia - On how we can end bad customer support experiences by leveraging technology

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to engage your support team and empower them to do their best work. My guest is Justin Winter, Co-founder and CEO of Boostopia.

He has been an advisor to over a dozen companies and acted in a consulting capacity with over 150+ consumer brands and technology companies across areas of growth, retention, product, and operations.

Justin studied for his Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA.

In 2010, he co-founded Diamond Candles, the fastest-growing and largest online home fragrance brand in the world. He led the company as the CEO for 5 years.

In that process, he became frustrated with the solutions available to him to deliver customer support that his customers loved. So he decided to set out to assemble a team to lead to build what he wished he had during his tenure there.

This became the spark that started Boostopia, of which Justin is the Co-founder and CEO. Boostopia is a technology company that helps B2C companies decrease the number of tickets they get, discover ways to efficiently manage support issues, and transform support into a new revenue-generating channel.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore why bad customer support still exists and why the current approach of focusing on the support agent is not enough to solve it. We also discuss the opportunities to turn the support department from a cost-centre into a profit-centre, and the opportunity to increase the wage of support team members by a mere 50% as a consequence of that.

Here are some of his quotes:

We fundamentally believe that the way to create better customer experiences isn't by getting the latest and greatest fancy ticketing system. It's really about engaging your support team that you have and empowering them to do their best work.

Why is customer support, from our perspective as a consumer, so horrible? We all hate talking to customer support. We have lots of frustrating experiences. So, we fundamentally believe that the reason why bad customer support still exists. It's not because companies don't know that that's happening. It's because they don't have an underlying attribution model for understanding how those bad experiences lead to them making less money.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to spark momentum by overwhelming your users with opportunity, i.e., give them a clear picture of the value they are creating with your product
2. How to find balance in your investment between ‘selling what you got’ versus making ‘the next big thing.’
3. Why companies that bet on product-led growth are proportionally better rewarded than those that are sales-led.
4. Why you’d drive more value for your customers by instead of helping them be more efficient, help them eliminate the underlying problem all together.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Justin Winter
• Website Boostopia