Step Zero, CSAT Heroes & AI Fails

This week in CX: what happens before your journey even starts, why CSAT’s overrated, and one AI flop to rule them all.

Author

Jen Weaver
April 18, 2025

Welcome to the Support Snapshot, our Friday newsletter bringing you the podcasts of the week in the customer support and services world, so you can listen a little or a lot, and either way get the best of the best.

Top Quick Clips

if you have just a few minutes, hit these highlights

  • The Intuitive Customer podcast, minute 22: the Congo and the customer journey step zero that never occurred to me.

  • The KPI Podcast at minute 10:45 for Ali's hot take on which metrics aren't important (😅 CSAT 😅) and which to use instead.

  • The Modern Customer Podcast at minute 8:15, for a masterclass on interviewing from Blake Morgan and a great answer from Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk for the #1 must-have AI strategy for support teams.

🦸 This newsletter is brought to you by Supportman.io, which connects Intercom to Slack with AI to give agents feedback and surface problems in real time.

a small selection of the CS podcasts published this week

😄 Customer Journey Step Zero 🤯

This episode of The Intuitive CX Podcast is FULL OF GEMS from Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton ! Also it's delightfully and sartorially British.

Minute 5ish: "We make decisions so fast that anything we think about how we made that decision is just a story we tell afterwards."

Minute 18ish: "There's an opportunity for a new first impression when there's a new traunch of information ... it could be when you actually speak to that person for the first time ... they could form a new first impression."

Minute 22: The Congo story. The customer journey, step zero - before they even interact with you - is what they think of your kind of company and the emotional state they're in when they meet your brand. Your frontline specialists know what this step zero is, but is it information that you're using strategically?

"What people have told you, what you've seen in the media, the films you watched... I may be looking for an insurance company, but I know what it's like to call a contact center ... to deal with insurance companies ... so I already have my first impression of what it's going to be like."

💰 Premium Support

Miles Goldstein talks with me on our Live Chat with Jen Weaver podcast about how to implement premium support tiers. I've been sharing some shorts, and here's another highlight: Miles discusses what tools you need to implement premium support.

🥇 Remember One Thing About Each Person

Alisha Joseph gives an amazing tip on leadership on Next in Queue :

"I always try to remember one thing about each person, not just who's reporting to me, but who I'm reporting to or leaders above them... the one conversation that makes 51:52 them tick, that brings them joy ... if you don't, you get into this robotic thing of just going through the motions."

This works in reverse too - to connect with someone, give them that one thing that you know you could talk about all day, so you can always connect on a personal level.

➡️ Watch minute 33:20 for Alisha's hot tip and a great reply from Rob Dwyer

📈 The KPI Podcast

Alisha Joseph is making the rounds! Here she talks with Greg R. on The KPI Podcast about support metrics.

➡️ Skip to minute 10:45 for Ali's hot take on which metrics aren't important (😅 CSAT 😅) and which to use instead.

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"CSAT scores are set up to fail in the first place... there are a lot of uncontrollables that go into that score."

Greg Reffner

🤖 Top 3 AI Strategies for Support Teams

Adrian McDermott, CTO at Zendesk, talks with Blake Morgan on The Modern Customer Podcast about the top 3 AI moves to make:

  1. RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation. "Everyone should have a plan to implement this ASAP."

  2. Copilot mechanism for agents that delivers recommended steps and AI-crafted replies

  3. Direct automation: what we sometimes call bots

➡️ Watch minute 8:15, when Blake flexes her interviewing skills to get a great answer from Adrian about what RAG is and why we should implement it for self-serve support:

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What's RAG? "...turning your search box into something that looks more like a chat window, where you ask it a question and get an answer... if I ask you how do you do a return, you don't get a link to an article, you get an answer."

If you need more to listen to...

these are also great, but so much happened this week, we just can't fit it all in - maybe you can!

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The best CX is a really good EX.

Neal Travis

There's a lot of great content in the podcasts this week, so we're keeping the rest of this newsletter short.

📌 A delicious AI fail: a company replaces humans with bots and it hits them in the wallet. Discussion in ElevateCX Slack.

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“It shows that people in general respond positively to diversity. It’s a spontaneous, perceptual effect.”

Uzma Khan

🦸 This newsletter is brought to you by Supportman.io, which connects Intercom to Slack with AI to give agents feedback and surface problems in real time.