How companies can support the well-being of their support team with Tade Anzalone at Calm

The more heightened your stress levels are going to be, you're going to see a decrease in how alert and focused you are. And those are the exact things that will start to decrease your productivity, and will start to decrease the quality of your work as a result. So having a culture company wide, that acknowledges that breaks are necessary, I think is incredibly important. Hello and welcome back to Conversations with Zendask, where we explore new technology and trends in customer experience. Each week we speak with industry innovators and experts to hear their thoughts, unpack industry trends, and discuss the most important ideas around CX. I'm your host, Nicole Saunders. My guest for this conversation is Tade Anzaloni, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Calm. Tade has been working in the customer experience and support space for nearly a decade. She's led several award-winning CX teams for a variety of industries including healthcare, banking, and financial management software. Today we're going to dig into a topic that has become increasingly important over the past few years. The mental health of support teams. Being on the front line of a company's support means always being on. Dealing with questions and challenges from customers who may be frustrated or stressed out themselves, all while trying to provide a great customer experience and represent your company's brand and values. It's a tall order, and support agents I think are the true heroes of many businesses. Tade is going to talk about how individuals, managers, and organizations all have a part to play in supporting team members' mental health and has some great recommendations for the things that we should all be doing when work gets stressful. I learned a lot from this conversation as it is just chock full of great insights and advice. Enjoy. Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the ZenDES complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at zendesk.com Hey, it's Anzolone. Welcome to Conversations with ZenDESK. Thank you. Very excited to be here. I've been a long time ZenDESK user, so great to have this conversation going. I'm so excited to dig into this topic with you today. Where I would love to start is just talking about why is mental health something that's important for CX leaders to be thinking about. What is the value of it and why is it important right now? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a couple of reasons why mental health is really important to focus on for any leader at a company and specifically for CX leaders. I think for CX leaders, people in the customer support and call center spaces, those are industries that from the research I've done see a 30 to 45% turnover rate. That's pretty alarmingly high, especially when you consider that company wide, we see something a little bit closer to the 15. So in some cases, depending on your company or your industry, you know, I'd be seeing double turnover rate that you would in other departments and mental health and the toll that this kind of work can take on somebody is a huge factor in why that's the case. And on a broader scale from comms research from the mental health on this trends report that we released earlier this year nearly two of three employees about 64% say they're struggling with mental health issues. And the ones that are most commonly reported would be stress and anxiety and work stress and anxiety is a huge part of that. But that can be a really awful state to be in when you're also trying to do your best work at your job. And it's something that can really put your team's productivity and retention at risk. So even on a broader scale, this is definitely something that any reader should be concerned with and taking steps to address. Absolutely. I mean, it's an important value to begin with, but certainly then you look at your business bottom line and you don't want to be losing all of that time and all of those people. I imagine that this is a problem that has gotten worse over the last several years with things like the pandemic. We all knew that that caused a lot of additional stress. But then I also think about even before the pandemic, this is an important topic for teams that work in support. We've heard about the community moderators at Facebook struggling with having to deal with some of this challenging content that they've had to watch as a part of their job. I certainly know that from the community management space, we're dealing with a lot of customers that are coming in and telling us they're so passionate about what they love and they're also passionate about what they don't love. And that's hard for somebody that has to day in and day out just deal with people's problems and their frustrations. So, Tade, tell me a little bit more about what the specific nuances of support teams are. Why those individuals tend to be so vulnerable to some of the mental health challenges we've been talking about? I think the nature of the work is really the culprit there. I had a manager once described this kind of work as high repetition, high critical thinking. And that's because you're doing a lot of processes and solving tickets in a kind of a repetitive manner. But each and every one requires you to be incredibly focused on a lot of different things at once in order to do them well. You have to prioritize your conversations really quickly if you're looking at a large queue, you have to know which ones make the most sense to start with. You have to identify and empathize with the customer's problem, even if it's one of their own creation to make sure that you can really show them that you're there to help solve the problem. You have to demonstrate a lot of care and productivity in your solutions. And you are probably doing all of that while following voice and tone guidelines that match your company's brand. And you're doing all of this while you know that dozens of tickets are kind of rolling in at the same time. So that's a lot of different skills to rely on at one time. And it can be a lot. There's a human can only do so much. So I think the level of care that you need to have with each ticket, I think can take a toll on somebody because they're doing it so repetitively and so back to back. And at the same time, you also need to be prepared for yourself to be an extension of your company. I mean, in our line of work, we tend to need to be prepared for anything we say to a customer to be screen shot and put on the internet somewhere and fill it with our company because we are really to this customer the face of the company. And it can be really tempting for your department to operate on numbers and try to get as much productivity out of your team as possible. When you take into account how much you have to accomplish with each ticket, it becomes more important for you to understand exactly what is possible for your team to accomplish in a certain amount of time before you start sacrificing your team's mental wellness and your team's productivity and work quality. And all of those things, it just really drives home the point how much those support agents are kind of superheroes, right? They're doing so many things at once. They're doing it over and over often with not a ton of time to decompress in between one interaction in the next one. I can really see where there's huge value in setting those folks up for success, supporting them, managing their time, and then also creating a culture where they can do what they need to do to take care of themselves. I think drawing the connection with your team between taking care of yourself, being a huge factor in your own work quality and productivity is so, so important. And it's one that just needs a lot of repetition, but it needs managers to build in that kind of language and how they talk about work because that link is just so stark and it's not going to go away. So making sure that your team understands that them taking care of themselves is part of their job is part of them making sure that they can do their work well. It's really important for managers to be on top of that. I love that point. Taking care of yourself is part of your job. Nothing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's like hard to be on all the time in the first place, much less be super empathetic and great at deescalating situations if you're in a state where you're really stressed out and having a tough time. Yeah, very much so. And I think you're right to point out that this was hard before the pandemic and then the past couple of years we've seen people have to maintain a high support quality as consumer expectations just kind of continue to rise of the products that they're purchasing. While also handling a transition to remote work, which I think is still a transition for a lot of us, it's still a big change even though it's been three years, it's really not that long and the grand scheme of how long we've all been working and used to an office. So that all happening at the same time as you really need to keep your game up is that by heart state on you bring up remote work. That's a great point because for support agents part of what helps them is their network of their peers and colleagues and the ability to blow off some steam or get some support empathy from some of the people. It's a lot harder to do that when you can't like take off your headset and talk to the person next to you or pop over down the hall and you just alone in your apartment or your house trying to figure out how to sort out your feelings and that kind of thing. It is definitely put the strategy of keeping yourself on and keeping yourself to well taking care of a little bit more individual. There's less people for you to rely on and to turn to as a form of support you can still do that. It's just in a written format or maybe in a zoom format if that's what you prefer. But it has I think made a lot of people think about what is it in my work day that really makes me perform at my best and how can I make sure to build that time and to build those priorities and so it has I think cost a lot of reflection in the community. Well, and I imagine that that's made it really hard for managers as well, right? Because if you're manager and you're trying to support your team, one, you don't have as much visibility into who might be struggling. You know, if they don't tell you, you might not know right away. And two, there's a lot less that you can do to support someone if you can't go have a sit down with them or do something to support them in person. Absolutely. I think it shifted what managers have had to take into account and look for in terms of getting the vibe of what your team is. I think previously we were in an office. It's a little easier to frankly your conversations and read people's body language and kind of see what energy level they were bringing to the office. and now that shifted a bit so that we have to take a few more factors into to account to see is the team handling a reasonable amount of work and how is that going for them? So what are some of the things that managers should be looking for as signs that someone or that a team maybe needs some helper intervention or isn't doing as well as they were before? There are a few things that I look for that are both qualitative and quantitative. I think from the quantitative side, any manager who has eyes on what the numbers behind their team's performance is could find this information pretty easily. First thing we look for is ticket count increasing. But it's usually one of the biggest signs that your team may be up against a higher workload than they've been used to or that they might be prepared for depending on what your bandwidth and utilization rate is for your department. So when we see that ticket count start to rise, we need to very quickly start to compare it to what our expected utilization rate is for the department. And when I say utilization rate, I'm referring to what is a reasonable percentage of time that your team is focused on support and is basically utilized in providing support, whether that's answering tickets or looking for an answer by researching through their materials or asking a coworker what a tricky question's answer is. And in doing all the rep relatives follow-ups, they have to do for support in general. So when you start to see your ticket count rise, that's usually the biggest factor in your utilization rate increasing. So you first need to look at what is the reason that your ticket count is increasing? Is it something that looks pretty temporary? Like potentially a fire within your product. Maybe there's a bug out there that's going to be resolved in a couple of days or a couple of hours. But it's temporary. Then that thing that can require a different set of planning to make sure that your team can make it through the next couple of days. All right. And do prioritize a few things that really can wait if you want them to? Or is it to give volume that you're seeing increasing for a more permanent reason? Is there a new product that's launched, a new feature that's launched that is going to generate this amount of volume on a consistent basis? And when that's the case, you need to put your focus on what cross-functional efforts you need to be involved in and what head count adjustment you need to be involved in. Working cross-functionally that might require you to look at this ticket line that's being generated from this feature of this product are there things that we can be doing to modify the product in some way to prevent that ticket volume from coming in so quickly. Or if that's not possible, this is just the reality you have to live with. What head count adjustments do you need to make? Can you point to the utilization rate that you've agreed on with your cross-functional partners and show that it's going to be increasing on a more permanent basis and start making the case for additional head count? That's why I've found it really, really helpful to agree on a utilization rate with your executive sponsor and with your finance team because that can be a huge asset in making these kinds of decisions when you're looking at a more permanent change to your team's utilization. So that sounds like a good quantitative indicator, like you said, right? You're seeing ticket volumes increase. It might mean that people are struggling and you're getting the same number to get the bus out going as fast might be because there's some outside cause. What are some of the qualitative things that managers need to keep an eye out for to understand if someone on their team is having a hard time? So one of the first things I look for is signs of lower energy. Is your team expressing or showing signs of fatigue or maybe lack of motivation? If you start to see kind of the room shift a bit in that direction, I think it's been really helpful for us to really just very quickly reach out to somebody to see, is this circumstantial? Is it just not your day or is there something going on either at work or in your personal life that's affecting your ability to show up? And I think when that happens, it's important to remember that that's going to happen to all of us in our careers. It's going to happen many, many times. So showing somebody that it's OK, this has happened for them that they might be just not feeling the level of energy that they're used to. Showing them that is a part of the natural fluctuation of being a human at work and kind of normalizing the fact that that just is what it is. And we just have to be prepared to know what to do when that happens. And that might involve telling somebody, I think taking a half day or taking a day or taking a long weekend might serve you well. If you want to use it, we can make it work. Just let me know. It might mean telling somebody, you are totally free to take a walk around the block or do some errands or do whatever it is. You need to do for the rest of the day, kind of a back. Or if you're one of the people where focusing on work, kind of get too through a tough time, great, so be it. Just keep the updated on how things are going. So lower energies, one that I look for, lack of enthusiasm around the work, which can totally happen to all of us. Those are signs that I keep that eye out for. Shorter patients or ability to empathize with customers. I mean, the work that we do involves an incredible amount of empathy. We have to put ourselves in the customer's shoes and really identify with the problem that they're experiencing. Even if the problem is caused of their own accord, we still have to acknowledge that we're all human. And even us and customers can make a mistake that requires support. And that's a skill that can really get burned out if you're using it day in and day out, without a break. So when I start to see signs of shorter patients or maybe irritability, one, it happens. And two, it's a good thing to follow up on in the statement or in the check before. You just let somebody know that whatever it is that they need to do to kind of get their work quality to the point that we know it can be, is a really great business decision, not just a great personal decision. And finally, so many good numbers that I also look for would be CSAT scores for specific agents. I know that our team, we have really high CSAT requirements. Then while that does make us a great support team, it also can be tough to achieve, depending on the kinds of tickets you're getting or frankly the kind of day that you're having. So when we start to see CSAT slip for a specific agent, our first strategy is to assume positive intent and not to assume lack of motivation to have a high score and to provide great support. It might be a variety of other things that has really nothing to do with an agent's commitment or skill ability. It could be it had a weird mix of tickets that just the CSAT shook out that way. It's important to kind of look into the data of the tickets themselves to make sure that you're aware of what's actually going on. Before you start to approach somebody about a lower performance conversation before it's actually appropriate. So we look at the CSAT scores or we also looking at specific tickets involved there so that when we have a conversation with an agent, it's based on data and not based on assumption. So it sounds like, because from the quantitative side, we're looking at ticket volumes, we're looking at the CSAT scores. Is there something in the numbers that shows us, either that people are likely to be challenged or they're having a challenge? You're also looking qualitatively at the agents themselves, are people seeming unmotivated? Are they slowing down on their work? Are they maybe struggling with empathy or being a little more irritable? And those are great times to step in and do something. So what are some effective tools that managers can do to proactively protect their team's mental health? Great question. So I think the first thing that I rely on is more of a structural strategic planning initiative and that's capacity planning. I think having a realistic capacity planning and understanding of what your team is responsible for and what they're able to take on is vitally important to making sure that you have the right structures in place to prevent your team from getting overworked and eventually burnt out. So the first thing under there is knowing what your team's reasonable utilization rate is. And that can really vary to industry and from company to company. Something close to 80% utilization might be perfectly appropriate for some teams, but depending on the kind of subject matter they're handling, if it's commonly proving to be difficult or draining, you might be looking at a reasonable utilization rate that's closer to 60% to 70%. So I think having a really consistent tracking of what your team is able to handle over a longer period of time, knowing what that reasonable utilization rate is is really important. And then tracking what it is week over week month over month is also incredibly important so that you can see how is it changing over time? Are we consistently above what we have decided is our reasonable utilization rate? And if so, what steps we need to take like the one I mentioned before around working cross-functionally to help reduce ticket count or is it changing what your head count planning is? So I found that to be a huge, huge tool in our arsenal is the data behind what our team can do. And then second, in your capacity planning, creating really great backup plans for coverage when somebody on your team is out is so, so important. Something that I've seen in this industry is that we kind of have a zero-sum game when it comes to artwork. We're receiving a certain amount of tickets every week. And if your team's not available, those don't stop coming in. And if they're just going to continue the backup, your customers unfortunately will still continue to submit tickets even if your team is off for a holiday. And that can make it feel like it is an inconvenience to the rest of your team for you to take time off because you are kind of leaving the same amount of work behind. And that is not quite accurate, but it can be the feeling that a lot of people in my line of work are left with. And I think what's really important to do there is one for managers to make it very, very clear. It is our job to make sure that our team is covered. It is not the individual's job to make sure that their PTO isn't entirely inconvenient for the team. There might be some weeks where your team is really busy where you kind of let people know that it's less possible to have more people on the team out. But at the end of the day, it's really the manager's responsibility to make sure that you have the structures in place to make your team run well, regardless of who is taking some well-deserved vacation. So the things that we do to make that possible would be utilizing written out-of-occus plans. And what we have in there is exactly what you'd expect. It's a list of the things that you tend to do. And it's a name next to each responsibility of who's going to cover it. Then we found that doing this in a written format and making a very clear shared understanding among your team of who's going to be doing while this person is out, can start help remove that feeling that you are leading your team in a lurch just by being away. And that can apply to PTO for a day for a week or two weeks, whatever it is, that can apply for an afternoon where you say, I just don't have the energy today. Can I go take some time to myself and all we have to do is pull up their previous out of office plan. And mark, you know, is this person available? Great, is this person available? Great, we have coverage and we can make this work. So having those backup plan, I just found to be really, really helpful in kind of removing the own ads from the individual to make sure that the team is going to be set up well. That makes a ton of sense. So it sounds like there's sort of three major players that we need to consider here, right? The first is the individual having some self awareness, managing your own time and energy, asking if you can take a break when you need one, recognizing when you're starting to get burned out and stepping away or doing whatever you need to for self care, especially in a remote world, that's so important. The second player here is the manager. And we've talked a lot about how the manager needs to have awareness of to your point, capacity planning and utilization rates and making sure that you're not overburdening a team, making sure there's backup plans so that people feel able to take breaks when they need to, and then facilitating that keeping an eye out, then the third player to me is the organization itself. What do you see the organizations need to put into place either in terms of process or in terms of culture? The managers can only do so much if the company's not supporting it. What does the company or the organization need to do to empower everybody to be thinking about their mental health? There's a lot of things that the organization can do and that other managers can be leading by example with. I think the biggest initiative I've seen at calm and has worked incredibly well is encouraging a culture of taking breaks. And this is something that's kind of permeated throughout our culture and other teams I've been on is encouraging people to celebrate other people taking breaks and to celebrate themselves taking a break when they need to. And like I said before, it's not just a good personal decision to do so. It's a fantastic business decision to do so. Some of the research that calm has done on this subject is that 60% of people rarely take a break throughout their work day. They're kind of nose to the grindstone, continuing to do their work, maybe packing their day with meetings. And that can feel like you're being very productive because you're doing a lot. It feels like you're doing a lot. But I think in reality, the more productive or busy you are throughout the day without taking a break, the more heightened your stress levels are going to be you're going to see a decrease in how alert and focused you are. And those are the exact things that will start to decrease your productivity and will start to decrease the quality of your work as a result. And some of the ways that we've done that quite well would be one, we have a company wide daily calmbrake everyday at 10 a.m. pst, where you can join us, do and do a daily meditation with the rest of the company, you can be camera off, whatever you want. And it's just a really good reminder to take a minute. And our team specifically, it's been helpful to have a culture of high levels of communication when you're taking a break away from your desk. I think that does two things. It's typing out, I'm going to go take a walk around the block because the sun's out, I really want to. Can do two things, I can one kind of help give yourself permission, like, I am going to go do this break. And I'm going to allow myself the time to do so. And it can also be really important communication for the rest of your team, they might think, okay, this person's going to be out for the next 20 minutes. I'm going to keep an extra eye on that queue, just because I know they're really active in it. And there's probably going to be little to no impact if somebody doing that more often than not, it's going to be no impact. So having a high level of communication, I've found to be really helpful. And I think on top of that for customer support team specifically, a certain level of celebration of their work is really, really important and can have such a huge impact. I think we're in a department that can have, we might call unsung heroes. And I think that's because the nature of the work that we do is not as natively visible as maybe some other departments might be. And I'm sure a lot of other departments are saying for their work. And I think when you take that into consideration, it becomes more important for managers to celebrate the work that their team is doing. And for peers to celebrate the work that they're doing to kind of give some recognition for that work. And I think that can happen both at company level and at the nature level. That is such a great point because I feel like if this support team is being really successful, what it looks like is things are not on fire. Yeah, you might argue or anything from us invisible work. And it is so important. So if you're a support agent and you're out there, we're celebrating you right now. Thank you for your hard work. You do great things. We know it. We see it behind the scenes. Spredations are dealing with customers who are complaining, who are frustrated, who are working through a challenge and they're stressed out. I know one of the things that I've found really helpful is going back and reminding myself of what the company does that's really good, right? Like reading those positive customer stories. I think it's a great thing that managers and organizations alike can do to help their CX teams is help to remind them, hey, it's not just all people that wish that our product did this thing, your people that are having trouble with that thing. We also do a lot of great stuff. You guys just don't hear about it because they only call you when they have a problem. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I have placed like comment. I've experiences that other companies as well. We're very fortunate to receive inquiries from people who just want to tell us how much they love our product. And that's so amazing. My favorite part of my week is you just kind of look through some of the tickets or people just say, you just want to let you know this story was amazing. And I think something that we do to kind of highlight that is we have a channel repost really great customer stories and really great testimonials. And that can help us focus on what is going really well with our product that we might want to take a minute to reflect on. But on top of that, we also have a channel where the CX team specifically can kind of shout each other out on some great work they've done. Oh, that's also sorry. Oh, it's so fun. It might be a specific ticket where somebody who handled a really tricky case and got it to a great resolution. Or it might be this project that's personally done has raised our CSAT in this queue by this match. And that's really amazing with the tough queue. So it can be smaller, more individual tasks or it can be larger wins. We just want to celebrate with each other. I love that. That is amazing. And I think it's so important to capture those things too. Because my team manages an online community. A lot of those kinds of things come in in a written format. And I love grabbing a screenshot of it and then pulling it into a Slack channel and being like, Hey, everybody look such and such did such a great job today. This customer called it out specifically. And then that's something you can hang on to you, right? And put enough pile of successes and wins for the team. I think that's great. So we've talked a lot about the importance of taking breaks. And you've mentioned a couple of things that I like to drill in a little bit of when you're taking your break to de-stress in the middle of the day. What are some of the things that you should do during that break? What are helpful ways to de-escalate and de-stress that aren't just well, I stepped away from my computer and then I came back and I was still feeling stressed, right? I think what's going to work best for everybody depends on them. So honestly, for those who are taking breaks, then coming back to their computer, still stressed, I'd recommend trying a variety of things that you maybe haven't tried. Some that I know have been helpful for both me and the rest of my team. Frankly, I'm somebody who will be less stressed if I can get something done. So it might be literally going to do my dishes or my laundry or do something around the house to kind of feel like the tasks of life are building up quite as much. I found outside time when the sun's out or even when it's not to be really helpful to people. I think whether it's with calm or otherwise sitting down and taking a few day of breath, I think that's what our research has shown to be really, really helpful and kind of microdosis throughout the day. So not looking at your computer, maybe not even looking at anything and all having your eyes closed and taking a few deep breaths can be really, really healing. I think we're feeling stressed throughout the day. And I know if very, very many people who were do their daily workout in the middle of the work day, because that's just the time it's going to make no sense for them. So that can definitely be something that can be super helpful. And I'd be remiss if I can say, maybe show that you're drinking a lot of water and eating enough. I think it's also really important. We were talking a lot about taking care of your mental health. Your physical health is very, very tied to that. So doing what you have to do to stay happy and healthy as it were is also going to be really important. I love those suggestions. I keep my guitar near my desk. So when I need to break sit down and play some music for a couple of minutes and it's something that I enjoy, right? And I think that that's one of the keys. Do something that makes you feel good. Something that you enjoy or something that's really restful. Are there any resources that you would recommend if managers out there are looking for things or individual people that are saying, Hey, I need to figure out how to better de-stress or manage my mental health during the day. Anything that you recommend that people check out, whatever helps somebody facilitate some mindfulness or break in their day. I think it's a great tool to be relying on. I know that's something that me and my team will rely on. I think we really frequently look at what is the full list of my own responsibilities at work and how long does it take me in a given week to do that? And what is that number of hours add up to? I think having that list of resources of your responsibilities can be really illuminating on where your time is going. And that can really help facilitate conversations about bandwidth that can really give you the information and vocabulary that you need to describe why it is that you might be showing overwhelmed or overworked and help you kind of develop a plan of action to handle that. I would also say that because of the nature of the work that people and customer support are doing, we have to be experts on our product and all of our offerings at our company. And that means that we need a lot of information about our product and how it works and about when certain things are launching in order to be able to be the face of the company to answer any questions. that the customer sends our way can be really draining to be consistently asked questions. You don't have the answers, too. So in terms of resources, I would say agent enablement in the form of documentation about how your product works and what's happening when. I think are really the biggest tools that our team relies on to make sure that we're able to do our jobs effectively. I think feeling like you can do your job effectively and productively without having to rely on a bunch of research and asking questions, but something that we've really seen, at least on our team, be very impactful to somebody's engagement at work and to somebody's level of stress and anxiety. So having a well-enabled team, I think, is one of your biggest assets. And some of the ways that we make sure that that's possible, we really consistently look at what our escalation rate is. We have a target of a 2% escalation rate, which is quite low for the industry, but we do a lot of work to make sure that's possible. And we analyze any ticket that's escalating and any question that's asked for somebody didn't feel like they had all the information to do their job without having to rely on others. And then we see where was there maybe a documentation or structural failure that made that question necessary. And that leads us to updating our documentation really frequently. It leads to us working with other teams to make sure that we know exactly what's gonna be happening in our product. I'd say really great internal documentation of how your product works. It's gonna be hugely effective in making sure your support team is well-supported. So last question before we wrap up here, we've talked about all of these different people involved with managing mental health at an organization, all the different factors. What are some of the impacts of implementing some of these strategies that you've seen? What are the big business benefits or organizational benefits? Yeah, I think the biggest two really would be retention of your team and then support quality. I think when you have a team that is well-supported where you have managers who know their people very well, note their strengths, opportunity areas, their goals and their personal priorities. When you have a team that feels like they are supported and can have easy conversations about what they need at work in order to do their best work, that is gonna be one of your biggest assets to keeping your team engaged and retained. So I think having a really great sense of mental wellness on your team is going to really save you a lot of time and effort in terms of retention. And I think next is gonna be your support quality will just be better. I mean, imagine you are trying to solve a huge queue of tickets. You have to make sure that you are expert knowledge of the product is really on point. You have to make sure that you're following protocol for how to answer some of these questions. If you're at certain companies with high data handling requirements, especially in healthcare, you might have a lot of really strict privacy requirements that you also have to follow where there's really no room for error. And let's imagine you might also be an introvert who gets a little tired from talking to people all day. Like when you combine all of those while also knowing that there are tickets coming into the queue, regardless of how quickly you work your ticket, that can really be a lot. And so when you have a team that is mentally well and mentally fit and knows when to take breaks and knows how to make sure that they are set out well for success, your support quality is just gonna be higher. I mean, I can't tell you how many times they've looked at I see that trend for somebody that really just didn't allow themselves for a break, which is totally understandable because of the zero sum game that we talked about earlier. Compared to somebody who kind of knows themselves well and knows what they need to do to keep their support quality high, I mean, the difference is really stark. So I think your support quality is just gonna be far in a way better if you have a team and it's really well equipped to handle the volume. - There it sounds like the key takeaway here is the best way to support your customers, it's to support your teams. - Absolutely, it is mean that it's so true in all parts of life, but taking care of yourself means that you are able to take care of others and that applies to support for sure. - Awesome. Well, I think we'll leave it there. Dave, thank you so much. It was a great conversation. Thank you so much. I hope you're leaving this conversation feeling empowered to take a break when the going gets rough and with some ideas of how you can help other team members to do the same. Join me for our next episode with guest, Addy Wallace from wine.com. We'll talk about the thoughtful ways that wine.com always keeps their customer needs front and center, from how they've identified the key personas of their customer base to the different kinds of programs they've created. Whether you're in a customer experience or wine or both, you won't wanna miss this one. We'd love it if you would share this podcast with a friend or colleague or would write us a review if you like what you heard today. Thanks so much for listening and for being a part of our community. You can always join the conversation at zendesk.com/community or connect with other zendesk users through our user group meetups. Find one for you at usergroups.zendesk.com. Until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders for zendesk, the intelligent heart of customer experience. Ready to explore how AI can help your business provide richer customer experiences? Zendesk enables you to instantly harness the power of AI to deliver scalable world-class customer experiences. In the era of intelligence, the X, Zendesk is here to help you find your way. Sign up for our free trial at zendesk.com.