When Pigment raised $65M this summer, we were very clear on one key objective: we were going to use the funding to continue creating an outstanding customer experience.
Technical Support is a crucial cog in the customer journey, and we treat it as such. The Pigment tech support team sits under Customer Experience instead of the product team as is traditional with other B2B tech companies.
This unique combination of technical expertise and customer management skills sets Pigment Support up with exposure not just to the inner workings of the product, but also to customer education, community, and solution architecture.
Read on for the fascinating story behind the people who help Pigment customers embark on an ultra-smooth business planning journey.
Meet the Pigmenauts: Tech Support edition
Pigment Tech Support is spread across EMEA and North America and growing fast with ambitious hiring plans for the next year.
The team has thus far been dedicated to setting the foundations for a remarkable support function, and is looking to expand their scope alongside Pigment’s increasing customer base and use cases.
Internally, the team is divided into technical support managers and specialists — although customers generally only see them referred to broadly as “Pigment specialists”. The reasoning for this comes from Pigment’s core value of how every team member, regardless of seniority, helps achieve our mission.
Shares Keiran Rice, Technical Support Manager, on the team’s mentality:
“We try not to use the word “Support” as much. We’re not just there to support customers but also to enable them — we’re active in the community answering modeling questions and overseeing a much wider picture than just providing solutions when something is broken.”
Why Tech Support wears multiple hats within Pigment
It really does seem like Pigment Support does it all — and more.
Although the team does take on tech support tickets from customers, they also contribute in many, many other ways:
- Support Pigment employees and modelers internally
- Help tweaking model efficiencies
- Field technical operations requests
- Create workspaces and app copies
- Set up configurations
- Report on trends
One of the biggest ways Pigment Support adds value to the organization is by observing week-on-week trends in support tickets for proactive handling of potential future roadblocks or helping customers lower the learning curve on new features:
Keiran shares a recent example,
“A lot of customers raised GSheet connector questions — we could tell that they had been reading the documentation — and we were able to adapt our documentation and customer training modules to better support customers trying out this new feature.”
The team works closely with the customer education function to ensure that new training material reflects the nuances and common challenges customers face.
But more importantly, the team tracks the impact of specific training modules on reducing the frequency of tickets related to that specific topic. This granular insight and consistent feedback loop between customer education and support amplifies the rate of customers finding success and value in the Pigment platform.
But how does a team juggling multiple roles prioritize their day?
Pigment Tech Support’s mission statement
To help prioritize their day, Pigment’s support team is unified under a single mission:
To give customers the resources and support they need to get further value from Pigment.
Shares Keiran,
“We are customer-first. Everything we do is to fix problems with the customers in mind.”
The team, however, still places importance on supporting Pigment internally, and manages to remain customer-first by splitting areas of focus between team members.
For example, while one team member manages self-service and community articles, another might redirect their focus on tackling tooling and automation. This further helps with cross-functional collaboration by offering a distinct owner to communicate on certain topics with other functions at Pigment.
What truly motivates and drives the team
Put simply, Keiran and his teammates are motivated by helping Pigment customers. He reflects on how it takes an inquisitive nature to be part of Support,
“Every time someone raises a new ticket, it’s the most important thing in the world for them to get their issue fixed.”
Managing varying priorities is rigorous work, but the results are telling: happy customers with high customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and shout-outs to the tech support team provide the positive feedback needed for the team to drive forward.
Crushing silos to uplift customers
A unique trait shared by Pigment’s CX team as a whole is the successful sharing and reuse of information within the org. When the tech support team reaches out to customer support managers with trends or insights, they make sure to act on it — again, a unique aspect of Pigmenauts living the Pigment value of ownership.
Fine balance of self-serve and community support
Support is a big advocate of self-serve learning through the Pigment Academy and Pigment Community articles. The team consistently shares documentation and resources from this stellar collection of expert knowledge, to customers looking to find answers that might have been addressed before.
The team approaches this through the lens of enablement — highlighting how e-learning and training can help solve common issues. However, the team is still happy to talk one-to-one with customers as it can often help to talk through issues with an empathetic and caring support team member.
And there are incredible stats to prove how powerful this blend of self-serve and support team guidance can be:
“We analyzed all tickets that could have been addressed by self-serve. Every single one of those tickets came from people who hadn’t completed the training, showing how effective customer education materials can be at addressing FAQs.”
How Pigment Tech Support uses Pigment
What better way to empathize with the customer journey than by using the platform for internal reporting?
Like many other Pigment teams, the tech support team actively uses Pigment for reporting and is working on expanding this to capacity planning as well.
“We love Pigment. We have support meetings to go over processes and tickets: our ticket analysis is done solely on Pigment. We’re one of the early adopters of #PigmentforPigment.”
The extent of analysis is essentially only limited to the data available to the team, who regularly analyze tickets to find trends and understand customer usage patterns.
Most significantly, however, the team has been able to achieve more functionality through Pigment than through their existing ticketing system by adding highly detailed custom statuses to each ticket, thereby influencing the product R&D team’s vision and roadmap.
What the ideal tech support team member brings to the table
The Pigment tech support team is hiring additional team members! While it can be exciting to grow as a team, they are mindful of finding the ideal candidate who fits perfectly with the culture and values imbibed by the rest of the team.
Keiran shares what it takes to join Pigment tech support:
“We have three entry routes: people with backgrounds in EPM support, SaaS support, or Finance. We expect a quicker ramp up for EPM experts, but are happy to train people from SaaS or Finance. The skills we look for depend on your background and level, but soft skills are more powerful — building customer relationships, for example.”
Additionally, Support is a wonderful starting point to explore other avenues or roles at the company. To illustrate with an example, the team is happy to welcome people with a finance background who would learn technical aspects and progress into consulting roles, or vice versa.
In terms of soft skills, Support looks for team players skilled at prioritization, independent working, customer service, and working seamlessly as part of a remote, distributed team.
Pigment’s tech support team shows a high level of ownership, as the face of each ticket assigned to them. Even when cross-functional asks emerge from tickets, the support team makes sure to follow through on the progress from end-to-end and remains the single point of contact for the customer to reach out to.
To round it off, Keiran has one clear message for anyone evaluating Pigment for their planning needs:
“Go for it!! Honestly, I’ve seen so many solutions in my six years in EPM — there’s nothing like Pigment. It’s powerful beyond comprehension, yet still so easy to use. Just go for it!”
