Ye, welcome to the introductory episode of the quest for epic customer support. I'm shelby, one of the producers of the show, and we're here today Miss Sam, senior founder and CEO of test box. Sam, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much, shelby. I am excited to get this kicked off. Yeah, absolutely well, to give our our listeners just a little bit of context, the goal of this episode, of course, is to share with you what you know the listeners can expect from this podcast. So, before we jump into you know, sharing the mission for this podcast, Sam, tell us a little bit about test box and why you founded the company. We found a test box entirely for the listeners of this podcast and the people who care about enabling their teams to find...

...the right software to make them successful. The story behind test box, essentially, is that buying software is an extremely frustrating and challenging experience and we want to change that. We want to make it feel like a more consumer like self serve experience that enables people to really test compare their options before they buy, without having to go through a long sales process, without having to listen to lots of demos and pictures and slides and take lots of phone calls. Instead, get instant access to the different products that you care about and be able to say does this one work for me? On to this one, like test drive those products yourself. Um, and the reason that we're focused on that and we're doing a podcast around customer support is actually the very first software category that we built test box for is customer support. So we have integrations on our platform of Zendesk and fresh test and in a common help scout and and hubspot and, like all of the major products out there are on test box. If anyone's ever looking to buy a new platform, well,...

...they need to do is sign up to test box, get immediate access to all of those and, within just a week, two weeks, be able to decide truly by test driving hands on, which the right product for them and which one isn't that need to go talk to anyone else. It's entirely free, super easy. But yeah, that's why we're doing a podcast about customer support. We started customer support and we just want to enable leaders and teams to find the right tools to make them successful. Yeah, well, so, so you mentioned, then, the the people that are out there looking for customers support software and making that process easier. Um, what, then, do you expect some of the topics are going to be for the podcast? Yeah, the PODCAST is called the quest for epic customer support and it really is all about how do you create fantastic customer experiences? And so we we go starting from people's origin stories. We like to learn around phenomenal customs sport leaders from some of the top companies in the world. What what...

...got them started in the support space? But then we really dig into things like what are amazing customer support experience that they've had, nightmare experiences that that they've had? But then also really what is the area of expertise? Is it around scaling teams? Is it going from zero to a hundred? Is it actually going from an already scaled team and then globalizing it, or or how do you think about career growth and career pathing for Support Team members? Um, sort of all of the myriad of many different topics that are out there of key things that support leaders are thinking about on a daily basis when they're trying to make their teams successful, their company successful and all of the customers. So then who is the podcast for it is for all leaders and customer support teams, potential leaders and support teams, executives who are trying to think through how to make the most out of their support team and is customer support now actually an opportunity in the area for them, rather than being considered...

...a cost center in the past, like it is for people who are thinking strategically about customer support and want to give the best experience, as I said, to the team, to their company and to their customers. Right, and you know, those those leaders are certainly facing challenges. You know. We know that, uh, that customer service that you know, basically helped US personnel any of those, those people that really produce an experience with a company. You know, it's that, that, that customer facing person that that you want to have exceptional tools, exceptional service and being able to to uh, to have things fully staff. That that's been a challenge for a lot of a lot of companies. So so I guess our listeners can expect to to hear best practices, uh, maybe the good, the bad and the ugly and UH and maybe some some anecdotes from their from their experience. Right, absolutely absolutely that there's some pretty crazy stories that you're going to hear...

...from how people got into this space and then some of the fantastic experience they've been able to give to customers and what it's meant to them. Um. But I think to your point, you're also talking a bit about some of the challenges people face today. One of the questions that we ask a lot of people is where do you see this industry and this capability developing over the next few years and how are you starting to get ahead of that now? Is that new tooling or is that new practices with your teams? How are you thinking about automation? How do you think about Ai? How do you think about having the conversation with the executives to demonstrate that customer support is actually now becoming a success function in some ways, like it really is? Talking about all of those things plus the future, and how do you set yourself up for success? Yeah, absolutely. Well, a lot of great information I think we can look forward to. So I think that will wrap it up for our introductory episode. Sam, thank you so much for for joining me and I'm excited to hear more about the show and about the guests that...

...are to come. Perfect. Thank you, so much shelby. I'm very excited to hear the feedback and uh to our listeners. Be sure to come back and tune into episode one of the quest for epic Customer Support.