How Braze Built a Best-in-Class Technical Support Organization

At the end of every job interview I participate in, I always make a point of opening the floor to the candidate for questions; I often hear things like “What’s your favorite thing about Braze?” or “What’s been your most rewarding experience in your role?” or even “What sets the Braze technical support team apart from other tech support organizations?” And everytime I get a question like this, I can’t help but smile, because the answer is all around me: It’s the people on the Braze Technical Support team, their passion, their drive, their empathy, their hunger, their focus, their dedication, and the intelligence they bring to their work every single day.

As the Braze Technical Support Regional Director for the Americas, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with—and learn from—each and every member of our tech support team during my time here. That experience makes me uniquely qualified to share with you all just how inspirational and impressive this team really is. (Okay, maybe I’m a little biased.) So join me as I introduce you to the Braze Technical Support team and walk through what we do every day.

Why Braze Prioritized Technical Support

When someone uses a product, I think we can all agree that ideally it’d be best if they never needed any help in order to use it effectively. But the reality is that we all need a little extra help here and there—often when we least expect it. While we’ve all probably called customer support at one point or another, what that support looks like is pretty different when the product in question is a powerful software platform, rather than, say, an air-fryer.

Platforms like Braze are built to support a wide range of features and functionalities that can be used effectively by a mix of different companies—each with their own unique strategies, use cases, and business needs. That flexibility is powerful, but because there’s no one “right” way to use Braze, brands can sometimes need a bit of hands-on assistance to get the most out of our technology. So back in 2016, the leadership team at Braze made the call to invest in a team capable of providing the dedicated level of support and technical guidance that our customers sometimes need. And out of that decision, our Technical Support team was born.

This, as you may have guessed, is where I come in. I was hired that year to help create, manage, scale, and nurture a team capable of addressing our customers’ technical inquiries, issues, and platform questions—and doing it all while providing a best-in-class customer experience. While I came to Braze with plenty of management experience in the software as a service (SaaS) space, I wasn’t an engineer and didn’t have a particularly technical background. But during the interview process, I was impressed with the way that Braze leadership values finding employees with the ability to learn—people who embrace curiosity, who are hungry and driven to grow their skills in order to more effectively serve and support customers in thoughtful, human ways. That was a key reason I chose Braze and those principals have informed the way we’ve worked to build and evolve our Technical Support team ever since.

How Braze Built an Exceptional Tech Support Organization

Back in 2016, it was clear that we had our work cut out for us when it came to putting together a Technical Support team and establishing processes capable of successfully supporting the customer experience in reproducible, efficient, and scalable ways. But five years later, we’ve largely achieved that goal. So let’s take a look at a few of the ways we made that happen:

• Prioritize customer access to support. Early on, we made a point of working out where Technical Support falls into the larger Braze customer lifecycle, with the goal of understanding when customers are likely to reach out to us. This ensured that brands could contact us effectively, and we could enable our customers on how to do so if they needed to.
• Focusing on effective cross-team collaboration. A lot of the time, supporting customers when they have a question or issue that needs solving is a group effort. That’s why we made a point of working to define how the Technical Support team interacts with different customer-centric teams within Braze—including the Customer Success and Integrations and Onboarding teams—with the goal of ensuring that we can provide our customers with resources and support that match their specific needs and place in the customer lifecycle.
• Measuring performance against industry benchmarks. Early on in my tenure, Technical Support began to measure our performance as a team and assess how that data matched up against industry benchmarks, including first response targets, number of days to close a case, number of cases closed, customer satisfaction, and more.

Once we completed that foundational work, the Braze Technical Support team didn’t rest on its laurels. We made the conscious decision to invest in and expand our support team across multiple regions to match our company’s global customer base in an effort to consistently provide exceptional quality and service. We focused on finding the right talent and resources to build an in-house team of Braze support specialists across the globe who are ready and available to jump onto support cases at any time of day or night—including weekends and holidays, because, let’s face it, emergencies need an emergency response no matter when they happen.

We’ve also continued to find ways to challenge ourselves to further refine our processes and improve our metrics—for instance, by setting down a team goal of reducing our response times and increasing customer satisfaction scores during a given timeframe. One of the most important inputs that helped us keep improving was—no surprise—our customers. We’ve found that paying close attention to support cases and customer signals over time can provide us with invaluable insights and real-time feedback that makes it possible for us to swiftly optimize the way we handle future cases. One key outcome of this approach? The Braze Global Support team has won the NorthFace Scoreboard Award for excellence in customer service for two years running, something that I’m incredibly proud of and something that speaks to the exceptional support we’re able to provide our customers each and every day.

An Essential Ingredient: The People of the Braze Technical Support Team

All those processes and evolutions helped make our team what it is today. But the reality is that we couldn’t have done any of this without the exceptional work put in by the people who make up the Braze Global Technical Support Team.

Growing our team over the past five years has allowed us to hire an ever-expanding team of highly driven, talented individuals, all of them brilliant and passionate about what they do—but each one with a wealth of different perspectives and experiences that they bring to work with them every day. This diversity helps us to provide better support to our customers while fostering an inclusive and inviting team culture, one where we champion and support our customers while growing closer as a group. Whether it’s sharing in-depth Braze product insights and challenging each other’s trivia knowledge or celebrating each team member’s passions and talents outside of Braze, every person on our team is an essential part of an impressive, ever-evolving whole.

Working in Technical Support can be challenging, especially in today’s fast-paced world. But the kind of people who genuinely want to help others, to solve puzzles, to lend an ear and teach what they know, and to do it all with a smile on their face—well, in my experience, working with people like that is the most rewarding experience there is. So the next time someone asks me about the most rewarding experience I’ve had at Braze, I have my answer.

Speaking of job interviews, the Braze Global Technical Support team is hiring. To learn more about our organization or to check out open roles, visit our Careers page.