More Than Just Testing, Mobile Beyond QA

Video Transcript

0:00 | Adam Creamer
yes. Hello, Paul. Hello, Jennifer. Thank you guys for joining us. So I am very excited about this session in particular because kobiton, when you think of us, you may think of testing and things like that, but Paul and his team at bluebeam use us for a very unique and not necessarily normal use case in our world which we think is great. So I don’t want to spoil anything. I will pass it off to Jen and you guys have fun.

0:29 | Jennifer Palma
Awesome. Thanks, Adam. Hi, everyone. My name is Jennifer Palma. I am a customer success manager here at kobiton really excited to be a part of this. I will definitely be keeping an eye out on the chat for any questions or any messages that come through as me and Paul go through this. But without further ado, I do want to take some time to have Paul introduce himself and speak a little bit about him before we get started on what I’ll be covering today. Our segment is going to be covering customer support and the importance of customer experience and how support really plays a part in the customer journey when it comes to customer satisfaction on things. So, Paul, we would love to hear a little bit about you, your background, where you’re located? Yes, all.

1:17 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Right. Hi. I’m Paul gibbons wagner. I am the senior operations manager for the technical support group at bluebeam inc. What that means is I’m responsible for all of my division’s data, analytics and reporting, as well as our systems and processes. More or less. I oversee how we take care of our customers. And I make sure that we’re providing all the stakeholders in the company, the right data to understand what the needs of our customers are from our lens. And I’ve been at bluebeam almost 14 years, always in the support division. And yeah, and I’m in the pasadena California area. That’s where bluebeam’s home office is. And I’ve been, yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at and what I do for the company. I kind of look at the, where we are as far as a support organization and where that fits in kind of the technical services industry and gauge that against, you know, our like how can we take the next step forward in providing better support for our customers? And just kind of taking care of all of that. So that’s who I am. That’s what I do, you know, that’s kind of what brings me here today?

2:46 | Jennifer Palma
Awesome. Paul. So I have a question for you, what does bluebeam do? Can you talk to us about what your company does? Just so I understand.

2:56 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
We provide aec architecture, engineering and construction industry collaboration and project management solutions started out really as a drawing plan sharing platform and communicating drawing plans between offices and providing tools to enable that. And we’ve kind of become the industry standard in that where we’re a global company, we have customers around the world who are building everything and we just help them do what they do and it’s a changing industry. They’re very kind of the industry was kind of slow to adopt digital solutions. So we’ve kind of been the right solution at the right time to kind of drive that evolution. And yeah, so it’s very much construction management.

4:02 | Jennifer Palma
That’s awesome. So let me just further dissect this just to make sure I understand Paul. So if I’m a construction company and let’s say I have blueprints to what I’m working on, and I have more than just the person in charge that needs to see those blueprints. I’m assuming those are available in an app for the other construction team members and those team members view the blueprints can make changes, make requests. And that is essentially where bluebeam assists them. Yes. Is the navigation of that app between these worksites. Is that correct?

4:36 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
That’s correct. Yeah, you’d be amazed at the number of people who need to be in the loop in the conversation at any particular stage of a construction project. And so, yeah, it’s all about sharing plans. It’s all about notating plans. It’s all about requests for information about the plans and what, what’s needed. Yeah, it’s all about helping everyone stay connected to meet deadlines, stay under budget, you know, the important stuff.

5:09 | Jennifer Palma
Awesome. Well, it sounds very interesting. My dad is actually in construction, so I know how often those guys talk to each other, but I understand in the construction world, there is a lot of them that have flip phones that don’t want the latest and greatest device. So when they do upgrade to the greatest device, sometimes it’s tricky to help those customers, right? Sometimes it’s tricky to help those team members. And a lot of it comes from like an educational point on the device, the app making sure they’re comfortable using it, and that it doesn’t prohibit them from getting their work done. So, I think what you do is really cool. So, I’m excited to hear a little bit more about bluebeam and understanding you. It sounds like you’ve been with bluebeam for a long time. What made you get into support? How did you start in that role? And where did that come from?

5:56 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
I’ve been doing support for a long time. I changed gears at a certain stage in my life and got an engineering degree but it so happened that at that time there was, it was 2008 economic downturn, recession was having trouble landing a gig and there was a company that I wanted to work for that was looking for help in their tech support department. And I thought it would be a good way to get my foot in the door. And that way once things started to pick up again, I’d be in a good position to move into the engineering department and go from there. What I found out while doing that is I don’t want to be an engineer. It’s not where my personality fits. I really like talking to customers. And with the way that I tend to look at problems and communicate, I did really well in that department in that area, it was a good fit. So it really helped me because I like working with people, I like helping them solve problems. I like helping them be successful in whatever they’re trying to do. That’s kind of my primary motivation. But I’m very technical and so I kind of have a skill set that puts me in a position to help people. It was just a good fit sitting in a cubicle running simulations and tests. It just, it didn’t fit who I was. And so I did well there. And then things shifted and bluebeam was just starting to take off when the company I was at was just starting to decline. So it was a good timing to move into another area. And bluebeam at the time when I came over was a very small company. I believe there was about 23 employees when I came over. And so when it’s a small company like that, it’s still kind of in its startup phase. Everyone wears a lot of hats. There’s not a lot of specialization or significant divides between teams. And so I really took to that well where I just kind of did everything I could. And then as the company grew and expanded and we needed to have specializations and teams to scale effectively, I was always kind of a leadership voice in doing that. And that just kind of progressed my career with the company. As we continued to grow. I continued to make sure I was informed and educated on what we were doing and what the best choices were. And that just kind of helped move my career along. And bluebeam has done well over the years and as far as growth and I’ve just kind of moved right along with it. And where I’m at right now is just kind of looking at the future landscape of our industry and what do our customers need? And I’m helping the company get where we need to be to provide support for those customers.

9:19 | Jennifer Palma
That’s awesome. Well, as we know, like I introduced myself earlier, I am a customer success manager now at kobiton but previously to this, I actually was a support manager for kobiton and I know particularly for kobiton in general, we specialize in mobile app testing, right? We help our developers of apps, be able to test their app. In the case of bluebeam, it’s a very interesting use for kobiton. So I’m more so curious where did the decision come in or more so how did the concept of establishing a device lab for support for bluebeam originate?

9:52 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Yeah, that came from our launch of a mobile companion app. Primarily our flagship product is desktop, very heavy does a lot. But as mobile devices became more and more popular and more capable, we were getting regular requests from people who are out on the construction site, needing to work on their plans, needing to send requests. So they wanted a mobile solution that wasn’t a desktop in the trailer. They wanted their tablet, they wanted to enable their phone to help as they walk to the job site, be able to communicate with the rest of the team. And so we created a mobile solution to help with that. And customers liked it. It grew and then needing to support that customers would call from the job site. Hey, I’m trying to add some notes to this plan and share it with the team. And I’m running into this issue or I have this question and we need to help them. But at this point, we were very, we were a bit bigger. We’re a bit spread out. We have regional offices. We have global offices. So we had to provide devices to all of our regional teams which when there gets to be multiple devices, different oss, physical devices get clumsy to manage at scale. And so it was a while ago, like six years ago, when we started to look for solutions, there were emulators available. There were device… there were like device lab options, but everything was very geared for testing very much about scripted testing, very much about being able to configure an environment and spin it up and then test it. Where in a support organization, we get a call, we’re live with the customer. We need to have that immediate access to our app to be able to follow along with what they’re doing and help them find the answers they need. And so being able to having to be offline and take time to do that, it doesn’t work. So we were forced to continue to manage a lot of physical devices which is not ideal. And that was pre pandemic. When we were running into that. Then the pandemic hit. And all of a sudden the new challenge was everyone’s working from home. What do we do with these? Do we give physical devices to every single employee? We’re a sizable support team spread around the world. Then who manages them? What’s the secure, what’s the data security there? If there’s all of these Unmanaged devices with proprietary information out there? It’s just not it’s not ideal at all. So I went back to looking for what solutions were out there. And it was just like years before where everything was really geared for… you. Know, qe testing, QA testing, you know, scripted tests, more offline something where you have time and again, I needed a live solution and I ran into kobiton who had just introduced what you called like lightning mode that actually allowed you to be able to interface with a remote device quickly, very little lag, very little delay. It was very similar, a nice analog to the physical device. And so we originally looked at okay, we have all these physical devices. We could set up our own device farm and use the kobiton platform to manage them. But that my it department felt that was a bit, there were some hurdles there and they’d have to staff for it. And, you know, kobiton offered other solutions. We couldn’t go with the public device solution for data security purposes. We needed our own devices, but kobiton offered kind of the middle ground of dedicated devices for our organization but managed by kobiton in their data center, and that was the perfect fit for us. So we’ve stopped purchasing physical devices and we’re just focusing on that because I have teams around the world using the kobiton platform and people in Europe, people in Australia, they’re not finding lag, they’re not finding issues with it. So it’s ideal for us to have these managed devices that anyone in any regional office around the world can use and it works smoothly and it’s immediate. And that’s kind of what brought us to kobiton and why we chose kobiton over other solutions out there. It was the immediacy and low latency of the connection and of the platform.

14:58 | Jennifer Palma
That’s awesome, Paul. It sounds like kobiton’s really helped your team out with what they’re trying to do. And it sounds like kobiton has helped your users as well. How would you say leveraging kobiton? You know, for non testing purposes, how do you think that’s affected your user experience?

15:16 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
It’s improved it in that allows all of my team members access to the app. So it doesn’t matter if someone was issued. Like the problem we had before is we didn’t think it was reasonable to give a device or multiple devices to every team member. So it became segmented to only a few team members, provided support for the mobile app, and any call that came in had to get transferred to them. And that’s kind of that handoff is not ideal. We want customers to get someone right away who can help them right away. So it allowed all of my team to be able to use the devices. It allows all the team to get familiar with the app to answer those questions. I have a documentation team that uses that doesn’t have to be issued devices because they can just connect to kobiton, get all the screenshots they need for documentation, create workflow guides. So it’s about offering the app to all of my team members, wherever they are, whatever specialized team they’re on, they have access to it. And also what the individual apps don’t provide is the logs like kobiton being a testing platform, it offers a good offering of accessible log files, screenshots, screen recording, step recorder, like so much that we can provide information to our engineers. When we find an issue, we can create documentation with by just grabbing screenshots. It’s great for a team member who grabs a screenshot to send to a customer. It’s convenient. It’s there. It works well. And it does that for everybody on the team.

17:10 | Jennifer Palma
That’s awesome. So if I was a customer of bluebeam and I’m out on the site and I’m having issue, let’s say with my tablet and it’s not letting me load a document. I can call bluebeam support is going to pull up a tablet on their side and walk through the process with me and be able to help me real time. Yes. Awesome. So it sounds like that’s definitely helped the end user feel like they have the support. They know that your app is reliable even with the support added. And I’m sure that also educates them on knowing how to better use your app. So in the end, if that person has to call once and knows what to do the next time, that eliminates a support call coming in for you. I think customer education is super important when it comes to support. When it comes to your customers, how are you guys grading your customer satisfaction? Are they getting like any type of survey afterwards or how does that work out for you guys?

18:05 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Yeah, we do send out a csat survey following interactions, but the volume is weighted so heavily toward our desktop solution that I can’t really speak to our customer satisfaction scores for just the companion app… but I do know it’s been an improvement. I know it’s really helped us. There was one particular incident where we released an update for our companion app and customers immediately started reporting an issue with it that our qe teams didn’t catch. And what helped us is on the kobiton platform, we have devices with different OS versions. So we have a good selection to check from and where the problem was. It was in an old, when the app was run on an older OS that’s where the problem was. And our qe teams keep, they test on physical devices and they keep their apps updated to the latest version of the latest OS. And this is how it kind of escaped their view. But in support, we were able to isolate the exact previous OS where this happened and give them the exact steps to reproduce, give them logs for when the issue occurred. This is what’s happening on the device. Give them all of the information they needed to then work on resolving the issue quickly and getting a new update released. That solved the problem. And this was an area where kind of tech support was able to save the day because of, you know, the kobiton platform and what we’re able to have there.

19:49 | Jennifer Palma
Well, that’s awesome. It sounds like kobiton’s definitely, you know, aiding both sides, right? The customer and your team when it comes to making sure that your team is up to date with, you know, the industry and things that are changing for users. How do you promote a culture of continuous improvement for your support team?

20:07 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Because that’s kind of my role that’s all I talk about. It’s what I’m all about is taking the next step forward, as good as my team is as good as our product is. There’s always the next step, the next peak to reach. And so, I’m continually looking at what we offer and what we could offer and taking incremental steps on the way there. And the thing about a culture of continual improvement is it’s in presenting it as continual improvement as growth. I mean, the team is great, the people are great and it’s not like we’re doing anything wrong. It’s just there’s always that next step to take and that’s just growth. And I think that helps with buy in from teams and stakeholders is, you know, that it’s steps forward and not speaking poorly of what was or what is.

21:06 | Jennifer Palma
You know?

21:07 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
When talking about what’s next, it’s looking at how great it will be once we get to that next accomplishment.

21:15 | Jennifer Palma
That’s awesome. My next question for you is more so understanding, you know, process improvements. So when you talk about thinking of the next step and making sure that the team is thinking ahead, can you give us an example of a process improvement that you’ve initiated and that’s you know, done well for you?

21:34 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Wow. There’s a lot. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’m continually one of the voices of innovation and change and growth. So there’s been a lot. I’ve really kind of built out this organization to scale well. And I think probably one of the biggest successes is when we were a smaller company, our full website and all of its offerings were owned by the marketing department. And we found that when it was managed that way our support materials weren’t really enough or they weren’t current enough to address customer needs at a given time. So I created a business plan for tech support, taking on our own section of the website, creating our own documentation, having a documentation team focused purely on the technical needs of the customer, how to articles, technical troubleshooting, articles, user guides, all of that was owned by tech support because we have that direct connection to the customer and a different voice. We’re not a, you know, hey try this, you know, this product out, it’s hey, you have the product and this is how to get the most of it or this is how to, you know, work through whatever hurdle or challenge you’re running into here’s, how you can do that. And we built a really successful site around, that in support. One of the, one of the driving statistics or bits of data we collect is case deflection. So customers that go to the website looking for help and they find help there, they don’t have to submit an email or give us a call or something like that. And we’ve you know, created, you know, we found a way to create a website that has really high case deflection, making sure that customers are able to get the help they need immediately any time of day because it’s just information there on our site and it’s accessible. And we’ve been able to do that with an AI backed federated search that’s very well tuned to industry terms like what are our customers going to say and what that means for what content they need. And that’s been probably one of our most successful initiatives is being able to deflect cases by providing easy access to the most relevant documentation and having a vast documentation library.

24:11 | Jennifer Palma
Support articles. I love them. They’re so useful, so helpful for everybody. So, we have about five minutes left Paul. I do have some questions in the chat for us. So I’m going to read them out loud. Okay. So, our first question comes from Supreet, who wants to know is actively listening hard to build, is active listening hard to build due to security issues? And I believe that question came up when we were talking about the limitations of the team.

24:41 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Is active listening difficult because of security issues? I’m not quite sure I understand what the security issues are with that. Is it that customers not being able to share the information that they need to help with? If that’s what the question is, we understand our customers workflows. And so if it’s document specific, then that’s a little bit of a challenge where… we have our own test documents and we’ll test their workflow on our documents and kind of work through it. That way, if it’s document specific, then it’s getting permission in this modern data world. It’s all about getting permission. Sometimes we have them redact certain pieces of a document or extract a piece of it that they’re having trouble with. That might not have… the need, you know, the intellectual property, IP information on it. There’s ways to work around that we tend.

25:55 | Jennifer Palma
To.

25:55 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
make it.

25:56 | Jennifer Palma
Work. No worries. My next two questions, how easy was it for the team to learn and adopt using the kobiton platform?

26:06 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Learning to use the desktop interface for something that’s a touch mobile device. It took a little getting used to, but they adapted relatively quickly. I created a good quick start guide for them with all like explanations on what controls to use to mimic what feature on the app. It wasn’t that difficult. I’d say we were fluent using the kobiton platform versus the physical device within a month?

26:46 | Jennifer Palma
Awesome. Well, my next question, I have one more after this is what does the process look like for an agent to bring up the app on a call?

26:57 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
Either having someone loading it up on a web tab at the beginning of their day and just having it accessible or having it bookmarked. So it’s quickly accessible. Log in. The landing page shows the devices available and click launch on the device. It loads relatively quickly. A few seconds. There’s really not much to it. It’s cloud based. It’s a web tab and either they already have it open or it’s bookmarked. So it’s easily accessible. Like I said, the landing page dashboard is the devices they just click launch on the device they need and it’s a few seconds later, it’s up and running.

27:45 | Jennifer Palma
Super easy about.

27:45 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
The same amount of time it takes to reach into a drawer and take out a physical device.

27:51 | Jennifer Palma
Love the ease of that. All right, Paul, our last question actually comes from Sean berry. Sean writes. Thanks Paul for sharing your story. Your innovation and drive to solve problems in unique ways is awesome. What is it culturally at bluebeam that enables you to be creative?

28:11 | Paul Gibbons-Wagner
It’s the permission to do it. We have a culture of, you know, do whatever you need to do to get the job done. You’re not micromanaged, there’s not a lot of strict rules… and ownership. You’re really encouraged to get results. And even as we’ve grown, we’ve kind of maintained that work with whoever, you know, we have very open door policies regardless of department, talk to whoever you need to talk to and get done what you need. It’s all about results and solutions than ownership and strict, you know, red tape and boundaries. It’s a very openness atmosphere here.

29:05 | Jennifer Palma
That’s awesome. That sounds like kobiton. One of our core values is being constantly curious and always asking questions because that’s how, you know, things happen. Yeah. Well, Paul, we are at the end of our show here today, we appreciate you so much for joining us and being a part of this and talking more so about customer support, how kobiton helps bluebeam and how bluebeam you know, works to help their customers. So we appreciate you joining us today and thank you to all the viewers that, you know, took time to watch us and then ask some questions.