176. How Slido Cut Support Tickets by 70% With AI ft. Jo Massie (Slido)

Much better for us than we were expecting, but it’s also really beneficial because we’ve been able to add chat in more places. So we’re actually being able to give a better customer experience people now who didn’t have chat before have now got access to the chatbot. And of course, if they can’t solve it, then it leads, leads through.

Jenny Calvert:
I am Jenny Calvert here with Unchurned live from Dublin, Pulse Europe going down. And I am joined by Jo Massey from Slido. Thank you so much, Jo, for joining me.

Jo Massie:
Thanks for having me.

Jenny Calvert:
Quick little jump over from where you live.

Jo Massie:
Yes, yeah, so I live in Edinburgh, so very convenient for me today.

Jenny Calvert:
So tell the listeners a little bit about your role at Salaito, what you own, your remit, what the structure looks like.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, so I, I’ve been with Salaito for a very long time, growing the team in all kinds of different directions. Now I own everything customer, basically, so from marketing through to everything customer success, but also 90% of sales. So it’s with me as well.

Jenny Calvert:
That’s literally all of customer.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, exactly. Everything customer. Everything. Basically, marketing and post-initiative sales. Yes.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Wow.

Jo Massie:
Yes.

Jenny Calvert:
I think that’s the most expansive remit we’ve heard in a long time.

Jo Massie:
Well, you know, it’s, it’s fun.

Jenny Calvert:
You always had sales and marketing?

Jo Massie:
No, no, no. This is like the, the sales and marketing is the latest, um, thing to be added to my remit.

Jenny Calvert:
What was the strategy behind aligning all of that under your remit?

Jo Massie:
Um, just about making it make sense, really. So especially with— we’ve been really heavily investing in digital for the last couple of years. At some point, digital and marketing become very closely intertwined. We’re also— Slido is a product-led growth company, so it’s all loops and things like that. Actually, usage of the product and making sure that people are using it well means that you know, that leads to customer acquisitions. So, you know, if we’re able to do that well, it makes—

Jenny Calvert:
How is the alignment? And it’s newish. How has it maybe broken down some of the previous silos or the friction points that you experienced?

Jo Massie:
It’s been really interesting because actually, especially our digital team, so everything is now— they’re owning all of that basically in one team now. And that means we’re just able to operate so much faster. On everything when it comes to, like, recycling content. So, for example, we put out a couple of blog posts on how, how to lead well in this AI generation. So, a couple of blog posts which we turned then into everything socials. We’re doing a customer webinar on that. It’s been a newsletter. So, actually, things that would have been owned previously by 3 different teams, one team’s just been able to take that and and turn it into something useful.

Jenny Calvert:
Have you had to restructure any of your teams around this change, or they just all kind of roll up under your leadership?

Jo Massie:
No, we just, yeah, mostly we haven’t had to make too many changes in that regard. So it’s been good. But you know, as business grows, you outgrow every structure you ever have, right? So our structures never last all that long. In a fairly high-growth, high-volume business. Of course. Like at some point it’s like—

Jenny Calvert:
It’s going to change again.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, exactly. I’m quite happy now that it’s— we only need to restructure the teams like once a year, whereas when I first started in the role, it was like every 3 months we needed to create something new or some new like specialism or something grew out into a function. So it’s much— this is nicer in some ways.

Jenny Calvert:
Now you mentioned it’s been about 3-ish years of really going into this digital transformation, a PLG organization. So yeah. Placing your bets and investments on digital.

Jo Massie:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
How is AI shifting, disrupting, maybe empowering all of that, that investment that you’ve made?

Jo Massie:
Yeah, so that’s where we’ve really like, so a couple of years ago, what we said, and we set a strategy that we want to move from human-first customer success to digital-first customer success. And we had different areas that we wanted to focus on with that. And AI was obviously one area. Where we’ve really focused on to start with, with that is in our support. So we most recently just added an interface where you can use a chatbot before you actually hit our agents. That’s working really well for us. Only about 30% of those tickets get escalated, which is much for deflection.

Jenny Calvert:
Again, efficiency.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, huge. Much better for us than we were expecting, but it’s also really beneficial because we’ve been able to add chat in more places. So we’re actually being able to give a better customer experience. People now who didn’t have chat before have now got access to the chatbot, and of course, if they can’t solve it, then it leads through. Elsewhere, we’ve been, as I said, the digital team have expanded their remit a lot by taking on marketing. So we’re using it quite a lot in helping us think, helping us build those skills, basically. So especially in content creation, using it a lot in videos, like just to help us do more there. Going forward, I think then we’ll start looking at how can we use it to enable our CSMs in that way.

Jo Massie:
But the other key area where AI has made a huge difference to us was with our customer voice program. So I used to have a team of 4 who handle our customer voice program.

Jenny Calvert:
Um, they, they—

Jo Massie:
it’s amazing what they do. It’s— our product team rely on everything that, that they have. It builds into all of our roadmap and everything like that. So super good process. But with, of course, you know, as every team, we’re being asked to do more with less. So earlier this year I was like, we can’t afford to have 4 full-time employees doing this anymore. So I need you to rethink how can you still deliver the same outcomes with 1.5 full-time employees headcount. So it’s still the same number of people working on it, but overall it’s less.

Jo Massie:
So they’ve, they’ve done amazing work with AI in that space.

Jenny Calvert:
So it’s been able to, again, and they’ve exceeded my expectation.

Jo Massie:
Completely. That’s, uh, yeah. Where else do you think you’ll see that in the business?

Jenny Calvert:
As you use more with less, right? That is the narrative, the mantra, uh, or the mandate, I should say. Seeing it in that voice customer team, where else might that start to trickle in as you move into next year?

Jo Massie:
Um, yeah, hard to say, right? I think AI is also moving at such a speed. Um, so seeing where we can, where we can bring that in. We definitely, our CSMs are one place which we haven’t touched that much with AI. So I think that’s something we definitely need to submerge us a little bit more into.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah, I’m curious with digital first where education and community maybe play into, uh, your strategy.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, so actually we— everything first, right? But, um, last year we also moved to community first, so we actually wanted to start making that more of our primary support channel opposed to like support tickets, basically. Sure. Because we really like, we wanted all that information to be indexed, to be searchable, to be out there. And, you know, so many questions that come to our support teams are repetitive anyway. So actually, you know, many people go to ChatGPT now to ask the questions. So if they can find that, if those models can find it from our community, that helps us a lot. So community has been really critical. There.

Jo Massie:
We’re using the communities platform from, from Gainsight, and what is, is actually at the center of our strategy, our digital person, really the heart. And we’ve made it like a— we call it our digital hub, and we’ve got everything in there. But also, so anything you need around education for Slido, you’ll find it at community.slido.com. Content, videos— we don’t have a learning management platform, we’re kind of hacking the community with that, the personal pages.

Jenny Calvert:
This is fun.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, it works super well for us. It’s just having everything accessible in one place. It’s perfect.

Jenny Calvert:
And the deflection, it sounds like, for the support tickets, so you’re able to run a more leaner, it sounds like, work team. Sure, the customer experience you mentioned improving.

Jo Massie:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
I’m going to guess the satisfaction of the employees improving, right? Because they get to maybe work on more meaningful work.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, definitely.

Jenny Calvert:
And faster.

Jo Massie:
Yes, and everyone’s able to, you know, we very much believe in bringing the ideas from everyone. So I think, you know, giving everyone ownership to be able to do things and someone comes with an idea. So yeah, try it. Like, do it. Why not? What a fun culture. Go for it. What’s the worst that can happen, right?

Jenny Calvert:
I think that is the mindset of AI though, right? No one’s perfected this stuff yet. You have to kind of just be like, hey, give it a go.

Jo Massie:
Especially I think when it’s a two-way door decision, right? Like some things you can’t undo, but so many things it’s a case of you open the door, you close the door, right? So, so much fun to experiment.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. And that experimentation mindset, especially like, again, as you move to this 3-year transformation to digital first, sounds like you were there.

Jo Massie:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
Aligning the teams to let you even do more faster.

Jo Massie:
Yes.

Jenny Calvert:
Really incredible. Makes me wonder strategy, um, somebody who is really like the expert, right? So more specialist versus generalist. As you’re looking forward into the talent that you’ll bring in when you do hire, what are your thoughts on that?

Jo Massie:
We’re quite, we’re quite an agile team. We’re doing a lot, but there’s only like 35 of us in the team covering, um, that scope. Um, so we don’t have— we— everyone has their specialist skills, but at the same time, everyone’s also wearing many hats.

Jenny Calvert:
So what sounds like it’s been a little superpower, honestly, that’s allowed you to get to this point. Yeah, exactly. Being able to kind of poke, tap, just try.

Jo Massie:
And yeah, so yeah, I would say we do a bit of both. So everyone definitely has things that they’re known for and things that they, they go for, um, and then yeah, then there you need to be able to do anything and everything as well. What I care much more about when it comes to looking at teams and structuring teams is do you have a diversity in in what people are bringing to the table. So, you know, my head of digital, she’s like such a partner for me because I speed her up, she slows me down. And like working together, we are so much stronger as a unit. And that’s what I really look for in all of those teams. Like actually when you’ve got those, you can put people without any skills, but if you’ve got the right like dynamics in the team, then The work that they can do will just blow you away.

Jenny Calvert:
Sounds like creating really innovative ideas and ways to go about things and stay, as you mentioned, a really lean team. Yeah, yeah, I have a pretty lean team.

Jo Massie:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
I’m curious though, Slido was acquired by Cisco 4 or so years ago.

Jo Massie:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
So you’re kind of the startup within a much larger ecosystem.

Jo Massie:
Yeah. How has that been?

Jenny Calvert:
Have you been able to operate with more of that still kind of early startup mindset, or have you had to shift into more of the large Cisco environment?

Jo Massie:
Uh, it’s been super interesting in a couple of ways. So when we were acquired, every— we’re part of the Webex infrastructure. So the Webex products like Zoom, Teams, all of those kind of products, and everyone who purchased Webex suddenly got Slido, but they’re like super enterprise. And we thought we knew enterprise when we got acquired. We did not know enterprise. So it was really interesting for us to, yeah, just have this whole new subset of customers and the things that they needed and they were asking for and like security and like it just took it to a whole new level for us. That was really—

Jenny Calvert:
You learned up real quick.

Jo Massie:
Yes, we grew up very fast, I would say. But they kind of just for the first 4 years, yes, 4 years since we were acquired, they mostly left us alone where integrating more now. So it’s also hard for me to talk about where AI will come in next year because actually I think our team will, will be changing quite a lot coming into the next year as well, maybe expanding scope to cover more things across our business units.

Jenny Calvert:
So yeah, and that goes back to where building that kind of diverse team that has the ability, they’ve got specializations within all of them. Yeah, but you know that you can plug and play all of those players with whatever. Yeah, come next year.

Jo Massie:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
So what is most exciting for you knowing there’s a lot of unknowns, but going into 2026 then, what are you most excited about?

Jo Massie:
I’m excited to see, yeah, how everything evolves. Like I think everything everywhere is changing so fast right now. Like we had this morning in the keynote here that, you know, this wasn’t possible a year ago. Yeah. Right. And, and just thinking about that. Speed of innovation that we’re seeing. Like, I find that super exciting.

Jo Massie:
Yeah. Well, I want to really get my team into doing a bit more of over the next year is getting into vibe coding. I think that’s something really like, actually, can we experiment with vibe coding? Not too much. Not too much. Not, not really. But I think that’s a really, I think that’s interesting also for CS like people to actually be bringing a bit more like of a technical thing and actually bringing some of their ideas to life in a different way and showing it in a different thing. I think that’s, that’s interesting. So that’s something that internally I want us to focus on.

Jo Massie:
And, you know, right now our engineering team have been working a lot with our product team on like actually setting them up with the tools and stuff to do that. And so I hope to just piggyback on that in the future. You’ve made a lot of gains. Again, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t easily the outcomes, but if we’re all growing and learning and trying new things, that’s, you know, that allows us to grow also in what we’re doing, in the results that we get and everything like that as well. So incredible.

Jenny Calvert:
What else from a strategic priorities are you thinking about headed to next year? Or is it really this we’ll see just given where you are with the integrations and things like that?

Jo Massie:
Yeah, I think really we’ll see. I think, you know, speaking to like the leader of the organization that we’re just moving into, They definitely want— they’re interested in what we’re doing in the digital space. That’s a gap that they’ve got. Sure. In the Webex business. So I think we’ll be looking to see, can we take what we’ve been doing in our, yeah, in our PLG world?

Jenny Calvert:
You’re leading by example. Instead of them translating some of their business requirements to you, it’s like, hey, this is how we did this with the community as the center of the business, digital first.

Jo Massie:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
And all of that.

Jo Massie:
It’s a completely different world, right? There’s so many more stakeholders and you’re definitely missing that. That small, everyone, everything led under one roof that I was saying makes things easier. So, so we’ll see how that, how that shapes up.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah, really. How is the speed? I’d imagine being a smaller, lean, gritty, it sounds like, and also very diverse team, probably very quick to execute.

Jo Massie:
Actually, the digital team done something like really cool in the last couple of months and that we’re working, they work in sprints, so weekly sprints. So every week they’re like, this is what we, this is what we wanna get done. And at the end of the week they do a sprint review. Um, and that’s just enabled the volume of things that they’re coming out with. Like since we moved—

Jenny Calvert:
here’s our focus, this is what we’re doing, here’s how we did, here’s what we shipped.

Jo Massie:
I mean, yeah. And it’s, it’s working so well for us because— and weekly sprints? Yeah, weekly. Okay. Um, because they, they, cuz they’re at the heart of our strategy and everything. That there’s demands on them from every other team, but they’ve also got their own KPIs and things that they, that they need to hit. So what we were finding was we had too many roadblocks. They were a roadblock or they were waiting for things from other people. So this has just enabled us to, to accommodate that in a much, in a much better way really.

Jo Massie:
And, and get the velocity, um, of, of like done well.

Jenny Calvert:
So yeah, it was really incredible.

Jo Massie:
So it’s fun.

Jenny Calvert:
As we come to a close. For those thinking about leading with community first, really prioritizing that digital-first strategy, it’s been a conversation point. Some people are further along than others. I’m sure you’ve seen—

Jo Massie:
I’m so happy at Pulse that it’s a topic now. When I first started coming to Pulse in 2017, everything was all about alignment with sales. I’m like, I can’t relate to any of this stuff. And now I’m like, oh, there’s so much interesting content. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
So what would you say to listeners who are maybe just starting to, you know, explore a digital-first or community-first type of type of operational model?

Jo Massie:
What would you say? I think don’t be afraid to experiment. Like, try things. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Don’t invest too much, right? Do like MVPs, do pilots. Just, just try and get going with it.

Jenny Calvert:
Really is like an engineering development cycle. You mentioned sprints being really efficient and provide like this experimentation mindset. Yeah, that’s required for AI, by the way. Yeah, but it’s also, it sounds like the key to success for digital.

Jo Massie:
Yeah, the same, right? Like, actually, you also want to know that the things that you’re doing and investing in are delivering the results that you’re looking for, right? And how much time you put into it. We work a lot with what’s our cost, how much, what’s our budget for something, how much time are we willing to give this? 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks? If something’s going to take more than 4 weeks to implement, then that’s quite expensive. So we need to make sure we’re getting results from that, right? So, so yeah, try. Experiment. Try, try small.

Jenny Calvert:
Find ideas from different people and yeah, really build that diverse team, right? Yeah, yeah, I think it’s really important. Yeah, Jo, it’s been awesome.

Jo Massie:
Thanks so much.

Jenny Calvert:
Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me. From Splido, sharing all about community and digital first. So much fun.

Jo Massie:
Thank you so much. Thanks. Bye.