Spotlight: Emre Tekoglu @ Zywave

How do you see post-sales teams evolving when it comes to AI?

The biggest impact AI has had so far is in customer support. AI-powered chatbots have done a great job handling quick, straightforward support requests, but the real evolution is how AI can help with analyzing customer conversations.

Support teams can take all the data from customer conversations and use it to make products better, track how well their team is doing, and get a better understanding of what customers need. Imagine this: you type in a customer’s name before a call and instantly see everything about their history—what issues they’ve had, what’s unresolved, and how they feel about your service.

AI can also give detailed insights about your team’s performance—like whether cases were resolved, what types of problems they handled, how tough the cases were, and how customers felt during the process. The best part? It can do this across all cases instantly, without needing a big quality control team or a bunch of data analysts. This is how AI is going to make support teams smarter, faster, and more focused on what matters: helping customers.

What's the most rewarding part of your role in customer support?

Customer support gives you the chance to really understand your products and your customers. It feels good to know that your team plays a key role in keeping customers happy and loyal. Plus, every issue you deal with is a chance to improve how things work, which makes the job interesting and keeps you on your toes. And let’s be honest—starting your day knowing you won’t get stuck in boring, repetitive work is a big bonus.

As a leader, what I find most rewarding is helping my team grow, getting rid of roadblocks that slow them down, and making things run more smoothly with the right tools. Seeing my team succeed and knowing I’ve made their jobs easier is what makes this work truly fulfilling.

What do most people get wrong about customer support?

One of my biggest pet peeves is “check-in calls” that lack a clear agenda or purpose. It's incredibly difficult to capture and maintain customer attention, so every interaction should be valuable. An unproductive meeting can erode customer trust and make it harder to engage them in future conversations.
What's top of mind heading into 2025?

What are some of the biggest challenges in Support?  

Going into 2025, the focus is shifting to the idea that preventing issues is better than just fixing them. If we can stop problems from happening in the first place, we’ll have happier customers and more efficient teams. One of our initiatives will be case prevention and then make it easy for customers to report issues leveraging in app customer support for our customers.

Another priority is using tools that can analyze all customer interactions—whether they happen over chat, email, or phone—and give us real, useful insights that help improve products and services. Customer support teams sit on a goldmine of information, and we need to do a better job telling the story behind all the data we have.

Lastly, it’s time to rethink the metrics we use to measure success. Instead of focusing on numbers that only matter to the support department, we need to adopt ones that reflect what’s best for our customers. Taking care of both customers and employees will be the key to success in 2025.