Please hold on the line.
Very few people know what their calling will be in life. I certainly had different plans.
A graphic designer! A forensic specialist! A software engineer!
Turns out, my true skill is in Operations, specifically Technical Support.
Not what I envisioned, but I can't deny I am good at it. And to be fair, it is not a bad career path.
Provided of course, the company you work for is not guilty of the Deadly Sins I have compiled, after years of experience.
Sin 1: Everything on the 1st Line
A good support operation requires effective and proper demarcation of skill and responsibility. Issues that customers encounter come in different flavors of complexity and intensity. The same way the people hired will come with different skillsets.
Yet many a company will only have a singular level of support, expected to be able to pick up, diagnose and resolve every problem or request right at the entry point.
Oh, and bonus if they are expected to do so within 15 minutes every single time.
This is simply unrealistic and ends up in extremely low customer satisfaction and high turnover on the employee side.
It seems that many corporate executives consider support an afterthought, or believe that if they just simply throw enough people at the problem, eventually the customer will encounter someone that can resolve the issue, after facing extreme frustration and delays.
Ideally a company will require three levels of support, with other departments available to provide their expertise on specific matters. Your first line should be expected to and effectively trained to resolve 60% of all incoming cases, being able to recognize when their skill set and tools are not able to do the job, and escalate to a higher department as needed.
Sin 2: No Alternative ways of Contact
Some people are simply too busy to call you.
Some might be socially anxious.
Or alternatively, they love a good talk!
Yet often you will find that there is only a single way to contact a support department. You might be forced to call, forced to e-mail, or forced into a Live Chat.
As a personal anecdote, I fall into the category of "too busy".
No, I don't have time to call you during the day.
No, I can't make time for an agreed call-back time.
I will send you an e-mail, I will answer when I can.
Oh, you don't do e-mail support?
Well, that is too bad. I shall take my business elsewhere then.
Of course it is not realistic for every organization to pull this off. If you are serving millions of customers, you simply have to choose or else your entire support chain can get overwhelmed.
But any small to mid-sized company, with a reasonable customer base should provide plenty of avenues for contact. Combined with a solid ticketing system, well trained operators and effective demarcation lines will lead to higher satisfaction, better reputation and more sales of your product line.
Sin 3: Humans, not Robots!
internal yelling REEEEEEEEEEEEE
This one really pisses me off.
And no, it's not what you think. Not AI "assistants" that are more Ayyyyy than I.
It is turning what is meant to be a human interaction into a cold, rigid, robotic process.
The mandatory opening script. The required response. The rigid flow of the conversation. The empty goodbye.
It is not the 1990's anymore. Stop doing it. It's a meme by this point, if only it was funny.
From a customer point of view, hearing an obviously rehearsed opening, automatic responses, forced flow of the conversation tells me the following:
Your support is built on inflexible processes, and if my issue is not recognized by it, you will not be able to help me, and I may as well go and throw whatever I purchased from you into the trash or cancel my subscription.
Whereas a free-flowing, perhaps if chaotic, but most importantly human interaction makes the whole support process a lot more enjoyable, be it for the operator or the customer. Your company can be the one with the fun, energetic support line, putting a human face to what is in the end a corporate entity.
The operator can personalize their interactions, and not feel like they are inside a cult.
Stop doing templates. Stop doing scripts. Let people be people.
Bruh.
Sin 4: Beep Bop My CRM Just Froze, Oh C*ck
Let me tell you a story.
A previous employer required all support operators to arrive at work 15 minutes before the actual start time of their shift. This time would be unpaid.
The reason?
The tools are slow and require a long time to load.
You can probably see the insanity of this already, effectively they said:
We know our tools are slow.
We know they are outdated.
We know it affects operations.
We don't plan on doing anything about it.
Every professional in every profession requires the right tools for the job. A chef requires sharp knives, a software engineer requires a powerful IDE, an accountant requires...Excel?
And a support specialist requires tools that allow him to do the job he was hired to do, and not to spend time watching a window spin it's wheels and restart it mid-case because it keeps crashing.
If you don't invest in your tools, you can have the best people working for you. People that might be even overqualified for their job but happy to do it because they enjoy it. But your support department will never deliver, because it can't deliver.
Either invest, develop, upgrade, maintain and take feedback from your people doing the job into your own toolset, or look for outside suppliers.
If you don't, then you have already lost, and will keep losing (money).
Sin 5: Not everyone is from the US of A.
Americans. Love 'em or hate em. One thing is for sure: they adore small talk.
In fact when serving that market, having support specialists that are social butterflies more than they are technical experts might give you better results.
Yet it is important to actually know your customer base, don't assume you can just apply the "American model" to your structure and expect it to work.
If an European customer calls/texts your support, and they start asking him about the weather, politics, hobbies or otherwise we do not think we are being served. We just think you have absolutely lost the plot. Fix my issue please, thanks, I don't actually want to be talking to you, I am only here because something broke and I'd like to go back to my day. In fact, I would be perfectly happy to put the phone down while you work.
The gist of it is this: know your customer base. Stereotype them even a little bit. If you serve globally, train your support in the art of mirroring the customer. Train them in recognizing cultural differences and how to align to them.
And brother in Christ, do not have them-
Sin 6: The Mandatory Upsell
Yeah, that. Don't have them do that. Please I beg you.
When a customer contacts your support, we can usually assume the following:
He is in a bad mood
He is paying you money
He feels he is not getting the expected value for that money
What he wants is for the person on the other end of the interaction to address his issue, provide him with information, even just hear out his complaint.
He most definitely does not want to be offered the chance to spend even more money with your company at that particular moment.
If you want to sell more? Hire more professionals into Sales. Support is for resolution of issues experienced with the service they are selling. An upsell should only ever be part of the support process if it is part of the issue resolution (more bandwidth, more capacity, more of something), and even then I argue it should not be handled by support. Train Sales on how they can turn this into an opportunity.
And yet, a staggering amount of companies do the exact opposite. Support performance gets measured by how much they can upsell, not by how many cases they resolve.
Look around, you will see what it leads into it: high complaints, low satisfaction, and in fact lower sales.
Pick the right soldiers for the battle ahead. I couldn't sell a thirsty man water, but I can fix his satellite phone so he can call someone for water.
Sin 7: Train Once, Fire Later
People forget. That is human nature.
A Doctor does not know every ailment under the sun.
A software engineer does not know everything in his chosen programming language back to front.
And any support specialist, even your highest performer will in due time lose knowledge he previously possessed.
Processes might start being broken, resolutions of particular issues slower to come by.
The usual instinct of companies in this regard is to just fire waves of people and hire anew.
But this results in the support quality ending up in a state of constant flux, as those who do still possess the most knowledge are removed and fresh faces who barely can find their way around the toolset replace them.
This is not to say fresh blood is not a good thing, but ideally you replace people because they moved to a different position within your organization, not because you failed to recognize and address small issues of quality that started to build up.
Continuous training, an open and worry free channel to admit lack of knowledge on a subject and a solid database containing all of your processes are key in employee retention and high support quality.
"Fire and Rehire" is not a short or long term solution, only a way to make sure the quality of your support operation never moves part a certain point.
Train & Retain is the name of the game.
I hope the above unhinged rant was informative if not entertaining. But a man gotta get some things of his chest.
See you next week!