One of the great things about living in the future is the rapid dissemination of information – for example, my colleague Dustin turned me on to the podcast Entrepreneur on Fire, which in turn lead me to learning more about Mastermind groups – and to eventually start one with some of my Happiness Engineer colleagues at Automattic.

We’ve only met once, though our second meeting will be in-person at next week’s Grand Meetup. The goal of our particular Mastermind group is accountability and goal-setting: in a company like Automattic, it’s easy to get caught up in the many, many ongoing projects and iterations. Having a group prepared to listen to one another’s goals and hold each other accountable will, I think, really bear a lot of fruit.

Our goals individually are interestingly broad; I’m taking a course in Google Analytics that I’d like to have finished by our next meeting, others in the group are building things using JavaScript or putting together entire WordPress Themes – the important thing is that we are moving forward and helping one another to accomplish our goals.

One piece of that that we discussed in our first meeting you can already see, above: we asked one another “What is your personal mission statement? Your broader vision for yourself?”

(This turns out to be a harder question than I had expected!)

In the end, I think my vision for myself is this; to use my background in operations management, as well as growth engineering principles, to revolutionize the way hospitality is done on the internet.

An idea that’s pretty popular among sales people and growth engineers is considering the journey your customers take toward their eventual purchase (or non-purchase) in terms of a funnel. Here’s an article that’s a good starting point to thinking about sales funnels.

Using the metaphor of a funnel , along with modern analytics and tracking software, allows us to think of the sales process as a precise thing: between Page One and Page Two we lose about 30% of our traffic, from Page Two to Page Three we lose another 40%, and then about 5% of the original folks from Page One tend to make a purchase. The Big Idea of a sales funnel is to make that final number, the final group of folks who make a purchase, as large as possible.

We can take this idea of a funnel and apply it to providing support to our customers as well, with an interesting twist; rather than the final count being our paying customers, we want to consider the final count as the folks who open a support request. In this way we flip the sales funnel on its head – rather than maximizing our final number, in support, we want to minimize this number.

It might look something like this:

Our goal, as folks who provide hospitality (and service!) for technology products, is to enable our customers to leave this funnel as early as possible. I am of the opinion that every customer who contacts support has already experienced two failures on our behalf: the product fails to fulfill some expectation that the customer has (it is just as much our job to set reasonable expectations as it is to make products easy to use), and then that problem is not easily solved with the tools we make freely available.

That means that for every customer who reaches the last step, Contacting Support, we’re already on our third strike. It’s our last chance to provide them a truly excellent experience.

If we start to co-opt the skills that our growth engineer brothers and sisters are becoming so good at, we can use those same skills to help our customers escape this funnel earlier and earlier: we do the job of hospitality the best when our customers never need us at all. This is the value of a good support funnel – it keeps us down to one strike, and that’s a win for everyone.