Tag: support

Five in Five: Looking to the Future

I live in a neat little neighborhood just outside of the city center of my town – it’s not a development, but a little residential pocket with a half-dozen streets, maybe 80 homes?

It’s one of those neighborhoods whose first or second round of homeowners are starting to get a little older, move into apartments or somewhere where it doesn’t get so darn cold in the winter time. As they sell their homes, first time homebuyers and small families are moving in – it’s a neighborhood in transition, and it means that my kiddos, when they’re a little older, will have lots of kids around their age in the neighborhood. It’s a good thing. It’s a nice place to live.

One joke I have with my wife, about our neighborhood, is this: there’s a street hockey goal that’s always in the street where we turn toward home. We’ve never seen anyone actually using it, but it’s always there, rain or shine, spring, summer, fall. We had both noticed it, independently, and once, driving together, I said;

“I figured it out, by the way. It’s not for street hockey – it’s a reminder.”

She looked at me, and nodded.

“It’s a reminder, so when we drive in, when we get home, we say to ourselves, ‘Don’t forget to have a goal.’ ”

We had a chuckle – I’m still working on my Dad Jokes, obviously. But, still, it was the sort of little thing that has stuck with me, and every time I pull into our neighborhood, I see the street hockey goal, and I say to myself, ‘You’ve got to have a goal.’

Especially when you’re working in a job you enjoy, with people you respect, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day ebb and flow of The Work. It’s a small thing to do your work and go to meetings and let the tide carry you in and out of your daily labor. I have been in that type of aimless, do-good-work-and-go-home mindset for some time.

There’s no shame in it: to be ambitious without a clear destination, though, is a recipe for frustration and for burnout. So – I joined a Mastermind group. I got more involved in the broader support / success community. I’ve given it some thought – my need for a goal, I mean – and I’ve decided on this:

I’m going to be in the top five Customer Success professionals working in the SaaS space within the next five years. 

Or, ‘Five in five.’ Even shorter: 5in5.

Here’s why Customer Success is the right fit for me:

I’m an analyst; I know how to find patterns in behavior, I know how to use the tools of Big Data to identify the best course of action that will reveal real insights. I understand the import of Small Data; I’ve surveyed and interviewed customers across multiple product lines, using a diversity of approaches. I know how to turn all of that research into action and communicate that action clearly – even to busy folks who aren’t interested in statistical significance. 

I’m customer focused; I’ve built my career on finding ways to make the millions of publishers, bloggers, artists and business owners find success at WordPress.com. I understand how customers can provide us information even when we aren’t asking for it. I am keenly aware that while reducing the time it takes for customers to get a reply is important, it’s not as important as reducing and preventing the pain that causes your customers to reach out in the first place.

I am dedicated to leading; I know that I am better for the folks I work with. I know that a diverse collection of perspectives and approaches will always be greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve found great satisfaction and endless opportunities for humility in leading teams, especially remote teams. I’ve written about that an awful lot.

Customer Success is in its infancy; the combination of skills that I have, this weird intersection of analysis, customer experience, and team leadership – it’s not clear how I can leverage this into impact, into creating the most value in the universe. In this way, the fact that the work of Customer Success is still so flexible, without the more rigid history and expectations of something like Customer Support (‘Reduce response times’), it allows me to not only pursue impact – but to create the role, shape what it means to be successful.

The next piece of the puzzle; how do I get there?

Stay tuned!

 

 

 

Hospitality is a Team Sport

If you’ve been reading my stuff for very long, you’re aware that I think about hospitality a lot.

I use it in broad terms – I think that the work that we call Customer Support, Customer Success, Customer Service, and so on, all fall under this same umbrella.

Before I worked for Automattic I had a successful career in high end coffee – before that I was in grad school and working in restaurants and cafes.

One piece that’s worth keeping in mind, one cornerstone to excellence in hospitality regardless of industry, is that we’re playing a team sport.

Today is my fifth wedding anniversary (Happy Anniversary, Doc!)  – last night we went out to a nice dinner. She had a lobster salad and I had the tuna steak. During our meal, I noticed a waiter serving a large table next to us.

Each of the entrées had toothpicks with different colored foil on the end – some red, some blue, you know the kind. As he turned his back to the table to pick up another diner’s plate, he’d quietly remove the toothpick, leave it on the larger serving tray, and present the entrée to the customer, announcing confidently the entrée, the sides, the special bibs and bobs requested by that particular diner.

If you’ve worked in a restaurant, you know what those toothpicks were – they indicated the done-ness of a steak, or which cheeseburger had the Swiss rather than the cheddar. They were little reminders built into the process to allow the server to present an entirely seamless and apparently perfect experience to the customers without holding all of that information in his head.

(This was a table of maybe twelve diners? Not an easy task to remember every person’s nuanced order)

It was an interesting reminder for me, that a seamless and lovely delivery to a customer, a shiny and outstanding experience, is the result of a whole team of folks working behind the scenes – working to support one another just as much as they’re working to support the customer directly.

(I’ve written some about this here and here.)

This kind of internal hospitality may seem small – a cook leaving reminders of what makes each dish special – but it adds up to a lower effort, higher-level experience for the customer.

It’s easy for us to extend this idea to the work we do in developing software. Think of your internal tooling – are there obvious, visible flags for features or situations where things are different from the usual? How much do you make your colleagues lives easier?

This doesn’t just apply to development teams working with success/support teams, either. If you work in a customer-facing role, whether support or success or whatever, how easy do you make it for others in your company to understand your work? What are the toothpicks that you offer to make their jobs easier? Do you have a standard, easily replicated template for bug reports that includes steps for reproduction, customers effected, and a consistent urgency scale?

(If not; think about making one 🙂 )

The customer experience, especially an excellent customer experience, is the end result of tons of tiny decisions, all stacked on top of one another. It’s only possible to really do the very best for our customers when we first do the very best we can for one another.

Risk and Support in Leadership

Not long ago I had the pleasure of hosting an old friend in Saratoga (where I live).

Rob and I became colleagues first, by working together in high end coffee in New England, and then eventually friends.

Rob had worked in coffee longer than I had when I joined that industry, and is still a big part of the community in Providence. He was in my neck of the woods visiting clients of his – he’s a coffee trader these days, and sells green unroasted coffee to folks who turn that coffee brown and sell it to the general public.

Over wine and Hatties’ fried chicken, we talked. We talked a lot! We talked about family and career and what it means to live a good life. It was an excellent visit with a great friend.

One of the things that he introduced me to was the idea of thinking about leadership in terms of risk and support. You can imagine these two ideas as different dimensions on a field, like so:

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In a leadership position, the decisions you make will tend to fall into one quadrant most of the time – the way that we can think about these dimensions are in terms of how we work with our team.

Support here means, how well do you as a leader back up the members of your team?

When someone falls down, when something doesn’t work as planned, do you step in, do you take responsibility for the team? Or do you allow the individuals to face scrutiny and take the blame themselves?

If a member of your team tells you that they have a bold career plan, as their lead do you find ways to help move them along that journey, finding or manufacturing opportunities for them? Or do you nod, ask about their day, and let them try to find their own way with neither help nor hindrance from you?

These are both different ways that we can compare high support and low support.

Risk here means, how much risk do you allow or encourage your team to take on? Do you fully insulate them from the winds of your organization’s politics, content with their low amplitude day to day work? Or do you allow them to wander outside your team’s safest places and experience both the opportunity for great work and the chance of failure?

Risk and Support are not always absolutely good or absolutely bad – you can imagine a lead who exposes their team to great risk could create a terrible environment to work in. You can also easily imagine a leader who fully supports her team in all they do, but never offers up any Risk, which means the support isn’t ever really needed.

This is why truly great teams balance the two, and achieve a state of both High Support and High Risk – offering opportunity (and the accordant risk) when appropriate, and doing all they can to also provide support for the decisions made in pursuit of that opportunity.

As far as a guideline for leadership and leadership decisions go – I like this one a lot. I’ve been asking myself, “Am I allowing for some risk? Am I supporting bold choices?” 

This is pretty half baked on my end – there’s a lot here to consider (how much risk is appropriate? Can one over-support? What does high-risk low-support look like? What about low-risk high-support?

Have you heard of this kind of structure before? How does this gel with your own experiences, as a team lead or as a team member?

 

 

Collaboration Post with Help Scout

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Following my presentation at SupConf I had the opportunity to chat with some folks from Help Scout, a popular support software startup. They were great! They sponsored the photo booth, which is always a treat.

Since the event, I’ve had the chance to work with Emily, one of the members of the writing staff at Help Scout, and they’ve been kind enough to help me translate my presentation and following blog posts into a single friendly bite-sized bit of content. Plus – check out that illustration!

You can check it out here – Create Value With the Support Data You Already Have

Huge thanks to Emily and the whole crew at Help Scout – it was a treat to work with you all!

SupConf Talk Rehearsal Recording

If you weren’t able to make the first ever SupConf in San Francisco this week (and today’s the second day!) , here is a previously recorded rehearsal for the talk – not quite the same as being here, but I hope valuable! I am not 100% certain if there will be a recording of the live talk available, but if it is, I’ll share that once it’s in my hands as well.