As I mentioned in my last post, I’m stepping away from support to begin focusing on customer experience management. Before I get too far removed, I wanted to look back on a few of the key environmental and strategic decisions that made for a smooth transition for me and the team.
Where you work matters
Let’s jump back in time. When I joined Fog Creek Software in February of 2011, I did so almost blindly out of a sense of “this seems like a really great place to work,” trusting everything would work out in the end. It’s fair to say that decision paid off. While working at great companies is still a motivator for me, I’ve learned that great companies are also a fertile ground for growing a great support team.
When I joined FullStory, it was clear from day one that this place was special. Yes, Jaclyn had written about our unique approach to customer advocacy, but it became real for me in the early days when I would sit down with the founders, share my vision for support, and be able to prove a hiring model that would set us up for long term success.
It’s one thing to say “we care about customers.” It’s an entirely different thing for founders to say “we’re willing to stand before our board and advocate that this support team is the best possible way to care for customers, which is critical to our short- and long-term growth.” From the very beginning, I had strong backing from the founders and from my peers at FullStory.
Is your team set up to attract the best people?
Of the seven people currently on the support team at FullStory, four had previously been managers in customer support. I recruited them all as individual contributors. How were we able to convince them to join the team?
Like I said above, where you work matters. When we were a team of three, I asked the founders if we could commit to a hiring model that allowed senior members of the support team to spend 40% of their time outside of the queue. This would allow us to attract and retain the best talent in customer support, but it was admittedly a big ask. Not only were we committing to paying more to find experienced support professionals, but we were going to purposefully not put them in the queue 100% of the time. Thankfully, it worked.
When you have the right people in place, the team has the ability to become largely self-managing, able to take on increasingly large sets of responsibilities that might be reserved for “management” in other companies.
Chase quality, not survey scores
It’s one thing to say you’ve put the right system and team together to support customers, but how do you know that it’s working? Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores can be a great proxy for support quality, but they can also lead to focusing on the wrong thing.
Our first bet on quality was hiring the right people to support our customers (see above). Next, we focused on setting up an internal quality assurance system based on our watchwords. Using MaestroQA, we set up a simple system of questions that we asked ourselves—we used both manager and peer review—to ensure we were aligned with our overall brand. Over time, we watched how the questions we would ask—such as “are we truly listening to the customer?”—transformed the way we approached support.
Only after these systems were in place did we turn our attention back to CSAT. We decided to go with Stella Connect because of the way they index on empathy in asking customers to be a part of the customer experience process. Since we started measuring CSAT this past summer, I’m proud to share that the support team has had a score of 4.8/5. While the score serves as validation for the work we did, it wasn’t the primary driver for how we got there.
Make a move and let others lead
Part of working at the right place means working with leaders who recognize opportunities to adapt and change. As Darren and I worked together over the course of this past year in his role as VP of Customer Experience, we identified an opportunity to improve customer experience across the entire customer journey, not solely within customer success and support. In December, Darren asked if I would be comfortable leading this new effort—what we’re calling Customer Experience Management—with Kailee taking over management of the support team.
Although there’s always a bit of hesitancy to bang the gavel on this sort of change, it’s been a fairly seamless transition. Kailee had brought previous management experience when she started as an individual contributor, and as the team matured, we found opportunities for her to increasingly demonstrate leadership (see above about the value of assembling the right team). For those who have worked with Kailee, the decision to have her manage the support team was rather obvious. This meant that the actual transition contained but a small set of items to hand over.
To the future
I’m excited about the future of Customer Support at FullStory and am confident that it will thrive under Kailee’s continued leadership. I’m also excited, if a bit nervous, about what’s in store for the new practice of customer experience management. I’ll share more about that story in a future post.
Header photo by Tomáš Malík on Unsplash