This week I divert from my normal musings about CX to share a bit of my personal journey, in part because when I created this newsletter, I promised my coworkers that I would tell it. We’ll be back next week with something more muse-ical. And if you like what you read, please hit that thumbs up button.
Imagine you’re beginning a career in customer support. “A career in customer support”, you think, “does the bad attitude come with the depressingly low salary or do I have to bring that myself?” Haha, no, we’re talking about a different—no longer new—era of customer support. This era has been paved by folks from companies with names like Basecamp, Trello, Help Scout, Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, Buffer, Automattic, and countless others. High quality customer support has become a basic expectation among software as a service (SaaS) providers, and with new SaaS businesses popping up every other day, there are plenty of opportunities to level up your career as you transfer skills from one company to another.
So you get your first support job and you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of potential here. You decide to level up. What is leveling up in customer support? Becoming a manager. Becoming a manager isn’t the only way to level up within customer support, but it’s by far the most common way. It’s effective within large organizations for giving people a career path and retaining institutional knowledge within customer support. I’ll call this the promote-to-management model. Another way people level up is by leveling out of customer support. This also is effective, though with different outcomes, namely, the main positive outcome being that it retains institutional knowledge within the company as a whole, not necessarily tied to support. I’ll call this the do-something-else model.
Both of these models break down at some point because all models are wrong, but more to the point, they both tend to push your best individual contributors (ICs) further away from working directly with customers. In the promote-to-management model, all of your best ICs become managers, necessarily leaving you with some managers who aren’t great managers (they were really quite content as ICs but had no other option to level up) and some ICs who feel unrewarded because there’s not a management position open. And in the do-something-else model, you end up moving your best ICs outside of support, which leaves you with the people who maybe aren’t the best ICs in support and also leaves those ICs who left support wondering why, if they were so good at support, they had to do something else.
Back to our imaginary story where you become a support team manager (you must have been on the promote-to-management track). You’ve talked to some of your friends in the support industry (yes, there’s a support industry) and decide you want to design a model for your team that avoids some of the downsides of the promote-to-management and do-something-else models. You’re going to work really hard to attract and retain the best talent to support the customers you were hired to serve, and you don’t want your team members to just leave customer support after hanging around for a while. So you design, what is in your humble opinion, an all-star team. In fact, it’s such an attractive proposition that you’re able to recruit several people who have managed support teams before—themselves on the promote-to-management track—and found management wanting. They’re happy to do the work of an IC but with compensation that looks more like what other companies pay managers. (This model, by the way, is quite common on modern engineering teams, which work exceptionally hard to attract and retain the best IC engineers).
So things are kind of perfect? With a team of strong individual contributors—several who have managed before—many of the operations of the team that normally get reserved for “management” get absorbed into the daily operations of the team. You might even need systems to track all of the extra-queue-rricular work your non-managers are doing to make an impact to the business. This model might be so perfect, that if you walked away, would anybody notice? I mean, you’re not just going to walk away. Maybe you find another job or get offered another opportunity within the same company. But the point is that the team is pretty much running itself while increasing its impact, which is exactly what you wanted.
Maybe you do get the opportunity to just walk way. And maybe that opportunity is to focus on really meaty hard problems that affect all areas of customer experience, those problems you couldn’t quite figure out how to solve when you were managing just the support team. So with your new role in Customer Experience Management, you can finally tackle some of the thorniest customer experience problems that the company never seemed able to prioritize, yet were painfully obvious to the support team. Your team is in a really good place, so it’s quite easy for you to accept the opportunity without skipping a beat. After a decade in customer support, you’re excited for the new challenge.
Photo by Tobias Mrzyk on Unsplash
Enter global pandemic, stage right
On the day you begin your work in CX Management, a city in China has been in lockdown for a week due to a new virus overwhelming their healthcare system. You barely notice (to be fair, nobody else seems to be noticing either) and focus on your new role. Because you work for a growth-stage company, you’re thinking about CX Management for the long term, how to ensure your company is truly seen as a leader in CX at all touch points in the customer journey. It’s going to take time, but just like when you built out the customer support team, you’re going to do this right.
That virus you barely noticed? It creates a global pandemic, shuts down the world economy, and in the fallout, your brand new role in CX Management is eliminated.
End scene.
Grateful
This of course is my personal story, not some imagined thought experiment (though if you’ve enjoyed the ride, let me know). I started a support team (2 of them, in fact), modeled my team to attract and retain highly skilled ICs, left that team to start a CX Management practice, only to watch that work stop before it had really begun because of the role being eliminated in the midst of the global pandemic.
So what have I been up to over the past month?
I’m still at FullStory, back on the support team as a support engineer. All things considered, this is an excellent opportunity. If I had lost my job in addition to just my role, I’d most likely be on the job market looking for an opportunity in customer support. What kind of team would I join? Will it be a promote-to-management team or a do-something-else team? Or will it be one of the rare teams that strives for a more thoughtful model that leads to a robust support team? Thankfully, I get to remain at a company that I believe will weather this storm and on a team I’m proud to belong to.
“Why didn’t you end up managing the support team again?” is a reasonable question someone might ask. When I had the opportunity to step away from customer support, my boss, Darren, and was very clear that should CX Management fail, Kailee would still be the support team manager. I wholeheartedly agreed, as this is just part of the model of building a good support team because it ensures success past the presence of the founding manager—removing the new manager to reinstate the old manager would end up working against the model I had designed. The fact that all this happened as a result of a pandemic doesn’t really change anything.
“Is it a little weird to report to someone you hired?” Sure, but not really. I mean, most people wouldn’t have this kind of transition on their five year career plan. But Kailee and I have worked together for years, have a deep mutual respect for one another, and both appreciate what it’s like to approach customer support in a thoughtful manner. Now she’s the one to have her calendar filled with meetings (ha!).
The FullStory support team is one of those rare teams that strives for a more thoughtful approach to customer support. When I recruited people to the team, it was always with the spirit of “this is the team I would want to join if I had been a manager before and was considering an IC role.” It’s rather fitting that I have the opportunity to serve alongside my fellow team members under the same banner.
Etc.
Things I’ve read:
From Matt Levine’s newsletter, read the section on “Customer Acquisition”. Remember how we talked a couple weeks ago about how incentives matter?
A Biblical Mystery at Oxford, another story about incentives that were created when the Hobby Lobby founder poured millions of dollars into the antiquities market. I’m disappointed the author didn’t go for the jugular with a “you cannot serve both God and money” quote somewhere in the article.