Wednesday was both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. Love and chocolate collided with repentance and ashes. Except for the practicing Catholic like myself, the chocolates had to be moved to another day. No matter. We Catholics are quite used to moving things around to accommodate various feast days.
CXOXO
Wednesday also marked the launch of my friend’s book. Mercer Smith wrote CXOXO: Building a Support Team Your Customers Will Love. You can buy it on Amazon today.
I worked with Mercer when I led the support team at Trello. She was the first support engineer that I hired and she took over leadership of the team when I left Trello to join FullStory. Her career in support and customer experience leadership has in many ways surpassed my own and I couldn’t be more proud to endorse her work.
Getting started managing in support can be a real challenge. Often someone is taking a bet on you. Perhaps you’ve shown real ownership in the support queue as an individual contributor, or maybe you’ve introduced some good ideas into how to evolve the customer experience. But nothing quite prepares you for all the things you need to know to truly succeed in the role of building the team.
I remember thinking, “I wish there was a book I could read to help me learn how to manage a support team.” And while I read a few books at the time, none really addressed what it was like to lead a support team at a small-but-growing tech company.
CXOXO is that book.
If you know someone who is getting started as a support manager, I highly recommend you gift them a copy.
On writing (this newsletter)
I feel a need to confess that I’ve been struggling with motivation to carry on this newsletter as of late.
Part of it is just simple time and how I’ve reprioritized things. I’ve been going on walks with my wife every night and don’t want to give that up. I read to my boys every night and don’t want to cut that out. I’ve been going to bed quite early so I can rise the next day quite early, which I love so much that I’m loathe to change it. And on weekends—especially Sundays—I try to avoid the computer as much as possible.
But if I’m honest, it’s also just the content itself. I can fairly easily crank out a post if I’m motivated and a seed is planted (like the recent one on abductive reasoning), but if I don’t have a topic that I’m excited about, the process itself feels forced and unenjoyable.
I’ve shared before on the various reasons I write this newsletter. It’s mostly for me and the connections it creates with the people who take the time to read my stuff. Someone asked me if I was going to monetize my Substack. Probably not? My readers are readers, not customers, and I think that’s the appropriate relationship right now.
Lately, I’ve been feeling pulled to write about spiritual things, perhaps even dangerous holy things. I’m not shy about mentioning my Catholic Christian faith in some of my posts, but it’s also not the point of my writing. If I’m writing about taking a sabbatical, it makes sense that there’s a religious overtone to my story, but it’s also within the broader context of work and career, which fairly fall into the “Etc.” bucket of this newsletter.
I’m considering whether I should put in the time to make spiritual writing the point and purpose of what I write, or at least a portion of my writing. It probably won’t be here on Customers, Etc.—I know enough about knowing your “target customer” to know that completely shifting my content will likely alienate many readers, and although I don’t hide my faith, I also don’t want to make this a channel for proselytization. So if I start writing on new topics about e.g. spirituality and faith, it will likely be somewhere else.
So is this the end of Customers, Etc.? No. I like having a forum where I can get my business-y ideas out there and having a newsletter to practice long-form writing is my favorite venue for that. But my posts will probably be less frequent.
If you’re a reader of this newsletter, I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Hit reply and let me know what you think.