The Super Switchboard Team
This week we explore a fantasy about the perfect team for “inbox of the entire company” at a business-to-business (B2B) company. If you like what you read, hit the thumbs up or send me a reply. And if you’re reading this online, subscribe!
After my last email, a reader responded:
It sounds like you might be hinting that the best option would be for Support not to live in any Department, so as to avoid the preconditioned biases towards some metrics over others?
Not really. It’s natural that if you have a team of people at your company, you need them to align with some department that represents the goals and movements of the organization. For Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, customer support usually means “technical customer support”, which is usually a function of both customer success/experience (retention/satisfaction) and product (quality). Usually you’ll find support as part of a customer-facing team.
But! What if, instead of being primarily technical support, you have a team that truly is “the inbox for the entire company”, on whatever channel customers choose to reach out? What would that look like, and would it then be its own department?
Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro on Unsplash
The Super Switchboard Team
It’s your first day taking calls on the Super Switchboard Team and there’s an undertone of excitement and nervousness as you get ready to talk to customers. You’re also just really proud to be on the team. You had to work at the company for years before even being considered for an opening—this is no entry level job—and had to undergo months of training before working directly with customers at the switchboard, even after several years of working directly with customers in your previous role.
The phone rings. “Hi, could you remind me when the renewal date is for my account?” After verifying they have a seat on the account, you share the renewal date, immediately followed by a question of what has them thinking about renewals at this time. It turns out that with Covid-19, their business is reevaluating all of their tools to figure out which ones to keep. You ask if they would like to schedule a call with their renewal manager, who can go over how their account is being used and explore options for the upcoming year. You settle on a time and schedule the appointment directly on the renewal manager’s calendar.
Next call. “Hi, I just heard about your product at a conference last week. I’m wondering if you could give me an idea about pricing.” This topic was covered extensively in your training. You don’t want to hide pricing, but you also want to avoid setting the wrong expectations. “Basic plans start in the low five figures, but we frequently customize plans for our enterprise customers to meet their specific needs.” The caller seems satisfied, so you ask what had them so interested in your product while at the conference. You’re mostly in listening mode, taking detailed notes to understand their business. Your caller is the Director of Product at a medium-sized e-commerce business, reporting directly to the CTO. She needs to know which bugs are having the greatest impact and why. She lists other tools in her stack and other solutions they’ve explored. As a next step, you offer to set her up with a call with a product expert so we can continue to learn about her needs and she can learn more about the product. Again, you book the time directly on the seller’s (that is, the product expert’s) calendar and get the invites sent out. You leave notes in Salesforce about her value drivers and which areas of the product she’s immediately interested in seeing in case the sales team wants to prepare a strike deck.
Next call. A current customer is frustrated that they’re not getting a faster response from support on the ticket they had submitted that morning. “I totally understand your frustration. I’m pulling up your ticket now. I can see it was added to the engineering queue but it the team hasn’t had a chance to dig in yet. One thing that helps with prioritization is better understanding the impact this is having on your job and the ability to get things done. It’s clear from the fact that you called that this is a big deal for you, but can you tell me more about how this is impacting your workflow?” You hear the customer out. Honestly, it sounds like they just needed to vent, but you can also feel the pain of how this bug is affecting them. Reviewing the response that customer support had sent over email, you can tell that it described the technical issue correctly, but could have used just a touch more empathy. So you listen and it’s clear by the end of the call that the customer is in a much better place. You take detailed notes as the call ends and add notes to the current support ticket. You go ahead and ping the support team’s manager so this is on their radar.
Next call. The caller isn’t able to get in touch with their sales rep, Christina, and their account rep’s out of office message said to call this number. Their deal got stuck in legal review and would it be possible to set up a call with our legal team ASAP—it’s urgent. You see a note that Christina has been out on maternity leave for the past week and her manager is traveling visiting customers. You connect with the executive assistant for the VP of Sales, who agrees to set up a call at the top of the next hour to help this prospective customer get what they need. You follow up with an email to the prospect and leave a note in Salesforce to give legal a heads up.
I could go on. There are countless ways you could think about what happens when you have a team whose primary focus is just “be really helpful when people reach out, regardless of where they’re at in the customer journey.”
Focus and Alignment
This isn’t a new concept. New York City has a 311 service than any citizen can call to get answers about any government service offered by the city:
311’s mission is to provide the public with quick, easy access to all New York City government services and information while maintaining the highest possible level of customer service.
311 allows other government bodies to focus on their core missions and manage their workload efficiently. 311 also helps City agencies improve their service delivery by providing accurate and consistent data tracking and analysis of all service requests.
The modern startup would write it like this:
The mission of the Super Switchboard Team is to provide customers and prospective customers with quick, easy access to information and all areas of the business while maintaining the highest possible level of customer experience.
The Super Switchboard Team allows other departments to focus on their core missions and manage their workload efficiently. The Super Switchboard Team also helps other departments improve their service delivery by providing accurate and consistent data tracking and analysis of all service requests.
Really, you barely need to change anything. Swap out “customer service” with “customer experience”, change “agency” to “department”, and to polish it off, throw in a jazzy new name like Super Switchboard Team (it’s starting to grow on me).
I think if you set up a team like this, it really can be its own department, not necessarily falling under Sales, Customer Success/Experience, or Product. Its whole mission is just to be helpful to the customer, but in order to do that, it has to be aligned to other departments within the organization. The Super Switchboard Team isn’t incentivized, like their colleagues in sales development, to generate qualified opportunities for sellers, but they’re still going to set up calls for sales reps. They’re not set up, like their colleagues in technical support, to get deep into customer issues, but they are still equipped to set expectations and will deflect basic product questions. They aren’t experts on a particular customer’s account or the nuances of the sales cycle, but they understand the basic machinery of how the customer journey maps to the entirety of the business’s operations, so they serve as the perfect switchboard to connect customer needs with business outcomes.
One thing I like about this idea is that it necessarily becomes a forcing function for good business practices. Someone working the Switchboard is going to have to have all of the same tools as someone in sales development, support, and probably half a dozen other teams. They need to know how teams are structured, how the customer relationship management (CRM) system works, who is on vacation, what happens when you file a ticket in support, etc. It’s truly an immense body of knowledge, and lest we think it’s an insurmountable problem, the first question we ought to ask ourselves is: why wouldn’t we want a team within the business to be responsible for understanding how the business works from the customer’s perspective? We’re already doing that for individual silos. Why not do it for the entire customer journey? And when they do their jobs well, they’ll free up resources on other teams to focus on their respective missions, all the while delivering a superior customer experience.
If you’ve seen good examples of teams like this in the business world, tell me about it.
Etc.
Things I’ve read:
The Riot of 1846 how slavery and elite American education intersected.
Southern Comfort breaks down the myth of the “lost cause” of South’s loss in the Civil War and confirms, using the words of southern leaders at the time. Just one quote from the time period, “We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money [slaves], or we must secede.”
The Confederate flag is finally gone at NASCAR races, and I won’t miss it for a second and Bubba Wallace emerges as NASCAR’s improbable yet ideally suited change agent
One of these days I’ll get back to more regularly reading about customer experience and will share those articles with you.