The most Precious Resource on Your Support Team

If you can only focus on one thing in training teams of front-line technical support folks, what would it be?

Technical skill? Soft skills like deescalating conflict? Communication upgrades?

All of those are great, but pale in comparison to the one thing that your team needs: ownership.

I go into this in the book, but here’s the deep truth: each individual on your team should feel complete ownership of the customer’s needs in front of them.

When a user comes to me with a problem, it’s my entire focus to resolve their problem. Sometimes that means advocating with the product team to make enhancements that scratch the customer itch, but even when i can’t wave a magic wand and solve the problem in the product, there’s ALWAYS a way to solve it.

Do I need to reframe the problem with a different solution that it more technically feasible?

Do I need to make the solution more logically discoverable in the documentation?

Do I need to provide a custom-coded solution to just this customer?

All these questions boil down to one thing: If I were in this person’s spot, how would I solve the problem? I can’t proceed without knowing the answer to that question.

There’s a real creativity to owning a problem on behalf of your customer, though. It’s just simply not possible that you can DO all of the things that your customer needs to do for them. So my ownership of the problem looks less like me suiting up and hopping in the game, and more like me equipping them with the resources to play the game. I’m a coach, not a player.

The true sweet spot of customer support is when the customer walks away equipped to solve their next problem.