But How Do I Make them Care?

The secret sauce of a thriving support team is care. A customer can smell a support agent who doesn’t care, and take it from me, it doesn’t smell like daisies.

So how do you make an agent care?

Aside from hiring people who default to caring (it’s way easier to change what someone cares about than it is to make a sluggard care about something), your only option is to demonstrate to them that you care, and back it up.

“But Ben, I already told them how important Q4 metrics are, and that I’ll fire them if they don’t perform!”

Ah yes, so what you’ve demonstrated to them is that you care about something, just not that you care about THEM.

See, you have to care (and demonstrate that care) about things that align with where your agent wants to go, not just with where your company or the stakeholders above you want to go.

Show your agent where there’s overlap between a company goal and a personal one. Demonstrate it from your own life, if possible. Help them to change their mind about some company initiative not because it benefits YOU, but because it benefits THEM in ways other than “I’ll continue paying you money.”

Hint: it’s next to impossible to fake this. You have to actually care about them.

So at the risk of sounding like some kind of self-help shaman, I’ll go out on a limb: you can’t make your people care if you don’t care, and you can’t care without some deep self-reflection into what motivates and drives you. Know what you believe, and how your business goals align with those personal convictions.

That’s been my secret sauce for building teams of Technical Support superstars who just can’t help but rake in 5-star review after 5-star review.