Thursday, May 12, 2022

All the stars you cannot see

Blinded by the light

Late next month the James Webb Space Telescope should be fully operational. With a collecting area 6 times that of Hubble and its near-infrared instrumentation, it is both literally and figuratively extremely cool.

This telescope will let us see things that were previously impossible to see because they were too far away or blocked from our view by other objects.

Managers back on Earth could use a similar tool¹to study the performance of their customer facing teams. It is easy to measure some types of performance. The queue crusher will turn up on the top of your reports each month².

Other types of people are harder to see. The ones who might appear mid-field in your resolved conversations report, but who are quietly answering Slack questions from 6 different team members via DM.

Or who spend time tracking down an intermittent issue that has generated 40 conversations without a satisfactory answer.

Or put together data for the product team to convince them that one little change could prevent tons of customer problems.

There are so many ways to contribute to the success of a customer service team that are not immediately obvious or instantly measurable. One way to identify and encourage those behaviors is by making them a part of your role description.

I have adapted a document I used for my previous team, in which I provide a broader definition of success. You are welcome to read it, copy it, and adjust it to suit your particular situation.

If you do, I would love to hear about it!

¹ Though perhaps not at the cost of $9.7 billion. It's hard enough to prove customer service ROI already without adding a full-on budgetary supernova.

2 Their bright light leading managers into thinking "if only we had 10 of them, we could halve the team budget!" But invisible work is still work that has to be done.

Mat Patterson
Help Scout

Free template:
How to succeed in support

How do your team members know if they are doing a good job? Here's a free document template to help you explain what success should look like in their roles.