How to Reinvent Your Technical Support Team, Part 2

September 3, 2008

The second step in reinventing your technical support team deals with the way you hire new employees and the way you manage them. Generally speaking, this is the most critical part of the operation. You can make mistakes in other areas without failing overall, but you cannot afford to fail at staffing and management. The people on your team will make or break your department, so be savvy about who you hire and intelligent about how you lead them.

You have some people on your team today. Unfortunately, even if they are doing a decent job, it is likely that they are not the ones who will help you reinvent the team and reach new levels of success. You don’t have to fire them—natural turnover will probably resolve this for you in time. Simply make sure that you hire better the next time around, and focus on improving your management style.

If your old staff members remain, raise your department standards so they know what is now expected of them. They will either start performing to meet your expectations or leave on their own.

How Do I Hire the Right People?

Hiring is critical in creating a capable technical support team. Since you will be getting the technical skills, personality quirks, emotional stability, and overall attitude of each person you hire, you must spend some time thinking about what you need. Here is the criteria that I use to judge my hires.

Necessary Skills: First make a list of the minimum technical skills that your new team must contain. Next, prioritize that list and decide which skills each individual must possess. (It is not necessary for every person to have every skill, since team members will compensate each other.) You will inevitably include such skills as:

OS, DB, and specific application knowledge
Problem solving skills
Basic spelling and grammar skills
Good phone presence

You will then have to consider the character traits you want in your team. Here are some that I have found to be incredibly useful in technical support staff:

Trainability: Some people learn faster than others, and you can easily test a candidate’s trainability level during his/her interview. Find a few puzzles that build upon each other in complexity. Show the candidate the first of them and then ask him/her to solve the second one. Under the pressure and stress of an interview, can this person digest the information and apply it? If not, you probably have the wrong candidate.

Responsibility: This is one of the big character traits that a technical support job tends to beat out of people. Think about it: your staff will be solving other people’s mistakes constantly. Customers will often be angry and over time, this has the potential to make even the most motivated employee calloused and hard. I fight this by looking for people who demonstrate a strong sense of responsibility in their personal lives. Strong connections to family—parents, siblings, spouses, children and cousins—demonstrate an undercurrent of responsibility. How a person talks about the other people in his/her life will give you a sense of whether or not this person feels burdened by the needs of others.

You can also ask specific questions to measure a person’s sense of responsibility. How are they doing repaying their student loans, and how do they feel about it? Can they tell you about a time when a mistake they made hurt someone else? Probe for their feelings about that event. Someone who doesn’t have a strong emotional reaction to telling one of those stories, or who has done nothing to fix the situation, is a candidate to be avoided.

Empathy: Empathy is very important because it dictates how you communicate with an angry customer. We once had a management consultant come in to help us figure out how to reduce our costs. She told me that she was dubious about one of my technical support people. In order to test her hypothesis, she “randomly” chose a desk where she could hear this person doing support. After a few weeks she revised her opinion and decided he could stay. When I pressed her she said, “He gives really good phone.” I asked her what she meant and she said, “The angrier and more frustrated the customer gets, the more he communicates, ‘I understand your frustration.’” Empathy.

While interviewing, I usually ask a candidate’s references, “Would you describe _____ as an empathetic person?” Also, you can have candidates take a Meyers-Briggs personality test. ‘F’ personality types tend to be more empathetic than others.

Curiosity: Technical support is essentially a long series of rational problems to be solved, yet sometimes the problems aren’t so rational. A person who is naturally curious will persevere more than someone who doesn’t have the same curiosity. In interviews, I ask about hobbies to find out if a person is curious. Curious people tend to have active hobbies.

Logic: Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I have found that a logical person will approach a seemingly magical system with the assumption that “somehow this all makes sense” and “I can figure it out.”

I do actually test for logic during all of my interviews. I find a few logic puzzles online and make them multiple-choice. I then give them to the candidate and let them work on them for five minutes before we go over it together.

Me: “Okay, question number one: Which is more valuable, a trunk full of nickels or a trunk full of dimes?”
Candidate: “A. Nickels.”
Me: “Really? Why is that?”
Candidate: “Well, I’m not sure actually. I guess I just like nickels better.”
Me: “If you aren’t sure, why didn’t you select option C, ‘I don’t know’?”
Candidate: “Well, I thought that since nickels are bigger, they must be worth more.”

That candidate was not a person who approaches problems logically. The trunk in the question was magical to them. I did not hire them. I’m not looking for perfection, although that is nice. I’m looking for someone who answers with their head instead of their heart.

Character: Another great litmus test for potential hires is to pretend that you are going to take a month-long vacation. Imagine that the person you are interviewing is a friend of yours. Would you trust this person to take care of all of your personal business while you are gone?

Get your mail?
Check on your house?
Feed your pets?
Log in to your bank’s website and pay your bills?
Visit your mother at the nursing home?

If not, don’t hire them.

The Best Way to Manage Your Team

While hiring is important, some portion of my success is due to my overall management style. Certainly I’m far from perfect, but I have an intentional plan for how I manage, and I like to tell myself that I mostly stick to my plan. Here are the main points:

Train your team well
Explain goals and boundaries
Listen to and help them
Review their performance
Stay out of their way
Maintain morale

Train your team well: Technical support is a demoralizing job, and just imagine trying to do technical support on systems that you aren’t trained on. “No ma’am, I don’t know how that is supposed to work.” It’s a killer.

You are going to be hiring people to figure out problems, so obviously you can’t train them on precisely what they are going to be working on. This rule requires some interpretation for technical support staff: Don’t put them into entirely unfamiliar systems and ask them to demonstrate proficiency quickly, unless you are hiring wunderkids. (I’ve never been able to afford those. More power to you if you can. Drop me a note and tell me how it works out for you.)

Your current staff are probably under-trained. As you reinvent your technical support processes, get real product training scheduled for their first few days. And make ongoing training—especially around new releases—a priority.

Explain goals and boundaries: Every person has goals and boundaries, both of which are very important. Most of them will be written into a job description. Tell everyone what their goals and boundaries are and then recognize them when you praise, correct, and review each person.

Goals are easy. Make them SMART. (Do a search on ‘SMART’ goals if you need help—it’s an article series by itself.)

Boundaries are talked about much less. At first, you might think of them as being limiting and confining. I think that the opposite is true. People need to know what they can promise on behalf of the company and what they cannot. It frees them from guesswork and hesitation, as well as responsibility for the tough decisions.

Listen to and help them: An advisor of mine once told me that a manager’s job is to help people do their jobs better. I take that to mean that I am the one-man technical support team enablement department. Unfortunately, many managers get the whole dynamic backwards and treat their staff like servants or worse.

Even more so than other types of workers I have managed, technical support staff needs help and advice. They have to know that your door is open to them. They have to have your cell phone number and not be afraid to use it. I always tell my team when I will be unavailable to them for a period of time, and I let them know when I will be back. If I am going to be out for very long, I make sure that everyone knows who will be leading in my absence.

When they knock or call, you have to stop and help them—but don’t wait for them to call.

Review their performance: Everybody needs to know how they are doing, so give your people their appropriate praise (in public) and correction (in private). You should also do regular performance reviews. If you want to keep your people long-term, and you do, then you will need to have a job growth plan in place, meaning a way for your level 1 people to become level 2 people, etc.

You will also need to hold regular team meetings in order to promote communication. Teams have processes and dynamics that individuals don’t have. You need to keep your eyes on those processes and talk about them with the whole team from time to time. If there is a problem, I usually approach it without assigning blame. “I was thinking about this process, and I’m not sure that we’re really following it like we should be. I’m also not sure that it’s the best process. So I want to talk about the process, why it is what it is, why we don’t follow it when we don’t, and how we might tweak it to make it flow more smoothly.” Hundreds of useful little improvements have come about by letting the whole team participate in these conversations about how we escalate cases, how we close cases, how we get help when we’re stuck, etc.

Stay out of their way: If you have done everything else in the plan, this is the easy part. Trust your people to do their jobs; it will give them necessary self-confidence. Let it go. Get a hobby. Find something else to do with your time.

Maintain morale: Don’t wait for morale to sag. The guys on the front line of the complaint department will get enough reasons to lose morale. Do small things for them to keep them happy. For example, I make sure that my team gets lunch more often than any other department in the company. When someone hears a compliment about the support team, I ask them to email it to the entire company.

Staff Retention

The management style that I have described above will go a long way towards maintaining good retention. Other standard retention tactics apply here as well: raises, bonuses, days off, plans for promotion.

The fact is that retention is much more important in a good technical support team than anywhere else. The reason for this is that so much of technical support is fringe features and low-level problems that can never be fully documented and trained. Good technical support people can say to themselves, “Hey, this problem is similar to the one I ran into two years ago.” You can’t train a new person to remember what the last person saw two years ago.

If there is one magic bullet in my staffing plan, it is retention. I would much rather pay more, train more and do more with my current people than have to deal with hiring and training someone new. (Don’t tell my people I said that.) The overhead costs and ramp-up time are just too big to overcome. That’s why hiring is so important—you are going to want to live with the consequences of your selections for a long time.

About Randy Miller: Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including: Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company’s largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at randy@journyx.com.

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