We tend to look at our organization’s departments as either profit centers or cost centers. Profit centers are the teams responsible for generating revenue, and cost centers are necessary to operations, but do not drive revenue and are ultimately a cost. Two roles that may fall into this relationship are your sales team, which brings new customers in, and your customer support team that services existing customers. Supporting existing customers is often seen as a cost center due to the fact that little or no new revenue will come in via the channels that your customers go to for help and problems. It is a necessary function, but is seen simply as a cost of doing business.
One of the first major issues with seeing your business through the lens of profit and cost centers alone is a true devaluing of the people in all the roles, from the sales team to the customer and everything in between. It enables a path of thinking of revenue being the only success metric. It breeds a class system into your model that perpetuates until you may not be able to remove it from your organization’s very DNA. We are all in business to make money, but what keeps business going is the people. Lose sight of that, and the end is nigh. This thinking brings in a mentality that support representatives are the lowest rung on your corporate ladder. Easy to hire, train, and replace. This sentiment becomes felt at all levels. When your customer interacts with these front-line employees, they can hear in the rep’s voice and their responses that they know that they are not engaged or invested in the customer’s success, because no one cares about how good a job they do. In a sense, we all get what we pay for.
There is an easy solution, though. See the value in the people who interact with customers. Invest in them and enable them to do a good job and create a positive experience. Everyone wants to do a good job, be recognized for it, and be rewarded fairly for their work. Most everyone would like to be exceptional at their job, though many today find it hard to map out what that means.
I will give you an example from my experience with cell providers. I had been with T-Mobile for many years since I was added to my parents’ plan in high school. The service coverage was good enough, my plan was unlimited, and the price was right, so when I got on my own plan, I just stuck with T-Mobile. It always stood out to me that if I called support, they were chipper, helpful, and fast. So much so that I rarely thought much about it. It was just how service should be. Everyone does it that way, right? Well, after some time, Verizon came out with a deal that lured me away. It was limited, but I shouldn’t have hit the limits; it was cheaper, and the coverage was a little better in my area. I made the swap. Not long after, I was bombarded with messages to upgrade from my low-tier plan, the free phone I got was horrible, and when I called support about these things, the team couldn’t have cared less and pitched me costly upgrades. I officially regretted my move, not because of the product, but the way I was treated as a customer. Simply a source of revenue.
You see, T-Mobile at the time was one of the largest low-cost providers with an ambition to scale. They understood what they needed to do that – Volume. Acquire new customers with competitive offerings and keep them with exceptional service, living up to their marketing of being the “Un-Carrier” and different from the rest. They had the easiest to break agreements of the time, removing the gimmicks of how companies typically operated by locking clients in for as long as possible. They seemed, at least, to want their customers to be customers by choice.
So after my dreaded first contract was up for renewal, I swapped back. When I called support, they were still cheerful and eager to help. Were they perfect? No. After all, they were still the value carrier; some things were still clunky, and coverage was a little worse, but they were there to help. I knew that I was valued. In fact, they still remind me of how long I have been with them anytime I talk to them.
We have a T-Mobile call center in our town, and I have had a chance to meet some of their reps organically through the years. I always compliment the service and ask them about the job. They have a few complaints. They are compensated decently, their managers treat them well, and their primary metrics are time to answer and customer satisfaction. Why? Because it retains customers. They have sales teams to sell and support teams to retain and generate natural referrals. You know, when you are talking to a salesperson, you can almost guess their commission rate by their enthusiasm, but not the support team. They just want you to be happy.
Another form of value in customer interaction is expertise. Support teams interact with customers and your product more than anyone. They don’t have a sales script; they have real problems, product failures, edge cases, unintended effects, and uneducated customers that all need solutions. They see everything that can and does go wrong and are working to resolve them without escalating. This builds a wealth of knowledge of your product’s strengths and weaknesses, best practices, and real-world applications. These people are the Swiss Army knives of your organization that are best equipped to take your product to the next level. So why are they seen as low-rung operations? Why are they treated as expendable? Why are they so often given the least clear path of advancement? In short, it is because leaders fail to see the value in their work.
Managing support teams for years has taught me that the people capable of doing a great job in these dynamic, high-pressure, customer-facing roles are exactly the people that you want moving up in the organization. They develop the product knowledge to properly position it well in sales, they learn the pain-points and customer use cases to manage products well, they see all the design flaws and inefficiencies to build better, and they have the soft skills to get it all done with empathy and grace. They know how to lean on their team, from coaching to knowledge transfer; they know how to communicate in the field.
One thing that these rockstars don’t tolerate, though, is uninformed people telling them how to do their jobs. Micromanaging and blaming these teams for issues. Hearing common problems and complaints, and returning false promises. No, they are results-driven people with a passion for serving customers. These things are impediments to their mission and the ultimate morale killers. They need autonomy and support to do their job. They have to operate quickly and expect the same from their support teams.
Rock stars, as they are when it comes to serving your clients, there are some things that they are not as good at. Working on corporate agendas is one of them. Promoting the latest thing or pivoting conversations to uplifts, and bringing up potential issues like past due bills or account deficiencies. It’s not that the people are not capable of crushing these objectives, but they cannot create the timing and space in their conversation for them. These are generally inbound teams. Customers come to them with questions and issues, and that is where their mind is. For anyone to make a pivot, calling in for support to be pitched something new is challenging, and quite frankly, infuriating. It is outside the mission and should live in a separate channel. Changing the goal post from helping a customer in the best possible fashion to promoting, selling, or account management items distracts from a singular mission and dilutes the interaction.
Customers are normally singularly focused on what they need at a given time. To best serve them, they need teams that can match that goal and exceed expectations. Customer service is being watered down every day with the latest tech solution or barriers to connecting with humans. Organizations are losing customers and giving up the chance to save them. All this stems from the idea that supporting customers is a cost that should be reduced and not a function that adds a hard-to-track, but insanely valuable service to the customer and the organization. I challenge you to talk with your support teams, hear their wins and losses, and lean into their voice, because that is the true voice of your customers.