One of most companies’ most challenging, most underappreciated roles is Customer Support. Most companies would look at technical support as a cost center. A necessary but annoying constant reminder of “the glass half empty”.
I love customer support, but it isn’t for everyone. You constantly deal with issues, both externally and internally. You are the face of the company for the customers and the face of the customers for the company, but if you excel in it, the tools and skills you will learn will help you solve the toughest of challenges as a leader.
Here are five skills that I learned about being a leader in my 15+ years of customer support.
Understanding the motivation and addressing it
Being excellent in customer support is not just about understanding processes and solving issues. It’s about identifying the underlying motivations of your customers and helping them fulfill them. Whether your customers seek guidance on how to use the product, solve a problem, or request a new feature, understanding how to help them fulfill their motivation is a powerful tool to provide great service and obtain customer loyalty.
The same is valid for employees and co-workers. The underlying motivation for each person is different. Understanding the motivation and helping them achieve their goals by harnessing their motivation will be a win-win for everyone. The performance will increase, and employee retention will reach new heights. Each employee, like each customer, is driven by different things, don’t make the mistake of handling all your customers and all your employees the same way.
Not getting bogged down by complex problems
The strange (but extremely cool) people who love to work in customer support also love to solve problems. Being good at problem-solving is all about troubleshooting skills. These problems are sometimes complex and highly technical. How do you approach such issues without being bogged down by them? You divide them into smaller pieces and look at each piece to identify the root cause by the process of elimination. Eventually, you will locate the source of the issue, which is the hardest part of solving these problems.
Eventually, this approach becomes embedded in the way you approach issues, so why not use the same skill set to solve other types of challenges? As a leader, a lot of times, you encounter problems that are widespread throughout the organization. These issues are known and hated by just about everyone, but others will steer clear of these issues like the plague. Why? Because these issues are big and highly complex, you need to enlist the cooperation of more than one team to solve them. This is precisely where this skill set comes in handy, as deconstructing the problem and identifying the problematic elements will go a long way in solving these challenges.
Removing resistance and gathering cooperation
Customers usually don’t contact customer support from a neutral standpoint. They might have had a crappy day, and they might have had a bad experience with the company you work for, other support people in the past, or even with you specifically. To first troubleshoot, then to solve an issue, you need them to cooperate and work with you. It would help if you had their buy-in, and they might resist giving it to you.
When you have been doing this job long enough, you get your own ways to remove the obstacles you encounter along the way, whether it’s an upset customer, an R&D developer you need assistance from, a product manager you are trying to sell a feature to, or your team members. You learn how to de-escalate a situation by removing the debris from the road ahead so you can get to where you need to go.
These skills of removing resistance are inter-connected to understanding the motivation and not getting bogged down by complex problems. As a leader, your team might be resisting your feedback, they might be resisting change, and they might be resisting themselves from achieving their full potential. Understanding the motivation, not shying away from the root cause, and enabling them to move forward instead of constantly looking in the rearview mirror is a fantastic skill to hone.
Keeping cool under stress and prioritizing correctly
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire – this is the soundtrack of most days when working in customer support. Everything is super urgent and usually in more than one front. Pressure is high, emotions are running wild, and to hose it down requires working methodically and keeping a cool and analytical head. Not just with the issue in front of you but also by balancing your workload and other priorities.
Understanding what’s important, here and now, is something that many support people I met, coached, and lead has struggled with. It’s the toughest of feats when the workload is high and things start to fall between the cracks. Knowing how to balance it all out and find the way to accomplish everything in a high standard takes experience and finding your way. You can use that skill everywhere. In leadership, this means that you need to put out the fires while moving the needle on your plans and staying focused on the big picture. It’s right here and now and planning for the future all at once.
Turning a problem into an opportunity
This one is my favorite and one of my main motivations, which have attracted me to what I chose and kept choosing to do professionally. Taking an angry and disappointed customer and turning it around to happy and satisfied is rewarding and makes all the hurdles worth it. Doing so requires the ability to see each crisis as an opportunity for something better, and this is something all of my friends who have been doing this for a long time point out as one of the main things they still enjoy the most.
As a leader, approaching issues with this state of mind can be highly constructive. Approaching a situation where someone made a mistake, where we fell short, and turning it into an improvement is something everyone wants to do (learn from our mistakes, etc.) but rarely do. As a support professional, you need to deliver on your role—day in and day out. If you don’t, you won’t last. So employing the same skill as a leader is a constant growth as there will never be a shortage of problems to solve.
