Category: Team

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Revenue Retainers

A common perception of most customer support, customer success, and customer experience (let’s be honest, these are all the same–let’s say CX for short) teams is that they are not revenue generators. This is true. Simply put, they are not best used for sales; that’s what the sales team is paid the big bucks for.

CX teams are best suited to tend to customer needs and ensure they remain. A potentially significant part of the customer experience is providing them with happiness and enjoyment of the product or service they purchased from the organization. Keeping the customer happy is a significant retention goal.

If you retain a customer into the future, you also keep the potential for future earnings that the company can realize from that customer. It is important to make certain the CS team is empowered to keep the customer happy.

Another possibly more critical idea to remember is that you also need to keep the Customer Experience (CX) team happy and motivated. They may not have earned you that first-dollar from the customer. Still, suppose you train them well and empower them to do their job effectively. In that case, they will earn you the potential for those future-dollars, and let’s face it, potential sales are almost as important as the immediate sales that are often overshadowing what your CX team has done for you.

Customer care (yes, yet another term for customer experience, etc.) does not ask, “What have you done for me lately?” It’s asking, “What have you done for me in the future?”

It is vital to future-proof your organization with a strong customer care and experience team focused on keeping your customers happy and engaged. This could mean a steady revenue stream rather than an overworked sales force.

A business is a holistic entity, treat it that way.

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Lead. Follow. Friend.

positive diverse friends with bike walking on street

Managing your team is a lot like coaching your family. In some cases, you like the person, and there is mutual respect, so the management is easy. In other cases, you simply did not choose your family, but there they are all the same.

Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Anonymous

Through many years of experience, I have learned the above does not apply, so why do I want to share this somewhat well-known quote as part of this conversation?

Let’s break down the whole thing to understand better how you can use this all the same.

Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.

Yes, you can work with the understanding that your team will blindly follow your instructions, but they should be helped and coached to accomplish the goals you set for them. Please work with your team to maximize their skills and talents.

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.

You should not be following behind your team to pick up the pieces. Your job is to manage your team so they can recognize when something gets missed and how to reconsider best and pick up their pieces. Following behind is tantamount to micromanaging, which ultimately will drive down productivity.

Just walk beside me and be my friend.

This quote is almost valuable on its own. However, what it means to be a friend should still be considered, as should creating a friendly atmosphere. A very fine balance needs to be maintained in this case.

Developing a friendship with a team member can have many valuable benefits, but it can also create an atmosphere where directions are not followed or ignored. The friendship can smooth over the indiscretions, but that does not get the work done. Creating a friendly atmosphere will promote better, more transparent conversations and more constructive feedback in both directions.

In life, take the full quotation as you will, but with work-related situations, remember that, in general, and at best, the quotation is both a guideline and a warning. Make sure it serves you well in either case.

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Step Up

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

Amelia Earhart

Helping others can often time mean doing something others cannot, or just will not, do. This could be a special skill or adeptness, or simply choosing to “muck out the stables” when fetching the water could also be done.

In many cases, the real defining aspect is the work needed to be done… and whether you have already put the efforts in or just need to put the effort forth. Helping others is still going to be “work” in that sense although stepping up and putting yourself in the position to do the work can only be better for your customer as well as yourself.

This also speaks to challenging yourself with new goals and ideals. It doesn’t necessarily translate into being the first, or the best (although it could); it really should be considered as just being more capable of helping more people.

Possibly even more important, when you are stepping up your skills, is to help others do the same so they can step up their game, too. In the end, everyone wins as everyone else gets more done and there are fewer things others cannot do or will not do.

Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay

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Helping Others

Success is attaining your dream while helping others to benefit from that dream materializing.

Sugar Ray Leonard

There is no reason to climb over others to reach the goals you have set for yourself. You will feel much better and more accomplished by having others rise up with you.

Make room for your family, friends, team, circles of influence, and acquaintances to benefit from your dreams. Make room for everyone you meet along the path your dream takes you on, and to share the successes and benefits of the goals you achieve.

A dream shared is much easier to turn into a goal. Sharing a dream with others means they may be able to help you turn that dream into a goal and perhaps even make their own dreams come true along the way.

It is far greater to share a dream with others than to sit alone, at the top, and have no one to share the successes it can bring you.

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

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Celebrate All Your Successes

You don’t have to hit all of life’s curveballs out of the park… singles, doubles, and triples can still move your team mates around the bases.

Accept that not everything will go your way. To continue in the analogy above, the ball is not going to bounce your way every time. If you think it will, or more importantly think it does, you can consider yourself extremely lucky or fortunate… or in life’s reality: probably mislead.

Some days you’re going to make that catch and other days you’re going to make Bucky Dent look good. The idea is not so much to dwell on that ball slipping through your legs, or catching a fly ball as it tries to sail over the left field fence. See both as opportunities to learn and improve… block the ball so it doesn’t get past you, or anticipate that spot on the fence and get there ahead of the ball so that spectacular leap has less chance of not being timed perfectly.

Both of these ideals will provide benefits if you take the time to learn from them. Also, share these experiences with your teammates whether they were there on the field with you or not.

The most important part of lessons learned is sharing which can only help; and, every little bit of help can make the difference especially when you’re expecting that curveball on the outside corner and it drops off the table when it gets to the plate.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

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Confidence

Support needs to be encouraged and uplifted all the time. This should not be because they need it but more for letting them know they are doing a great job and offering that recognition of their efforts.

Everyone likes to know they doing well, or maybe not so well, and making efforts to let them know is a vital part of them being successful.

For those team members doing well it’s mostly a nice-to-do and for those struggling it’s an opportunity to interact and assist.

Always temper encouragement and recognition with the appropriate context of the situation making subtle adjustments to let everyone know they have support internally and an open door to walk through for help… or maybe just an attentive listening board.

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Support Needs Support

Service and support should not just be for front-facing interactions with customers it must also be for those that provide this front-facing communication.

It is vitally important to take the time and spend the energy to care for your own team’s needs and requirements which in turn will allow them to continue and improve in how they provide the service and support your customer deserves and needs.

On-boarding and training are not just some catchwords to bandy about the office space. The company must focus on actually providing an on-boarding process and ensuring training is at least at a minimum standard for the support team member to understand what they do not know.

Knowing what you don’t know is a great starting point to improvement and although you will never truly know what you don’t know it will become less over time as you continue to provide and receive the appropriate training to do the job well.

This is not necessarily something only in the purview of customer care teams it can happen in any role although some of the most common places to find this are in support focused roles.

Also to note, most providers of customer care and support need to know that it is OK not to have the answer immediately. They also need to know where best to look for the answer as the case may be.

On-boarding is often one of the best cornerstones when it comes to providing a basis to finding answers and it often leads to pointing out potential gaps in a company’s internal support systems as well as external support services.

Ongoing training will fill these gaps and in so doing so can only improve the company, its support team, its product offering … and ultimately its customer’s approval rating.

Support is a lynchpin to greatness in moving a company forward. The team that provides it should be recognized and offered any and all assistance to continually improve and strive for more.