Supporting customers gives CEOs a reality check

Supporting customers gives CEOs a reality check
ceoonsupport.com

Its amazing: you learn so much about the problems your customers have using the product. You're used to seeing the great customers, the ones who figured it all out, the ones who love your product. In support, you see the poor messaging, confusing pricing, the bugs. It can be a little bit harrowing.

But you also see the people who love everything you do. People write in to say how much they love your product and how much they rely on it, and how much they tell people about it.

Anyway, I recommend it to all, and I plan to keep doing it for years.

An hour with your front line support --or bothering to read through or even solicit their thoughts-- can do just as much for you, multiplied by however many support members you have. If anyone knows the flaws of your product, it's the guys and gals on the front lines that have to make excuses for it every day.

>A support rep can only go so far. Support agents often don't have the visibility in an organization to go back and fix bigger process problems. Only you can.

Speaking as someone who has done support before, and will likely continue to do so in the future in one way or another: you've got this all backwards. If anyone knows how screwed up a process is in your organization, or how broken your product is, it's the poor saps like us that are tasked with carrying those processes out and supporting those crappy products. Support agents don't lack "visibility." They lack authority and autonomy to handle issues on their own without fear of reprisal for not using the proper openers and closers and not keeping all calls under 12 minutes so they hit that magic 5 calls and 10 chats an hour marker. For all the talk of "horizontal" and "flat" organizations, most support shops have a very clearly defined hierarchy and strict control over lateral movement that blows up the very "gold mine" you're chasing after.

>When employees see their CEO on Support, they realize it's absolutely essential for them to go above and beyond call of duty to make sure their customers are more than just satisfied.

If you want "above and beyond," be prepared to compensate for it: more-than-COL raises, PTO, TOIL, year-end bonuses, above-average salaries/wages. You're the CEO. You'll go above and beyond because at the end of the day your compensation is tied directly to how well the business does financially. Front line support? We get paid the same amount no matter how easy or rough the day was, no matter how "above and beyond" we went. If anything, going "above and beyond" just means "this call will take me an hour," which means "my metrics are totally fucked for the rest of the day and possibly the week." And that could mean losing your job. Or it could just be justification for denying a raise or promotion.

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Overall, I don't think you'll really get the experience you're looking for as a CEO. Unless you insist that your support manager treat you like any other front-line support tech, with all of the same metrics, and expectations, and "rough" customers, and "in-house" problems, and hours, and compensation, and fear of reprisal, you're going to miss things by simple virtue of the fact that what you're experiencing simply isn't what actually occurs on a day-to-day basis.

Look tech world, it's a sorry thing but a startup is just a 'small business.'