Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
If you work in customer support, if you lead a support team, or if you are looking to better the customer experience for your company, then this podcast is for you!
Happy to Help is a podcast about all things customer support brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. Join us, on the second Tuesday of every month as Buzzsprout's Head of Podcaster Success, Priscilla Brooke dives into the world of customer support to make remarkable support the standard, not the exception!
Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
The High Cost of Urgency: Mistakes, Burnout, and Bad Customer Experiences
In this episode of Happy to Help, we dive into the pressure-filled world of customer support and why it’s time to shift from frantic reaction to intentional response. Learn how operating from a place of calm not only reduces mistakes but leads to better customer experiences, stronger team morale, and reduced burnout.
With real-world examples of how urgency can derail even the best support intentions, this episode is packed with strategies to help you:
- Recognize the hidden costs of urgency in the inbox
- Build a calm support culture even when customers are in crisis
- Train your team to slow down without sacrificing service
- Model healthy leadership that prioritizes quality over speed
Recommended reading: It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
Whether you’re leading a support team or answering tickets yourself, this is your permission slip to breathe, slow down, and serve better!
We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com.
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people of Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today we're talking about the urgency that comes with customer support. We'll look at why a calm environment is vital to offering remarkable customer experiences and some strategies you can use to get out of the chaos and embrace the calm. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. How are you doing, Jordan? Good, it's just us today. We haven't done a solo episode in a while.
Jordan:Yeah, I mean it feels like it's been at least six months since we've been just the two of us.
Priscilla:Well, I'm excited that it's just us. You know, it makes it a little bit more casual, relaxed here. Yes, one of the things you know we do every episode is the who made our day recently. Yeah, and it's funny because we have a little bit of a not conventional answer today, but I think we both agree that this person made our day. Yeah, do you want to tell everyone who we're talking about?
Jordan:I mean, we can both say it on the count of three. We can do one, two, three.
Priscilla:Taylor Swift, Dr Taylor Allison Swift to be specific. You know we always say that you can share anyone who made your day and, honestly, the month of August has really been Taylor making my day. Every day it was her month.
Jordan:More specifically, you know we're in the business of podcasting, yeah, and we're also really big fans of Taylor Swift, so we were very, very happy to see her make her podcasting debut Like that pretty much made my month, honestly.
Priscilla:It's fun because she's like coming to our space now in the podcasting world and so now there's a reason to talk about Taylor Swift at work, when there wasn't before. Really, even though I still did it, we had to work her in, it was really hard, but it's fun, okay. So, speaking of that podcast, the thing that I wanted to point out she said something during that podcast that she did on the New Heights podcast that really struck me. So she was talking about buying her master's and that whole process and I'm not going to go into all of the lore, that's a different podcast but there was something she said that really struck me in how it related to customer support. So she was talking about kind of that like process of getting them to sell her the master's in the first place. And she stopped herself and she said I'm in the business of human emotion. And I heard her say that and I went hey, me too. We have that in common.
Jordan:We have that in common.
Priscilla:Because all of us who work in customer support are in the business of human emotion, absolutely.
Priscilla:We really are. We are working with humans who are experiencing different emotions, whether they're frustrated because something's not working, or they're sad and they need encouragement. You never know what kind of emotion someone's coming to you with, but there are emotions tied in with each of your support emails. And so when she said that and then went into how she lets that change the way she communicates with people because she's in the business of human emotion and how that allows her to do a better job of communicating, it really was cool to me to hear, because we are in that same world of human emotion and we are working with people and it would be easy to say I'm taking all the human emotion out of support and I'm just going to help people and lose all the human emotion. But if we use that human emotion, we can make our work so much better and we can like leverage it for ourselves. And so enough about Taylor Swift. We can talk about her all day long, but I think we should switch gears and talk about urgency and support. What do you think?
Jordan:Let's do it, perfect segue.
Priscilla:So I'm excited to talk about urgency and how we, as customer support professionals, should react to urgent situations in the inbox. I think there is such a big focus in our society, in our industry, put on speed and instant gratification and wanting things done immediately, and if they're not done immediately, then they're done poorly because they weren't done right away and I think we just want things done right away. I feel like it's not in our DNA to just be patient and yeah, it's hard.
Jordan:It is hard.
Priscilla:We've been trained to not be patient, exactly, and we get everything when we need it. And if you have to wait for a page to load, when you go to Google you're like, oh man, this is taking a long time to load and the reality is it's been four seconds.
Jordan:I get annoyed if I order something on Amazon and it's three-day shipping instead of one Exactly, which is pretty crazy, honestly.
Priscilla:Yeah, or if you're sitting in a red light and someone doesn't go immediately.
Priscilla:I'm like oh, I should honk at them because they're sitting there and they're not paying attention and it's been two seconds and I'm like, no, I should not honk at them, just be patient, it's OK.
Priscilla:So when we think of urgency, just as a society, I think we kind of operate with this level of urgency all the time, and I think that shows up in the corporate world and in customer support a lot too.
Priscilla:Yeah, and I'm sure we can all think as customer support professionals of a time where someone wrote an email to support and maybe they were like writing in all caps to try to convey the urgency of the situation, or they put the word urgent in the subject to try to get it to the top of the queue, which I could totally see why you might feel the need to do that.
Priscilla:But what does that mean for your customer support professionals who are working that queue? And how should we take that kind of urgency, or sometimes I'll say perceived urgency, because a customer might think something's urgent when it's not actually urgent. And so how do we as customer support agents take that urgency and respond in a way that doesn't reflect the urgency, takes responsibility and ownership of the sensitivity of the question, but doesn't reflect the urgency, takes responsibility and ownership of the sensitivity of the question, but doesn't react with this huge sense of urgency, because the reality is, if we work at the urgency that our customers demand in the inbox, then our teams are going to feel pressured to move fast, which is going to cause mistakes. It isn't a healthy way to work and can honestly lead to burnout faster than if you're working from a place of calm.
Jordan:Yeah, so I worked in an accounting office for about seven years and you know we dealt with people's finances and taxes and that was one of those industries where everyone feels like everything is an emergency at all times and I used to let that get to me to where I would be like splitting up my time and attention. And I remember the owner of the accounting firm that I worked at he told me one day he said you know, if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. Exactly Like that's the threshold now.
Priscilla:Yeah, so today, what I really want to look at is how remarkable support isn't about speed at all costs. It's about finding a healthy calm that serves your customer and your support team. I feel like a good place to start is talking about the problem with urgency in and of itself, and we've kind of, you know, chatted about it a little bit. But you know, urgency creates stress and it leads to mistakes, which leads to bad experiences. So when someone brings urgency into the inbox, that creates stress for our customer support professionals and it causes us to rush. And what happens when we're rushing? We make mistakes, yeah, and I feel like we've talked about a couple of times on this podcast. But mistakes are a natural part of life and of being human and when mistakes are made, that can lead to a bad customer experience. There's ways to turn mistakes around so that it's not a bad customer experience, but a lot of times, if you're making mistakes repeatedly, especially if you're with the same customer and they're seeing that over and over and over again, then that's just going to lead to a really bad relationship and probably going to lead to the customer looking for a new product. Yeah, so it becomes this dangerous cycle and you think about the inbox and someone writing in with a question and we work fast to try to get it out of the inbox. Maybe we don't answer it exactly perfectly, and then that causes them to write in and say, oh well, that's not exactly the answer I needed, let me try again. You haven't actually worked through that question faster, you've just doubled your work. And so a lot of times when you let that urgency of the inbox dictate the way you're working, it's actually making your inbox busier and causing more urgency and you get stuck in this vicious cycle of urgent emails that you just can never get on top of. Yeah, all right. So I kind of jotted down a list of some of the mistakes that I've seen from myself when I'm working from a place of urgency and responding to urgent emails in an urgent manner.
Priscilla:When I look at those emails, I see that I'm not responding in the tone that we've set for our team. I'm responding really quickly and so maybe I'm close to the tone, maybe some of it's there, but it's not written to the level that we should have every email written to, because I'm working too quickly to focus on tone. I'm not offering educational resources. A big indicator of remarkable customer support is the educational side of things. And so when you're working quickly and you're trying to get through these emails really fast and get them out of the inbox, or you're working with someone who's demanding immediate responses, you're going to skip that extra piece of education. You know you might explain something, but you might not say here's a video that goes in depth or here's an article that'll give you a little more information about this, or reverse, you might just send them the article without explaining it, and so you're missing that education side of things.
Priscilla:When you're working quickly and not working from a place of calm process, okay, a big one that I've seen in myself, that I've seen with people on my team, is when we are working from a place of urgency, when we're responding to emails in an urgent manner, we are not double-checking account information. We are not double-checking the context of the situation. If someone writes in with an urgent email about all of their episodes getting deleted, we want to respond as quickly as possible and sometimes what that means is we don't log into their account and look around Did they actually get deleted or were they moved somewhere where the podcaster wasn't aware of where they got moved? If we don't take in that context the full situation, we're not going to be responding with the most accurate information, the full situation. We're not going to be responding with the most accurate information and in some cases that can add to the urgency, or the perceived urgency, and make the situation that much worse.
Jordan:Yeah, well, and also it's not a fun thing for those around you and also like the leadership when you escalate things like that. So let's say that you know we stick to this someone saying, oh, all my episodes are deleted story, and then you immediately write in to Tom and you go oh my gosh, this person's like episodes were deleted, what happened? And so now you have gone to leadership and escalated it and then they're going to be like oh my gosh, this is, this must be dire. And then they go in and they're like no, they created a duplicate account and they're just in the wrong one. And it would have been. It would have taken you five seconds to look into it and realize that.
Priscilla:Right, exactly, and I think it's hard sometimes to give yourself the freedom to slow down when someone's yelling at you and telling you that, oh my gosh, this is super urgent. Yeah, but we have to take ownership of that, because we can only control how we're going to respond to something, and if we react without going through our steps and making sure that we're looking at things in a logical, you know, processed way, then it's going to be a lot harder to make sure we're offering remarkable services.
Priscilla:So urgency in the inbox can look like a customer that's saying this is urgent and you need to deal with it right away. It can look like a really busy inbox that you feel the urgency to get through. So maybe it's not urgent customers, but maybe it's thousands of emails in your inbox that you just feel this urgency to get through them as quickly as possible. Yeah, but it can also look like urgency like you were just talking about in escalations. So going and taking that urgency outside of the inbox and passing it up the line or passing it to other people on your team and interrupting deep work and having this sense of urgency be this propeller that you're using as you get your work done, which really isn't sustainable in the long run. No, I feel like a hot topic in customer support is this idea of burnout right? The idea that we're carrying, as customer support professionals, a lot of emotional, like Taylor Swift was saying, but like?
Jordan:a lot of emotional weight.
Priscilla:And so, as you pile that on, it leads to burnout over time. I think that's, you know, pretty common in this industry. I think that's, you know, pretty common in this industry. And so, adding this level of intensity on top of it and saying to your team hey, not only are you needing to show empathy and patience and kindness and all of these things and help all these people who are being rude to you, but you also need to do it immediately. There is no room for calm and that is going to lead to people on your team burning out and being done with this kind of work because it's just not sustainable.
Priscilla:Yeah, and I think that in the beginning, if you are focusing on like a really fast response time, and in the beginning that might feel like productivity, you're like, yes, we are so productive, we're getting so many emails out so fast. This is great. But over time, what you realize is that intense culture that you're building is not productivity. Or someone writes in and says this is urgent and then you're like, man, I solved that problem in 10 minutes, that's so great. But then you don't realize that they write back a week later when it wasn't solved, because they didn't understand the answer. And so it feels productive, but really it's just building, you know, even more intensity down the line.
Priscilla:And it's not a sustainable feeling to treat everything like it's urgent. So you and I clearly agree that there's an issue with letting that urgency dictate the way you move and support yeah. So what do you do about it? How do you make sure that you're working in a calm environment, even when you have a chaotic inbox, even when you have people writing in with urgent in the subject line?
Jordan:because it can be really hard, yeah, or a supervisor who believes in the urgency is a driving force.
Priscilla:And that's a whole facet of this that is so much harder If you are working for a company that is putting emphasis on the urgency, or putting all the emphasis of your team and your success on response times.
Priscilla:It's very hard to not operate in that way.
Priscilla:If you're working in a culture that is like that and hopefully if you're stuck in a culture where that's the way they're working, you can use some of these strategies. You can show some of these benefits to your supervisors to encourage everyone to work from a place of calm. But I hope that if you're a leader listening to this, you can take some of these and start to build a culture that is not focused on letting the urgency or the perceived urgency from the inbox push your team to react with an urgent response, because that's not going to lead to anything good. No, you might have a great response time, but you might not have many happy customers if they have to write in six times in order to get the information they really need. Yep, okay, so we know that urgency can be a problem, but what about the power of calm? So a couple episodes ago, we had Chase Clemons on and he talked about a phrase that he used to use when he was working in the food service, where he would say things are just sandwiches.
Jordan:We have used that so many times, so many times In so many different contexts.
Priscilla:I love it so much. It's just sandwiches. I need to get it like needle pointed on a pillow and put it like on my office chair or something, because it's so good.
Jordan:Yeah.
Priscilla:But it is a really important thing when you're trying to work from a place of calm to kind of keep that perspective. And just for anyone who doesn't know where the phrase came from, chase used to tell it to his team when he was working in the food industry as a way to kind of ground them and bring them back down. When someone was either acting with a ton of urgency or being really frustrated, he would say, hey, it's just sandwiches. We can keep perspective on this because these are just sandwiches and as leaders we can model what a calm environment looks like. And sometimes what that means is reminding our team that it's just podcasting, or it's just a hotel room if you're in the hospitality world, or it's just home internet, because the reality is it really is just those things. And I'm not trying to diminish the importance of our work or the importance of your product, because of course It'll have an effect.
Priscilla:Yeah, yeah exactly, but perspective is a really healthy thing and if you want to have people on your team who are healthy and able to attack each day with the best work possible and the best experience possible for your customers and for the people on your team, then you really want to help them build those healthy mindsets and that perspective is going to help keep things calm.
Jordan:If you think about it emergency room surgeons they have possibly the most important job in the world.
Priscilla:And the most urgent, the most actually urgent job, literally urgent, literally life or death.
Jordan:But if they get panicked and they get into a space of their urgency is overwhelming to them, then they can't do their job. And so if those people can have steady hands and do a three-hour surgery when someone's going to die, you can write back to an email in a little bit it's fine.
Priscilla:Well, and think about an ER. I think that's a great example. Someone comes into the ER and they are like bleeding or whatever, having issues. They need to go and have surgery. The doctor is not going to go. Let's get them into the OR right now and not check their blood pressure and not check their vitals and do the things that you need to do before you can go into surgery. We don't need to worry about anesthesia, we're just going to get him in.
Priscilla:No, you can't do that, because if you do that and you skip those very important steps, you're going to end up in a much worse situation than you were before. Yep, that would be the doctor taking the urgency of the situation and letting it be dictating how he responds. They have to respond in a way that is methodical and calm, even though the situation is not necessarily calm, and so I think that's a really good example of what we're talking about here. I mean, think about I'm just running with this, but think about if someone came in with a bruised finger and it hurts a lot and they're like man, I think my finger's broken, I need you to set it. And then the doctor goes OK, yeah, let's set it, but really it's just a bruise or maybe it was.
Priscilla:You know, they got stung by a bee or something. Yeah, it wasn't actually broken. But they never checked to see if it was broken. They just said it because they let the urgency of the person that came in dictate it. But sometimes, in support, I mean, I've experienced where people say I need you to do X, I'm experiencing this and I need you to do X, and my response is okay, I'll do X sometimes, but what really needs to happen is why. But what happens is we take the urgency that the person is writing in with and we take their information as true, without double checking it and going no, actually your finger's not broken, it's a bee sting and we're going to treat it a different way.
Priscilla:Yeah, okay. So when you're working from a calm environment, how does that show up in your emails? We talked about what it looks like to work in an urgent environment. So when I see myself or the people on my team working from a place of calm, I see thorough responses that take in all of the context of the situation. I see intentional communication. So you know we've talked about in previous episodes how to write well in emails to convey the correct intention that you have.
Priscilla:If you are working from a place of urgency, you don't have time to craft a really intentional response. But if you have a calm environment and you're working from a place of calm, that means that you're able to take the time to craft a response that's going to give you the best shot to respond in the correct way, in the way that you intend to respond and have the best outcome. When they read your response especially when you're working with someone who's frustrated right and you're trying to be really careful about how you respond to them it will show up in emails that are aligned with our tone, that have accurate information, you'll see confidence in problem solving. Right, yeah, because if someone has time to go through the different troubleshooting steps that they are supposed to take and they have the time to problem solve, then when they come back they'll have confidence in that. And even if your customer says no, no, no, no, that's not right.
Priscilla:It's definitely this If they've already taken the time to go through and do the problem solving, they can stand on that in confidence that they know what they're talking about. And it allows you to include personalization and focus on the relationship side of things. We talk a lot in this podcast about how the human side of support is so important and how it can level up the work you're doing. And if you are working from a place of urgency or if you're encouraging your team to only look at response time as the thing to chase after, you're not giving them the ability to bring in that personalization, which is what's going to make your loyal customers. Yeah, all of these qualities of remarkable customer support can only happen if you give yourself time to do them.
Priscilla:So if you're always pushing yourself to work faster and more urgently, then it's going to be harder to provide these remarkable experiences Not never. You still might see some of them, but it's not going to be as consistent. So it's really hard as a customer support professional, as a leader of a team, to not let the craziness of the inbox or the urgency of every email dictate your movements. But as a leader of the support team, it's vital to model calmness and to show our team that they're allowed to operate from a place of calm. They're allowed to take their time. When people say this is urgent, respond immediately. They're allowed to take a break, take a breather, reread an email and approach it in a response instead of just a reaction. If we don't model that as leaders, then our team is never going to feel comfortable doing that on their end.
Priscilla:You were talking earlier about taking the urgency of someone's email and then escalating it to someone else on the team. Yeah, the amount of times I have done that in the nine years that I have been with Buzzsprout, I cannot count for you the amount of times that I've gone to one of our developers with this sense of urgency only to then go wait, is this urgent, or am I just being tricked into thinking it is urgent? It's really tough, and nine years into it it's still tough. I still catch myself letting the urgency of someone in an email push me to react in an urgent way. Oh yeah.
Jordan:If I see someone posting on social media about a problem, that's a great example. Yeah, because it's public, so everyone can see it, and they're also kind of making our other customers go wait what? And it makes me feel like, oh, this has to be fixed immediately because it's like it's this public facing sort of thing. But really it can wait, it's not a huge deal.
Priscilla:And sometimes things are urgent, and so I don't want people to hear this and be like, oh, you just work with like a nonchalance every day. No, no, but it's our job to figure out what's urgent and what's not urgent. Yes, and sometimes like the social media is a great example Someone will post something that they feel is urgent in that moment and then I always feel like other people are looking at the post, going man, it's been four minutes and they haven't responded, and the reality is it's going to take time to read through it, to do the research on what's going on and to post an update. Yeah, that's going to take a little time and if you rush that, you are putting in jeopardy the entire outcome because you could respond too quickly without knowing the whole situation. Anyway, we've gone through all of that. So it's really important to work from a place of calm and, like I was saying, I have been doing this for nine years and still feel like I struggle with that sometimes, and so these are some of the things that I do intentionally every day and I remind our team to do every day to help us stay focused on calm and stay focused on working from a calm environment.
Priscilla:Okay. So first take a beat before you respond. Right, read an email a second time, put the email in perspective, consider the context of the situation. If you make all of those things part of your process, it's going to force you to slow down. Got to go and you skip those steps. It's not going to turn out well. But if you go, okay, this is urgent. I'm going to go through my steps and I'm still going to make sure I have all my information before I respond, and I'm going to be very methodical about that, but I'm still going to do it right away. Right, I'm doing it now because I'm in this email, looking at it, but I'm not going to let myself rush through the steps. It'll force you to slow down If you feel an urgency pushing your conversations, like, let's say, you're in an email with someone and it's just not calming down. You're trying to calm it and it's not calming.
Jordan:You start feeling like the heat rising in your face.
Priscilla:Yeah, exactly, and you're like I can't solve this. What's going on? You can bring someone else in.
Priscilla:I mean I think that's one of my biggest strategies that I tell everyone in like every sense hey, if you need to bring someone else on the team in, there's no reason not to share the load. If you're feeling the urgency of something and you're having a hard time seeing it from an outside perspective or a place of calm, bring someone else in who can come in and help you with that. Yeah, okay, we talked about one of the reasons that there's urgency in the inbox being that you might have a very full inbox, one thing that we used to do. We don't do it as much anymore because I think we've gotten a little bit better about being calm regardless of the number of emails, but we used to physically cover up how many emails were in the inbox.
Jordan:Like with a piece of paper. Yes, with a sticky note.
Priscilla:I would put it on my screen on top of the part where it says how many emails are in the inbox, and that way I'm only focusing on the email that is in front of me.
Jordan:That was one of the tricks that my like second grade teacher taught us to learn how to read and stay on the correct line. So what you do is you take like an index card or a ruler and you would put it over the page and it would force you to just focus on the one line. So it's like that.
Priscilla:Yeah, think about it. You have 150 emails in the inbox and you're writing an email and while you're taking the time to work on that email, four more emails come in. You're going to go. I don't have time to spend 10 minutes on this email, but the reality is, if you shortchange yourself on the email you're working on, that's going to turn into four emails after you send it. Absolutely Cover up that number if that's causing you to rush.
Jordan:I love that tip. That's a good one.
Priscilla:Okay. Another thing that we will put a lot of emphasis on is training and how. When you invest in the training of the people on your team, that builds their confidence and understanding of the product, which allows them to, like we were talking about earlier, decide what's urgent and what's not and accurately figure that out. So if someone is writing in because they've misunderstood something in your product, if you don't understand how the feature that they're talking about works, you're going to adopt their urgency. Because you don't understand how the feature that they're talking about works, you're going to adopt their urgency because you don't understand. That's not really urgent, it's perceived urgency. But if you are comfortable, confident in your knowledge of the product, you're going to be able to approach that with a level of calm and go that educational route and explain why things aren't as dire as they seem. So investing in confidence, or investing in that knowledge piece and the training, is going to build your confidence.
Jordan:Well, and having that confidence is going to translate over to the customer, and then they're going to have confidence that you are, in fact, taking care of them Exactly, yeah.
Priscilla:If you're a support team and you're trying to figure out ways as a team to have this calm culture, what can you do in those cases? Transparency around how quickly a customer should expect a response. If you're trying to get your team to work from a place of calm, but you're telling customers they're going to get a response in 10 minutes, that's not going to work. Yeah, because no one is going to believe you. They're going to feel like I have to get this answer out in 10 minutes. How can I work from a place of calm and so be transparent with your customers, push those boundaries back a little bit and say, ok, we are actually going to try to respond to people within 30 minutes or within an hour or whatever it is for your traffic. Yeah, so that you're giving your team the ability and the freedom to work from a place of calm.
Jordan:I love it because when I get tagged in support emails maybe it's an equipment question or something that is in like my lane of expertise Whenever someone in the support team tags me in it, I see them responding to the customer saying hey, I'm actually going to send this to our expert on this. This is Jordan. She's a podcast producer and she will get back to you in the next 24 hours. Wow, 24 hours. I get a whole day to research this and reach out to them. It is phenomenal. Yeah, 10 times out of 10, the customer is like wow, you're setting me up Great. Yeah, I can wait until tomorrow.
Priscilla:Yeah, exactly, and we do that to protect your calm and because we know that you're not sitting at your desk waiting for a support email to pop up. Right, you're doing your work, and we don't want to say, hey, you actually have to drop everything right now and jump into the inbox and answer this in 10 minutes, and if you don't, then this is going to be bad customer support. And so it's the same kind of thing in communicating to your customers when they are like that first response into support, be transparent. If it's an hour, say it's an hour, that's okay. Another thing you can do as a team to make sure that things are staying calm is have a clear escalation path for things that are actually urgent, because some things are going to be urgent and you need to make sure to move them along quickly so they can get handled in a time sensitive manner. It's kind of like with that ER situation. The ER is set up in a way to move people through quickly, in a way that people can get to where they need to be, so the people that are in the more dire situations can go through quicker than the people who aren't, can go through quicker than the people who aren't. So having that escalation plan really clear before you're in the middle of it is another way to keep things calm, because when things get a little bit chaotic, having calm in any way that you can find it is going to be really beneficial.
Priscilla:We talked about metrics a little bit already, but make sure you're placing value on quality over speed and that when you celebrate your team for something, you're celebrating the actions that you want to encourage. So a good example of this, just on the Buzzsprout team, was years ago probably, you know, 2019, 2020, we had been, you know, we were still kind of in this growth phase, figuring out what our support team looked like, and we always focused on the response time metric. We were like man, we got our response time down to 20 minutes. Oh my gosh. People are always saying how fast we are, that's so great, that's all we talked about, and when. That's all you talk about, that's all you think is important when you're working in support. And so what does that do? It just adds to urgency. It adds to the feeling of I have to get this out as quickly as possible at all costs. Whether that's my own sanity, whether that's accuracy, whatever it is, I just need to get this out quickly, because I need our response time to be low. If you're celebrating that, then that's where people are going to put the value.
Priscilla:So, when you're trying to get your team to work from a place of calm, celebrate the things that encourage that. So talk about the quality. Talk about why the quality is good. What did they do in that email that made it really good? Praise people when they get that full context or when they send a really thorough email, or when it has good education in it.
Priscilla:It's not bad to look at the response time, because that is part of the whole puzzle when it comes to good, remarkable support, but it shouldn't be the only thing that you look at, and it can be really detrimental to the way your support is run if the only thing you're worried about is how quickly an email is sent out, ok. So the last thing I want to talk about is, as leaders, what can we do for our team to allow them to work from a place of calm? The biggest thing is modeling it right.
Priscilla:If you, as a leader, are telling people to be calm but you're not operating out of a place of calm, that's going to be a problem right, because your team is going to look at you and go yeah well, you're telling us to work from a place of calm, but you keep interrupting me all the time when I'm trying to work on whatever project or inbox or email that I'm working on. And so be respectful of the time of the people on your team and model that kind of calm and when you send them a ping, say hey, if you're in the middle of something, I don't need you to respond right away. Especially as you're trying to build this idea of calm, use phrases like that. Let them know, point blank you don't need to respond today, I don't expect you to respond right away, but I want you to think about this or whatever it is. Eventually, they'll start realizing that that's the default is that they don't have to respond immediately. But it's a really good thing to model, especially when it comes to emails.
Priscilla:When you get an email that's escalated to you, that feels urgent, respond in a calm way and show that behavior to your team that I'm going to respond to this in a way that is not adopting the urgency that they're writing in with, but responding in a calm way to bring it back down and to offer a remarkable service.
Priscilla:And then the last thing I would say is take time to debrief after crazy chaotic situations, because sometimes there are going to be times that get a little bit crazy. That's the nature of the job. So we're trying to find calm as often as we can and work from a place of calm, but occasionally there's going to be some urgency that pops up or some chaos that pops up. That's the nature of it. So once that happens, step back with your team and take a minute to go through what worked and what didn't work and how we can stay more calm next time and how we can handle things in a more methodical way next time because, that is going to be a huge part of that learning experience and will encourage that calm approach the next time something blows up.
Priscilla:Okay, so, before we wrap up, I just want to share a couple of final thoughts here, because I think you know we've talked about this urgency, we've talked about calm, but there's a couple things I want you to take away. I don't want you to hear this and think that calmness is the same thing as laziness or the same thing as slowness or the same thing I said it before as nonchalance or apathy Exactly nonchalant or apathy.
Priscilla:Exactly when I'm talking about calm, I'm talking about intentionally remaining calm to raise the standard of your work. Yes, I really think that ER example you gave us is such a good one and I'm going to keep going back to it. But you would never look at a cool, collected surgeon working in an ER and say, oh, they're working slow and they're not taking this seriously. They literally don't care about this obviously you wouldn't say that.
Priscilla:No, they are staying calm so that they can do the best work possible, and that is how we need to be looking at it. In our work, in the support inbox, we want to be staying calm. We want to operate from a place of calm, not because we value slow and not because we are OK with laziness, but because calm allows us to be intentional, and when you're intentional, the standard of your work is going to go up. Yeah, so as a leader, you should be creating a calm environment for your team, giving them the freedom to respond to tough situations instead of just reacting to them. To respond to tough situations instead of just reacting to them. Focus on metrics that align with the values you're trying to promote and then don't let the customer's perceived urgency or a busy inbox dictate how you're going to approach a problem.
Priscilla:As a support professional, remember that calm support is not slow support. It's intentional, it's confident and it's remarkable. And if you're looking for more strategies and ways and reasons to have a calm environment, like you were saying earlier, jordan, what if you're working in a company that's not calm and you're trying to infuse as much calm as possible? There is a great book called it Doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work. Aptly named, yes, written by the people over at Basecamp and it really is a great resource for anyone who is running a team or running a company to keep in mind that life doesn't have to be insane, that work doesn't have to be insane. It can be calm, yes, and we have the freedom to let it be and the benefits of that. So if you want to dig deeper into this and take it out of just the support context, I highly recommend it Doesn't have to be Crazy at Work.
Jordan:Yeah, I think that's on the required reading list. Here at Buzzsprout we have a whole bunch of books by the people at Basecamp and I think it's on everyone's shelf. I have it right behind me.
Priscilla:Yeah, it's a great book, so I highly recommend that. All right, it's time for Support in real life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences Jordan. What question do we have today?
Jordan:So this is from support driven slack and this is paraphrased. It says I lead a small support team and I'm considering setting up short daily meetings for agents to bring challenging support tickets. This could be a good way for us to learn from each other, but I wonder how effective it would be, since things move fast in the support inbox. How would you organize these meetings?
Priscilla:This is a great question for this episode. Oh yeah, we've been talking about this whole time and not letting you know. The urgency of things dictate how you respond, and this is specifically about how do I step back and train my team. And I think what you're referring to is the one-on-ones that we were talking about with Erica and about how sometimes those can feel monotonous if they're just happening for the sake of happening for the sake of happening.
Priscilla:So I think this is a great idea. First of all, to the person who had this question about doing these daily short kind of meetings to bring in emails and to learn from them, I think it's a really good strategy. It kind of allows you to take time out of the quote unquote chaos of the inbox to sharpen your skills and to get better as a team.
Priscilla:There's a couple of things that I would be careful about if I was trying to implement these kind of meetings. Two things. One is is the group setting the right way to do it? Because while there's benefits certainly in a group setting where everyone's reading an email together and then reviewing it together or talking about the feature and how it works and the best way to handle that question it also can be dangerous if you're trying to correct behavior, because doing that in a group setting can sometimes lead to shame and sometimes it can be tough. So just be careful about that and, depending on the size of your team, you might not be able to do it in a group setting. It might get too big to be able to really use that time well. So consider maybe one-on-ones being a better way to go through that.
Priscilla:The other kind of warning I have is about doing daily meetings. Daily meetings can be really good, right? If you're like we're going to do 15 minutes, it's just going to be a quick 15 minutes. Everyone bring what they have questions about the day before. We're going to do quick.
Priscilla:But the problem with daily meetings is they're going to become routine and they're going to become monotonous and then you're going to start losing. Am I doing these meetings because we have emails to talk about? Or am I coming up with emails to talk about because we have this meeting? And then you can turn into what I hate so much about one on ones, which is having them just for the sake of having them, with no real benefit and value there.
Priscilla:Yeah, and so maybe you don't start with daily meetings, or maybe you start with daily meetings and you're really aware about the value that's coming out of them and how long they're taking, and if they're taking more than you want them to take, or if they don't bring the value anymore, you step back and you find a new cadence. I think there's a lot of really good training that can happen when you get out of the inbox and as a team, you come together and talk through things. But I don't think it always has to be synchronous. I don't think it always has to be like a daily situation and I don't think it always has to be in a group.
Jordan:Yeah. So we actually in the marketing team we have one-on-ones weekly, but I get to decide what the agenda for that one-on-one is. I get to decide if we have that one-on-one. So if I don't have anything to check in about, I don't have to do it. I don't have to do the one-on-one. It's not going to reflect poorly on me. So I think another thing that you could do is have this be an optional daily thing. Like maybe you just have some slots in a calendar and if your support team has an exceptionally difficult ticket, they can actually just go in and take up one of those slots and meet with you about it just first thing in the morning and then say, okay, great, I feel confident going into this and then they're done. But it's completely optional, they don't have to do it.
Priscilla:Especially if you have a really big team and you want to give people the ability to have a face-to-face, one-on-one with you to talk about something more complicated, giving them the ability to book a 10-minute check-in is a great strategy. Another thing that we do a lot over here is case studies. So I'll find particularly either emails that are difficult or ones that didn't go as we had planned, or ones that went really well are really aligned with how we want to work. I will take those emails and I'll break them down and point out where things went well, where things could have been better, what things went off the rails.
Priscilla:Yeah, and have that be in an asynchronous situation, because sometimes you just don't have the ability or the freedom to always be meeting with everyone and, depending on the size of your team, it can be really hard, really fast, and so what we will do is these case studies. As a way. It still facilitates conversation because you can comment on them and discuss them, but it doesn't have to happen in a synchronous way. It can be asynchronous, which I think can be really valuable to some bigger teams, absolutely. So if you have a question or a support story or situation that you would like us to discuss or shout out text the show by using the. Send us a text link in the episode description and we might feature that question or your story on a future episode. As always, if you like this episode, please share it with someone you know who works in customer support and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. And thanks to everyone for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
