How Support Teams Can Prove Their Value Across the Company with Andrew "Coach" Rios

Customer support is where every company decision eventually shows up.

In this episode, we’re talking with Andrew “Coach” Rios, a customer experience and support operations leader with more than 25 years of experience building support teams at companies like Cisco, Fitbit, and Cityside Fiber.

We dig into why support teams often feel overlooked, how support leaders can communicate their value to the rest of the company, and why customer insights need to be translated into the language other departments actually understand.

We also talk about how coaching youth sports shaped Coach Rios’s leadership style, why “winning” looks different for every support team, and how leaders can start building influence even before they officially have a seat at the table.

Plus: how to create a support report people actually read, why employee satisfaction may be the most important support metric, and why great support leaders should constantly sell, market, and advocate for their teams.

This episode is for support leaders who want their teams to be heard, respected, and integrated into the bigger picture and for support pros who know their work is about far more than answering tickets!

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!

Transcript

Welcome to Happy to Help

Priscilla 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. In today's episode, we're discussing the value of support. We'll cover how to communicate support's value to other departments, the importance of empowering your support team, and we'll give you some strategies for integrating your support team into your company as a whole. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. It's time for another awesome conversation about customer support, and I am pumped to introduce our guest and get into it. But before I do, I just want to remind anyone who's listening that if there is a specific topic that you want us to cover, let us know. You can text the show using the link in our description. You can email us at happytohelp at buzzbrout.com. If you know someone who you really think would be a great interview, you can send them our way. We want to make sure that this podcast is bringing value to our listeners. And so part of that is knowing what you're struggling with and giving you episodes that are tailored to that. So help us help you. Exactly. Okay, so on to today's episode. Joining us today is Andrew Rios, known as Coach Rios. He is a global customer experience and support operations leader with more than 25 years of experience building and transforming support teams at companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 organizations like Cisco and Fitbit. Wow. He is currently leading the customer experience team at Cityside Fiber. Through his leadership, coaching, speaking, and practical Coach Rios Pro Tips. He's helping leaders build strong teams, better cultures, and customer experiences that actually win. So thanks for being here, Coach.

Coach Rios 1:45

Oh, Priscilla, thanks for having me. Super excited to chat today. And thank you for that great introduction.

Priscilla 1:51

As I was preparing for this, I was like, am I going to call him Coach? Am I going to call him Andrew? I Andrew does not seem right. So I think I'll call you coach if that works for you.

Coach Rios 1:59

I love it.

Priscilla 2:00

I know some people just call you Rios too. So it's all, you know, you have all a whole wide range.

Coach Rios 2:05

I I love it. And sometimes I not sometimes, always now I introduce myself as Coach Rios at a networking event. It'll be like, oh yeah, Coach Rios. Like your real first name? I'm like, I don't know, maybe one day. And then it just kind of starts the conversation.

Jordan 2:17

You've got your whole brand.

Coach Rios 2:19

Took a while for me to embrace, but once I started coaching the kids, it was really like, Coach Rios, this is what it is.

Priscilla 2:25

I love it. We always kick off our episodes with positivity. And so I wanted to ask you a question, which is who has made your day recently, Coach Rios?

Coach Rios 2:35

It was last weekend. I was lucky enough to coach a group of fourth graders in a basketball tournament. They have a tournament of champions here in Irvine, where I live, where the elementary schools get to play against each other in various sports. You know, my kids grow there, so I want to be part of their the chapter of their lives, and I coach them.

Jordan 2:51

That's cool.

Coach Rios 2:52

The parents after the tournament, we had a great weekend. It's a great weekend of community. I got to play five basketball games, you know, just great growth, great experience. But at the end, the parents kind of gave me a card, stop me, coach, I'll give you something. And the words were very heartfelt, touching. I think they really saw and felt what I was giving to the team. And I do it for the love, the passion. You know, I treat them all like they're my children at that point and treat them like young adults, right? I feel like I have this opportunity to do that. And the words they shared, that they noticed it and the impact it made for some of the kids. They shared kind of, they saw the confidence grow over six weeks. That really made my day. You know, that really just the words and I saved it. And so that was it.

Priscilla 3:35

That's great. Wow. That's a great story. I love those moments. Nothing beats a heartfelt thank you card. Yeah, I agree. Like when someone takes the time, I feel like we've all been there where we have to write a note or we want to write a note, and it takes time to sit down, carve out a few minutes, think about what you want to say, actually take pen to paper and write it, not type it up on a computer, you know. Yeah. And I always feel like it takes a few minutes to do, and it's very, you have to be very intentional about it.

Coach Rios 4:01

Yeah.

Priscilla 4:01

And you kind of forget sometimes the impact that having someone actually write out a note really can have on you and have on someone. And so I always recommend writing it out. But that's so great. I love that so much. That's such a good story.

Coach Rios 4:14

Yeah. It touched my heart. It still does, right? And I see the kids every day and I see their parents, and I'm like, I made an impact for that small amount of time, and I'm glad.

Jordan 4:22

So well, that's nice too, because you can revisit it later. You know, that's the other thing that I love about those thank you cards, especially when you're volunteering your time. I'm assuming you're volunteering to coach. And when you're volunteering your time, I did this with my daughter's play, and I got a thank you card from the kids who were backstage thanking me for it. And it literally like almost made me cry. And I still sometimes will just go back and revisit that card and read it. And it just makes me feel so good. So that's cool.

Coach Rios 4:48

I have a bowl on top of the cabinet here in our living room, says Coach Rios. And it was from one of the soccer seasons I coached, and the kids had our pinata party at the end of the season, right? No matter what happens, we're having a party at the end of the season. Yeah. And the kids signed it all. So it's kind of turned into that, you know, has this mementos throughout the coaching years, whether it's a little ball or kind of those little thank you cards that come once in a while. That's great to have right there, right?

Coach's Customer Support History

Priscilla 5:10

I love it. That is so good. And it's like a tangible reminder that you did this thing, you had this impact on these kids. That's very cool. I love that. So, coach, you've been in customer support for over 25 years. How did you first get into customer support? Did you kind of find yourself there? Or was it an intentional choice? How'd you end up in customer support?

Coach Rios 5:31

Oh, when I look back all these years, it happened because I wanted a car. It happened because I needed a job. Want a car. Yeah. I wanted a car when I was 16. You know, my parents were hard workers, but you know, they weren't giving me any money for a down payment. You know, I'm sure they wanted to, but they just couldn't. And those were, you know, life lessons there. So I said I need to get a job. So I got up to Upper Burger King. That was my first job, part-time worker, freshman in high school, and said I need to have a year to save some money. What I found was, you know, I would get excited about going to work the cash register. So I was in the back flipping burgers, fry station, making those chicken sandwiches. Everybody loves all the great stuff. Maybe if I was lucky, the drink machine. Um, but I really found when I got energized was when I get to go work the cash register and talk to people and take their order. And then I really enjoyed it when I would work the drive-thru, right? Be able to take their order, take the cash, and have that interaction all day long. And I just is looking back, right? I found that I was a little bit different when I talked to the customers, like I talked to them, right? Like I would recommend things for your Whopper, right? Or where you're coming from. Because I was this when I was in Vaccaville. So a very town between Sacramento and the Bay Area, a lot of tourists coming through and out. So I'd talk to people all of the time. And I found myself really enjoying those conversations while cleaning the table out in the dining hall, just talking to people about anything, right? Yeah. And then the jobs, I stayed there for two years. Then I got jobs in retail. And that was it. I worked at the Converse Outlet and the Vans Outlet, and I loved talking to people as they shopped. I liked welking them in, and I noticed other people didn't. And I was like, for them, it was just a job. For me, this was a job, but it was fun. And then kind of that was it. I like I had a help center job out of college, right? I went to college to get a bachelor's of science in telecommunications, right? So that was kind of why technology booming, late 90s, dating myself, right? Like boom, boom. So I got lucky to get into there. And then that was it. I was on the call center, and it was more than getting in and out of the conversation. It was really like taking care of the person I was talking to. And I I candidly I probably credit my mom for that, for her work ethic and work style that I watched, that I just kind of grew into. So that's kind of how the journey began.

Seeing That There's More to Customer Support

Priscilla 7:41

I love to hear that. I feel like I have a very similar history where I started working in like a bakery. The things I loved were checking people out and getting people the taste tests and things like that and like the direct interfacing with the customer. And, you know, you say that you noticed that you were excited to do it, and other people just kind of did it because it was their job. I don't think I've ever realized that, but I have similar memories where it was like, man, why are you not excited to talk to this person? I'm excited to talk to this person. And then I had some jobs where I was not in a customer-facing situation. I was in like an office setting. Those were just the jobs, right? Those were not the ones that I was excited about until I got back into a customer-facing role. And then that excitement came back. And so I think it's a cool thing to recognize about yourself, especially in those like early years when you're trying to figure out what things make you excited about work and being able to find something that allows you to be excited and that you can use that excitement to like be your career going forward, I think is really special. And a lot of people can't find that. And it's very cool that you found it so early on and you have stayed in it for over 25 years, and now you're leading teams and looking for people who have that same kind of excitement that you had. At what point did you feel in your career that it really was more than just answering tickets or closing out conversations or, you know, checking people out? And it was more relationship building. And then even beyond that, more into like the leadership side of things.

Coach Rios 9:15

When I made that transition from frontline tier one, tier two technician, right, to a network operations center engineer. So I was recruited to a company. When I was in Northern California, I was recruited to a company in Southern California from someone I went to college with. Their company had just acquired a company that provided DSL services, technology, internet back in the day, right? Just better than dial up. So they needed someone who understood that type of technology, had supported it before. I, for a couple of years, worked at a startup in the Bay Area called North Point that provided that DSL technology. So I knew it. So I made the move, came on in, and the manager at the time of the Network Operations Center started letting me do more than just answering the phone. So, you know, write a process, you know, write a phone script, take an escalation, right? Take some ownership in building a lab, take the initiative to talk to engineering about certain tickets and would just coach me through it, right? Let me sit in, shadow them, and then talk to me about, you know, why he had that conversation that way and what he was, you know, playing the game of chess for, working with networking, working with marketing. And I started really thinking, like, whoa, this is what it takes to put the team together that answers the phone calls and puts the system together. All this is happening in the back. So he introduced me to operations. And that was kind of like a wow, this is something that not a lot of people understand or see or kind of enjoy. Right. And that it was the internal customers that you then get to work with, right? And kind of those dialogues and how to have conversations and then you, you know, things that we'll probably start chatting about a little bit later is just how you communicate needs, asks, you know, and based on those relationships. So, you know, John, shout out to John Langlois out there for betting on me, giving me that chance and showing me a different side of customer experience and support beyond the break fix. Yeah. And I also say this he was the first one to give me a tough conversation and really actually steered me into, and this is a true vulnerable story, you don't talk to customers that way. He was the first one to literally tell me that. I think before, when I look back, people probably let me get away with rough conversation with the customer and whatnot. He overheard a conversation of mine, like third week there working after I'd been recruited. You know, they gave me a little package to move down here, all that great stuff. Pulled me outside and candidly said, you know, probably one of the technicalest people I've ever met. You're great at talking to people. But if I hear you talk like that to another customer again, I will fire you. And it was those were the words. I don't care how much we paid you to do here, you will not have a job here. And he just looked at me like that. And I was what, 22, 23, 20 years old? I'm like, some big words. Like, what do you mean? Fire. Hold on a second. I'm and boom. From that day, I can say this. From that day, I had never disrespected a customer before or talked to them in an inappropriate way. Doesn't mean we hadn't had firm conversations. It just means I know how to talk to them now as a manager of a team. So big story there.

Priscilla 12:20

It can be hard too when you're talking to a customer, especially when you are super conversational and relational with them, to keep those lines of professional there, even when that's not what's driving the conversation. Kudos to him for doing that because had he not taken the time to do that in that moment, a really great, you know, support professional may have not happened 25 years later, still in this space. You know what I mean? And so I do. Sometimes you do have to have those hard conversations. And as a manager, that can be tough, but knowing how to spot it and how to call it out quickly and graciously is a real skill.

Coach Rios 12:57

Yeah. And I learned it from him there because he learned he knew he could talk to me like that. Yeah.

Priscilla 13:01

Right.

Coach Rios 13:01

He probably couldn't have that same conversation with another coworker of mine. And so he knew that I knew when he was talking to me, he was talking to me. Yes, as a manager, he was being direct, but there was also a lesson there. And I think one of the things that I I look for and that I know I am is I'm coachable. I'm always learning. We always got to learn something. And I think he recognized that too. And I recognized that in that moment. And it really was that one of those moments that puts you on the path of, okay, you're gonna go this way instead of maybe going to sales or maybe a lifelong support engineer where you don't got to talk to customers, right? Yeah. I I'd probably be miserable because if you know me, Priscilla, I like to talk to everybody.

Coaching Mindsets And Defining Winning

Priscilla 13:40

Yeah, right. Well, and you just said coachable, that you're coachable. And I thought, oh, that's a perfect transition. Because when I first met you, it was a couple of years ago at a conference, and you were gonna give a talk, and they announced you and they called you Coach Rios and they pulled you up on stage. I remember being kind of struck by the amount of applause there was for you. I think there was an air horn, maybe. It felt like, oh my goodness, this is a celebrity coming up on stage.

Coach Rios 14:07

A band came through.

Priscilla 14:09

There was so much good energy. And I was like, we're all calling him Coach Rios. I think someone, whoever introduced you, I think they said something about you being a coach. And then you came up on stage and you gave a great talk, and you had some really cool coaching analogies that you tied into your talk. And so I want to kind of take a second before we get into our main topic today and talk about the parallels between coaching athletes and a support team. And when did you put that together? Was there like an epiphany moment where you went, oh, these are similar situations here?

Coach Rios 14:42

Yeah, the the word that comes to mind, and it was an epiphany probably a couple of different times, but the more recent one was competitive. When you're playing a sport, there's level of competition there and competitiveness as a team, personally. Same thing in support. You're competing. You're competing against that ticket queue. Yep. You might be competing against that stakeholder team, right? You might be competing against each other, whether you're having power hours in the queue or kind of for bonuses and things of that nature, right? You're competing for those scores. And what I was noticing is that, you know, customer support folks have that competitiveness in them because they want to deliver a great experience, right? To them, that's winning. So it's like losing is oh, I didn't get to all my tickets today, or maybe I didn't handle that case as well as I could have. Let me go learn a little bit more about it for my leader, my lead, or my peer, or whatnot. But it was being competitive. And we talk about this, I think, as leaders on the adult side. Focus on the strengths, work on the opportunities for improvement, quote unquote weaknesses or whatnot, but focus on the strengths of everybody on the team. And that will kind of lift everybody up. I found myself doing a lot of that with the youth sports coaching, right? They're young. Some are just getting that sport, so some might be fast, some have different strengths. Yeah. So as you looked at them, it's like, okay, how do I put them together to be in the best position to win? So it's the same thing on the support side. How do you take these folks with different strengths, various strengths, backgrounds, put them together in a position to win and grow? And I think what I found is winning is different for everyone.

Priscilla 16:18

Yeah.

Coach Rios 16:19

And adults and kids. You know, I go back to my earlier days of my career, winning for a peer I worked with was hey, I'm at that point of my career where I just want a good, stable job. I come in here 40 hours a week, maybe a little bit of overtime, they get my best, and then I'm out of here. Right. I was younger, I was like, I'm giving 12 hours a day, I'm cocking that overtime, I'm putting my name. That was winning. That was winning. It's different. You got to respect and kind of respect that. I think also having those hard conversations and the why. Right. So two topics there, I find bleed over a lot. When you're coaching young kids, you want to why we're running, why we're doing this drill, why we're doing this stretch, why we run this play, why. It's the same thing I always talk about on the support side too. Why are we doing this? What do the facts mean? Why are we presenting these facts? Right. We always kind of got to lead with the why as we're training and coaching. So I found those to be very similar. And the one thing I find that is not as similar, I like to just share with people is you could probably talk to kids a little bit more candidly than you can an adult.

Priscilla 17:20

Yes. Yeah. Well, and I like what you were saying about winning. When you're working with support professionals, how do you approach talking about what winning means to a support team? Because obviously, it's very easy to know what winning means when you're playing a little league baseball game. You either win the game, you get the most runs, or you don't. But in support, it's harder to define.

Coach Rios 17:41

You know, it's all going to matter where you're at in the game to keep the sports analogy. So I'll use an example from my Cisco days. When I had the opportunity to lead the support engineering function there, one of the early wins was the backlog. There was a large backlog, and there was no reason for it. No one could share why. It was just they're there. Why aren't we catching up? So I said winning now is getting control of the backlog, understanding what's caused it, right? That's the first win. We need to just understand. So it's building those wins, compounding them up. So eventually, as the leader, you're looking, going, okay, eventually I want to get to a backlog of, you know, 10% tickets. I want to get to my handle time of this. I see this, my effort score. I want to be this, whatever metric I want to kind of put out there. And you have to think about what wins get you there. So winning kind of changes and morphs and compounds as you go. Once you get the backlog under control, you celebrate it with the team. We won. Look, we have a process for this. We got the backlog under control. Customer sentiment has risen, you know, we're getting less escalations now. Then it becomes, you know, the win in that scenario was okay, now how do we continue to maintain this? Oh, we're gonna have to train more downfield to the tier twos at the call centers. Okay, so winning means now we have an escalation process because we were the center in Irvine that took the global escalations from the BPOs around the world, right? Yeah. I'm like, winning is now that we're taking those escalations and hitting our metrics, right? So once that became, it became okay, now what's winning? And this was always one of my passion topics is winning as a support team is being listened to. And when you bring up a situation, issue, a fact, an opportunity for improvement, a business insight, all the trendy words that they're acted on. That's a win. Are they all gonna be acted on? No. But that some are is winning. So I always put that as like, well, not even a North Star, just a star. As a team, we want to be respected, we want to have a seat at the table. But to get there, we got to have all these other wins first. Cause you you don't just start like that, right?

Why Support Gets Overlooked

Priscilla 19:47

Yeah. Well, and that's a perfect transition into the topic that we're here to really talk about today, which is that idea of proving your value, the value of your support team to your company as a whole, and integrating support so that we don't feel like this, you know, side section or department that's not really respected in the same way that, you know, maybe marketing or development or some other team might be. And I think it's pretty common in customer support that customer support professionals feel isolated or separated or not as respected on the team. And so I guess let's start there. Why do you think support teams sometimes feel isolated and overlooked?

Coach Rios 20:30

Attitude reflects leadership is one of my quotes I like to use out there is like attitude reflects leadership. So top, maybe not acknowledging, celebrating, talking about, allowing to talk at you know, company all hands events or or whatnot, or it just comes from the top, right? That's where really gonna come. Now, where the support leader, and and I may include a support leader in that as well, whoever may be leading that. So we as support leaders, and this is where I always say leadership, that word doesn't mean you have to manage people, right? You can just lead by how you act, how you behave, right? If there's a supervisor or a leader, a manager somewhere in there that notices that and can talk to the team to sunshine it and bring those opportunities up to share what's happening in the team or those feelings, that's another win, right? That starts driving that change, that momentum. You know, the first thing is calling it out, right? Letting the employees say that too. We don't feel valued, here's why. Um, and leadership can't be afraid to hear that. So it's all gonna come down to that. And the strong leaders, that I hate to use that word, but the strong leaders in support are gonna recognize that and fight for their team. Be proactive with sending out a communication or be proactive with communicating with their peer managers in the organization about topics and not asking for permission to communicate with them, but communicating with them as a peer. I use the phrase sometimes, which is if there's not a seat at the table for you just yet. You can stand by it.

Priscilla 22:01

Oh, that's so good. That's so good. I've never heard that. I love that because there are so many conversations, especially in the support industry, about getting a seat at the table. And that's so true. You can stand. You don't have to sit. You can get there. You can stand until they give you a seat. Eventually they'll give you a seat if you're standing there long enough. It's like, what are you doing?

Coach Rios 22:22

What do you what do you have to say, Rios? What do you have to say? Well, I just wanted to mention this right here. I'm gonna tell you a quick 30-second story, right? And what that means or what I'm asking for.

Priscilla 22:33

Yeah, I love that. As support professionals, it's clear that it is important for your support team to be fully integrated with your company and fully part of the value of your company and what you're bringing to your customers. But I think people outside of support might not understand that value. So why is it important, in your opinion, for support professionals to be included and respected as part of the company and the value of the product?

Coach Rios 22:59

They're the one team that is, if you take away forecasting for the future support volume that comes in, they're the one team that is dealing with 100% truth and facts.

Priscilla 23:12

Yeah.

Coach Rios 23:12

Right? Marketing, sales, if you think about everything else, accounting, it's if this, maybe this. We're hoping for this. This is what we plan, this is what we project. We do that too. It's just built on what's happened previously, right? The volume of contacts we get. But at the end of the day, everything we deal with, external with customers and internal with our internal stakeholders and customers, is all facts and truth. So I think that's important. And I say that a lot to people too. We're the one of the one, only teams that are dealing with day in, day out, facts and truth. And we're one of the teams that can really see and feel the impact that other teams make, decisions or not. And I always say that support's the one place where all decisions in the company are manifested. Good, bad, and no decision is a decision, right? But they're all manifested there. And I think once we as support leaders really embrace that, know that, it's like, okay, now how can I sell this to the right people in the organization? What's that one topic or conversation that I can have with marketing that might influence something or with product development? We always use product development, might influence something, right? Or even the sales team.

Priscilla 24:25

Yeah, I think you're completely right. And I think there's this other aspect of it too, when you look at the people on your support team, you want your support team to do their best work. And you want them to feel a sort of ownership over the work they're doing. And if the rest of the company is not valuing your support team, your support team is not going to value your support team. And they're not going to value the work they're doing. And then you're going to end up with people who either the light and excitement that they had when they started working in support kind of gets put out because they're not seeing that valued outside of themselves. And then they start to realize, oh, I am just a cog and a machine. And there's no reason to go above and beyond and give this customer a great experience. And so I think when I look at it from my side of things, there's so much value in valuing your support team for all the reasons you said, because we have that direct line to the customer and we are seeing what they are actually feeling and we are taking that. But there's also this level of if you want your customer experience to be great and amazing and remarkable for your customers, then you have to treat your team that is building that experience, you have to treat them in a way that makes them want to do that. And I think that comes back to valuing and respecting and including your team and giving them a seat at the table, even if it means, you know, maybe it's not like the head of the table, but they're there and they're part of the conversations. I think that's really important. Yeah. And so, you know, I think there's kind of two sides to it and both are equally valid. And for any companies that are not seeing one or both sides of that, I think that they're missing out on something that can really take your company to the next level. If you are putting effort and value on your customer support team, you're gonna see that in the way your customers talk about your product.

Coach Rios 26:21

Yes. Yes. That's from everything. And it could be something as simple as when you we'll talk about in-office and remote scenarios, right? In-office, you see a support professional walk in the hallway, ask them how they're doing, right? Yeah. Hey Jordan, how's everything going today? How's everything in the queue? Right. And then give them a chance to say what they're saying and hear them, right? Act on something if you can. It could be as something as simple as that, or even an acknowledgement. Hey, I saw that report your manager sent out last week. Great job on those cases, right? Things like that. Then kind of the extreme, not the extreme, not the extreme, but the a step above that. In some cases, yeah, a step above, but sometimes extreme in some organizations, right? Yeah, yeah. Is you know, celebrate them when it's, you know, customer support week, right? Give them that one week every year and celebrate them. Celebrate them more, but acknowledge them then as well, too, right? And then the tools. Like, really, I think that's a whole nother conversation, probably, right? But the tools really invest and hear are the tools working for them? Is there an opportunity to streamline their clicks, their swiveling, their quality of life, all the terms we use to make sure as they're providing support, it's as effortless for them as possible too. Yeah. Right? We always talk about effortless experience for the customers. We got to give that to our team too.

Priscilla 27:36

Yeah. And if you can take away some of those steps and some of that effort that's needed, then what your support team can do is they can turn around and they can translate that to customers in going above and beyond, because now they're not having to go through all of the different pathways to get what they need done. If they can do that easier, then they can focus more on the relationship building side of things, which goes back to your original story about getting started in customer support and that excitement of working with a customer. If you don't have to go and do all of these other things that are not as exciting for you and you get to focus on the excitement of relationship building, that's going to be a better experience for your customer at the end of the day.

Coach Rios 28:16

Absolutely. Absolutely. It all comes down to relationships.

Allies And Speaking Other Teams’ Language

Priscilla 28:19

It really does. So imagine you're listening to this and you're on a team or you're leading a support team that really does feel sidelined or feels isolated and not part of the team. They're not worried about standing next to the table because they can't even get in the room in the first place. I want to talk a little bit about how you can work as someone in the support department. So whether you're a leader or even just an individual contributor, how you can start to change that perception from the inside out. How have you helped other departments understand the value that support brings through your career? What things have you done?

Coach Rios 28:55

Oh, man. First things I like to do and I've done is find that one ally in another department that you could talk to.

Jordan 29:04

Oh, yeah.

Coach Rios 29:05

Right. Just with that, that one ally. I take it back to the Fitbit days. I had a great ad, a couple of great allies there in the engineering side and the product management side. That, you know, I give the story that, you know, the product manager, after a presentation where my team presented a bunch of stuff to the product team, we thought it was a great presentation. It was good, not great. He took me for a walk around, you know, San Francisco and Barcadero and gave me a talk that was like, hey, great data there, great information, a lot of information. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it though. And he talked inside I was boiling. What are you talking about? I had charts. I had this. He goes, yeah. And he looked at me, he goes, Rios, Rios, they called me that back then. Hey, what's the one thing I can go change in the product that will make it a better experience or us sell more? Next time, answer that question for me. And we talked and we began a relationship and we talked about that. That right there helped because as we went through it, I was managing the field testing team, their alpha beta testing. As we went through the testing, they really looked forward and listened to what we were providing because we learned how to tell the story in their language.

Priscilla 30:08

Yeah. That's what I was just about to say is that it's like two different languages. You're in support and you're speaking one language, and the product is speaking another language. And what you have to figure out how to do as the support professional who wants that connection is you have to figure out how to speak their language.

Coach Rios 30:23

Yep.

Priscilla 30:23

Because otherwise you're not going to be able to communicate.

Coach Rios 30:26

And it's all of it too, right? Because you know, sales has a finding the motivation is then equal to the language you're going to speak with them. Right. I think so you kind of find that one ally in each department that you can understand what's going on under the hood, have those candid conversations, whether it's um, that's where you get to then understand things like, hey, we can't do that because we're we're limited in the hardware chip. That's why. Where they wouldn't tell you that just naturally, right? But as you're having conversations saying this is what's happening, customers want, and they can be, well, let me tell you why that's not going to happen. And then you can understand, go, ah, that alone, being able to go back to the support team and give an answer, a reason, lifts everything up as well and helps drive that change, and then start to have that level of respect at the table and say, you know what, we want to hear. We want to hear from that field testing team. And I think what happened was the second year we were invited to participate in the development planning process, right? And I think what was great there is I'll say it like this too. We knew our place, right? We knew we had one. So that was something to celebrate, right? That was the win. And said, okay, we're here. We get to see how they design what they're going to design the rest of the year, how they come to that. This is a big win team. So telling my leaders at the team then, let's embrace it, enjoy it. Okay, now let's learn from it. Like, what's the one thing we're so and and I would always tell them now that we're at the table and we have an action, we can't miss it.

Priscilla 31:54

No.

Coach Rios 31:54

We need to be on time with it now. Now that we're here in this classroom, don't be late with your homework, right? Um, so that's how you continue to build it. So then when you're invited in, they let you stay.

Priscilla 32:04

And then they see the value of you being there.

Coach Rios 32:07

Yep.

Priscilla 32:07

When you're entering in in the conversations or when you're bringing the valuable insight from the support inbox into those conversations, they start to go, oh, wait, I'm really glad Rios and his team are here because they've given me some information I didn't have before and I didn't know I didn't have before.

Coach Rios 32:22

I think it's also sharing too what you're building with the customers communication-wise, that's gonna help in the future. Right. As you're launching a new product, maybe, right? You want to have a pipeline for immediate escalations and feedback. So you kind of take that, like, okay, I want to get you feedback. Let's call it something else. Hey, as this product launches, we're gonna have a Tiger team where I'm gonna have a dedicated group of agents, like you speak them. Oh, really? Yeah, we're gonna give you insights. We're gonna give you a daily report, just a one pager of what we're seeing in the call center and the at the front of that launch. Marketing sales people, they love that, right? More data, more this. And then what happens is they start to call you out as they're talking, right? So now at that next all hands or that next QBR or that next meeting, oh, and I want to thank the support team. They were sharing these insights. They've been sharing these insights weekly, and we've done the following with it. Or we've altered our test plan to include that use case that we had never thought of before. That's a win, right? And I think you got to set the stage too. You gotta not be afraid. You have to be confident. You know, think about that as confident in what you're doing, how you're doing it. So when you talk to your peer in another department, you say, Look, this is what'll happen down the road. I promise you that, because you've done it before, you've seen it, and you speak to them in that way that's like, oh, okay, let's listen to them or her.

Priscilla 33:43

So, what advice would you give a customer support leader or manager who isn't at the table, isn't in the room, and wants to get in the room? What would you recommend they say to the person who's making the decision about who's in the room in order to get them in the room? How would you approach that conversation?

Coach Rios 34:00

You know, approaching it with why would they not want me in the room? Right? Why would they not want support in the room? And sometimes I've been in some worlds where they don't want support in the room. They look at it as you just answer the calls and the emails, make sure our CEO doesn't get escalations. We could do that. We could do that. So, kind of thinking that, the other thing, the way I'll answer that is share the reporting that you use to manage your team and lead your team and make decisions and highlight how those impact other business units.

Priscilla 34:31

Yeah.

Coach Rios 34:32

And don't be afraid to just share with hopefully your boss is supporting you. But also if you know, and this is something I've done before, if you know there's gonna be an off-site QBR with the leadership team, right? You know that because your boss is going there. Get ahead of it and share an insight or a takeaway. Hey, I would like for you to share this. This is if I was there, here's what I would talk about and want that one. If I had five minutes, here's one thing I would talk about with the team there. That, and then just share it and tie it to some team and what they're trying to achieve and do.

Priscilla 35:07

Yeah. And you know what? You can also look at the conversations that are happening in the support team and where that friction is. So maybe it's something new has been launched and there's some friction around the support team understanding this new feature. And so that's trickled down to the customer not understanding the new feature. And then it ends up getting back to that person in development. You can point those things out and say, hey, if we could meet with you before a product launches, we can iron these things out and then you never have to think about it again. And you're not gonna have to deal with this friction. We can handle that and give a customer a better experience. I think sometimes being really clear and intentional about those conversations of, I know this was not a comfortable situation that just happened. A way that we could solve that is getting ahead of it and including us in this conversation before we get to that point. Yeah. Sometimes having some of those things happen can be a really good strategy for showing the value you can bring. Let's just try it one time when you keep you clue us in before a launch and see how that launch goes compared to the last one when we didn't know something was changing.

Coach Rios 36:12

That's a new product introduction, right? One of the most important things the customer supports. So thanks for bringing that up right there, is one of the most important roles a customer support team can play. And I think the other the what leads to that is you you touched on a little bit is not saying I told you so, right? Not being the team that says, I told you so, I told you if you would have. And I I I use the analogy in and went through that at Cisco, which is we had a learning experience. Hey, we just had a learning experience. We got caught off guard. We didn't know about that that feature. We didn't know that you know the Wi-Fi didn't perform the way it was supposed to, right? Had we had the opportunity to just do a little beta testing with it, usability. And then I would say, and I I always say, don't use words that another that the team will get scared about. So no testing. We just did a little bit of usability from the customer standpoint for just one day, right? We might have been able to pick that up. So here's what I propose next time. And I took this from the director at the time there. Allow my support engineer to be a fly on the wall through the conversations throughout. And I and I said this to the team too. I was like, she will not talk. She will listen to every meeting. She wants one opportunity at the end to present her findings in this templated format. Can we agree on just that loose process to try it?

Priscilla 37:33

Yeah.

Building A Support Report That Gets Read

Coach Rios 37:33

They did, right? And we would coach through to just listen to what they're saying, listen to how they're testing it. So when you get it, you know the use cases in which you're gonna test it, out-of-box testing, right? Out-of-box review, right? You know, customer experience testing. And then from the agent perspective, what are the top things we might have to deal with in this new product? And then share it in this little format in a positive way. That changed kind of everything, and then rinse, wash, repeat with that, and show them that you have this flow. Then what'll happen, and I promise you this, they'll ask you to test more. They'll say, Hey, uh, can you can we give it to you with you know a class A board with no frame and just test it that way? Go, oh, we can, because the more we know earlier, the better. And now you've kind of ingrained yourself into that process. So I guess a new product introduction, right? Find a way to help out.

Priscilla 38:26

Well, and one thing you mentioned a little while ago was your support report, which is one of the first things I think that's what that talk was on at the conference that I where I met you. But yeah, can you talk a little bit more about that strategy, your support report, what it is, what it includes, and how you've seen that transform that connection between support and the rest of the company and the product?

Coach Rios 38:49

Yeah, absolutely. I always say it's based on a principle, right? It's um, what are the facts? What do they mean? What are we gonna do about it? And then the support report tells kind of three stories how we're supporting the customer, how we're servicing them, and then how the team is doing. So it's the metrics. What was our volume and what's the trend? Right. So that's the standard stuff that we all see. Then it becomes, well, how are we servicing them? Are we hitting our internal KPI, right? What kind of experience are we offering them? Are we morphing into? Are we elevating, right? And then the team behind it. What is the team doing to continue to deliver that experience? And I think in that presentation, one of the ones I did on the the my example for that talk was I always opened it up with personal, right? I'm not just gonna start hitting you in numbers right away. 97% CSA, average handle time, this, volume, this. It's like, hey, true story, we want to celebrate John's two-year anniversary. Also, on his two-year-old work anniversary here, his yoga ball broke. And we want to, you know, and it was that kind of tying it together because we all sat on yoga balls. We were remote workers, we all kind of that was our thing.

Priscilla 39:57

Yeah.

Coach Rios 39:57

Um, and tying that in, and then going into also John this week and supporting our new launch of the electric motor here, discovered the following uh bug and is now working with engineering on a fix for this, right? Started with a story that gets people kind of captivated and then leaded to kind of what's happening, but then also the why. Yeah, right. We saw volume increase this week based on the product launch. We're trending in this direction. You might see this go up, but what you're gonna see down below is another factor go down, another metric go down, and that's because of the following. And always letting the team take a part in that, right? It's the team report. As you first start to build it out, this is yours, this is ours, right? It's it's numbers, it tells us what we're doing. Now we're gonna tell people how we're doing it. And then this is where I celebrate things: anniversaries, process improvement, right? It's not just the metric went up or down, but maybe we introduced a process that took five clicks away that improved the quality experience, or maybe a feature finally went live that helped the customers and reduced a hundred contacts now.

Priscilla 41:03

Yeah.

Coach Rios 41:03

Right. So kind of those things.

Priscilla 41:05

So you send this as an email, right?

Coach Rios 41:07

Yeah. Yeah.

Priscilla 41:08

It's asynchronous. And does it go to the whole company, or how does that work?

Coach Rios 41:12

So it's a progression, right? I think the goal is to get it to the whole company. So we're where we're at now at Cityside, you know, we send a daily report out from the operation side and customer experience. My team, the concierge team in there. We I talk on Tuesday. So today we send out our weekly metrics and we call it the concierge playback. And we talk about the week, the previous week's activities. So you'll have the volume, you'll have the metrics, and you'll have some key indicators, whether it's outbound calls, you know, order scheduled, circuits activated. And then on, and it's a one-page PDF built in Excel, right? And then on the one column, it'll just be call-outs, highlights. Like example, we're rolling out three new processes on Wednesday. So we're letting the company know, hey, and that goes to the whole company.

Priscilla 41:54

Yeah.

Coach Rios 41:55

Right? It's a section in there. So it's it's weekly, but it also starts sometimes, it starts within your department first, right? You got to kind of slow roll it. I always say start within your department. Everybody gets it, they understand the, you know, so they can speak to it. Because it's one thing to send it out. What you also need is the team when they're talking to their peers, that they're able to talk to the report as well. They know what it means as well, and they're having conversations with it, but also what it means as they're talking to the customers as well. So then you just ripple it up from there. And I do like to give a heads up to you know, department leaders. This is something that we're gonna start sending out, and it's gonna be truth, facts, and we will call out things. Um, I always have a section for bugs, oldest bug, how many bugs, how many we closed. Yep. But it's just pure facts. How many customers are impacted by those bugs and what that impact means? So in a previous life, it was, you know, because we have this product defect, every time a customer returns that product, they get the refund plus two additional products based on that. Here's how many, and here's how we're trending. And we won't, we're not gonna see this decrease until the new product fix rolls out, which is here. And it's kind of like that stamp here, everybody's aware, we're good. All right, now we're gonna move on to the next one. Because what it what I find it really is, and again, it's not about I told you so, but when someone says, Wow, I didn't know that, I like to look and go, Why didn't you know that? And I mean that in a why didn't you know? If we emailed it, we sent it in Teams, it's in our single source of truth, right? Like it's very accessible in many different ways. Why didn't you know it? And if it's because, oh, there's this way, oh, oh, sure, no problem. We got it now a new way. Most of the time it's, oh, I didn't read that. No problem. I've been toying around, and actually, this is something we did at a smaller startup in Berkeley a long time ago. It was um an audio message that rang everyone's phones on Monday that talked about the previous week.

Priscilla 43:59

Oh, interesting.

Coach Rios 44:00

So I would on Friday, I would record a message in our PBX phone system old school and then send it off on Monday morning and it would ring everyone's phones and they would just go to their voicemail box and it would just be a voicemail in that talked about hey, we activated two small businesses last week and Panol, and we're also working this week on a big project to activate 300 more. Also, so-and-so is on PTO. Uh, we have two remote visits scheduled this week and blank. Please let me know if you need any more. Andrew Reales.

Priscilla 44:30

Yeah.

Coach Rios 44:30

I was been toying with going back to that too, but we'll see.

Priscilla 44:33

Well, I think one of the hard things is getting people to actually read it, you know, or listen to the voicemail or whatever it is, getting people to actually, you know, take the time to read through it. I mean, you can write it up and send it out, and that's great. And I mean, it sounds like it's got lots of great information, but if someone doesn't read it, then it's not gonna serve its purpose. And that I think goes back to the idea of making sure your team knows the value of your support team. It's like a chicken or the egg thing, you know, you start doing the support report and then you have to figure out ways to get people to read it and to take it seriously and to show them how reading that and understanding those metrics is gonna help them do their job better when they know what's going on in the support world. And so there's, I would guess that there's kind of a little bit of like you send that out and it's coupled with reaching out to people and saying, hey, this is why this is important. Please like encourage your department to read that. Do you find that when you started doing this, it was hard to get people on board to read it and to interact with it?

Coach Rios 45:36

Yeah, yeah. It is that's that's it's natural, right? Nobody wants another email, nobody wants another report. What does this mean to me? So I really found was one page, one page, be consistent, top three, right? Don't bury them with metrics that they don't care about, right? Keep it very high level and then tie it to the big, you know. Um, this was our contact to ship, right? Or this was our activation to sales ratio. So always tie, oh, you got that support volume. Oh, that was 13% of our user base this week, right? Or we took 5%. I think, and then the even more, and I always say this is when you talk about it with your team, you know, the support engineer, the operations person, the frontline person, the QA person, what what that means to them and who they want to talk to about that. And I'll sometimes say, like, hey, Jordan, section three, go ahead and talk to marketing and in the Tuesday meeting about that. Remind them that we got that insight. Or, you know, if we're doing the NPS follow-ups, hey, let's put a little section in this week's report that talks about the NPS follow-up. So it's kind of like planning almost the year of reports too, because every week, but that's the that's the hard part is getting it out every week. Yeah, the the the the fun part is planning for the future, right? Oh, sales kickoffs then. So that week we'll talk about this. Or three new hires just came out of onboarding. What does that mean? That means we're gonna have three more people taking care of emails for us, which is gonna mean the following, right? Yeah, also, you know, I'll give one that I did, you know, for this week's was you know, we're um we're a little understaffed right now and we have some unprecedented demand, right? So it's awesome. So what I highlighted was because the metrics are gonna show, wow, they're they're a little bit behind right now. Yep. Support, guess what? Sometimes we are behind.

Priscilla 47:19

Yep, that happens.

Coach Rios 47:21

But this is what we did last week. We made X amount of outbounds and we scheduled X amount, even though we were here. So this week, this is our goal. And then I share this is the weekly um challenge for the team. And if they achieve it, they're gonna get the following. Yeah. Right. So I like to highlight that kind of stuff and then celebrate it when you catch up, right? When you have that spike, we did it, right? We had that earlier in the year, which is look, look at the line, it's flat. That's where we want to see it. Here's what got us there, and here's what we're doing to hopefully not get there again. And that's where it's not just here's what we're doing, the team, it's here's what we're doing with marketing in collaboration with brand in order to change the messaging here. Just telling how you're collaborating, making that the report. Because I find that sometimes in other reports from other teams, departments, it isn't so much this is what we're doing with everyone, it's this is what we're doing, right? What sales is doing, the pipeline, the funnel, boom. Right. But in the support, you get an opportunity to really tell that whole story. And I think when I talk to support leaders, work with them, work with different people, I say, yeah, embrace that. When you embrace that, then everything is going to start sprouting up. Your team's gonna get fired up about it, and you'll start to see that momentum.

Priscilla 48:39

And as a support professional, you know, you can connect these dots for other departments to help show that value. You know, some other departments that don't kind of have this same situation where they feel isolated might not need to do the connecting of the dots as much. Yep. But as support professionals, we want people to see the connection. And if they're not seeing it, sometimes it does take being a little bit more overt and connecting those for you know the other departments. I think it's a very cool strategy, especially when you're looking at bigger companies where there's a lot of separation between departments. To have something like this that's consistent that puts support in front of these other departments, even if they don't read it every time, even if it's not, you know, top of mind all the time for everyone, it reminds them support is here and we're doing good work. And I think if you're listening to this going, okay, but I do not have time to write up a support report every single week and send that every single Friday, it might be something that you start doing once a month. Yes. Maybe you do a monthly thing, or maybe you do it quarterly. Yep. Or whatever it is that is something that's, you know, manageable to work into your workflow. But doing something in a consistent manner that gets support in front of the team will eventually lead to those conversations about how do I get at the table now? You've seen that this value is here. You see the work that the support team is doing. So now I'm gonna go to this leader on this department or this person on the product team and see, okay, now how can we make sure the next launch goes smoother than the last one that we talked about in that support report? Can we get someone in on these product meetings for this next launch? Because that's what's going to start that ball rolling. And so if you're listening to this and you're going, I don't think I can send out a weekly thing and people are gonna read it. Well, they might not. But if you send out a monthly or if you can send out a quarterly, just something to get the ball rolling, that's gonna help you down the line. It's not gonna be an overnight fix. That's never what's gonna happen.

Coach Rios 50:39

Never. And and I always say the early pro tips I always show people, don't worry about aesthetically what it looks like. Don't worry about that. Number two, use what you already have. You're using some sort of tool that hopefully has some sort of reporting. Start with that, right? Right. Um, some of the early, my early days, or even when I, you know, new position, new everything, it's I start with an email. Here's an email, here's a few numbers, and we're gonna evolve this over time. And I think quarterly, great way to start. I always say this when they say you don't have time, it's your history book as well, right? It's kind of why I like weekly reports for my direct reports. Like, what's your weekly report? And it's like, I don't have time to send a weekly report. Yeah, you do. It's gonna be your history. So when you look back, what did I do the last six months? Oh, I can go back to my weekly report to see that. Same thing as a support team leader. How did we do the last four months? Oh, let's just go back and remind ourselves because, and I see this all the time, we're in the trenches so much, we forget about all the things that we've done to improve little processes here and there. So if we just document them, yeah, not worry about how it is, that gets us there. And then over time, you know, I've been sitting aside two years, the report in over two years has finally gotten over the last eight months into a weekly here's the format, here's this, but it's evolved. It's gone from an email to PowerPoint slides to less PowerPoint slides to just a chart to now this. Now it's a nice PDF with words and formatting. That was always the vision, but to lead with that was not gonna get the impact or the belief or the folks surrounding the report and developing it versus building that village from scratch.

Rapid Fire Leadership Tips And Closing

Priscilla 52:17

Right. And you can, as you are sending these things out, as you're creating these, you can look at how it's being received and you can adjust to speak in the other languages. Yep. If you like PowerPoint, but you find that development team doesn't want to click through a PowerPoint, then maybe you want to do a PDF or whatever it is, being open to adjusting it as it goes so that it's bringing the most value because what you don't want to do is put all this time into something that's not bringing the value. So, how is that value coming across to the other departments? Okay, I feel like I have a lot more questions for you. So I'm gonna kind of go into a little bit of like a rapid fire thing. The first question I have for you is how do you encourage your team that might not be feeling valued by the company? How do you encourage them to feel pride for the work that they're doing?

Coach Rios 53:03

Customer feedbacks, right? So share what customers are saying online and in your surveys. If you're hopefully we're sending some survey out, and make them accessible to them. Two, compliment them on things you're hearing throughout the day in the center, right? The tone that might have, or hey, it sounded like that conversation was a difficult one, but I love the way you handled it. I love the way you ended it. It's that be out there and say those things often in the one-on-ones, too, in your weekly, bi-weekly, monthly one-on-one. You know, talk about the good work you've seen the individual do, right? Specific examples, really, really specific. This is one too for like, don't be afraid to ask. How are you feeling? Yeah. What could make you feel better tomorrow, right? What can make you have a stronger end of the day? Like, don't be afraid to ask. Best if you're feeling something, don't be afraid to ask. We hear this a lot too, I think, when we're talking to our team members or other team members in the organization. They'll talk about how, oh, Priscilla's so awesome, you know, Jordan's so awesome, Chris is so great, they did this, blah, blah, blah. Go tell them.

Priscilla 54:03

Yes.

Coach Rios 54:03

Go tell them. And I'll encourage them if someone suits me a team's message or an email, rather than just forward it off. And this actually happened two weeks ago. One of the field techs reached out to me, sent me a nice message. Hey, I just want to let you know Ben has done such a tremendous job on the weekends. He's always there to help me, blah, blah, blah. And that's why I hired Ben. I knew he would do that. I, you know, I knew that already. And I replied back to him, hey, this is great feedback. Thank you so much for sharing it. We have a process over here called the Duck promo, so the whole thing we do for employees. Would you mind shooting this over to the Duck email and sending this directly to Ben? I'm sure he'd love to hear it. And then I got another one from another team member of mine, Amanda. And I encourage those team members, go publicly share that, please. Go tell them it'll make more impact if they hear it from you than me saying, Jordan told me about you. Now I'm gonna do it too. Don't get me wrong. That's gonna happen. But encourage other people to do that. And I always say that too, and I've done this a lot more recently in my career, is like, encourage other leaders to call out support. If we're going to an all hands meeting and I see the agenda and someone in marketing's talking or someone in in sales is talking, I might go to that person and go, hey, remember when Doria did this for you on that? It'd be nice if you if you mentioned her there.

Priscilla 55:17

Yeah.

Coach Rios 55:17

Don't be afraid to sell and promote your employees like that, right?

Priscilla 55:20

Yeah. What is the most important metric customer support teams should measure?

Coach Rios 55:25

Employee satisfaction.

Priscilla 55:27

Yeah.

Coach Rios 55:27

Your team member's satisfaction because that's gonna dictate how they're performing every day, right? They got to be satisfied at work.

Priscilla 55:33

Yeah.

Coach Rios 55:34

All right. They have to be. And what and what does satisfied mean for them as a team, as individuals? That's the most important one.

Priscilla 55:40

Yep. And it's not focused on nearly enough. And when your employees are satisfied and they're doing work they're proud of, that's gonna trickle down into your customers and your customers are gonna feel it.

Coach Rios 55:49

Yep.

Priscilla 55:50

Okay, we've kind of talked about this one a little bit, but how often do you share customer insights outside of the support team?

Coach Rios 55:56

Um, so it's weekly, and then it's anytime anyone asks. So one of the things that I like to do, and and I've been doing the smile career, I give credit to Pei Wang from Cisco, who who taught me this about that, is she says build reporting for the future. Build your database, your structure, so that you're prepared to answer questions in the future that might not come now, but they're going to come. So that's what I'll always say.

Priscilla 56:18

All right, what makes a great teammate in sports and in support?

Coach Rios 56:23

Oh, we talked about one is coachability. They want to be a forever learner. That's right there. Yep. Next, and something that is not, you know, skill-based, but mindset, they come with the mentality um to give 100% effort every day, right? They're gonna be 100% focused every day on that craft, on that experience they're delivering. And they're they're hustling. They want to be better. Those kind of things together, if everybody brings that together, they're gonna continue to uplift each other.

Priscilla 56:50

Yeah. And I like that you said it's a mindset because it really, it's a decision to act a certain way. It's a decision to take ownership, it's a decision to strive for mastering the thing you're working on. And it's not necessarily a personality trait always. It is something you can control. Yeah. And so I think I think that's a really important thing for people to hear. And especially when you're in a place where it's like, oh man, I don't know about this. Like you have control over it. You can make the decision that you're going to be dedicated, that you're going to strive for something better, or you're going to work hard, or you're going to be focused, those things. You can really choose to lean into that mindset. Yes. Um, okay, last thing. What is one thing that support leaders don't do enough of?

Coach Rios 57:39

Sell and market their teams. And I use those terms deliberately. And just walking the hallways in the conversations with the examples. There's victories and wins every day in support teams. Yeah. Right. So there's every day there's an opportunity to sell or market them, whether it's to your boss, to your peers, to, you know, I talked to my buddy Raul at work, the knock manager. I'm always talking to him about what the team's working on, how they're handling escalations, what they're learning. So sell and marketing the teams. And, and this is something that I I love doing, encourage support leaders to do, encourage support folks to branch out into other parts of the organization or challenge them with other types of roles. I think sometimes we lock into a great support person. We want to keep them. Not everybody's gonna be, you know, like us, these 25-year lifers in support. Yeah. Some of this is a transition, this is a learning experience. This is gonna be where they learn and grow. So we got to sell, we got to market, we got to promote. Yeah, we got to sell, market, and promote our team members and team.

Priscilla 58:36

Well, that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for being here today. You always bring such a good energy. I mean, thank you when you're around. And so thank you for bringing that energy to Happy to Help. It's been great to have you here. Yeah. For anyone who's listening to this and wants to get in touch with you or learn more about you and what you do, um, how can they get in touch with you?

Coach Rios 58:57

Yeah, you know, um, I do a little bit of posting on LinkedIn once in a while. So connect with me on LinkedIn. That's a great place. Um, I like to share kind of some pro tips, both from coaching the adults and the kids. And then I have some, once you get to that profile, if we want to connect a little bit more, feel free to click on those links. And I'd love to talk to anybody. I call them um walk and talks. I love just to walk and talk with anybody out there. 15 minutes. Let's just talk about leadership, coaching, team building, sharing pro tips. I know I can always use some help myself. So would love to chat with anybody out there. And thank you for having me on. I think two, three, four years later from that talk. It's it's honored that you remembered it. I'm grateful for that, and I'm grateful for this opportunity to chat with you. Big fan of yours. So thank you.

Priscilla 59:43

Right back at you. Thank you so much for being here, Coach Rios. It really was great to have you on the pod. If you have any questions or a topic that you would like us to cover in a future episode, you can shoot us a text using the send us a text link in this episode description, and we will try to create an episode for you answering your question directly. As always, if you like this episode, please share it with someone who works in customer support or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you again to Coach Rios for joining us on today's episode. Thank you all for listening. Now go and make someone's day.