Charlotte Ward 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and eleven of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is the scope of support. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Chris Taylor. Chris, it's lovely to have you back. This week we're talking about support remit. And uh to me, this this means a number of things. Um, I know we had a little chat about this before. Um, but to me, support remit is a kind of slightly fancy way, maybe, of putting what your support team should and shouldn't be doing, and how you maybe how you define that or advocate for for those decisions, advocate for your team in this respect. What are your thoughts on that?

Chris Taylor 1:08

So I think I've got two perspectives on what support remit could mean. I think I agree with you. One, it's what is within the power of a support team? How much freedom do you give your frontline people to make decisions, advocate for the customer, push stuff through? So that's definitely one aspect. And then the second is what is the remit of support as it relates to the rest of the business? So, how does support influence and support marketing? How does it support the product? How can we take all the knowledge and learning that we gain out of support tickets and speaking with customers and feed that into product design and marketing strategy and all of these type of things? So those are my kind of two rough definitions of it, I think.

Charlotte Ward 1:53

Yeah, I think you're right. I think for me, that that second part that you mentioned, um exactly how support, where support fits, like what the lines of that jigsaw piece are. This is a terrible analogy, but in terms of how it fits with the with the other parts of the business and like how what's the responsibility that support has in relationship to those other parts of business, right?

Chris Taylor 2:18

I mean, it it's for me, it's a tricky one. I've worked in big call centers where um you are the bridge between product marketing and every other team. And now I'm in a SaaS company or a technology company, it's exactly the same. Support sits bang in the middle of product marketing, and it's sort of the place where you can gather insights for all of these different areas. So, for example, marketing, we do well, I feed into specific campaigns around support. I write content, I promote us, I make sure our key metrics are kept up to date so we can use those to support pushing out just good themes and good news about our offering. Um, the second thing is we regularly sort of harvest our customer data, the feedback and themes from tickets. We feed that all into product, we set up meetings between clients and the product team when we're developing new features. So I think support's a really good place to channel all that customer voice and that customer uh information. And then for me, it being a good support leader means that you can translate that data and make it useful for the rest of the business. You can prove support is not a cost center and that the rest of the business can get a return on investment from there being a support team there purely just through the analysis, um, the data points that you can pull out and you know, a good customer experience, people will talk about that. So another benefit.

Charlotte Ward 3:43

Yeah, absolutely. And and actually, everything that you just said there is is really quite uh a wide remit. I mean, it's it's it's that freedom to be able to do all of the things you wouldn't necessarily expect from the kind of traditional view of support, which is that kind of call center environment, agents just picking up the phone, putting down the phone, sticking to a script, not doing anything else, and then you know, leadership managing that very operationally.

Chris Taylor 4:14

I think in support, we've been seen as a cost center for a very long time. So, especially call center environments, you're just seen as a money drain, a money sink. You don't get any value out of it, it's just something you have to do. And I think it's on us as leaders to go into these businesses and prove the value of support. Um, prove the data points that you need to prove. Like our performance is good, that drives this. Um, we hit five-star support ratings uh every year consistently. What does that mean for our customers? Um, yeah, I I I think it's on the leader of a support team to be thinking more outside the box, and that that plays into the stakeholder engagement point and managing expectations from other departments. There's a lot of value in support. A good leader will know how to operationalise that and feed it into the relevant places to drive value for the whole business.

Charlotte Ward 5:09

And it is absolutely getting away from that that model, isn't it? It it's it's taking on more, frankly. It it is, you know, because you have to to to even if it's still quite operational, you still have to have a kind of level of creativity and and drive that says, you know what, I'm not just going to hunker down and stick with the core job. We actually have to do these other things. And that therefore effectively increases your remit because you're getting your fingers into so many more pies, aren't you?

Chris Taylor 5:40

I think it's a step, a natural leadership step to me in support. So generally you'll have like a team manager in support or a customer support manager who looks after your frontline. Um, you might be performing that role as well as the strategic role as well, um, for a while, but eventually you'll just have to become less operational or looking at it at a more high level and pushing yourself into strategic things. But I think it's a skill to be learned. I manage teams directly for ages. I wasn't thinking about strategy, I was just doing the individual performance, and now I've moved into more strategic, more business-oriented, more look at wide-ranging, I think. Um so yeah, I think it's uh a skill to be learned, but definitely a useful one to have.

Charlotte Ward 6:25

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Do you think just as a final piece to this then, um do you think that there are things that we should say no to?

Chris Taylor 6:37

As support leaders or just for our teams. For our teams. Yes, absolutely. Um, I think unfortunately, the more you become a leader, you more they start to realize that you have to represent the interests of the business, right? So for me, that is what this, whatever this proposal may be from the team or whatever the ask is, will it drive value to the business? Will it just drive value to the team? I don't know. If it's like, for example, a well-being proposal and it makes the team healthier, happier, etc., that's going to drive both. There'll be a return on investment, the team will be more productive, blah, blah, blah. So it very very much depends how it comes to me, how it's proposed, what it is. Um, but yeah, you can't you can't just be saying yes to everything, I don't think.

Charlotte Ward 7:28

Yeah, yeah, it's a fine balance. Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much. All right, right. Well, there we go. That's that one done. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one one one for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.