Customer Support Leaders
Customer Support Leaders
267: Finding the Balance Between Product and Functional Expertise; with Colin Flanigan
Finding the Balance Between Product and Functional Expertise; with Colin Flanigan
Unlock the secrets of superior product support with Charlotte Ward and special guest Colin Flanigan, Director of Customer Experience at Sage, in a conversation that promises to elevate your understanding of customer experience leadership. If you've ever pondered the perfect balance of product and role knowledge for leaders, our discussion serves as a treasure map to the middle ground where understanding meets practical leadership. We confront the challenges head-on as we scale the heights of team expansion, navigate the technical complexities, and traverse the industry specificities. With sage insights, Colin and I dissect the evolution of responsibilities and the bedrock of product know-how that supports teams from scrappy startups to towering corporate entities.
Embark on a journey through the crucial first 90 days of a customer's path, where the art of crafting and refining journey maps becomes a compass for navigating potential pitfalls and streamlining experiences. Learn from our strategies how to weave the frontline team's invaluable narratives into these maps, crafting a tapestry that captures the true spirit of customer interactions. As we wade through the shared waters of employee and customer experiences, we reveal how an in-depth understanding can act as a catalyst for organizational growth. By uniting customer-centric insights with a broad business perspective, leaders can cast ripples across diverse business segments, charting a course for professional development and operational excellence. Join us for this enlightening exploration and discover how to steer your team toward uncharted waters of success.
Hello and welcome to episode 267 of the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward Today. Welcome, colin Flanagan, to talk about deep diving into the product that you're supporting. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, colin Flanagan. Colin, lovely to have you join me. Would you please say hello to everyone and I'm going to thank you for coming along and I'm going to throw you in at the deep end with an introduction first, if you wouldn't mind, and then we'll dive into what we're talking about.
Colin Flanigan:Sounds good. Well, lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. So currently I am the Director of Customer Experience at a learning and development company called Sage, but I've been in customer experience in leadership roles for about 10 years now and started out as a contractor providing support to various companies with an organization you might have heard of called CoSupport In the past. That was my initial career, so I've just sort of been doing all things customer for a very, very long time now and I'm excited to be here and to speak with you.
Charlotte Ward:Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to this one. We had a little conversation about what we might talk about a couple of weeks ago and of all of the things that we threw out there as possibilities, this was the one that I that I said yes, we haven't talked about this before. What are we talking about today?
Colin Flanigan:so today we're going to talk about uh joining an organization and really learning and diving deep on the product from a customer's perspective to ideally, uh provide a greater level of customer experience as a result.
Charlotte Ward:I really like this because you know, I think there's a lot of. I can see this being quite divisive as a topic. I think there'll be people who will say you know, you need to know the ins and outs of everything that your team are doing down the you know, knowing as much about the product as they do, and in fact, really you should be able to step in and do their job. I think I think that's a valid argument. I can also see the flip side of this, which is, potentially, I don't need to know everything they're doing and in fact, that's a lot of time investment they're doing, and in fact, that's a lot of time investment when I've been brought in to achieve some other goals, such as helping them do their jobs and providing that awesome customer experience, et cetera. So I can see this being like really quite a quite divisive topic. Which side of that, or maybe somewhere in the middle, do you fall?
Colin Flanigan:Thank you for generously providing me that opportunity for a cop-out which I will take Because, as in most things, I find myself in sort of the middle territory of that question.
Colin Flanigan:I think that two things are true really. The first is that, yeah, there are limits to what you're going to be able to have functional knowledge, especially and I think the key are starting to reach that breaking point of knowing the exact ins and outs to where you can you know at the drop of a hat jump in and start doing someone else's job on your team. I think those limits appear early and they increase in size and amount as your team grows, but I do think that, at a baseline level, it's critical that you know at least some key information A about all the jobs that the folks on your team are doing. One of the reasons why I was excited to talk about this because, from a foundational product knowledge standpoint, my take anyway is the more that you can learn about the product that you're supporting, the service you're supporting and the customer journey, the generally more well-prepared you'll be to jump in and pinch hit, even if you're not completely aware of the ins and outs of the job.
Charlotte Ward:Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, I think you're right.
Charlotte Ward:I think it is probably somewhere in the middle, you know, and I think that somewhere in the middle is quite squidgy and gray as well, because you dare to put one number to it, which is that somewhere in the 25 to 50 range, like, you're definitely out of, like being able to step in and do the frontline work. I think there are other factors, though, right, I think for me a lot depends on, say, the technical complexity of the product, or or, let's say, the functional or maybe even the industry specific kind of complexities that are involved. So, you know, leading a team of, essentially, engineers I, you know, I've often said I wouldn't trust myself to step into my team's role and actually do the work, because they're infrastructure engineers really, and so I help them in other ways, I hope. But, but also I can think of other examples, right, where it's different sort of technical knowledge. Like, let's say, you know you can have a good enough, uh, knowledge of fintech, or you know the financial services, but if you're providing advisory there, you may not necessarily be a financial advisor.
Charlotte Ward:The same is true of, like, some hr or learning tech, and I think there are sort of some industries where it's harder to step in and some technical kind of gradation where it's harder to step in as well.
Colin Flanigan:Yeah, absolutely, I think that's true. Yeah, squidgy is the the right word, I think. Uh, and I do think that in each, in each individual position, you do really have to define that line, um, according to a number of factors certainly the technical nature of the product, the, the nature of the team that you're running and their level of knowledge, um, their level of autonomy that they're capable of, I think comes into play in a big way, and also just the sort of the structure of the organization too. You know, I've I've worked in quite a few early stage, very small startups, and there, of course, you just wear a lot of hats because you, there's no one else, there's no one else, yeah, so you're coming in effectively doing it already and whereas latter stage, you're being pulled in for that role, like the leadership role, almost exclusively I I do have a a slightly um, we'll say nuanced and not divisive.
Colin Flanigan:Take on CX from the same perspective, the CEOs and founders making it often as well, which is that.
Colin Flanigan:It's why I bring up that 25 to 50 person number is there's a massive difference in how you dive deep and how you learn about a product, even in ongoing changes as your organization grows from that sort of 1 to 10, 10 to 15 range versus like 25 on up, and one of the common mistakes that I think many of us have experienced is, for example, a senior leader from another department, maybe a co-founder, maybe a CEO. They're the worst aren't they?
Charlotte Ward:They think they still know it.
Colin Flanigan:Well, the worst is when they've provided support, when they've been the first person ever at the company to provide support, because it gives them this whole sense of security that they know how this works.
Charlotte Ward:Even if that was eight years ago.
Colin Flanigan:Yes, At a 10-person company. They know how this works? Sure, absolutely, and they were providing some level of support. But now you're 50, now you're 100, now you're 150. It doesn't work that way anymore. Everything about what your team does and you're not able to find that middle position you can find yourself making that same mistake by making a decent amount of assumptions.
Charlotte Ward:That's very true. It's that kind of dangerous territory, isn't it? I think the size of the team, I think other factors that are at play there are. You know, you're probably already leading leaders, so you are increasingly organizationally distant from the front line too, and you know, as I said before, like I think the complexity of the service that you're providing is a big one for me, and you know I'm in that dangerous territory of, like you know it would be catastrophic if I tried to answer some of the questions.
Charlotte Ward:However, you know, I think that what I, what at my current place and the previous places, the way that, um, the way that I approach that is that I've been hired with a different set of expertise. So, you know, I, I know how to lead support and they know how to engineer, and like, so long as there is sufficient overlap of understanding and information sharing, like so and I think this dials into much more about the customer experience than the employee experience, necessarily, than product knowledge and like how you talk about what needs improving, how you talk about what you're measuring, how you talk about how you strategize around all of that and build tactics for growth, for example. As long as they can find a way to cross that barrier, to cross that divide and bridge that divide, then I think it doesn't need to be an engineer that leads a support engineering team, for instance.
Colin Flanigan:Absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree and I was just talking about this with some other friends in the industry that there is this sort of lack of appreciation occasionally for people, someone who's a great leader and a good generalist yeah, yeah, generalists are often undervalued, right yeah.
Colin Flanigan:Yeah, and that's and that's. I think where you find a lot of these strengths is, you know, I I haven't written a line of code in many, many years, um, and nevertheless I'm great at working with developers and engineers, because I've just learned how to, how to work well with them and how to communicate well with them, even if I couldn't do exactly what they're doing, I can understand what they're saying and I think you know we were, as we were talking, something that came to mind. You know, up to this point, I'm I'm recognizing I've been very philosophical and ethereal about these things, but one of the very key things I can bring up for anybody who's in this position and trying to maybe you're coming into a new, an established organization as a new senior leader and you're trying to figure these things out. Um, one thing it seems like a no-brainer, but one thing that's been extremely helpful for me in the past has been skip levels, because that is a really great, almost a shortcut, really um to you can.
Colin Flanigan:You can ask a manager or a senior manager all day long. You know what are the things that your people are struggling with, or you know what's the hardest part of your direct reports, jobs, um, but you're not really going to get, uh, quite as distinct a report on that as if you have a skip level and just give somebody permission to say, like, what do you love about what you do? Okay, great, what do you. What do you not love? Um, and I, okay, great, what do you not love? And I think that that's a great way to get that deeper knowledge, because often, just by default, what folks are going to tell you is going to be pretty nitty gritty.
Charlotte Ward:Yeah, and doesn't always show up on a chart on a deck somewhere, does it? Right, right, yes.
Colin Flanigan:It's not. Does it Right right? Yes, it's not always metrics driven.
Charlotte Ward:Yeah, exactly, I think you know skip levels are great and I think as much as you as a leader can support it and your organization can support it, shadowing sessions, like opening up your support team and saying to anyone in the organization that wants to come and spend time with you whether you make it a requirement or just an invitation, we're here, come and sit with us, you know, uh, and and have those same kind of types of conversations as part of watching the work happening.
Charlotte Ward:Again, even if you're not co, like you know co-writing some some, uh, some technical solution with them, but like actually having them talk you through it, why we're doing this, this thing this way for this customer or whatever, and like.
Charlotte Ward:And I think just I think then going to those sessions or to your skip levels with a kind of different perspective, because I think bringing your questions is fine and asking them is also you know about what their challenges are. But almost I think the missing piece of this isn't necessarily conversational, but what you should be trying to understand is the customer experience of this as well, and I think that you don't actually need to know to a, you know, a coding level or to a like a financial services kind of specialism level, what this problem is and how we solve it. But you can understand and visualize and you know mind map almost as you go through these conversations the customer experience of this thing, whatever this thing might be, and I think that that is something that is actually quite hard to achieve when you're on the front line, unless you've got a bit of space in your day.
Colin Flanigan:Yeah, absolutely it's a bigger task. But another thing that I've just sort of found myself falling into as I've joined various organizations at various different stages, is I will usually try in my first 90 days somewhere to, either independently or, if I can really ingratiate myself quickly, or if I can really ingratiate myself quickly as a brainstorming exercise, try to sort of if they haven't done a customer journey map yet, I will do one, and if they have, then I will try and build my own. Or take what they've got and see okay, what pain points can I see in this? Where are the points at which this can break down? And then you know, you run around and try and validate that.
Charlotte Ward:Validate is the word. That's exactly what I was just going to say. Yeah, validate, because, particularly when you're coming in from the outside, you know customer journey map oh, we've got one over here. Yeah, it's pulled outside some kind of kind of technical dusty drawer somewhere on G drive. Oh, this is in, like I've dragged it out of underscore old dot archive we did that we did this three years ago.
Charlotte Ward:I think it's still valid. Like, okay, it doesn't. I mean that's that's almost every organization on the planet, isn't it no one's special in that regard? But but um validating it and validating, like not necessarily the whole thing, but I can bet. I can bet because also it's almost true of almost every organization on the planet, that that dusty old customer journey map was probably written up by one team as well. You know it was. It was the, the previous head of success four years ago, or it was, you know, one of the product managers.
Colin Flanigan:You had a bit of spare time six years ago or last summer we had an intern drew the short straw yeah, yeah.
Charlotte Ward:Or an intern we had last summer. We had to give them a project. Whatever it is right, it's like, uh, it's only right. It's often only one or two perspectives, and so validating some of that against the experience of your frontline team is interesting and valuable.
Colin Flanigan:That too feels like something of a shortcut to me to find, especially joining as a leader in an established organization with an established product. It's almost like I guess the analogy I would draw is that's like you going to the laundromat with everyone that you work with, um, and you're just gonna see everybody else's laundry. It's a great shortcut for that, uh to really understand what's going on yeah, yeah, yeah, I am.
Charlotte Ward:I think that the the other thing is with customer journey maps is they they only get to a certain depth, you know, and, um, I mean, whether it was the intern or some engineer or the head of cs from four years ago, whoever drew it up, um, if it was, if it was anything less than the ideal customer journey mapping workshop that has been maintained every six months since then, um then, like, it's very unlikely to reflect the opportunities or show you the opportunities that you have today, and I think that that's the other thing that spending time on the front line with your folks does. You don't need to know the product I think to any like meaningful technical depth but understanding, like how customers are moving through your bit of the ecosystem right now, can help you shine a light, sometimes on other parts of the journey map that are also, let's face it, woefully out of date.
Colin Flanigan:Right, yeah, well, and I think that's maybe the, the sort of um I don't think barometer is the word I want to use, but that's the, the, perhaps the goal post, or you know how deep, is deep enough to go into the product. I think your first goal post is if you can do enough in, again your first 90 days or your three years in, to consistently understand what it is that customers are doing, what they're clicking on, how they're moving through a process, how they're setting things up and being onboarded, all of that, and really what they're experiencing, then that's often that's good enough. I would say. Even better than that is if you can then take that same approach of like, okay, what is the customer functionally doing? And ask yourself that same question within your department what is the customer functionally doing? And ask yourself that same question within your department what is this employee functionally doing? What are the systems they're using?
Colin Flanigan:How are they moving through their day? What are they? Again, the baseline questions. What are they clicking on? What are they typing? Why are they typing it? Because you know, I'm one of those folks who believe that, at a certain point, your employer, your employee experience, becomes your customer experience. Um, and so I do think that that's my preferred level of engagement, anyway, is, I'd like to at least understand those two things and feel like I've got a decent enough grip, uh, consistently, on two things. It's like what is the customer experience and what is the customer journey, and what is the employee experience and the employee journey in this role?
Charlotte Ward:I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there is. If you understand it to that level, then I think actually what you do with that is the next important thing, Because I think as a leader, you have the opportunity to take that knowledge, that validated knowledge or that validated bit of the customer journey or the employee experience, and work across the organization to improve it and change it in a way that perhaps again I'm going to venture that this is a lot of organizations out there that perhaps people on the front line don't have the opportunity to do with quite such ease and maybe confidence as you do as a functional lead and particularly when you get to a certain level, have a certain amount of experience, like to say this is great, this is not so great, but I also know who to talk to about this and I'm going to help it change, you know yeah, yeah and well, and that's always been one of my favorite things is is to do that, um, initially in my own department, but then, you know, as as time and opportunity permits, oftentimes, I do think that it's the customer-facing leadership that is going to have the opportunity to do that for folks in other departments as well, and there's really no Once you start doing it, I think you have to be careful with your own boundaries as an employee and a leader, because people will just let you explain for them whether or not you have any business doing so um, but you can find some really key opportunities to uh, to improve that experience for sales people or product managers or almost anyone in the organization, um, and that it's.
Colin Flanigan:And then the benefit is twofold right, because you're doing exactly what we're talking about. You're learning about a new person's process, a new portion of the business, you're getting the inside scoop and you're also helping them and helping your organization as a whole. Likely, if you're doing this as a customer-facing facing leader, you're doing it in such a way that it's it's really going to help your customer facing team as well.
Charlotte Ward:It's absolutely going to help your customer facing team and your customers right because right as as in support, as often, the last team that has the touch point with the customer before before churn. Hopefully not, but you know we're really like we're at the at the end of the customer, like life cycle generally right that yeah, this customer's been through marketing, they've been through sales and they've been through our onboarding.
Charlotte Ward:They've been through like that or they have an ongoing success relationship, but support is the last stop gap on that journey and um, and that anything you can improve upstream of that, like, let's say, actually let me, I've got some ideas about onboarding and our experience here. I think what we've spotted is an opportunity upstream. You know, shifting left is kind of a uh, you know, a really positive thing that you can, really positive action you can instigate inside your organization as a support leader, because you're way right of everything else in that organization.
Charlotte Ward:So if there's something that you can bring to improved onboarding or improved, you know, sales engineering, or improved marketing, you know, actually this is not how, like that, you know, maybe even if it's just joined up kind of language across the experience, or or oh, we sell it, you know, oh, that's how we sell it. Well, that explains why downstream customers have got this expectation.
Colin Flanigan:Yes, the classical problem yes.
Charlotte Ward:The classic problems. They're everywhere, aren't they? But I think, I think that's something that you have as an opportunity, as a support leader, to do. I think the other thing, too, that something that you have as an opportunity as a support leader to do.
Colin Flanigan:I think the other thing too that that, um, I think is missed sometimes by by support leadership, um, or even leadership in other departments, is, um, it's a little bit of a be careful what you wish for scenario, because my experience anyway has been that if I show up and I ask someone about their segment of the business and about the detailed information there, they will tell you. And so you really have to you know if you have the capacity for that much information and holding it and storing it and keeping it organized somewhere in your brain or elsewhere.
Colin Flanigan:I do think it's worth doing. And I think that's where you know. It's almost like we're talking through a journey, right you come in, you learn the basics of the business, and then you learn the whole of the customer experience and then you learn the whole of the experience of the customer team. Having done that and putting yourself in a position to maintain that knowledge in an active way, you can then kind of sort of branch out and see what else there is and start bringing more knowledge and more depth.
Colin Flanigan:But it really is. It's like skipping. I feel like what you wind up doing.
Charlotte Ward:I can see that. I think also it's a massive growth for you as an individual, though, and I think those opportunities they come somewhat organically in smaller businesses, but I think also, if you can for want of a better word kind of engineer or create those opportunities by like starting with the customer and taking it back into you know, like the, the knowledge of how we engage with customers and how our customers engage with the product, because we see it on the front line in support, like I don't think it's a bad thing.
Colin Flanigan:I'm not suggesting like we have to like learn every functional part of the business to the nth degree, but I think it really helps to understand how things um click together ultimately yeah, well, and it's, it's not a bad way to grow, uh, healthy, um, cross-functional relationships either, because you know there's really there's not a better way, uh, I have found, to communicate to engineers, for example, that I care about them and the work that they're doing, than to ask them how something works and for them to explain it to me in the way that they want to, which is really going to depend on the engineer that you're speaking with, because some of them will say, oh well, the way that I want to explain this to you is not at all, and then you say, okay, well, great, that's, that's fine, um, but again, often I think, what?
Colin Flanigan:What you'll find is that, um, they will, they will do their best to help you understand, uh, what it is you're you're asking about, um, so well, I'm, I, I'm sure I have a question for you then. Um, where do, where do the limits fall? Where do the diminishing returns on this process?
Charlotte Ward:oh, wow, for you yeah, that's a really good question, um, I mean, I think I think that, um, that if we're talking about depth, like how deep will I dive with my team? I think it depends on the scale of the issue, and I know that's a bit of a cop-out answer, but I think you come in and you have to learn enough to get up and running, and then I think the big problems like in the early days of your time at an organization, the big problems surface very quickly, don't they? You'll come in with your polished 30, 60, 90 plan and then, day three, you throw that out. Right, let's just accept that for what it is, yeah exactly.
Charlotte Ward:Throw that out, actually get to the big problems quick, because there are going to be some that surface themselves really quickly. And then I think I think your, your language is right it's like diminishing returns over time and I think I think, um, am I going? Is my time valuably spent shaving, like helping my team shave two minutes off of the investigation time for this thing that we see once a month, like probably not, um, but the the thing that I think we all know about. You know a certain scale of companies, that things change all the time, so those big problems just bubble up all the time or they're more complex than you ever thought they would be. So what looks on a surface like it might take you a month to, kind of, and a conversation with a couple of teams like, oh, you just need an engineer and a product manager in a room, you could probably fix this right. And then six months later you're still kind of wrangling all the dependencies.
Charlotte Ward:I can tell you recognize this right, right, right, I can tell you recognize this right. So, yeah, so the diminishing returns are definitely there, but I think that there's there's always problems to be solved and I think, particularly from my point of view, like working across the business has, has made things immeasurably more interesting for me, immeasurably more interesting for me, immeasurably more beneficial for my team and my customers. And it is a cycle that I think most organizations will repeat in their early stage, possibly for years, right as the product evolves quickly, as the organization flexes and grows and shrinks and reinvents itself. I think that's startup land and I think that many organizations out there go through those cycles. So I think in that kind of organization, I think it has a long life, you know to have to keep reinventing it because the organization keeps reinventing itself In bigger.
Charlotte Ward:You know, I've done the kind of corporate as well, head of a, you know, a product support division within a much bigger support organization and I think it was harder to um keep engaged, you know. I think you know when you're leading one thing, even if that's a relatively complex product inside a big organization, I think that it's all about. I think it becomes much more quickly about escalations and, like your team, your team are handling and it's a smooth, there's a smooth, well-oiled machine to get product features and bugs like thrown to the to you know, to the upstream teams. Know, to the upstream teams, um, and you probably haven't got a great deal of you know a great many other levers that you can pull to make things massively better, and and I I mean for me right now that's much less interesting yeah, yeah, I think I think that that's that's true at a, at a much larger organization, the, the scope of um.
Colin Flanigan:It's not that you're not going to go deeper, uh, in your, your knowledge of your area, but it's just a.
Colin Flanigan:It's a, it's a smaller pool uh, so to speak, I think, um, so the the boundaries of your range are are tighter, um, I think another thing too that jumps out at me usually when I start to sense that those diminishing returns on expanding knowledge is, I mean, an easy one, is you just start forgetting simple things, which is never good. But I think the other is that you know, if you're a conscientious leader, you will notice that other people start missing out on opportunities to grow their knowledge and grow their influence and grow their role, and so at a certain point I think you have to kind of say like, okay, it's not me anymore for this. You know this vector or this problem or this thing. It needs to be so and so on. My team, um, and you sort of like give up that chunk of knowledge for them to own and just sort of keep you informed on yeah, I, I think that's absolutely true.
Charlotte Ward:I think, um, you know, I think it's quite damaging, uh, to both you and your team if you don't get good at delegating. And delegating includes delegating the management of that knowledge in other people's heads right, or in other people's documents, or whatever, or process artifacts, or whatever. And I think, yeah, you have to get good at delegating, that's for sure. How else are you ever going to free up space in your head to do anything else if you're still trying to do everything?
Colin Flanigan:um, yes, yeah well, and yet isn't that the mistake we see many, many people making over and over and over? Is is trying to keep that sort of vice grip on. Yeah, really, information, uh, is, I think, what it what it winds up being yeah, yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right.
Charlotte Ward:you're absolutely right. You've got to let go of some things for sure. Yeah, well, thank you so much, colin. This has been an interesting conversation. Uh, I knew that there was going to be a lot to unpick. I felt like when I started this, it'd just be like yeah, I think one thing, you think another thing, but there are lots of nuances to it, aren't there? And I think that there is no right answer, and I think the final thing is just that as much of this depends on your personality as well as anything else, like how comfortable you are with that delegating and, yeah, creating space for everyone to to grow and build the expertise on what they can and should be delivering for their organization and their teams, right, and their customers. So, yeah, yeah.
Colin Flanigan:Yeah, well, and that's the true goalpost right If you're, if you're, delivering well for customers and you're leading effectively and you've you've probably gone deep enough deep enough.
Charlotte Ward:Yeah, yeah, I think you've earned your weekend by that point indeed. Thank you so much for joining me what a super conversation and we come back and have another chat another time I would love to awesome. I look forward to it. Thank you so much. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaderscom. Forward slash 267 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.