Customer Support Leaders
Customer Support Leaders
271: Mastering Incident Management - Part 3 of 6; with Kat Gaines
What makes a Customer Liaison Officer indispensable during incident management? Join us as we tap into the expertise of Kat Gaines, who shares her invaluable experience and detailed examples to illuminate the crucial responsibilities of this role. Discover how effectively bridging the communication gap between incident response teams and customer-facing staff can transform your incident response strategy. Kat delves into the art of aggregating customer-reported issues and managing internal expectations, revealing why sticking to standard processes just won't cut it during high-stress incidents.
Beyond the basics, we explore the nuanced tasks of real-time decision documentation and post-incident action auditing, essential for thorough reviews and continuous improvement. Kat also brings to light the often-overlooked mental health challenges in customer support roles, the pitfalls of heroism culture, and the necessity of setting clear boundaries to prevent burnout. Tune in for leadership strategies that foster a supportive and effective environment, catering to diverse work styles and ensuring your team remains resilient in the face of stress. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to incident management, this episode promises to enhance your understanding and capability in handling high-pressure situations.
I'd love your thoughts on this episode! Comment below, and like/love/share/support if you found this inspiring, thought-provoking, or useful!
Hello and welcome to Episode 271 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward Today. Welcome Kat Gaines in Part 3 of a six-part series on incident management.
Kat Gaines:I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today Kat Gaines. Kat, so much fun on our last couple of recordings. Thank you so much for spending that time with me. Um, we're back here for episode three in the six-part series on incident management, aren't we? Uh, so I, more fun abounds and more, uh, very telling tales, very carefully told tales, I would imagine as well, and uh, but, but like lots of experience, uh, particularly from you, you live and breathe incident management every day, one way or another, either in your role or because it's your role to talk about it, right? And so how about a quick hello and we'll dive into episode three's topic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I am really happy to be back. I am excited for us to keep rolling on with this series. I think that I was reviewing our plan today and I'm so excited about both today and the next couple of things that we're going to really deep dive and get juicy into. So, listeners, strap in, we're going for a ride.
Kat Gaines:We certainly are, we certainly are. So today we're talking about customer liaison, which is a word that I guess you know. We talked a little while ago about the roles in that kind of tree or that hub that surround or sit below, or supportive of the incident commander, I guess, whichever way you view that visual right. But so customer liaison is one of those roles and we're going to deep dive into it. Right, we are Awesome. So what does a customer liaison officer do? There's a simple question up front what the heck, what the heck is this role?
Speaker 3:What is this? What are we doing? So we talked about it a little bit in our last episodes but just to kind of refresh our audience, it's one of the many rules that you'll have in incident response. While something is happening, something is going not to plan, your customers are going to have questions, feelings, thoughts, etc. And someone has to manage those.
Speaker 3:And obviously it's very easy to say, oh well, we already have customer-facing staff, we have a customer service team, we have success, we have sales folks.
Speaker 3:These folks all have great relationships with our customers, so we don't need to do anything special in incident response, right, no wrong, you do need someone who's a dedicated contact on both sides, both for the incident response team, the rest of the folks handling the incident in the moment the incident commander, subject matter experts and so on. And for the other side, I'm doing a lot of hand stuff which I realize our listeners aren't going to see. That's okay. But just imagine, folks, that I have two hands and I'm holding them up. Probably not hard to imagine. But for the other side, they're also managing not just your customers. They're not solely responsible for the management of what customers are experiencing during the incident themselves, but they're managing some of the communication and they're also helping manage expectations inside the org for other customer facing staff. So all those folks I listed a minute ago sales, customer success, the rest of the customer service team we've probably got more folks. They can help them understand a little bit what's going on there.
Kat Gaines:So is this first and primarily a communications role? Would that be fair?
Speaker 3:It is very much a communications role. I think what we teach is there are a few core components to what this role is. So the first of those components is just kind of aggregation understanding what is going on in the moment itself and aggregating customer reported issues.
Speaker 3:So the rest of the CS team is going to be getting probably reports of what's going on and it's ongoing and, of course, the engineering team or other folks who are managing the incident are going to have some understanding of what customers are seeing.
Speaker 3:They're not always going to see the full set of symptoms, and so what your customer service team can do is they can aggregate that data that they're hearing from reports from customers. So, for example, you might have geographic aggregation, knowing where your customers are located that you're seeing issues from. You might have some data partitioning. You might see increased reports of issues for customers in maybe a certain set of account numbers, for example. Or it might be product versioning. That's especially common on, for example, mobile apps, where there are often new versions going out where maybe okay, it's this version of the latest app, or people using a different operating system particularly are seeing this issue. Or it might even be things like feature partitioning If you have customers with access to some features that not all customers have access to, maybe it's causing some sort of weird side bucks. So that aggregation and visibility is one piece Prioritization.
Kat Gaines:I just want to dive into that because I think I had never really I'm going to dive into so much on this session. I can tell, just give me take a beat so that you can give me time to dive in On that. I mean, it never really occurred to me that those responsibilities would fall outside of, or potentially fall outside of, BAU. You, you know, within the context of an incident, so most like, let's say, software organizations. This is a nice simple example that we're both familiar with. Um, most software organizations of a certain maturity have mature product process. They have mature aggregation across you know, different customer segments. That feeds into, you know, the CS team or whatever. Right, there's different views on what is essentially this kind of VOC data. I guess that is taken care of by every other part of your business and the processes that sit and allow you to pull that VOC out of your help center, out of your socials or whatever, and perform that aggregation as part of BAU. So why don't we just rely on BAU in an incident?
Speaker 3:Because we can try to be perfect and it's an unreasonable expectation, and I'm saying this as a recovery perfectionist.
Speaker 3:You can try as hard as you want and you will spin your wheels and burn yourself out. So we can think that we have all of the monitoring for these things and we know our data backward and frontward right, and that we fully understand what's going on with our customers. We have so much insight. The first thing I'd say is that anyone who really says that about their team is lying, because there's always mystery to be uncovered in those things. And the second is that, even if you truly feel that way, again your customers are going to surprise you. Issues that cause incidents are going to surprise you where you might think it's related to one part of the product and then, way over here, it's for some reason causing a symptom with a different part of the product, and your monitoring might not be looking for that, or the team looking at the incident might not be looking for that, because they're saying well, it's over on this other side, so I don't even need to bother with that.
Speaker 3:So those customer reports become this really rich data that you can get all of that info out of and help you just get to resolution faster. Because now you know and understand the scope of the issue a little bit better, because you see those symptoms that are going to surprise you.
Kat Gaines:I think that sums it up really. I think a couple of things you pulled out there are really key. By their very nature, incidents are, as we established in part, one of this series. They are the unexpected, they are the unplanned, and so BAU isn't necessarily built for them anyway.
Speaker 3:No, not at all. That's built for them anyway no not at all that's built for your day-to-day work and things running as normal, and this is a very abnormal state of being for everyone involved yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely interesting.
Kat Gaines:I would have just assumed that all of that would happen or it would be the responsibility of someone like the incident man, uh commander, or the engineering team or the product team or something in the moment. But this makes sense, it makes sense. So you said that was kind of the primary, or at least the first part of the responsibilities as the customer liaison.
Speaker 3:It's one of a few responsibilities we have. So our next one is thinking about prioritization and thinking about SLAs, and when I'm saying SLAs here, I tend to talk about SLAs a lot in the context of customer support and response SLAs, just because that's been my world for a long time. Right, I'm actually talking about multiple kinds of SLAs here. You may have that response-based customer support SLA, where you have to get back to people within a certain time, but then it may also be a service deliverability or availability SLA. That's a contract you have with your customers.
Kat Gaines:Up time or that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Exactly an up time. Both of those kinds of SLAs are going to have potentially different tiers where for a lower tier of customer who maybe isn't paying as much for a premium plan, you have a little bit more lenient of an SLA for them. And then you may have folks who are paying up into a plan where they say either faster responses or extreme uptime are important to us and so their contract has some more stringent guidelines around SLAs written into it. Usually your incident commanders aren't going to be very funnily attuned to what those SLAs are for your different customers.
Kat Gaines:Very true.
Speaker 3:Right. They might be coming from engineering, from product, maybe from customer-facing teams. I think I said this maybe in our first episode. They can come from any part of the org, but it's very likely that they aren't going to be people who are very familiar with that. However, your customer facing teams kind of live and breathe in that.
Speaker 3:Back when I was running customer support at PagerDuty, we had to directly design our SLAs for what we were doing and we had to have the whole process with legal and going through and making sure we had the right terms in place, making sure we got it in the right places on the website for the general stuff, and then figure it out where it went in contracts for people who bought up into that higher tier of plan right. Usually your customer facing folks are concerned with what do customers expect, and so contractual agreements like that play into it, and so there might be a moment in an incident where, for example, you know that you can restore a specific set of services first and maybe that will maintain an SLA for either a specific customer or a category of customers, and so your team for customer service can help advise on if that would be the case and if that might be helpful in terms of directing the incident. So now, not only are they communicating and providing data, but they're also helping shape the direction of the response itself in the interest of preserving customer relationships and ensuring that when you're going back and reviewing later that there isn't this surprise of well, why didn't you do this thing? Because X customer expects Y thing? Well, you did because customer service was there to tell you what X customer is expecting.
Speaker 3:You can also talk about things like escalation or increasing severity based on, again, the data that they're getting from those customer tickets and that intelligence. So that's another thing where maybe you can't see the customer impact on the back end and the monitoring. It might not be appearing in quite the same way, but if you're getting that data from tickets that you know what, there are actually way more people affected and I've seen this happen. There are way more people affected than our monitoring is telling us. Then maybe we need to increase the severity level for this incident and, in turn, the response increases in terms of how many people we have on it, how quickly we're trying to figure it out, etc.
Kat Gaines:I've got a bit of a question. It's a bit of an off-beam question, but something has just occurred to me, because you're talking about the why of some of these things and the reasoning and the decisions being made in some of these roles, and in this case we're talking about customer liaison. How do these reasons? Obviously, the timeline is one thing that is maintained by incident commander and scribe, as we talked about a couple of episodes ago. But how are the decisions that may be being made in another room? How are they reflected back in the auditing of this incident in the scribing as it runs real time?
Speaker 3:Ah yeah. So if it's happening in the incident call itself, it should be coming into the scribing. If it's happening a little bit outside, you might end up addressing that a little bit more during the review, where there's context that has to be added.
Speaker 3:So the scribe is going to try and capture everything they can that they see and hear is happening during the incident. There might be a side conversation that maybe that customer service liaison is having with other folks on the customer service team or with customer success, helping inform the guidance that they're bringing back to the call, helping inform the guidance that they're bringing back to the call. Ideally, when they bring that guidance back to the call they should still give a little bit of that reasoning, just for context.
Kat Gaines:Right yeah.
Speaker 3:But that full context I think you're right is probably going to be missed, and so that's going to actually come back a little bit more in your incident review, your post-mortem, your post-incident follow-up, whatever you call it in your org. That's kind of where that's going to play in.
Speaker 3:So there is a little bit of extra responsibility potentially incumbent on these roles, on the liaisons and the engineering officers and all the other surrounding roles that we're going to talk about in auditing their own actions and decisions if it happens outside of the incident room absolutely communicate as much as you can in the incident call itself, but if you know there's something happening that doesn't really deserve attention in the call while everyone's scrambling to fix what's wrong, uh, just make a note of it for yourself and note things like time stamps, be exact about how something was communicated, where, even if it feels like you're getting over detailed, it's very helpful to talk about whether this was a conversation that was had in person or over Slack or over a call and so on and just try to write down the details that you can that are supporting the decisions you're making or the data that you're bringing back to the call, so that when you come to that review, when everything's calm, you can provide a full story around what happened and what informed your decision making and therefore just increase your team's ability to trust that you're on top of it in those moments.
Kat Gaines:Yeah yeah, that makes complete sense. So we've got aggregation prioritization. That's it. I mean that sounds already like a full-time job to me. What else does customer liaison do?
Speaker 3:So we talked a little bit about one of them already. We're talking about that post-incident follow-up. That's kind of what it looks like ensuring that you have that data and that you're bringing that into that incident review conversation. So, whether it's like we were just talking about extra side things that are happening or just additional information or things that you did communicate fully in the incident call, but you just want to highlight during the incident review to say, hey, this was either something that was really rough on the team or customers, or maybe this is something that went exceptionally well, it is important to talk about things that went well during incidents, during reviews, just as much as it's important to talk about what went wrong.
Speaker 3:I think we focus on the negative a lot in these spaces, but if it's like, hey, this person really helped me out or you know what, I had a stellar time getting through this process because our documentation is so tight that I knew exactly what to do, those things are worth that time in the review. Things are calm. You have the time now to talk about those smaller things, and so give people their flowers If they did something really well in the moment. Talk about parts of the process that are going well, just as much as parts that were issues. That's one of the. We've covered three things now and there's one more piece.
Kat Gaines:It's a biggie, isn't it? I feel I know what's coming. Yeah, I feel like I know what's coming. It's a biggie, isn't it? I feel I know what's coming. I feel like I know what's coming.
Speaker 3:It's the spoiler alert I think anyone who's ever talked to me probably knows what's coming. It's the communication side.
Speaker 3:So, it's the primary role, it's the fact that you are the customer liaison by nature. Your job and your day job and your job in this role is communicating with customers, also communicating with those internal stakeholders I mentioned those a little bit in the beginning of our conversation and we can't forget that those people need just as much communication. Often they'll be the first people that you communicate with as a customer liaison, so that, even if you don't quite hit the threshold for public communication, your internal folks know what's happening, they know what messaging to use. We're going to get into this in extreme detail in another episode.
Speaker 3:But that's the long and short of it. That that's the primary responsibility. I hesitate almost to call it that because those other three components are also wildly important, are also wildly important, but it's usually if a team is just spitting up their incident response process, it's the first thing they're going to focus on. For the customer liaison.
Kat Gaines:It drives so much and it's so crucial and, I think, the internal stakeholders as customers we touched on this a little bit but more than just support, more than just your customer facing folks, everyone who could potentially be required to communicate anything about this incident outside of the organization, at the very least, right, somebody is going to leave a social post. Potentially, somebody is going to pick up, pick up the sales line and start speaking to a salesperson as this is rolling in the background. You know, I mean fingers crossed, you don't ever get to an incident that's, that's that big, but it does happen.
Kat Gaines:It does happen you need folks to be prepped, yeah yeah, it does yeah yeah yeah, um, so, is there any? So that's lots of things that the customer liaison is. Is there anything that the customer liaison is? Is there anything that the customer liaison most definitely is not? I'm going to say they're definitely not, although they could be wearing multiple hats, but they're not the instant commander, unless you happen to be, as we've discussed before, so many hats at the same time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the roles are separate right, yeah, yeah, if you're wearing that many hats, um try to take a hat or two off and hand it to someone else that's a lot of hats to be wearing.
Speaker 3:It gets heavy, you know, um, but there are so many things actually that they're not. So I think the first thing that they're not, you hit the nail on the head the incident commander. They're not making ultimate decisions, um. The next thing that they usually shouldn't be is a subject matter expert, and you run into kind of funny territory with that.
Speaker 3:Sometimes, let's say it's an incident that where the cause was something that a support team member was doing, then you need to get that support team member on the call. They need to be the subject matter expert for what's happening. And then you need a separate customer liaison to manage communications, and it might be really tempting to just like combine those two and save resources, have folks in the queue, but it's still so important to separate that out because that subject matter expert has to be answering for information about what happened. They need to be potentially taking remedial steps at that point. Anything a subject matter expert from any other team would do, and so having that separate customer liaison is still pretty key. Something else that they're not they are not someone to kind of answer the whims of anyone who asks them to do something outside of the incident call. So oh wow, yeah, we've all been there, hey, could you just tell this customer, could you just do?
Kat Gaines:asks them to do something outside of the incident call. So oh, wow, yeah, we've all been there. Hey, could you just tell this customer could you just do this Could?
Speaker 3:you, just I'm actually let's see we are.
Speaker 3:We're recording this on May 8th and it's going to come out after this event, but I'm delivering this talk at the support driven conference next week called staying in your lane incident response for leadership, and it is spoiler alert about how to not do things that derail incidents, and so this is something that is often put on the customer liaison, where someone who is either in their direct line of management or leadership from another part of the organization, even executive leadership might see oh, this person is communicating, let me tell them what to do, and jump in and start kind of meddling and directing either parts of the communication or, in worst cases, we call it I think we talked about, did we talk about this on a previous episode we call it executive swoop and poop yes, I love that.
Kat Gaines:I've already used that. I've already used that so many times.
Speaker 3:We did good, when they'll try to come in and direct the incident, and so we talked, I think, about the incident commander having the ability to tell that person hey, do you want to take over the call? You want my job? And usually they're going to say no. The communications or the customer liaison can say the exact same thing. Okay, cool, Do you want to do this? They probably don't. They probably want to get back to whatever they were doing and that's a good reminder for them that, oh, we do have this process.
Speaker 3:This person is in charge of this for a reason. I will say there are probably a couple of exceptions to that. Let's say you have someone very new who's playing the role of customer liaison for the first time. Ideally, they should have ramped up a little bit by shadowing one of their peers doing it previously on other incident calls, and it shouldn't be their first jump into it if they're new. But if you were their direct manager or if your peer on the team which I would say is probably better then if you see that they are a little bit stuck or if they're potentially going the wrong direction with communication, you can gently nudge them back in the right direction. I explicitly said direct manager, because don't try to skip level these things.
Speaker 3:If let's say, for example, let's say that you have a customer support structure and you have a VP of support, a director of support and a line manager, and then you have the customer liaison who reports into that line manager. That VP shouldn't be nudging that customer liaison who's working on it. They should be passing the feedback down the chain just a little bit and letting them directly get it from the person they have an established relationship with and trust and know how to hopefully set some boundaries with by this point as well. Um, because if you're intimidated and you're like, oh, this vp is just telling me to do this thing, you're going to panic and just do it, and then you'll have to address that in the incident review as well yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Kat Gaines:actually, it's really important and I mean this this is the derailing, this is the potential derailing, isn't it that you talked about the executive swoop and poop?
Kat Gaines:Um is, uh, whether we're talking about, uh, a direct like skip leveling or or somebody else just feels they've got a better opinion, a better take on something, because they're probably because they're the sme, you know, and I mean you know, I can think of um situations where it might be that the engineers were saying I don't think we should say that, maybe we could say this.
Kat Gaines:And you know, and it's like I think it's important to say, I understand, as the customer liaison, what we're trying to tell customers, what we should be telling customers, and and I may even have a team working around me to figure that out you may be, as you said, you're working very closely with customer support, customer success, potentially other people like it's already the responsibility of at least you and probably several other people. And it has to be a liaison, not somebody who just feels they know more actually, because exactly the subject the customer liaison is a subject matter expert in a different way as much as all of your subject matter experts, right you're a subject matter expert in customers and I think for anyone who's working on a customer facing team, who's listening to, this the.
Speaker 3:The guidance I would provide and what I would almost beg you to do is, if you're in one of these moments and if you're fulfilling this role, step into your authority. I think that can be very hard for us to do in the customer support space.
Speaker 3:There is a lot of trauma there, to be honest, uh in terms of not feeling authoritative and not feeling empowered to have opinions, but you are the expert on who your customers are, how to best talk to them and what their needs are, because you are quite literally talking to them all day, every day. No one, absolutely not a single person in the org, not even the CEO, is more able to provide expertise on who your customers are than you are, and so that can be a very big and scary thing to own, and I think it's one of those things where we tend to feel imposter syndrome and say, well, I'm just a tier one support agent, I don't know anything you do, especially if you spend some time at this company and in this role, you do know your customers very intimately. You have to step into your authority as that person, and you have to be able to set boundaries with people who are trying to push them.
Kat Gaines:So true, so true. So I think I think, have we covered everything? Is there anything? So we've talked about what customer liaison is, what it most definitely is, and how to kind of stay in your lane and own that space. Like how much ownership can you take of that space? We talk about authority. What about you know? Uh, kind of the hero antics that we sometimes see yes, the heroes.
Speaker 3:We all love to be the hero, right? I think that I hope, I feel like we're shifting out of a space where we reward heroism in these moments and that we are shifting out of a space where the person who can take the beating the longest is rewarded the most.
Speaker 3:At the same time, I feel like some companies and some people still operate in that mindset, and so this is another conversation about boundaries, and it's a conversation about having a really tight process again too, because in the moment it can be very easy to say, oh, I'm on this call, I've got it, and then suddenly it's a long running incident. Maybe it's been going on for a couple of hours and you're like man, I'm tired. I haven't moved from this seat except for maybe a bio break for the last couple of hours. I need some water, I need some lunch. Right, there's a lot going through your head. You're starting to get foggy, distracted.
Speaker 3:I'm calling out those states of being, because it's not just about time spent. It's about mental well-being and ability to perform based on that. If you are tiring out, if you're burning out a little bit, you're going to be compromised in how you make decisions and how you provide input. And so it's for not just your sake and I'm saying that because there may be someone who doesn't know yet how to prioritize self-care, so that doesn't resonate with them, but it's for the sake of the rest of your team, and your customers too, that you're protecting them from your burnt out state and you're able to say okay, you know what, I have to hand this off to someone else, and I think, there should be two ways to do that that if someone is burnt out and done and tired, they need to be able to raise their hand and say I'm done, I'm good, either to their manager or to maybe they have a backup on-call person who can just step right in.
Speaker 3:And then the second way is just having some time limits built into team process.
Kat Gaines:Thanks, yuzi, say that again.
Speaker 3:So just having some time limits built into team process, that's the second way. And so you might, for example, say I think I gave an example of two hours a minute ago you might say you know what? That's the limit If you're on call and if you're in an incident for more than two hours, you would have to hand it off to your secondary and then for that person, if they're on call for more than two hours, well, we need to get a third person on the team to jump in. This is where it can be really handy to have process built in and use tools, obviously like PagerDuty, to manage things like escalation paths, where you can say I know exactly who that next person is, who should be on call and who I should tap. Even if you're not using a tool like that, you can just write it down somewhere. It is a zero tooling needed method of doing things to be able to just quickly start this up and say here's who our backups are, here's who's responsible.
Speaker 3:Here's what happens next if this person burns out and just needs a break yeah, yeah, um, it's interesting because I think this is a deeply personal thing.
Kat Gaines:I think you're right that I think we are getting away from the uh, you know the, the hero, the, you know the rock star kind of the person oh, they're just there.
Speaker 3:Oh, that term, I can't stand it. Yeah, gosh, I know right.
Kat Gaines:Um, so I think we are getting away from that culturally across most organizations now, at least as far as I see. But also it is deeply personal, you know. I know that there are people who I know who want to stay in there and are good to stay in there because in a weird way maybe they're a little bit weird like me they like work, they like work, they like work. They kind of find it a bit energizing somehow, even in these hyper kind of aware, hyper reactive states. Um, so, like the, the feeling of accomplishment is something that you want to kind of cling on to. It's a very real thing and I don't think that's necessarily tied with the desire of being a hero. I actually think it's more closely tied with being a support person. Like you want to see the problem through to the end, right, very much so.
Kat Gaines:So and I think I I was just going to chip in with like the question to that then, which is how do you account for? I mean, this is general leadership. Now, how do you, how do you recognize when to say come on, you really need some sleep. How do you, how do you recognize when to say come on, you really need some sleep? How do you, how do you do that for those different states of those different personality types?
Speaker 3:for me, it's been about not tailing it, tailoring it to personality type, so being able to say this is our process. We're sticking to it. Your two hours is up. You know what, charlotte? Your two hours is up. I don't care that you feel like you can do more. Go take a walk around the block, go take a break, go do something for you and then, if you want, you can be the next person after the next two hours. If this is still ongoing, I promise everything you did was really helpful and really great. And you're still going to be involved in the incident review, right? You give them that feeling of like yes, you did accomplish something. You are still going to see the fruits of your labor play out here.
Speaker 3:For folks who they feel like the anxiety because it's tied to performance. Right, when my performance review comes around, I don't want to be seen as having given up. Nope, you just give them the reassurance that I see what you did here. I am so appreciative of it. Please be sure that I am keeping track of these things and I'm writing them down and I'm going to make sure that you get your accolades for working so hard and doing those amazing things. But right now, what I need you to do, even if you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for me.
Speaker 3:If you care about me at all as a person, please go take a little bit of a break, because I need to see you have longevity, rather than work super hard today and then burn out. And I'm saying this there are always going to be exceptions. We can't all define exactly what those are, but sometimes there are moments where you maybe only have one person available, or you know one subject matter, expert for that component in your tech stack or whatever right and in that case you have to just encourage them to take self-care.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, I've seen it be really common I've done this in the past where it's like you know what you were on call or on that incident all day yesterday. Please just take today off as a free day. Don't even log it in your PTO hours. Just take it off. Just go disappear for the day. We've got your back. Or pick another day later this week that you just want to run away for a little while and the rest of us have you covered?
Speaker 3:those types of things you still have to encourage them to just focus on that self-care piece. Make sure that they get the appropriate just mental break from things again, even if they feel like they're good. Make sure they get that appropriate mental break so that yeah the next day the next week. Whatever it is, they come back fully refreshed and they're not still kind of mired in both the adrenaline and the exhaustion of what happened in that incident I.
Kat Gaines:You know, I think that is a uh, a gift that so many leaders forget that they have. You know, so many organizations are resistant or just simply don't have the budget or the structure to give on-call pay or to, you know, completely restructure their HR tooling, for heaven's sake, to allow you to take time off in a certain way, but actually at a certain level. Most leaders are able to give the gift of time and say you know what, tomorrow come in the afternoon, or, like you know you, you'd pulled an all-nighter, I don't expect to see you to the day after tomorrow. Right and and exactly as you just said, like let's go outside of the process and and feel free to do that to support our people. I would love to see more leaders remember that.
Speaker 3:We get so mired in process. We love it so much and it's a leadership just inclination. We're just like, ah, give me that process. I love it, it's my favorite thing, we gobble it up right. But you do have to have that creativity, you have to have that flexibility. You have to lead your team with that human first approach and make those decisions, especially in these moments, with a human first mindset around. If I was this person, what would help me? What would help me honestly just get through it and ensure that I'm coming back refreshed the next day? And that answer probably isn't going to live in the process. If it does. Kudos, you've built an HR process that is beyond what most companies have ever accomplished, I think. But most of the time it's just going to live outside of that and you have to be able to be that flexible, make those decisions and bring them from that human-centered mindset first.
Kat Gaines:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for taking us through customer liaison. That was me thinking it was just about writing emails. Come on, there was so much more to this right. So much, more, so much more. Yeah, awesome. Well, I know that you're coming back, because this was only part three and we've got three more to go Only halfway, only halfway.
Kat Gaines:It's been amazing. Again, thank you so much for joining me, kat. I know you're coming back. I will see you very soon. Part four Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so excited to keep moving.
Charlotte Ward:That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaderscom. Forward. Slash 271 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.