Customer Support Leaders
Customer Support Leaders
From The Archives: 41: Careers in Support with Matt Dale
From The Archives: Careers in Support
Discover the secrets of building a thriving career in the customer support industry as Matt Dale joins me to unravel the multitude of paths available for support team members. From nurturing the journey of an individual contributor to embracing leadership roles or exploring new arenas like QA and customer satisfaction, this episode promises to equip you with the insights to chart your career course. Matt shares an inspiring story of a team member's dream of becoming a developer and how the support culture facilitated their transition to QA, highlighting the importance of fostering a supportive environment for growth and transformation.
Join us as we tackle the challenges of retaining skilled individuals and nurturing talent, viewing support teams as a valuable "farm team" for the organization. Matt emphasizes the significance of open communication and personalized development plans during one-on-one sessions, providing listeners with actionable strategies to manage career trajectories effectively. Whether you're a leader seeking to retain talent or a professional aiming to grow within your support role, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights that you won't want to miss.
Hello, welcome to the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today we're listening to one of my favourite episodes from the archives. Today I'd like to welcome back Matt Dale. Matt, the topic for this week is career progression in support and I'd love to know how you manage that.
Matt Dale:Yeah, I think this is a. It's a topic that comes up regularly on our team. People are always asking what is what is you know support trajectory look like? And basically we kind of have a couple different paths. The first is to progress in, in in support, moving up as an individual contributor to kind of an expert level.
Matt Dale:One of our products is a special ed product, mostly used in the state of Michigan, and the support person we have on that team special ed product, mostly used in the state of Michigan, and the support person we have on that team. She's amazing. She handles all the support issues and she wrote a lot of the stuff that ended up being used in our system. So she's an expert in that area. She's a team of one and she's completely self-sufficient, and so for some people they could say, hey, I want to be like she is and I want to grow and become an expert.
Matt Dale:I don't want to lead people and I don't want to leave support. I want to be on support but I just want to be an expert in my field, and so that's one path. The second path would be to move into leadership and then the final path is actually off support. So in our company support is one of the farm teams that is, we bring people in, we train them and then after a year or two they know our products, they know our customers and they're a great transition into a role in QA or to help our customer satisfaction team in doing some backend stuff or even out in front of the customers, and so we've had a lot of people that you know. If you're interested in sales, make friends with the sales team and connect with them.
Charlotte Ward:How active are you in that process? If someone expresses an interest in being a salesperson or moving to QA or whatever, it varies a little bit.
Matt Dale:Typically we say have a conversation with your team lead. So when we were smaller and I was having the one-on-ones with all the frontline agents, I was very active in the sense that, hey, we had one person who wanted to be a developer really bad and it's like okay, let's see if we can connect you some of the development people, let's see if we can get you, let's cherry's, some coursework that we'd love you to take. And you know, over a course of about a year and a half he worked really hard to progress in that area. In his case, ultimately it didn't work out. He ended up getting married. He got life, got got busy as it is, it sometimes does. But because of the things that he'd done when we were starting up our QA team and looking for people like hey, we'd really like him. It was a perfect transition point. He moved from support to QA and it worked really well.
Matt Dale:We always encourage people in the one-on-ones to say, hey, this is where I'd like to go, or this is what I'm interested in, and then work with them to kind of guide their path. So it's a little bit of both. We want to make sure that we're open to that. We want to make sure that they have what they need to succeed, but putting the effort in, then if they're not taking advantage of the opportunities that are available, they're not making those connections with people and developing the skills that are needed, then it's not a guaranteed like oh well, I've been here for five years, so I get to move to this role.
Charlotte Ward:You described support as a farm team there for the rest of the organization. That's pretty common, right. I mean sometimes intentionally, support is really entry level in some organizations and I think a lot depends on geography and culture and industry and everything. There are a lot of variables that play there, but certainly I have been in organizations where it was a real fight to keep people. Particularly when you have a big learning curve for a product set, that's quite disheartening to see people want to move on as soon as they've learned the product. How do you view that? Do you try and retain good people that have had, frankly, significant investment, and I mean there is. I've always struggled with that balance of wanting to keep the good people but also allowing them to grow. I find that a really difficult internal battle every time I come up into that situation. How do you deal with that?
Matt Dale:We are one of those companies that has a pretty steep learning curve. We kind of joke that for the first six months as a new support agent you're basically useless and we're OK with that. And so in our interview process we always go through and talk and say, look, you know, where do you see yourself in five years? And then also have a frank conversation like, look, this is a complex product. The first year we're investing in you. The second year we kind of expect you to be reinvesting in the team. So that's when you're giving back, that's when you're helping the next group of people come on board. So really, if you're saying, hey, I'm getting in this to open the door to a new job in the company, that's not really going to happen for at least the first year and likely, you know, at least probably the second year as well. Through that time we'll help coach you, we'll help get you plugged in so that you can be positioned well when the jobs open up with the other teams. You know, helping people up front go hey, this is what you're kind of signing up for and this is what we're expecting. It has been really helpful for us.
Matt Dale:The other thing that you kind of mentioned there was, you know, losing good people. When I first started out in this role, it was really hard, because you get this awesome person and then they get pulled off by someone else and now they're over on development Darn it, like they were doing great work. Kind of heartbreaking, isn't it? Yeah, it was heartbreaking and I kind of had to come to grips with. This is my role. This is the role in the company. We've set this team up in such a way that we can provide really, really qualified candidates to some of these other teams and so on product management, who's going to know the product better than someone that's been supporting it for a couple of years and has done a really great job in that?
Matt Dale:I need to be okay with that and I need to have my processes as a manager of a support team set up so that I've got a healthy flow of people coming in every year.
Matt Dale:I've got a good process to onboard and train them as quickly, as efficiently, as possible. I've got good ways to do quality assurance as they're going through the process so that I know that they're doing good work and I can help them improve in their abilities quickly. And then I need to be ready when they're ready to move on whenever they hit their shelf life. If they want to stay here forever, I'm good with that, but if they're like, hey, I'm ready to move on in a couple years, I want to honor them and honor the time they've spent with our team, help them move into an appropriate role, but also not cut our team off at the knees. And so I think that takes some planning and, as a leader, just going okay, like I'm okay with that now. For a while I used to struggle a lot Wow man, they just took this person, and now I'm like that's how we set it up.
Charlotte Ward:That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaderscom. Forward. Slash 41 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.