By Randy Miller, Director of Services, Journyx

You have some people on your technical support team today, and they might be doing a decent job, but I can assure you that they aren’t the people you need in order to reach new heights.  Don’t worry about tackling this problem—it should resolve itself for you through natural turnover.  Instead, spend your time and energy on improving both your hiring process (for the next time around) and your management style. 

Who to Hire

Hiring is a major decision because you will be getting the technical skills, personality quirks, emotional stability, and overall attitude of each person.  The goal is also to maintain long-term staff (more on this later), so you will want to live with the consequences of your selections for a long time.  Consequently, spend some time thinking about what you really need in a support person. 

The first step in this process is to create a list of the minimum technical skills you want your new team to have.  You can then prioritize that list and decide which skills will apply to which position.  Skills may include:

• Operating system, database and specific application knowledge
• Problem-solving skills
• Phone presence
• Spelling and grammar skills

You should also think about what character traits you want your team to have.  Here are some important ones for technical support staff:

1.       Trainability

Some people learn faster than others and fortunately you can test a candidate for this during an interview.  Find a few puzzles that build upon each other in complexity, show the first to your candidate, and then ask him/her to solve the second one.  Can this person apply the information under pressure?  If not, he/she is probably the wrong person for your team.

2.       Responsibility

Your team members will constantly be taking care of other people’s problems, so they need to have a strong sense of responsibility.  This is easy to determine—look for people who take responsibility in their personal lives.  This can be gauged by asking questions about one’s connections to family, or even how they are paying back their student loans.  

3.       Empathy

We once hired a management consultant to help us figure out how to cut costs.  She was dubious about one of my technical support people, so she chose to sit at a desk where she could hear him doing support.  After a few weeks she revised her opinion, saying, “The angrier and more frustrated the customer gets, the more he communicates, ‘I understand your frustration.’”  Empathy.

I usually ask a candidate’s references, “Would you describe this person as empathetic?”  If you want to get candidates to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test, you will find that the ‘F’ personality types tend to be more empathetic than others.  I didn’t give my people personality tests until after they were hired, but as it turns out, all of them are ‘F’s.  My wife also happens to be an ‘F’.  What does that say about me?  In part, it says that I’m an INTJ, and I over-analyze everything.

4.       Logic

Logical support people have the ability to approach a tricky system with the assumption that somehow it all makes sense.  That is very important, so I test for logic during all of my interviews.  All you have to do is find a few logic puzzles online and make them multiple-choice.  Give them to the candidate and let them work on them for five minutes before going over it.  See how they do before you consider hiring them.

5.       Curiosity

Working in technical support is essentially solving a long series of rational problems.  Sometimes, however, the problems aren’t so rational.  A person who is naturally curious will be much more diligent in searching for solutions than someone who is not.  In interviews, I ask about hobbies to find out if a person is curious.  Curious people tend to have active hobbies (e.g. building things, learning how various systems work, etc.). 

6.       Character

Imagine that you are going on a long vacation, and the person you are interviewing is a friend of yours.  Would you trust this person to take care of all of your personal business while you are gone—feed your pets, get your mail, water your plants, pay your bills?  If not, don’t hire them.

Management 101

Hiring is important for getting the right people in the first place, and management is important for both keeping them and helping them be successful.  Here are some key things to address in your management plan:

Proper Training

Just imagine trying to do technical support on systems that you aren’t trained on.  “No ma’am, I don’t know how that is supposed to work.”  This is why proper training of new staff is extremely important.  In addition, your current staff are probably under-trained.  As you reinvent your technical support processes, get real product training scheduled for their first few days.  And make ongoing training—especially around new releases—a priority. 

Note that you are going not going to be able to train people on the exact problems they will need to solve.  Don’t put them into entirely unfamiliar systems and ask them to demonstrate proficiency quickly.  Be reasonable and realistic when you train. 

Goals and Boundaries

Goals are easy.  Make them SMART.  (SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely.  Do a search on ‘SMART’ goals if you need help—it’s an article series by itself.)

Boundaries are a bit more complicated.  People need to know what they can promise on behalf of the company and what they cannot.  It frees them from guesswork and hesitation, as well as responsibility for the tough decisions.  My father, who worked in the contracts department of a large company, knew exactly how much money his signature could vouch for.  That is an example of a well-set boundary, in my opinion.

Communication

Someone once told me that a manager’s job is to help people do their jobs better.  I take that to mean that I am the one-man technical support team enablement department.  Every member of your technical support team will need help and advice, and they have to know that your door is always open.  Not only that, but you should also try to be proactive in your leadership, rather than wait for them to call with problems. 

Performance Reviews

Everybody needs to know how they are doing, which is why your staff will benefit from performance reviews.  If you want to keep your people long-term, and you do, then you will also need to have a job growth plan in place. 

Holding regular team meetings will allow you to review the performance of the team as a group.  For example, each team member might be burning through cases twice as fast, but if the incoming case load has tripled, the team has a problem.  Everyone needs to be aware of this dynamic and understand how the team is doing on the whole.  If there is a problem, I usually approach it without assigning blame.  “I was thinking about this process, and I’m not sure that we’re really following it like we should be.  I’m also not sure that it’s the best process.  Let’s discuss the process—why it is the way it is, why we don’t follow it when we don’t, and how we might improve it.”  Letting the whole team participate in such discussions will provide you with significant insight and suggestions that will benefit your department in the long run.

Trusting Your Staff

The point will come when you just have to trust your people to do their jobs.  This gives them a sense of self-confidence that will ultimately improve their performance, so go get a hobby.  Do whatever it takes to allow yourself to stand back and let the magic work.

Keeping Morale Up

Your team will have plenty of reasons for morale to drop, considering the anger and frustration they will deal with day in and day out.  For this reason, you need to do small things for them to keep them happy.  For example, my team gets lunch more often than any other department in the company, and when a customer compliments them, I ask them to email it to the entire company.

For the Long Haul

A management style like this one will help you maintain good retention, especially when combined with other standard retention tactics such as raises, bonuses, promotions and vacation time.  Retention is much more important in a good technical support team than anywhere else because much of technical support deals with fringe features and low-level problems that can never be fully documented and trained.  Good technical support people just recognize, “This problem looks similar to that other problem that I ran into 3 years ago.”  You can’t train a new person to remember what the last person fixed 3 years ago.  I would much rather pay more and do more with my current people than have to deal with hiring and training someone new.  The overhead costs and ramp-up time are just too big to overcome if you have poor retention.  (Just don’t tell my team I said that.)

Check back next month for Part 3 of this series, which will cover reorganizing and rolling out your new technical support team.