As a new hire here at BrightGauge, I spent the majority of this week shadowing our Support Team. And let me tell you, I can’t believe how important this part of the Onboarding process is! Why doesn’t every company do this? I once worked at a company for several years without ever sitting on a single customer service call. Looking back, that was a giant missed opportunity for gaining insights and perspective.
This can be avoided by implementing a precise onboarding process, which should definitely include spending time with the Support Team.
Well, everything!
The Support Team (aka customer service, aka success, aka helpdesk) is like the central nervous system to any organization: it receives information (like customer’s different wants and needs) and fires it out to different receptors (aka departments), essentially signaling what activity needs to take place next.
It’s not uncommon that when listening to customers, Support will hear an underlying problem that needs improvement. They’ll kick that back to the rest of the company and boom! A great new idea that ultimately drives company growth is born.
The only way to grow your business is to know your customer. And who speaks to customers on a daily basis? The Support Team. Their importance is so obvious.
Spending a week with Support can be a really fast, really effective way to ramp-up and onboard. At some companies, like BrightGauge, there’s a learning curve that comes with figuring out how to use the product or service.
Learn everything about your service and your customer
Any new hire at any new company is going to experience a natural period of adjustment in their first few months on the job. Apart from finding their groove within an existing team dynamic, they need to really digest all of the different services their company offers.
Questions all employees (and especially new hires) should be asking themselves include: what do we do, but more importantly, why do we do it? How are we helping our customers make progress in their lives? What are our end users pain points and how are we addressing them? What do our customers expect from us, not just in terms of service, but also in how we are there for them? Why do/should our end users ultimately choose us over another company? What are our customers saying?
Yes, it is absolutely essential to know the ins and outs of a company’s product or service. But the only reason that service exists in the first place is to help customers, so truly knowing the end user is so critical. At the end of the day, they are hiring us to do a job for them and we better do everything we can to get that job done right.
You know who addresses all of this on a daily basis? Support. Their primary role is to listen to customers and help them make progress more effectively and more efficiently.
Plus, watching Support navigate a product and experiment with various solutions gives employees in all types of roles a new lens with which to view that product or service. Unexpected thoughts, processes, and skills can pop up just from being in a different environment and observing others. It’s a pretty cool way to upskill.
Putting this into BrightGauge terms
We’ve worked hard to make BrightGauge an easy-to-use, time saving resource. That being said, everyone needs a little extra help at times and that’s where Support comes in. They are constantly using BGS in a multitude of ways, building out gauges and testing a bunch of different filters before landing on a solution. They’re pros.
Here is a personal example of a simple solution I discovered while shadowing our own Support Team. If you use BGS, you may be seeing duplicate numbers in your gauges or your reports. Let’s say you want to see how many tickets Bob is working on in a particular week, but he has himself scheduled to work on one ticket at three different times. If you are filtering by ‘Count’, that ticket will appear three times when in actuality, it only needs to be there once, which will be resolved if you measure by ‘Count Distinct’ instead (lightbulb!).
Shadowing Support teaches team members to be problem-solvers, to utilize whatever resources are at hand, and to understand the common issues customers are facing. It all boils down to knowing the customer really well.
Something like 20% of new employees churn within the first three months of starting a new job. And what’s been proven to help retain those employees? An effective onboarding process.
Yes, it can be intimidating and somewhat overwhelming, but ultimately, onboarding just sets employees up for success and fosters an inclusive spirit that can go a long way.
Let your employees know that you trust them
During my shadowing week, I was tasked with responding to real tickets and helping customers find solutions to their issues. Do you know what it feels like to have your work and your opinions actually valued and trusted? That is incredibly motivating and empowering, especially as a new hire.
Investing in employees is good for business - they will know the product/service better, they will know customers way better, and they'll know how to do their job more effectively. Win. Win. WIN!