How To Manage A Customer Support Team (when you are an engineering leader and have never done anything like that before)

The other day spoke to a young CTO, who recently had the post-sales organization (e.g. customer support/ technical account management) shifted to him. He was clearly out of his depth, and wasn’t quite sure what he was meant to be doing to make it a success.

He reached out to me because he wanted to know:

how he could be a good manager to the head of support
what metrics he should be looking at to judge the success/failure of the team, and
what he could read to better understand customer support/technical account management.

So, never being one to waste a good brain-picking session, I decided I’d write up what I told him in the hope that it could help others!

How To Support Your Support Leader

If you are a senior engineering leader taking on the support function, first of all congrats! I think a strong partnership between support and engineering is at the heart of really excellent software. As a CS leader I have reported to marketing, ops-y, sales-y, and techie leaders and working under techie leaders has always been the best of all. Being under “one umbrella” with engineering leaders allowed for really tight collaboration to fix, maintain, and develop the product. The camaraderie I had working alongside engineering leaders and ICs helped deepen my knowledge of the product and my overall technical literacy.

On the flip-side, I think that working closely with support helps engineering develop deeper empathy for customers and the support team and also can spur engineering and product towards developing for supportability. I feel so passionately about this topic that I gave a talk about it at The Lead Dev a few years back (it’s only 10 mins and it’s informative!).

If there is no customer leader reporting directly to the CEO at the company, then support engineers as part of the engineering org/under the CTO or VP Eng is really the next best thing in my book.

Give Them Equal Footing

So when it comes to effective management of the support leader, it is important that your head of support has an equal seat at the table with all the other engineering leaders. They should be at the weekly team meeting and have one-on-ones with you with the same frequency as all the other managers. For good measure, they should also have skip-levels with your manager (likely the CEO) at some regular cadence.

If the customer team has meetings, you should occasionally come to them. Technical leaders tend to love going to dev team standups; however, to the other teams all that attention poured out on engineering can sometimes make the non-devs feel like they are pushed into the corner. When you show up to the support team meeting (and actually engage the team members and support the leader!), it gives the leader and the team a boost.

Talk Them Up!

If you are doing a weekly exec meeting and reporting on engineering team progress, you should also speak about how the post-sales team and customers are doing as part of your report there and also at QBRs. I’ll discuss which metrics you might want to be looking at later, but for now I want to emphasize that a good post-sales team should have their finger on the pulse of the customers and be able to share not just trends but also qualitative feedback – both good and bad — from your customers.

Don’t Be Afraid To Get Help

Finally, if you are feeling truly in over your head you might want to consider hiring someone more senior over them or bringing someone (like me!) in on a fractional basis to be a strategic leader, coach the team, and help you gain confidence to own this functional area. As an exec-level leader in your organization, you not only need to monitor the day-to-day operations of the department, you also are responsible for product innovation strategy, coordination with the rest of the exec team, and reporting out to the board. It can be overwhelming to be responsible for all that and also support everyone on your team in understanding how they can grow in their career — across multiple different career ladders! — at your company.

There is no shame in saying you also need some support.

The Metrics That Matter

As a leader it is helpful to have a few north star metrics that can be constantly monitored. For a support leader, I stand by:

Customer Satisfaction
Time To First Reply
Time To Close
Net Promoter Score

Read on to learn what these metrics do (and don’t!) mean.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction is the percentage of times your support interactions — usually tickets — get a positive rating during a certain period of time. It can be a day, a week, a month, or however you wish to slice it. The tricky thing about CSAT is that the number can vary a lot depending on overall survey response rate. It is easy to have 100%, 50% or 0% CSAT if you only have 2 respondents over whatever period of time you are looking at. In addition to survey engagement, you also have to contend with the nature of the rating. Sometimes customers are disappointed in the service they received, but other times they are upset that they didn’t get what they wanted. In software, we get a lot of feature requests, and while some customers may take a “we’ll think about it” graciously; other customers will become enraged (I wrote more about this here, btw). So that is something to keep in mind.

Finally, not all ratings are created equally. A handful of negative ratings from your highest-paying or otherwise most valuable customers, might get lost in the shuffle of a busy queue with high survey engagement, but they might be an early indicator that the customer is disgruntled and needs their issues attended to before you have a churn on your hand. So, looking at CSAT by customer segment is also a valuable exercise to do on a regular cadence.

Time To First Response (TTFR)

Speed is an important part of a good customer experience that will hopefully boost customer confidence and get you positive CSAT scores. So you want to be certain that, within reason, you are getting back to your customers in a timely fashion. I always like to tell leaders that hold up Amazon customer support as a gold standard — and don’t get me wrong, it is very good — that debugging a software issue is not as quick and easy as hitting a button and “ensuring Little Timmy’s new bike gets there for his birthday party”.

When assessing the quality of support tickets, I look for 4 things:

Care – Did the agent express empathy/concern for the customer?
Completeness – Did the agent answer all the questions asked?
Correctness – Was the solution offered actually right?
Concise – Was the agent able to share information without being long-winded?

So the expectation I always have is that within a reasonable amount of time — and here it can be helpful to have some internal benchmarks or SLAs — a customer will get a kind, correct, and concise response that addresses their concerns or sets an expectation about how/when their concerns will be addressed.

Time To Close (TTC)*

Time To Close or Time To Full Resolution measures the time it takes for a ticket to go to a closed state. This number often excludes the time when the agent or team is waiting for a response from a customer, but it does include all the time the agent is either working on a response or chasing down a patch or fix from developers. Longer average times can indicate a lack on the support team or they can indicate that the issues escalated from support to engineering or product are not getting the attention they need.

Because of the ambiguity around what the root cause of lengthy TTC, I think this is a number that the Head of Support should report on, but the CTO or VP Eng should *own*. There is likely a lot of information here that can improve processes, but in my experience the engineering leader is most empowered to make the necessary changes to bring this number down.

Net Promoter Score (NPS*)

Net Promoter Score is another one like CSAT that comes from a customer survey and can vary greatly depending on the sort of engagement you receive. However, NPS and its implication are even wider reaching than CSAT in that it relates to overall perception of the product, the brand, and the company. For this reason, while I am all for the customer team running this program, this is a number that needs to be owned by all the department heads.

… But Also Move Beyond Metrics

How the team is doing is not simply a matter of numbers and charts. The reality of how your customer team and your customers are doing is a story of both facts and figures. One of the most impactful things I like to do when I start at a new company is make sure there is a place — usually a Slack channel, but sometimes also a team newsletter — where we can share positive feedback from customers about the team and the product. Your support leader should be part of telling the story of who your customers are, why they use your product, and how they feel about it. Sharing direct quotes from emails, snippets from call recordings, or positive notes in customer surveys are all part of telling the story of how things are going.

Helpful Resources

While there is no substitute for the years of blood, sweat, and tears of being a front-line support agent and support team manager, there are a TON of great resources for learning about the discipline. I’ve dropped a few here below to help you on your journey toward becoming the most rockin’ leader your head of support has ever had the pleasure to work under.