At Linode, our Customer Support team works 24/7/365 to help customers solve problems. We accomplish this with a rolling schedule based on call and ticket volume, with either eight or ten hour shifts starting almost every hour, every day. Our overnight Support Specialists have the option of working fully remote, and everyone else can work a few days every week from home.
In addition to the standard technology everyone is using these days (Slack, Jira, Confluence, Gmail, Github, etc.), we do several non-technology-based things to keep our team in sync every day. We do two Daily Downloads (one during the day, one at night), we spread our leadership team out on the schedule as much as makes sense, and we cultivate a culture of asynchronous, in-the-moment communication.
When we were brainstorming for our 2019 OKRs in late 2018, we asked ourselves what is the most top-of-mind thing our team wanted to improve on. After much discussion, everyone agreed that due to the nature of our working hours, our tools, and our culture, we weren’t engaging in the peer-to-peer feedback that came so much more naturally when we were smaller. We knew from past experience, at Linode and elsewhere, that a culture of great internal feedback - positive and opportunistic - is one of the most important factors in a high-performing team. With this in mind, we set an objective marking 2019 the Year of Feedback - a year to completely revamp, redesign, and revive strong, widespread, and effective internal feedback throughout our Support Team.
Some of our Support Team in our Philadelphia Headquarters’ Training Room.
Q1: The Linode Support Feedback Model
To begin this year-long initiative, we had to create a strong foundation - a set of values to exhibit the spirit of feedback at Linode and tangible examples of what those values would look like when put into practice. With this in mind, we set a Q1 Key Result to design, deliver, and train on the new Linode Support Feedback Model, consisting of our Feedback Values and Feedback Guidelines.
We’re thankful that our team has diverse backgrounds and experiences working not only in tech, but across many industries and companies of all shapes and sizes. With our backgrounds came many different experiences with internal feedback mechanisms which we shared and assessed at great length. Our hope was that we’d be able to pick an existing feedback model, devour it deeply, develop training, and hit the ground running. Unfortunately, in discussing our experiences with feedback in our past workplaces, we found good and bad - but mostly bad. The feedback models we used or found under-represented what feedback looks like in real life. They were often tone-deaf to a company’s culture and workplace. Nothing that existed quite fit what we needed, and therefore, we endeavored to build our own.
To start, we listed some universal truths of feedback we believed we needed to incorporate into our model:
Positive feedback is as important as Opportunistic feedback.
Feedback should be the same peer-to-peer, manager-to-report, and report-to-manager. Hierarchy and reporting relationships are irrelevant when it comes to feedback.
Feedback should be delivered face-to-face whenever possible, as soon as possible, and directly - not delegated.
Feedback should be a two-way conversation, not one person talking at another.
Opportunistic feedback should assume positive intent.
From these truths, we painstakingly iterated on a set of values, reminiscent of our Core Values, that encompassed the overall tone and feeling of the purpose and importance of feedback:
We’re all on the same team, we all want the same thing. We always assume positive intent when giving or receiving feedback. This means we:
Enter the feedback conversations with an open mind and without assumptions about each other or the situation.
Understand that people have different perceptions and that giving feedback isn’t always easy.
We understand context and environment matters. We’re mindful of each other’s time and feelings when giving feedback. This means we:
Prioritize giving feedback sooner rather than later.
Don’t delegate our feedback to other people.
Consider the environment we give feedback in.
Always give feedback face-to-face – feedback is dialogue.
Eliminate distractions. We focus on each other and what we’re saying and hearing, not our technology.
Respect other people’s feelings and commit to follow up if the conversation gets emotional.
We seek to understand both sides of the conversation and take away something actionable. This means we:
Clearly provide specific and actionable feedback.
Actively listen to each other.
Build relationships by engaging in ongoing and iterative feedback.
We help each other learn and grow. Balancing specific and impactful positive feedback with opportunistic feedback is an essential part of great culture.
These Feedback Values, as they came to be called, were to be the starting point for us to kick off this initiative. They’d provide the foundation that drove not only how we approach a feedback conversation, but our culture as a whole - to solidify the why behind this initiative. Now that we had the why, we needed the how - enter our Feedback Guidelines:
Agree that the time is right.
Communicate what was observed and Exchange perspectives.
If warranted, Discuss and come to an understanding.
Wrap-up the conversation.
These values also include examples of how to exhibit this behaviors, but I’ve left them out for brevity.
With our Feedback Values and Feedback Guidelines (collectively the “Feedback Model”), we only had to have our Training Team develop a training module for our new hires and run a continuing education course for our existing Support team. After running our entire team through training in Q1, we set out to start observing results in Q2.
The Support area in our Philadelphia Headquarters, where many of our feedback conversations take place.
Q2: DISC Assessments
In Q2, with our Feedback Model developed and our team trained, our next mission was to get people using it. During our 1-on-1’s, we were getting feedback that while the model was useful and well-received, it hadn’t yet been utilized by everyone. Digging deeper, what we observed is that sometimes we didn’t know how to approach starting the conversation - in a large team, not everyone knows everyone yet, not everyone has worked together or has built rapport with one another, and it can be tough for a feedback conversation to be your first ever conversation with a team member. Our model didn’t account for that, and we needed something to help us start conversations. Enter DISC.
DISC is a behavior assessment similar to PI or Myers-Briggs. It’s designed to communicate how to approach a conversation with a person that will be best received based on their personality. A group of Trainers and Support Leaders were trained on administrating the DISC assessment and we began integrating our DISC profiles into our feedback process, first by running every Support Specialist through DISC training, both in a group setting and individually by our DISC administrators. We modified our training and integrated it into our new-hire curriculum.
DISC training helped us learn how to approach a conversation with a peer to be most approachable and conversational, and therefore effective. Most of us have found DISC to be a helpful tool in helping us communicate with one another. One issue we’ve encountered, though, is remembering to actually use someone’s DISC profile when approaching a conversation. To start tackling this, we’ve created a section in our Slack profiles for our DISC profiles where everyone shares their DISC type, but we’re still exploring better ways to reinforce this behavior.
Q3: Quality Control
With a strong Feedback Model in place, training completed, and DISC assessments performed, in Q3, it occurred to us that our work on the Year of Feedback so far had enabled us to kick off a formal Quality Assurance program. While we’d done “Quality Assurance” informally for years - Customer Support Managers and Senior Customer Support specialists reviewing tickets and providing feedback as objectively as possible, sporadically and informally - our Feedback Model could provide the strong foundation needed to formalize a program of objective and rigorous Quality Assurance to ensure consistant, accurate, and timely support to our customers.
Creating a QA program begins with creating a rubric - an objective, exhaustive, and fair set of rules and standards. While the full story of our Quality Assurance team could be an entire post in itself, to date, our QA team consists of two part-time Quality Assurance Experts who have graded and provided feedback on 1,171 tickets via an objective and exhaustive rubric. This team is only in its infancy, and we have a lot of plans to grow the amount of experts we have, as well as introducing peer-to-peer ticket grading, phone calls grading, and additional strategies to be introduced.
Q4: Review, Take-aways, and Lessons Learned
By Q4, we felt that our Feedback Model had started to be truly effective. We were observing more open dialogue, and even though a large portion of feedback is private, in our 1-on-1’s, we were hearing that the Feedback Model and Values were gaining traction. We felt our team was more open and comfortable with giving and receiving feedback and the attitude had shifted from feedback being scary to being an opportunity to for us to grow every day. To test our observations, we wanted to solicit feedback via a survey from the team on how they thought it was going. The survey being optional, a little less than half the team responded. The first question to share asked about the general helpfulness of the Linode Support Feedback Model:
Of those who responded, all indicated that they found the Linode Support Feedback Model at least moderately helpful (3 out of 5). The majority of those who responded ( 95%) indicated they found it quite helpful (4 out of 5 or better).
Of those who responded, 90% felt that the Linode Support Feedback Model helped them at a rating of 4 out of 5 or better. All respondents indicated that they found it at least a 3 out of 5 or better.
Of the respondents, 75% indicated that they found the DISC training and assessments at least somewhat helpful in having effective feedback conversations with others. A smaller percentage (25%) indicated they did not find it helpful or did not use it.
Overall, we consider our Year of Feedback initiative to be a success. As stated, we’re still observing an uptick in feedback conversations and open dialogue. Since the year has ended, we’ve integrated our Feedback Model into our Core Values:
“We value remarkable, innovative, and compassionate individuals who have profound impacts on our team. We use open dialogue and the Support Feedback Model to empower each other to seek every opportunity to improve ourselves, our team, our processes, and our company. We come to work every day committed to being better than we were the day before.”
I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts, opinions, or questions on creating or having a culture of great internal feedback, and I would be happy to help if this is something you’re trying to take on. If you’d like to chat or would like more detail, please reach out on Twitter or send me an email.
This past weekend, a few of my colleagues and I went to Las Vegas to attend the Stevie Awards ceremony in Las Vegas, where we were up for awards for Customer Service Department of the Year in Computer Services and Customer Service Training or Coaching Program of the Year in Technology Industries. To be considered was a huge honor; last year, we won Bronze for Customer Service Department of the Year and won the for People’s Choice for Favorite Customer Service. Being considered for Customer Service Department of the Year, plus the new training program award was great validation of our Support Team’s hard work in 2019.
This year, we took Silver in both of the categories we were nominated in, which I am immensely proud of our Support Team for accomplishing. Congratulations, Linodians - you earned this!
P.S., if you’re interested, you can read more about our Year of Feedback and Feedback Model here.
Camden is important to me - my mom taught in a difficult part of this struggling city for many years. Many of us at Linode volunteered at her school, reading to students. I live only a few miles away.
Knowing Camden’s struggles, I was even more impressed with each and every person I met at the code day - employees, volunteers, programmers, students, entrepreneurs, and judges alike. Their mission - “to provide a positive, healing atmosphere that propels young people to build strong futures and break the cycle of violence and poverty in Camden” - was evident. Hopeworks hopes to better Camden’s youth through an amazing program that myself and Linode hope to support long-term.
I wanted to congratulate all of the incredibly talented and inspiring entrepreneurs who presented at the Pitch Competition. Every pitch was engaging, thoughtful, and inspiring. Below, I’ve included a list of the entrepreneurs who presented and links to their burgeoning businesses where I could. Please visit each and support them if you can, and, if you’re looking for a way to get involved in Hopeworks, please take a look at how to be a donor or volunteer.
This post is a recap and update from my 2018 Elevate Summit talk, “How Having a Training Team Changed How We Do Support”. That talk came from a 2017 episode of the Elevate Support Podcast, “Rick Myers knows about clouds”, where I talked about training teams. You can view or download the slides for that talk here or listen to the podcast episode here.
In 2016, Linode had a problem. Our Support Team was growing at a rate slower than our customer base. Our ticket volume and Time to First Response metrics were creeping up. Our self-service options weren’t putting enough of a dent in our new ticket queue. At the same time, we were also struggling to find applicants with enough technical experience for our user base, which is made up of highly technical customers, no matter where we were looking and how we were recruiting. We had to do something drastic. The only thing that made sense was to create a dedicated Training Team, increasing our new-hire on-boarding time from a few weeks to a few months, taking resources away permanently from the support queue to do the training, and entirely re-write our training curriculum and support manual.
What?!
We had to come up with a new solution, and our conclusion was if we can’t find the right candidates, we have to change who we’re looking for. This short-term investment for a long-term win couldn’t have worked out better. Here’s what we did:
The most recent Support hires in our Philadelphia Headquarters’ Training Room.
Evaluate Candidate Competencies
When we began evaluating our hiring practices, our Core Values helped us know where to start. While we and our customers use and depend on Linux every day, what’s more important than command line knowledge are the things that we feel are much harder to teach – good problem solving abilities, empathy, and a passion for helping customers and solving problems. The solution, then, was obvious to us: first, we’d change our “ideal” candidate from “Experienced Systems Administrator with Expert-Level Customer Support Skills” to “Best of the Best Customer Support Skills with Hobbyist-Level Technical Experience”; second, we’d build a world-class training system with this candidate profile in mind.
With brand-new job requirements which focused on technical and troubleshooting acumen instead of experience, we could target previously-untapped pipelines like new grads who worked help desk, career changers who ran Linux at home, and service industry employees in a technical environment. We found people through career fairs, college clubs, and user groups. Very quickly, incredibly good candidates started rolling in - but now we had to train them.
Create A Training Team
This is the really hard part.
We got lucky - we had an incredible Support Specialist, Cody, who used to train flight school instructors. His enthusiasm for training, development, epistemology, and learning styles, coupled with Linux expertise, made him the perfect candidate for our first Trainer. We spent about two months creating an MVP training curriculum and we got started training our new-hires. Because our new hiring strategy allowed us to attract candidates with outstanding Customer Support skills – the stuff that’s harder to teach – our new training program, in turn, focused heavily on building technical troubleshooting skills and our Core Values. Meanwhile, training is nothing without documentation and support, so we started working through reorganizing and updating our support manual and knowledge base, an exercise through which we were able to begin modularizing our curriculum. Through modularizing the training, each module can be taught by any of our Training Specialists, or even plucked out of the new-hire training to do a continuing education class. We leveraged the “Acquisition, Application, Reinforcement” learning model into each of our modules in an effort to be both be the most effective trainers we could as well as provide a consistent experience throughout training. We implemented weekly check-ins with our trainee’s manager and a robust documentation system to keep managers and Training Specialists on the same page throughout training. The initial new-hire training was producing incredible Junior or Level 1 Support Specialists on it’s own right, but that is only the first part of the Support Training journey.
When a Support trainee has finished initial training, we hand-off to a Training Expert on the Support team to wrap up their training. While the initial training is structured to the hour, a trainee’s mentorship is unstructured and of indefinite length, intended to tie up any loose ends and reinforce skills learned in training. In mentorship, a trainee is essentially doing the job of an on-boarded Support Specialist, but has a single point of contact and escalation for issues and challenges. Throughout mentorship, the documentation and check-ins that initially informed the trainer of a trainee’s progress continue, but now with the purpose of informing the trainers and the Customer Support Managers of the same. When each box on every checklist has been checked - every skill acquired, competency met, and task accomplished, we can finally on-board a trainee - a huge moment to be celebrated. While a smooth ride for the trainee, each on-boarded trainee represents an incredible investment in talent acquisition, training, people and skills development, and meticulous planning - an investment which is immediately paid off with the phenomenal new Support Specialist helping solve problems for our customers every day.
Every single piece of our training is still being evaluated and iterated on. A module is almost never exactly the same as it was in the previous class. We’re currently working on identifying the Lominger Competencies required for every role in the Support organization and the skills to teach Managers and Training Experts to help develop those competencies. Our Support Manual is still undergoing a huge re-write and re-organization in git to introduce version control and more collaboration. Our mentorship model is always undergoing improvement. While we’ve come a long way, training is one of those things that can never be perfected - we can always get better, and our team is always better for it.
Initial training is instructor-led, after which our trainees move to mentorship to complete their training.
Leverage Your New Advantage
Currently, our Training Team is committed to a brand new group of recruits every two months. Their structured curriculum, mentorship and check-ins with trainees, and maintenance to our Support Manual is a lot of work, but it’s important that we leverage this team to be bigger than just new-hire training. To accomplish this, we designed our new-hire training to be six weeks long. In the other two weeks until the next class starts, our Training Team both iterates on our training and is the perfect group to provide continuing education classes to our existing Support Specialists - retraining on rusty skills, presenting new and exciting technical edge-case training, and refreshing fundamentals. Today, our Training Team runs at least one Lunch & Learn each month for our existing Customer Support team on an existing skill or a brand-new topic. This ensures we have the entire team at the same knowledge level to provide a consistent experience for all customers. Making any team’s purpose bigger than just fulfilling a short-term need is necessary in any do-more-with-less business - plan to make your Training Team more than just an on-boarding team, but instead a critical part of ongoing education and development.
Linode’s Training Team has been an incredible success. Yes, it’s a huge investment, but I cannot stress enough how much I encourage you to create the same in your own Support department. So why do you need a Training Team? Because without one, you aren’t getting the best people into your organization. You’re thinking too small, not branching out, and losing out on the best candidates (and later, employees) to help your customers. You’re relying on someone else to train your people - their last employer. You need a Training Team not just to re-teach skills your Support Specialists already have, but to find new people who will make your team better than it is today. Today, because of our Training Team, we have a steady stream of great candidates, a comprehensive new-hire training, a robust continuing education system, and the absolute best, most diverse, and enthusiastic Customer Support team that we have ever had - and it gets better every single new class. To date, we’ve put 92 new-hires through training and have an average new-hire on-boarding time of 72 days. A significant investment has paid off many times. Our Training Team now consists of a Training Manager, two full-time Training Specialists, and six Training Experts. Furthermore, as intended, our Time to First Response is down, our number of updates to resolution is down, and our Customer Happiness is up. Customers are being helped more quickly and consistently. Creating a Training Team has absolutely been one of the best investments the Customer Support department has made.
I’d be enthused to hear anyone’s thoughts, opinions, or questions on training or creating training teams, and I would be happy to help if this is something you’re trying to take on. Further, this was a very high-level and simplified overview of a very complicated, calculated, and time-consuming topic. If you’d like to chat or would like more detail, please reach out on Twitter or send me an email.
This post was the basis of my 2019 Elevate Summit talk, “What is Customer Success, Anyway?”.
Without a doubt, if your organization doesn’t have one already, you’ve either thought about starting a Customer Success department or have at least heard about it’s benefits. Chances are if you’re in the latter two categories, you’ve heard more than a few different opinions about what Customer Success is and how it fits into your organization. While CS means different things for different companies, there are a few things that hold true no matter what your industry or size. This post is designed to be a primer of what Customer Success is, is not, and some specifics of what it could look like at your organization.
Customer Success was conceived of by Salesforce not that long ago. Being one of the first subscription-as-a-service organizations, Salesforce was one of the first companies to have to battle seriously with month-over-month churn threats. To combat this threat, Salesforce enacted an entirely new philosophy - a company-wide focus on (at least) reducing churn and (at best) increasing growth for their customers. Customer Success, therefore, was born from recognizing that in today’s environment, the customer is more powerful than ever. They can leave at the drop of a hat. To survive, your company must listen to your customers’ voice and deliver what they want and need.
At the highest level, Customer Success is perfectly named. Customer Success’ single purpose is to ensure the success of your customers. If your customers succeed and grow with you, you succeed, too. If you enable them to make money, you make money. Simple. Said another way, a Customer Success team exists to align your goals with those of your customers. If your goals and your customer’s goals align, it provides the best chances for mutual success. Efforts to reduce churn or increase customer spend through proactive outreach is within the purview of the Customer Success team.
To ensure success, Customer Success departments have several activities, responsibilities, and iterative tasks, all designed to make sure your customers are having their voices heard and their problems solved. This can include everything from on-boarding customers to regular conference calls, all designed to lower Customer Effort, improve the customer experience, and make your customers’ voices heard. They provide proactive support for your customer base - solving problems before a customer is fed up and becomes a churn threat. Typically, these responsibilities are differentiated based on what type of customer category they fall into (as described in the aforementioned Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue):
High-Touch customers are the smallest group of your highest-spending customers by MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and have primarily one-on-one communication with your Customer Success team. They get the highest, most personalized attention with activities including a comprehensive, thorough, and personalized on-boarding, monthly status meetings, quarterly Executive Business Reviews, early access and influence on your product roadmaps, and on-site visits.
Low-Touch customers are a larger group of your medium-spending and well-known customers and have a blend of one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Low-Touch Customers receive “just-in-time” Customer Success, meaning Customer Success reaches out at critical points in the Customer’s lifecycle; spending just the right amount of effort to make one-to-one interactions valuable to both your company and the Customer. Low-Touch Customers receive slightly less personalized attention including a packaged on-boarding, as-needed Executive Business Reviews, inclusion in product and service surveying and feedback solicitation, and regular automated health checks.
Tech-Touch customers consist of your remaining customer base and have 100% technology-driven, one-to-many communication with zero hands-on intervention. Tech-Touch customers receive an automated, email-based on-boarding, educational, collaborative, and upsell-focused one-to-many communications, and untargeted inclusion in product and service surveying and feedback solicitation.
Regardless of the cohort your customer falls into, one thing remains the same: a Customer Success team’s job is to make sure that the customer’s voice is heard, that their problems are being addressed, and they are taking advantage of everything you have to offer.
At some level, it is your entire organization’s responsibility to ensure your customers’ success. Therefore, for every blog post about what Customer Success is, there is a recommended organization structure for where your Customer Success department exists. CS shares responsibility with Marketing, Sales, Business Development, and Support, among others, but regardless of whether your Customer Success department is independent, under Revenue Operations, Support, Marketing, or just used as a company-wide philosophy, in an ecosystem where customers have an infinite choice of vendors, it’s imperative to implement in your organization.
Hopefully, this post has served as a high-level overview of what Customer Success is and why it exists. Customer Success, though, is a fluid ideology, open to many implementations and constantly changing, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting. I hope to write more about CS in the future about the details which make this philosophy so powerful and important.
Some of our Support Team in our Philadelphia Headquarters’ Training Room.
The Support area in our Philadelphia Headquarters, where many of our feedback conversations take place.
The most recent Support hires in our Philadelphia Headquarters’ Training Room.
Initial training is instructor-led, after which our trainees move to mentorship to complete their training.