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.
Earlier this year, the Linode Support team entered into the running for the Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year in Computer Services. This past weekend, a few of my colleagues in Support and myself went to Las Vegas to attend the award ceremony.
In probably the biggest room I’ve ever seen, we were honored to be awarded with the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Customer Service and the Bronze Stevie for Customer Service Department of the Year in Computer Services. The People’s Choice Award especially was a fantastic honor in that was voted on by our customers.
Winning awards is often thought of as vain and/or a waste of time, but I contest that in Customer Support - a department traditionally known as a strict cost center - it isn’t that simple. An opportunity for recognition is a reminder of just how important and critical the Support team’s work is. The passion that our team has for solving customers’ problems, the incredible amount of hard work, dedication, and perseverance required to work Support, and the depth of required knowledge to be successful - it’s extraordinary, and I think it deserves to be recognized.
I’m incredibly proud of this team and all they’ve accomplished. Congratulations, all!
This is the first post in a series of indefinite length on implementing Customer Effort Score (CES) at Linode.
At Linode, we’ve just started to use OKRs to set goals and track milestones throughout the year. Each Key Result contributes to an Objective, and those Key Results waterfall into Objectives for the layers underneath. For 2019, a top level Objective for Linode is “Deliver on the Voice of the Customer”, for which a Key Result in Q1 is to re-analyze how we measure Customer Satisfaction. With this in mind, we decided to analyze the big three Customer Satisfaction Methodologies - Net Promoter Score (NPS), Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR), and Customer Effort Score (CES) - and determine if we’d like to add any to our current Customer Happiness measurement, which we collect and analyze with Hively.
Net Promoter Score is a measurement of how likely is it that a customer would recommend your company. By far the oldest and well-known Customer Satisfaction measurement, NPS is used by more than two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies. NPS is measured by asking a customer to rate how likely they are to recommend your company to a friend or colleague on a scale from 1-10:
“Promoters” (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will actively “promote” your brand to others.
“Passives” (score 7-8) are satisfied, but not “wow’d”. They won’t actively promote or detract from your brand.
“Detractors” (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who will actively “detract” from your brand - they will find opportunities to tarnish your reputation by recounting their poor experience.
I’ve used NPS in the past at Apple, and there are two great tenants that still resonate with me today. First, at Apple, every detractor is contacted by someone empowered to resolve their problem (1). At the least, sending an email or calling a customer who had a poor interaction assured them someone was listening and that their opinion is valued. At the best, we were able to repair the relationship by solving something that was missed or could have been done better. I saw this transform experiences so often that at Linode we also contact every customer who leaves us an “Unhappy” Hively rating and who provide a means to contact them.
Secondly, while passive customers did not have an experience where they will actively promote or detract from your brand, the key is that they are people whom you can convert to promoters. Many criticisms of NPS ignore or forget that inside the passive customer experience lives a world of opportunity in creating incredible experiences for customers, and exploring how to transform a passive experience to a promoter experience is a huge and often untapped opportunity. Analyzing and providing feedback on how we could have promoted an experience from “Satisfied” to “Happy” is something we focus on at Linode down to the individual interaction during our monthly 1-on-1’s.
“The best research questions are about past behavior, not future behavior. Asking a study participant ‘Will you try to live a healthy lifestyle?’ or ‘Are you going to give up sugar?’ or ‘Will you purchase this product?’ requires they predict their future behavior. We are more interested in what they’ve done than what they’ll do. We’re interested in actual behavior, not a prediction of behavior.”
Since we’re able to implement the most valuable two pieces of NPS into our existing system as it is right now, on their own they won’t be enough to sway us in NPS’ direction. At the end of the day, the research is worrying enough to rule out moving forward with NPS.
Wallet Allocation Rule is a measurement of what percentage of your customers spend in your industry is with your company. Sort of the outlier in the mix, WAR depends on you obtaining the following data from your customers:
What percentage of your spend for (your company’s industry) is with (your company)?
What percentage of your spend for (your company’s industry) is with each of (your company’s) competitors?
How do you rank (your company) in (whatever performance metric)?
How do you rank each of (your company’s) competitors in (whatever performance metric)?
I found that Wallet Allocation Rule may very well be a viable measurement for some companies, but is not a fit for us. Soliciting this information from our customers is just not our style - we’ve always been fairly “hands-off”. Additionally, a curious piece of WAR is that you’re deciding to implicitly trust this data - putting myself in a customer’s shoes, I’m not sure I’d be willing or excited to share this information with any company. In fact, to date, I’ve never been encountered with WAR, so I can’t speak for what I’d do.
Further, Linode is a cloud hosting company, and a company that needs reliable hosting diversifies. Using only a single hosting provider is bad practice, so aiming towards capturing 100% of a customers’ total spend while still providing the best solution for them is a dangerously tedious line to walk.
Customer Effort Score is a measurement of how easy it is for a customer to solve their problems. The Harvard Business Review, the creators of CES, contends that contrary to conventional wisdom, delighting customers has very little to do with customer loyalty. Rather, “…when it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.” Therefore, measuring Customer Happiness or Customer Satisfaction is a somewhat unimportant metric, as it does not correlate with loyalty or lifetime spend. This idea isn’t hard to grasp - what keeps customers coming back and more likely to continue to grow with you is the assurance that when they do encounter an issue, they’ll have it resolved quickly and easily. Delightment is fleeting - solving problems is enduring.
Further, CES promises a commitment to actionable feedback, an area where NPS is notoriously weak. Targeting and fixing exactly what made it hard to solve a customer’s problem is what drives loyalty and makes customers happier and more satisfied in their experience, and a methodology designed with collecting that information is of particular importance.
I’m further attracted to the idea that measuring and acting on Customer Effort requires company-wide adoption. To bring everyone together with the goal of making customers lives’ easier is an exercise in continuing to focus 100% on the customer - or to quote our OKRs, to Deliver on the Voice of the Customer. From Customer Support to Documentation to Product Development, UX, Operations, and beyond, it is a company’s responsibility to focus on driving loyalty through effortless experiences.
All this said, I do not agree that delighting customers isn’t a transformative experience - I have had great customer experiences which, barring unforeseen circumstances, have captured me as a lifelong customer (a Christmas present gone wrong solved with a one-ring phone call, a delightfully mood-matched and empathetic representative, no-hassle replacement, and free shipping just because from B&H is the most recent in memory). We’ll still be using Hively so we can catch interactions going south in real-time and identify and reward delightful experiences.
Customer Experience balances simple feedback collection, a promise of that feedback being actionable, company-wide commitment to Customer Experience, and measurement of what amounts to actual loyalty. The decision was easy - Linode will be moving toward implementing Customer Effort Score in 2019. I’ve picked up my copy of The Effortless Experience, and this blog will document the process of implementation, adoption, and lessons learned. In the meantime, however, if anyone has tips, tricks, or pitfalls to avoid, please reach out on Twitter and let me know.
1. This is 8+ years old information, so I can’t speak for if this is still the case.
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.