How We Support Our Team to Support Our Customers

We talk to our customers every minute of every day. Literally. Our team of Support Professionals dedicates itself to providing an unparalleled customer experience 24/7/365.

As a company, we believe in finding every opportunity to help our Support Team grow and develop their skills. This approach is not only beneficial to Linode and to the growth and development of our Support Team, but to our customer’s experience in crucial times. Through onboarding and training, career paths, and professional development, we seek to improve ourselves, our team, and our processes. Watch the video below for more about our Customer Support experience.

Peer feedback is critically important to our Support Team. While technology and tools play an active role in how we communicate with each other, our approach over the past year has changed with 2019 being the “Year of Feedback,” which I wrote about in a recent post on my blog, Explicit Type.   

Here are some highlights from my blog post:

1. We started the year by developing a Support Feedback Model with values and guidelines based on the following:

• Always assume positive intent.
• Be mindful of each other’s time and feelings.
• Seek to understand both sides of the conversation and take away something actionable.
• Strike a balance between specific and impactful positive feedback and opportunistic feedback.

2. Next, we set out to get everyone to use the new model. The biggest hurdle was how to start conversations. We introduced the DISC behavior assessment tool to help us have more approachable and conversational, and therefore effective, peer-to-peer conversations. Our personalities are different. Not only did all of our Support Specialists and managers complete a DISC, but we modified our training and integrated it into our new-hire curriculum.

3. To assure quality and make sure we’re providing consistent, accurate, and timely support to our customers, we developed a rubric that has graded more than 1,100 support tickets. This part of our feedback model also will include peer-to-peer ticket grading, phone calls grading, and the introduction of additional strategies.

4. Finally, while we observed adoption to the new model and an uptick in feedback conversations and open dialogue, we set out to quantitatively understand if it was really working through an optional survey. While the response to the survey was low, those who participated provided some critical feedback. Any apprehension by others to complete the survey provides another opportunity for us to grow.

So, the next time you’re on the phone, in an email thread, IRC, or somewhere else with our Support Team, I hope you know that we take our interactions with you and each other seriously and continue to work on how we can provide you with the support you deserve.