Support, as an industry, is mostly based on soft-skills: the interpersonal skills required to be skilled at talking to, interacting with, and helping people. Soft skills are extremely hard to manage and, as such, managing customer service representatives is extremely difficult. But that’s not all there is to it: there are metrics to pay attention to, growth and paths of interest, and individual customer relationships.

There are so many small pieces that make up one individual’s customer support career development that it can be difficult to keep track of them all the time. Luckily, though, we are here to help—let’s first talk about some reasons, beyond the above, that it’s important to have Performance management in support, and how to do it.

Increase Your Employee Retention

When you give your team opportunities for growth, you support them in their career path, and when you have regular customer support performance reviews, you keep them on your support team. What that means is that you would be able to keep better, more leveled-up, more committed employees on the support team (rather than them transitioning out to product, marketing, or engineering) for longer.

When you talk regularly about performance and coach your employees, they see that there is a real time investment in support and it makes them encouraged for their own career to be moving forward, rather than constantly looking for ways to jump ship. This levels up both your support team and also support as an industry—so do us all a favor!

Level-up Your Whole Team

Great teams are motivated by the personalities of the members within them, just as much as they are by the manager or skill-set of the team. According to HBR, everyone plays a “functional role, based on their formal position and technical skill, and a psychological role, based on the kind of person they are.”

Through managing the customer support agents on your team, you can help to move forward both on their functional roles, and their psychological ones, and subsequently level-up your team in two different ways. Keeping a balance between the two will give you the most highly functioning team possible.

Create Consistency and Quality

As you go through processes like your customer support performance review, you have the opportunity to ensure consistency and quality across your support responses and documentation. In your conversations with direct reports, ensure that you are talking about their Ticket history and what they could shift or potentially do better moving forward.

Not only that, but as you go through the process more regularly, and talk with more of your employees, you will begin to get a sense of who is performing above par, and who could perform better. That means that, ideally, the more frequently and regularly you conduct customer support career development conversations, the more often the right person would be matched with the right job.

Set Clear Objectives for Success and Growth

Now that you know why you should manage performance, let’s talk about what performance management actually looks like for a customer support team.

An obvious benefit of managing customer support agents is being able to set the objectives clearly for their success and growth. As the team’s manager, it is entirely up to you to decide what is important and valuable, and how you plan on measuring it. That being said, no matter what options you choose or route you decide to take, regular customer support performance review is the best way to communicate your expectations and ideas to your employees. The two methods to do this are usually either through metrics or through suggested career paths for growth.

Using Metrics to Measure Your Agents

There are three different levels at which you can use metrics to measure your agents: ticket level, agent level, and team level. All of them are equally important and should be discussed in depth with each of your employees. Here are a few metrics for each segment, what they mean and how to measure them:

1. Ticket

Happiness rating: the happiness rating on a ticket is how the customer rates the interaction. Instead of NPS, which relates to your brand and if the customer would recommend it, happiness rating refers specifically to the conversation that you just have within the ticket.

Number of responses: how many responses does a ticket have on it? If it seems like a fairly simple ticket, but there’s a thirty-email thread, there may be something awry with how the agent is handling tickets or even just this ticket specifically.

2. Agent

Average Resolution Time: Average resolution time is the total time taken to resolve a ticket, divided by the number of tickets resolved in the selected time period. This tells you how quickly an agent is resolving their issues in entirety.

Average Response Time: This is the total time taken to respond during the selected time period divided by the number of responses in the selected time period. This is important because it shows how long your agent, on average, is taking to respond to their customers.

First Contact Resolution: This metric is how frequently your agent is able to resolve their interaction in a single reply, thus offering the best experience for the customer.

3. Team

Happiness (overall): Take a look at the happiness ratings for all of your tickets overall, and use it as a metric to grade your team’s effectiveness.

Customer effort score: Survey your customers on how much effort was needed to use your product or service. It’s a good variation on customer happiness, and also a good measure to use as a team-wide metric.

Contact Ratio: This is the number of tickets that you have received over a given period of time divided by the number of active users. This helps to show you a bit more about how often your customers have to email you and, hence, how complicated your product may be, or how much more work you need to do on your documents.

Build Career Paths and Plans

In support, there are three separate paths that you can go down for growth: technical leadership, people leadership, or operational leadership. All three of those are extremely important to develop within your team because, if you don’t, your team will probably quit.

1. Technical

Technical growth usually looks like moving from being a support specialist to being a support engineer, or taking on another technical role for the team such as building tools, managing macros, or something that requires a technical, hard skill. Most people think that hard skill development is the only way to get ahead in support.

2. Operational

There is so much organizational work that goes into a support team, it’s no surprise that this is an opportunity for one of your employees to potentially grow into. Someone working in operations on support could be managing all documentation, as well as being in charge of creating and enforcing new processes. This frees up the manager or team lead to do more people management, and the operationally-focussed member of the team to grow their role in a direction that excites them.

3. People Leadership

This is the other commonly thought about opportunity for growth within support, and while it is an opportunity, it’s usually fairly limited. There are only so many team leads and managers that a support organization can have, whereas there are myriad roles for technical advancement and operational leadership. While this is a path that should be made clear if you are making a chart for career growth within your organization, it should also be clarified that this is not a path with as many opportunities as the others.

Create Objectives Aligned with Company Goals

Performance Management in customer support should always focus on objectives that align with your company goals. Aligning employees with the company’s goals makes them feel like an integral part of the business, and like they have some kind of impact on what happens with the company. So, when thinking about making your support team’s goals, align them with the company’s overarching ones to create a deeper alignment and sense of purpose for your team.

Conclusion

Customer support is an industry that suffers the most from lack of alignment in terms of performance expectations and career growth. By aligning upwards, and setting your teams expectations properly for where they can plan themselves moving in the future, you set yourself up for long-term maintenance of a highly-functioning, awesome team. Use measurable, applicable standards that are put in place as a process, and you’ll have happy, growing team members in no time.

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