Q: How do you think about KPIs for individual support folks?
A: Jason: We have overall goal for support to answer 70% of tickets in under an hour. We start off with 20 tickets per day and then it goes up to around 50 a day. In addition to number of tickets per day, we are not explicitly marked on what the happiness ratings is of that or anything like that.
Matt: I think we probably have too many things we’re looking at and we should just have one North Star metric that we focus on.
Q: How do you think about tearing down support for customers? Is it based on customer value or complexity of the question?
A: Jason: We definitely have a distinction between free users and paid users. We try to tackle free users tickets first and then anyone that pays us money gets gets tagged first. We try to make sure that everyone at that business is doing alright.
Matt: I think figuring that out is a psychological barrier to get across. Reframing it in a way that feels more fair to them to treat people differently.
Q: How do you think of career progression within support is there a difference for technical versus non-technical?
Jason: At zapier, we have different paths that people can go into. There’s people that go on to go to into customer success which is usually supporting the people that pay us the most. There’s people that go on to help with the documentation team. There’s people that then go into a more technically focused support role.
Matt: I like zapatillas model. They’re trying to find ways for people who don’t want to be people managers to still progress in their careers and to be able to specialize maybe to take on certain types of tickets or to start to learn skills relating to certain areas of the product.
Q: How do you ensure that your team knows what to do and how you want it done when you’re delegating?
Jason: I would have written more things down earlier. The act of documenting it makes it clear like what is a good what is the good way to do this.
Scott: The first thing that you need to start with is an understanding of the strengths of your team or at least a perception of what those are.
Matt: You don’t start off by say like hey can you go leave the support team it’s like hey can you leave the support team during our conversation as a group and talk about our metrics.