Significantly Reduce the Learning Curve for New Employees

I was discussing time lines with a client recently.  I was taken aback when we were discussing the learning curve for an engineering new hire.  What surprised me was the 6 month /1 year estimate quoted for the new hire to ‘come up to speed’.  When I pressed, I was told that everyone knows it takes from 6 months to a year.  I challenge that assumption. 

First of all, what company in today’s fast paced revenue challenged environment has time to wait 1 year for new hires to come up to speed?  With this 1 year mindset, I can understand why some employers are so hesitant to hire anyone who doesn’t completely match all of the required and desired skillsets.  Although this may appear to be a sound strategy, the opposite is actually true.  Restricting the flow of fresh blood into the workforce reduces the competitive spirit, reduces creative input, and deprives the company of efficient growth. 

Learning curves can be significantly reduced when a type of syllabus is created and rites of passages defined.  Management needs to create an active learning plan for new hires.  Link the new learning curve to the new hire probationary period.  This creates additional employee incentive in what is sure to be a challenging period.  Actively create opportunities for the person to work through what you consider to be the major milestones for understanding your product, your organization, your customers, and your culture.  Take some time to determine the most onerous challenges that need to be mastered before full faith can be placed in this employee.  I consider these to be important rites of passage. 

When considering the important milestones in a particular learning curve, management can eliminate the redundant and nonessential work.  Create an active learning plan and bring your new employee up to speed much more quickly.

Benefits of the Follow-the-Sun model for Technical Support

When working with a complex product which is deployed globally, it makes sense to consider the feasibility of utilizing a Follow-the-Sun model for Technical Support.  Technical Support is the team that works escalated customer issues, those issues not easily solved by Level 1.  Level 1 teams tend to be established in the country or region where major product growth occurs.  Tech Support teams tend to remain co-located with the product development teams.  While product footprint grows, the afterhours demand for Tech Support begins to increase.   It is important to watch the ‘inbound call volume’ and ‘time to restore’ metrics.  The Engineer on-call solution might have to become an Engineer on-duty solution.

I have managed ‘engineer on-call’ and ’engineer on-duty’ solutions.  They work great for the short term but don’t scale well as the global product footprint grows.  It becomes even more complicated if through acquisitions, there are geographically separated product development teams, each working on different products in your company’s portfolio, each with its own Level 2 and Level 3 teams. 

By creating one or two regional Tech Support office locations; co-located in existing sales offices in Asia and Eastern Europe for example, you can replace all US based overnight solutions with just one or two small teams.  Each Tech Support team location, US based, Asia, and Europe would work during their respective daytime hours to support all requests globally requiring product specialists.

I have had great success implementing Follow-the-Sun and ensuring Technical Support competency at remote locations.  There are many important considerations but with proper attention, the FTS support model can ensure that your Technical Support solution is World Class and continues to be World Class as your company grows. 

Advantages include:

                Reduced cost by consolidating all afterhours Tech support

                Reduced ‘time to restore’ metrics

                Reduced employee turnover due to shift work

                Creates the best contingency plan for handling US based Tech Support facility shutdowns

Team Building – Choosing the best Candidates for Technical Support

What are the best criteria to use for choosing candidates?  It all depends on which phase of the team building process is at hand and the manager’s ability to be a leader.  I suggest to all of my clients that they view their team members as chess pieces.  The biggest correlation between the two is the fact that chess pieces or team members have unique abilities.  All of the unique abilities combined make the team very effective problem solvers.  One team member might be great at handling the pressure for restoring product functionality to 9,990 users, while another team member has the patience to comb through data to determine the cause of the remaining 10 user issues.  One team member likes to travel to customer sites, while another team member works best solving customer issues remotely.   And similar to chess, there is a finite number of team members.  The manager’s job is to understand each team member’s strengths and unique skills as they pertain to the department goals and use those resources to get the job done.  I suggest that the manager performs this analysis themselves rather than rely solely on behavioral assessments.  The reason is that the manager needs to take ownership for the decisions he makes about his team and assessments are data points, not a final report.   Unless the manager wrote every question himself, the standardized assessments defer ownership.

An advantage of the hiring manager performing more of the early sorting steps is the discovery of new unique candidate abilities.  Technology is always changing, so are the skills your department needs in order to be effective.  Review the candidate’s ability, assess the value, and determine whether this will make the team stronger.  Resist the temptation to grow or replace team members with a clone.  Certainly a common foundation of knowledge or experience such as a Bachelor’s Degree or military service is helpful.  Limiting the sorting to an absolute set of requirements though precludes any chance of discovery.  The most knowledgeable and effective engineer that I ever worked with never went to college. 

The Often Underestimated Requirement of a Technical Support Engineer

Superior product knowledge, strong communication skills, patience, and listening skills.  Ability to problem solve and be able to diagnose problems with very little information…

So begins the typical job description for a Technical Support Engineer.  Years of experience dictate the grade level of the position as does the formal education requirements.  Very often missing from the description is the candidate’s ability to troubleshoot.  You might say that it is included in the phrase ‘ability to problem solve and diagnose  problems with little information’.  I would counter that it should be but it isn’t because of an underestimation of what troubleshooting is. It consists of applying logical thinking to create a comprehensive list of possible causes and eliminate each possibility until the true problem is found.   It is impossible to create an accurate list of causes unless you have accurately defined what the problem actually is.  Defining the problem and then applying logic to solve it is absolutely key to proper troubleshooting.  I can’t tell you how many times in my career I have seen smart people waste time problem solving because of this.  It is an acquired skill mostly dependent on experience and mentoring.   Effectively applying this is a significant value add for any organization and from a customer's perspective, is a differentiator between vendors.

Technical Support is the new Mail Room

Remember the stories about successful business leaders who started in the Mail Room? 

• Dick Grasso (NYSE)
• Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, and David Geffen (William Morris)
• Mike Medavoy (Universal)
• J. Lawrence Hughes (William Morrow)
• Ned Tanen (MCA)
• Jeffrey Katzenberg (Paramount)
• George Bodenheimer (ESPN)
• John Borghetti (Quantas)
• Tom Whalley (Warner Bros.)
• Don Hewitt (60 Minutes),
• John Bachmann (Edward Jones)
• Simon Cowell (EMI records)

The old Mail Room was in the critical path of all interdepartmental and customer communication.  The Mail Room personnel navigated a maze of personalities and witnessed communication styles used throughout the organization.   They could learn the crucial dividing line between what matters and what doesn’t in an organization.   The Mail Room was the perfect department to bring new blood into a company.   It was a low rung position that offered bountiful learning opportunities.

Which group of employees in your company know every customer and know every product flaw?  Which group of employees have to accommodate all of the flavors of customer personalities (particularly when the customers are under stress)?  Which group of employees must absolutely  provide some sort of answer back to the customer?  Which group of employees know which customer facing departments are ineffective at doing their assigned functions?  Of course I am describing the Technical Support team which is in the critical path for customer communication.  Technical Support teams witness it all.  What better place to introduce new hires to the inner workings of you company.  Never underestimate the importance of a powerful Technical Support team.  It is the safety net for catching issues that fall through the cracks.  All companies have cracks.  Many companies however commoditize Technical Support.  Metrics are overly applied to measure results and the true value provided is lost.  Instead, create a program so that all new hires spend some period of time in Technical Support.  Provide mechanisms where Technical Support can improve new product testing cycles.   Take advantage of the trust that Technical Support has earned from customers to sell additional products and services.  Take advantage of Technical Support to groom the future leaders of your company. 

Technical Support vs Customer Support

I want to take a moment to explain the terminology difference between Customer Support and Technical Support.  Customer Support or Customer Service as a function is a first level communication between customers and a business.  In most cases this connection is via the telephone.  A consumer calls customer support to check account balances, add/delete services, or report an issue.  In the last twenty years, we have seen many customer support functions replaced by computers.  An excellent example is when you call your local pharmacy for a prescription refill.  A computer answers the phone, asks what you want, when you want it, and creates the work order for the pharmacy staff.  Banks use computer driven automated attendants to provide balances and even let you pay bills.  Customer Support has been commoditized so that costs per call can be driven down.  Call Centers have been outsourced to companies that have hundreds of agents available to handle consumer calls, volume optimization.  Cost reductions can be realized when these Call Centers are setup in low wage countries like India.  When a consumer is contacting support because of an issue or problem, Customer Support will attempt to resolve the issue.  If the problem cannot be solved at this first level, the issue must be escalated. 

The second level is considered to be the transition from Customer Support and Technical Support.  A considerable amount of product specific knowledge exists at this level.  The educational requirements of the agents is higher starting at this level.   The reasons why are quite simple. Customer issues reaching this level must be solved quickly.  Customer satisfaction and future customer purchases are at risk.   In this blog, I will be describing the roles and functions that Technical Support performs in an organization.  Some of the functions are absolutely critical to the success of the business and are not immediately obvious.  I will discuss how to leverage Technical Support abilities to increase service revenue.  I will discuss how to leverage Technical Support to help manage customer relationships and increase sales revenue.