Lots of change is in the air at FullStory as we begin our new fiscal year. As growth-minded companies are wont to do, we’ve been doing a lot of restructuring lately. As part of that change, I’ll be stepping away from leading the customer support team to begin a new practice of customer experience management. This is a big change! Before the dust settles on this transition, I wanted to take a quick look back on my career to see how I got here.
Help People & Solve Challenging Problems
I love to help people. I also love to solve challenging problems. When you put those two things together, I almost can’t not solve a problem that’s helpful to someone. That’s probably why I started my career teaching myself to code. It allowed me to make my boss—who happened to be my dad— a happy person because I could solve these complex technical problems with code.
Here’s a fun story. We had this inventory problem where each of the six branches would separately order inventory from the external vendor without checking to see if other branches potentially had extra inventory that could meet their needs. You can’t blame them. It was a lot easier to just to generate a purchase order for your local warehouse than check every item on the purchase order to see if another warehouse had it.
This was a fun and challenging problem! Using Microsoft Access (naturally), I designed a program that calculated each warehouse’s required inventory, checked other warehouses for extra inventory, and then generated the report necessary to transfer inventory between branches. Beep. Boop. Magic! This made a handful of people at the company very happy (and one salesperson for the vendor not happy).
When I had the opportunity to leave a software developer role to become a support engineer at Fog Creek Software, I realized this was an opportunity to continue helping people—directly, as is the case with customer support—by solving their challenging technical problems. As it turns out, helping customers wasn’t all that different from helping internal stakeholders.
Solving Problems With Systems
After a few years helping customers directly at Fog Creek, I had the opportunity to lead the support team at Trello and then again most recently with the support team at FullStory. In both cases, I was tasked with helping people. The people in this case were both the business’s customers and the employees who were part of my team.
When it came to management, the problem at hand was still hard, but it wasn’t as tightly scoped as say, a technical problem that I could solve with code or with a craftily worded support email. A sampling of the problems I had to tackle at both companies: How do you attract and retain the best talent to support the customers you’ve worked so hard to acquire? How do you avoid burnout? What metrics really matter in customer support? I’ve written in the past about ways I’ve thought through tackling some of these problems.
The common denominator, at least for me, was that I was still solving hard problems and helping people. In this case, the solution involved designing systems that aligned human motivations (support team members were happy and fulfilled) with business success (providing remarkable responsive care). At this point in my career, there’s a pretty clear theme of what kind of work I find fulfilling.
Adapting Systems to Better Help People
One of the challenges I struggled with while managing the support team at FullStory was how to affect change on behalf of the customer outside of the immediate scope of the support team. I’m not talking about surfacing bugs and product feature requests (though systems for surfacing those are a fun problem to solve in their own right). Rather, it was when it involved changes that affected other customer-facing teams. How do I get other teams to make pro-customer changes?
I guess we should clarify: why was this my problem? As a Hugger, we had a mandate to always be on the customer’s side, even if the problem at hand wasn’t tightly aligned to our immediate scope of responsibility. And because it’s usually pretty easy to contact support, we would often be a point of escalation if the ball was dropped in another area of the organization.
Let’s walk through an example. Imagine support gets an email where the customer says they signed up for a demo, but no one at FullStory followed up. Frustrating! The short term problem was fairly straightforward to solve. We’d ping the individual contributor, or maybe loop in their manager, and someone would follow up to make it right. But what about the problem of how the demo request got dropped? Why didn’t the individual contributor know about it? Why didn’t their manager know about it? Because I want to solve hard problems and help people, I couldn’t help myself in terms of proposing systems that would potentially prevent the problem in the future.
I can solve systemic problems that are within my scope of control. But what if it’s on another team? Sometimes, the systemic change I would propose wouldn’t necessarily get implemented. Huh. Why not? I suppose if I worked at a place where my peers didn’t seem very, er, effective, I might blame the individual or perhaps the business for “accepting a low hiring bar” But this is FullStory, and it’s such a strong group of empathetic, smart, thoughtful individuals, it’s highly unlikely it’s a problem with the individual. For some reason, something else was higher priority than the solution I had suggested and I couldn’t figure out why.
This is starting to look like a very hard problem to solve when compared to previous challenges.
Enter Customer Experience Management
As of Monday, I’m stepping away from managing support to lead a new “Customer Experience Management” practice, which will be accountable for customer experience across the entire customer journey. I’ll be writing more about what this practice is and why it was necessary in a future post, but I can rest assured that the theme of solving hard problems and helping people continues.
This time around, the person I’m helping is “all my peers at FullStory” and “all of FullStory’s customers”. The problem at hand is to help FullStory become the standard-bearer in business-to-business customer experience. It’s the hardest challenge I’ve faced yet and I couldn’t be more excited.
Header Photo by Vashishtha Jogi on Unsplash