Management Madness

Following up to this post on tech support, I have to say that management can make all the difference in the end user's tech support experience.

First, it is helpful if management treats the support techs with a modicum of respect. These are, if you hired well, intelligent, dedicated, skilled people who will help make or break the image of your company and its products. They are part of your overall marketing strategy and product development/feedback loop, not just a pesky addition to overhead to be done as cheaply and thoughtlessly as possible.

Pay appropriately, and if you can't, don't pretend you are; try to make up for it by being a great place to work.

Don't starve support people for training and resources. Nobody can know everything, and tech support is as much about finding out as knowing answers offhand. However the more you know and grasp in the first place, and the better your resources, the quicker and easier it is to find out.

Don't be a sweatshop. People will accept "all hands on deck" more graciously if it's not a way of life.

Hire qualified people, and don't hire people who can't learn.

If you do hire unqualified people, cut your losses or watch morale suffer. And don't treat people like children.

Don't fall for fluff over substance. Meaning, standard greetings and "thank you for calling My Company" closings, and all the customer service mushiness in the book are no substitute for customers calling and having problems solved in a skilled, effective manner. No rudeness, but people aren't fooled by know-nothing support techs shiny with customer service platitudes.

Try to find ways to keep people interested. Support can become boring. If it's possible, try to have available career paths, even if it's just moving to different or more advanced products.

Have a sense of humor. Allow support staff to be the geeks that they, if you hired well, are.

Tech support is the front line for bugs, usability problems, documentation problems, and enhancement requests by your customers. You know, the customers you'd like to keep for the long term rather than just this one product or accounting cycle. Yeah, those people! So give the support techs some credit and some leeway for creativity, an open channel of communication to your product development and other staff, and heck, supportive management that grasps how the pieces fit together.

Don't let HR have too much control over technical hiring or derail the hiring of superlative candidates.

I am sure I must be forgetting something here, so if I think of more I'll append to the post, or mention it in a future post. I do want to give an example of that last item above, regarding HR. When I was a tech lead, I did tech screenings of applicants, and the department managers did management interviews. Several people had been screened for a prospective new class (the first five weeks at that point was training, so it was a class). One was particularly marginal, only getting a reference check in case we needed all the warm bodies. Of course, "warm bodies" is never the proper approach, but it was what often had to be done as a matter of company culture as it devolved over time. So one of the managers asked HR to do reference checks. Custom was that they would provide him the results, then he would tell them which ones to make offers.

We had a job fair day and interviewed additional prospects. One of the managers and I handled that, and in the process found one of the most ideal candidates who had ever applied. He would have undoubtedly been up there with our best, most internally revered techs. He was also a nice, personable guy, originally from Indonesia if I recall correctly. We wanted him to be hired. Now. There was an opening in the new class, because Mr. Marginal was not going to be offered a warm body job when we had Mr. Ideal to hire instead.

As it turned out, HR had broken with traditional procedure and as soon as the references checked out, had offered jobs to all of the previously interviewed candidates, good and marginal. Further, they insisted to the manager that this was the way it had always been done and were supremely irritated that he questioned them on it. We were absolutely, hands down, no second chances not allowed to hire Mr. Ideal. HR, in effect, made the decision to hire Mr. Marginal instead. He proved to be worse than he had appeared in the interviews, being hard to train and not that bright, yet arrogant and secure in his knowledge that he already knew more and was better than anyone else.

Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be HR weasels.

Respect people. Respect. Support techs are not serving up fries with that.

I also want to talk about what I look for when screening candidates, but this is enough for now. More down the line if I missed anything.

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