You are a high producing, intelligent and aspiring leader driven to climb the ladder of success. You are sitting in your cube hurriedly knocking out your end‑of‑day report so you can go to dinner with your friends. You see a message pop up from your boss on slack. All it says is, “Do you have time to chat? Can you come to my office?” You feel your heart pumping fast because you never know if that’s a good or a bad thing. All you know is change is the only constant at your company.
You stand outside the door and feel your palms sweating. This job is everything to you. You feel like you’ve been crushing it but you don’t get a ton of feedback from your boss. She’s always busy working on other important stuff. You open the door and walk in.
She praises you for the amazing work you’ve been doing and then comes the “promotion.” She says, “We want you to run our customer service team.”
You walk back to your cube filled with excitement but as you settle back into your chair, you start thinking. Is this a good thing? Maybe you were on the marketing team, or an operational supervisor, or a customer service supervisor, but leading a customer service department was not part of your career plan. How do you make it yours? How do you get it organized? How do you leverage technology? How do you make this successful?
This is a pivotal moment in your career. It’s a huge opportunity. Our goal is to help give you the resources, content, people and strategic guidance to help you navigate this space. Your job is to take this opportunity and do a killer job.
- The first questions you want to ask might include,
- How does customer service contribute to the success of the company?
- What are the goals of the support team?
- How important is efficiency?
- How is the support team measuring success?
- What role does technology play?
There are many things that contribute to building a good customer service solution. As you are taking on this role, it is critically important that you meet with everyone on the team and understand how the team currently operates.
Sally is in charge of QA, but what does that mean? How are we doing? What are we measuring? Are we using AI or is it all manual? How many interactions do we listen to each week? Each month?
Bob is a Supervisor. What does Bob do day in and day out? How much interaction does he have with his team members? How does he measure success?
How involved are the leaders day in and day out? What partners do you have? What strategy have you used to get you where you are today? How do you know what your budget is?
There are so many questions. We are going to put together content that helps guide you. We can’t (and would rather not) make the decisions for you, but we can let you know what’s out there. Our goal is to help give you information that gives you the tools you need to be successful in your role.