[Lauren BuchsbaumParticipant]

There’s a large potential for burnout and low retention among support teams, simply given the nature of the job. And, at many workplaces, support is a gateway to other roles at the company.

With all of this in mind, does your company have anything in place to formalize specialization, promotions, or a horizontal transition to other teams? How do you proactively ensure employees in support are on the right career path? And what do most team members head on to do?

[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

We discuss professional development at every other 1:1 between me and my staff. Sometimes it’s taking a class, but occasionally they talk about what they’d like to be doing in the future. I’m lucky in that we’re a combo support/community department so they have some opportunity to do different things in this role. (I think that’s actually pretty instrumental in slowing burnout.)

I haven’t been here long enough for anything to change, but we’re definitely starting to discuss and look at roles they could end up in. I think having an honest conversation about it also helps slow the burnout - it’s hard when you are burning with this desire to try new things and haven’t voiced that desire!

Hope that helps a bit…

[Andrew MoyerParticipant]

This is a great question! It certainly depends on a lot of factors. At UserVoice, we’re such a small team that we all pretty much do more than our initial focus of working with customers such as manage the knowledge base, QA test new features or bug fixes, etc. In our own situation the responsibilities grow as you become more knowledgeable about the product, company and vision.

As we hire more in our support department we’ll likely move on to other primary roles but never being too far away from support.

At iContact (a much much larger support team) there were always different roles to move into, especially since we grew so quickly. You could move to a team lead position, to the deliverability team (protecting our reputation from spammers), Billing, and so on. As they’ve continued to grow they’ve broken their teams down into tiers where the more you’re trained on, the more focused you get to be in your job duties. They even have a QA team and community teams.

It’s hard to show support reps the various channels they could go in if those channels are not clearly defined. However, keeping an active conversation with them about what interests them and allowing them an opportunity to hang out/shadow with other teams is a great way to keep them motivated. It also gives them a deeper insight into how the company runs as a whole and could even open their minds to different career paths they may have never thought of. So long as you keep their hope alive that they can move forward in one way or another, I think it would go a long way to inspiring your team, empowering them, and helping fend off burnout.

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