[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

I’m reading a great book called Switch by the brilliant Heath Brothers, and one of the core lessons is to look for “bright spots” rather than problem areas. You can find problems all day, but you’ll have more luck focusing on successes and replicating those.

I’d love to take my top-performing support agent and show some of their bright spots to the rest of my team. However, I’m worried it could create tension on the team…especially since many of the tips may be “soft”, and up for interpretation/based on personality.

Anyone done this? Is there a best way to do this?

[Micah BennettParticipant]

One of the things I try to do at Zapier is regularly recap all the super positive feedback we get. As I notice the “Wow, awesome!” or “You guys are the best!” responses that come in, I bookmark them. When that folder reaches a certain level, I screencap them all and post them to our company P2 blog as a nice self-esteem boost for the whole team.

I could think that you could re-purpose that idea to be a bit more educational in nature. As you notice those bright-spots, briefly write up the “why” that bright spot was so great. Then you could reveal them all in aggregate to team at some interval, be it in writing like ours, or a standup, or even (gasp) a meeting. If that top agent is a huge percentage of those bright spots that type of tension may be unavoidable, but the more you can sprinkle in other instances(from you, from other agents) the more that tension should be diffused.

Maybe not the exact angle you were looking for, but hope that helps!

[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

@micah-bennett Definitely helpful, thanks!

[Eric HirshParticipant]

Switch is just an all-around good book about change management. Which means its a great book for customer support peeps to read when thinking about dealing with challenging cases or challenging customers. Fun to read, AND you might learn a thing or two. But, don’t take my word for it.

[Mathew PattersonParticipant]

I totally understand the concern about saying “look at this awesome person!” and how that might effect other people on the team.

In my experience (and assuming you have a team of people who are engaged), everybody already knows who the high performers are and they would really like to know what they are doing differently so they can do it too.

I’ve had good experiences with having an open discussion about “here’s this excellent ticket I noticed; let’s talk about what went well here and what we could maybe make standard practice”. If it’s presented as a chance to learn it can go down well.

One of my team noticed another team member was getting really great responses from customers and off her own bat went through a bunch of tickets and shared with us all a list of “here’s things that X does really well” in the comments of our “what makes a great response” discussion.

It was AMAZING and everybody found it super helpful. It presupposes an environment which is more collaborative than competitive though.

[AyraParticipant]

Great advice everybody! Just to jump on the same bandwagon, I’m actually thinking of writing up and creating a little report card for my tiny CS team (me +1) so that we can both share feedback and bounce around ideas on how we can make the experience better. Kinda corny?

[Mathew PattersonParticipant]

I’d be interested to hear what sort of thing would you put on your report card, Ayra.

[Anonymous]

One of the ways we do this at Automattic is by sharing “hugs” with each other. Hugs are simply any ticket where the user replies with a message that goes above and beyond the normal “Thanks!”

For example:

Thank you [name] for responding to my email like you really read it… that speaks volumes to you and your company!!! You rock!

We encourage people to post these on an internal blog that gets sent out to all the support folks. Since getting a hug makes you feel pretty awesome, it’s nice to be able to share it with others and have others share their hugs with you.

For us at least, it’s not really about “learning” why each hugee received a particular hug, but more about sharing the customer love and staying motivated.

[Author]

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