Establishing Communication Goals for Your Support Team

On this episode of Happy to Help, we unpack why your support team should have strategic communication goals and how to set them. Setting pillars (or goals) for your support helps inform the message and ideas you convey with every customer interaction. 

We'll guide you through the process of identifying realistic goals that align with your company values, and how to communicate those goals with your team. Then we discuss the importance of reviewing work to make sure it aligns with your goals and celebrating when those on your team do work that drives it home! 

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!

Follow us on Instagram @happytohelppod

To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Priscilla: 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, priscilla Brooke. Today we're talking about the importance of setting communication goals for your support team, how those goals can lead to remarkable support, and then we'll talk about some tips for identifying the right goals for your team. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. We don't have a special guest with us today, but, as always, we have our wonderful producer, jordan, here. Hi, jordan, hey there, excited to be here, as always. Thanks for being here, as always. How's your week going?

Jordan: 0:34

It's going pretty good. My kids are on spring break, and so I've been trying to ship them off to different activities, so I can actually get some work done.

Priscilla: 0:44

We were just talking, before we hit record, about the weather in our different areas of the world. So if listeners don't know this which I don't think they do because I don't think we've talked about it yet I'm located in Jacksonville, florida, and Jordan's on the other side of the country, in Boise, idaho, yeah, and so we have very different climates outside right now.

Jordan: 1:05

Yeah, it's been a little brisk which has made it really hard to get my kids out of the house to do other things.

Priscilla: 1:12

That's the one thing about being in Jacksonville that I love is that it's not so hard. I mean, getting out of bed is hard, no matter what, but it's not because of the cold, whereas when I'm vacationing in cold climates I'm like, oh, I cannot even get out of bed, it's too cold. But in Florida that's not the issue.

Jordan: 1:30

Well, speaking of vacationing in cold climates, you actually just got back from your spring break vacation in Sedona, arizona, yeah, and I was shocked to see that you had snow.

Priscilla: 1:40

Yeah, there was snow on the ground. It was crazy, yeah. So I went to Sedona with my brother and my sister and his family and my niece. It was a great trip. And while we were there we went to the Grand Canyon and we went to Antelope Canyon and we saw Horseshoe Bend. We saw lots of stuff. And one day we were hiking in like the morning and it was so hot that we were like down to like tank tops and wishing we had put on more sunscreen and that kind of a thing. And then by the evening the sun was still out. So it wasn't even that many hours later. But by the late afternoon we were hiking around a crater and there was snow everywhere and we had like three jackets on each and mittens and gloves, I mean hats and stuff. It was crazy and I thought how is it possible that in one day we went from one extreme to the other? But I guess that's just Arizona. You know the nature of it out there.

Jordan: 2:37

Yeah, that's just like living in a desert, because Boise Idaho is like Southern Idaho and so we're right near Nevada and Utah. So we get that like really weird spring weather where you're either dying of heat or you're going to be like bundled up and it's miserable. Like just in one day you'll have that. So it's really hard to dress kids for school in the mornings. Yeah, it's all about layers.

Priscilla: 3:01

Well, I mentioned at the top of the podcast that we are going to talk about goals for your support team, and I kind of want to take a minute to define what I mean by goals. I feel like, when you think about goals for like a team, what you're talking about is like metrics for looking back at your success as far as like oh, did I meet a certain number of emails that I sent in a day, or did we hit a sales goal, or something like that, and what I'm talking about is a little less those kind of metrics. I'm sure we'll have an episode in the future that's about those kind of concrete goals. But what I want to talk about today is more about like communication goals At least that's what I'm going to call them or kind of like the pillars that are your driving ideas for your support team. Like, what kind of communication do you want to have with your users or with your customers? How do you want them to feel? What big ideas do you want to be pushing and communicating when you're working with them?

Jordan: 3:58

Yeah, almost like the foundational goals that you should have within your support team.

Priscilla: 4:03

Yeah, those like driving forces, yeah Right, and so I'm going to call them goals through this episode just because that's how I think of them. But I want to clarify from the front that I'm not talking about those kind of metrics for reviewing your work really in that way, but much more of like the communication style, that communication goals that we kind of have developed at Buzzsprout and how that can really be beneficial for setting for your whole team. At Buzzsprout we call them our big ideas and they kind of drive how we talk to customers. All right. So first I want to talk about the importance of setting these kind of goals and what they can do for your team. So if you're new to leading a support team or if you have a really small support team, it might be hard, if you're managing a large workload, to set aside time to define what your communication goals are going to be for your team.

Priscilla: 4:56

When I started working with Buzzsprout I was the first person to do support full time for the team and I just remember feeling very overwhelmed with getting to inbox zero within the day that, the idea of taking time out of my day or out of my week to sit down and figure out what our values are and what we wanted to communicate and what those goals were going to be. I just remember thinking, you know, there's no way that I'm going to be able to step aside and do that and still get my work done. And then, as we brought new people onto the team and our workload grew and our customer base grew, it became even more important that I take time out to do that, because now there are multiple people working on the team. So it's not just in my head how I'm going to communicate with people, but now I need to train other people to kind of be on that same path with me, and it was just very difficult in those early years to set aside time for that.

Priscilla: 5:50

But it's so important to bring your team together and to set those goals and to set those communication goals even if it means stepping out of the day-to-day grind to put that stuff together, because then you come back and your team can be so much more unified. And so hopefully this conversation will be encouraging to anyone listening who's kind of struggling with that about whether it's worth the time to do that. I promise you it's going to be worth your time to step out of the day to day and to focus on this and to align yourself on how you want to communicate with your users, because it'll give them a better experience with your product, which is ultimately what you want to have. You want them to have the best experience possible and in order to do that, you really need to define these goals and unify yourself.

Jordan: 6:36

So how early do you think is actually like a really important time for someone to start establishing like these goals or pillars for their customer support.

Priscilla: 6:46

Honestly, as soon as there's someone who is communicating with your users, there should be some guidelines in place for how you want that interaction to go and what you want the customer to feel after they're interacting with you. So it doesn't have to be this huge plan that takes months to develop. But even if it's just sitting down by yourself, if you're the only person doing support, sitting down by yourself looking at the different values of your company and figuring out how you want that to align with support, I think it's very important for even one person in a team to do it. It becomes way more important as your team scales and as you bring more people on. We have eight people on the support team now, and so it's very important that everyone on our team is aligned with how we're communicating with our podcasters. But even if it was just one person, it's still really, really important to have that set going into this kind of communication. So setting these goals unifies your team.

Priscilla: 7:43

We were just talking about how you know if you have a larger team, it's important to have everyone unified on that same goal, those same communication goals. But having a set of defined communication pillars really brings your team together and allows them to kind of feel like they're working for something that's a little bit bigger than themselves. It kind of changes the way you approach the inbox bigger than themselves. It kind of changes the way you approach the inbox right, say, you're using email support primarily. That's what we do primarily. So it changes the way that you sit down and start working through emails in an inbox If you know that you have these communication goals that you're trying to achieve throughout the day, instead of just helping someone log into their account. It changes almost to like a quest. You're working to make sure someone understands a little bit more about who you are as a company and as a support team.

Priscilla: 8:33

Setting these kind of goals also just makes successes more exciting. So if you define what your goals are before you meet them, then when you do meet them, when you achieve that, when you successfully make someone feel like you care about their voice, if that's one of your goals, it's one of our goals, but if you successfully do that, then you're going to feel so much more proud of your accomplishments, whereas if you don't set those ahead of time and then you just kind of stumble upon it, you're not going to get that same kind of accomplishment. Kind of like, if one of your goals is to have a 20 minute average response time and then you hit that but you never set it beforehand, it might not be as exciting as when you set it and then you hit it and then you can celebrate with your team. Oh my gosh, this month we had that 20 minute response time and it was so fantastic and now we can all celebrate because that was a goal that we were all working toward actively.

Jordan: 9:25

Yeah, I imagine that, like setting these goals, also helps with the mental health of your support team to you know, not being stressed out about everything as well.

Priscilla: 9:36

Yeah, absolutely Well, and if you know what things are important, then when you're working with a customer, it helps you to direct your energy to the things that are important and not necessarily just the things that are seemingly urgent.

Priscilla: 9:48

I think anyone who works in support knows that it's very common for someone to write in or to reach out to your support team with a sense of urgency, and it's really easy to let that urgency dictate how you spend your time and energy as a support person, dictate how you spend your time and energy as a support person. You can spend hours focusing on one aspect of a support conversation that the customer has told you is the important part and miss out on the things that maybe are more important or more aligned with your communication goals, because you're letting yourself get distracted from this urgency. And so if we have clear communication goals in the front of our mind when we're working with our customers, that gives us a better shot of focusing our time and our energy on the important work instead of getting caught up in what may or may not actually be urgent from a customer.

Priscilla: 10:37

Yeah, all right. So a good example of this is Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines is known for being a high quality, low cost airline option, but it's not like they just stumbled into that. That was one of their goals is they wanted to be the low cost provider of air travel. The former CEO of Southwest Airlines once said that when he was running the airline, if a question came up or an issue or something he had to make a decision about would come up, he would ask himself will this help Southwest Airlines be a low cost provider? And if the answer decision that he made came back to that goal and it helped him to define what was important versus what was urgent or seemingly urgent? And so, if you look at that kind of within this realm of support, we're dealing with communication with customers via email, or maybe it's phone, or maybe it's in person. And so the question becomes does this aspect of my communication help me accomplish my communication goal, whatever that is? And if the answer is no, then you can shift your focus and realign on the information that will move you to your goal. So imagine that one of your communication goals is that you want your customers to know that you're always on their team. That's one of ours for Buzzsprout, so I'll use that, but we'll come back to that later.

Priscilla: 12:07

So now someone emails your support team and they have an issue that they're telling you is urgent. They're frustrated and they're angry because the product they're using is not working the way they want it to work, so they're blaming this on you. You have a couple options, but two of them. You could respond and get defensive and explain to them how the issue is not the product. The issue is the person. You know you're at fault here and the product is good and you're misunderstanding the product. That could be a way you respond. It'd be a pretty poor experience for the customer and it also wouldn't be communicating that you're on their team. Right, it would be dividing you from your customer more.

Priscilla: 12:46

But how you could respond to reinforce your communication goal instead of getting defensive, maybe you empathize with them and instead of educating them or just educating them on how to use the product, maybe you log into their account and you fix the product for them. You fix the, whatever it is that they don't understand. You do it for them and then you educate them. But the biggest thing you've done is you've shown them that you're on their team and that you're here for them, and if they run into an issue in the future, they know that they've got you in their corner. And so you're accomplishing that communication goal through the way that you're interacting with that customer and you're not letting their urgency dictate a defensive response letting their urgency dictate a defensive response. So I think taking the time to identify what those goals are for your support team is going to be vital in making sure that your users get the right experience and that they have a positive outcome after working with your support team.

Jordan: 13:36

And what would you say are the first steps that, like someone, needs to take in order to identify what these goals or what the pillars of their customer support should?

Priscilla: 13:46

be. Yeah, I think the first thing to remember is that your goals are going to be different than someone else's goals, and copy and pasting a group of goals that another company has set up on their end may not work best for you Now. There may be some crossover, but your goals are going to be unique to your company, and so the first thing that I would do is, I would say, identify what's important to your organization, to your team. So look at your values.

Jordan: 14:18

So it's kind of like how different companies have different mission statements. Your customer support team is also going to have a different sort of like mission statement as well.

Priscilla: 14:28

Yeah, kind of yeah. I mean, if you think about, I mean, your customer support team is a department within the bigger organization, and so if you're setting goals for your specific team, then you want those to be aligned with the values of the company as a whole, and so start by looking there, look with the values of the company as a whole, and so start by looking there, look at the values of your company. If you don't have values set some organizations don't have those like top of mind or front you know, talked about so much then meet with your leadership team and figure out what those are. If they're not set at all, then sit down and define them yourself. But somehow figure out what it is that the company values and those will dictate, or at least lead you to, how you want your customer support goals to be, to be commute and like, how you want to set those, how you want to define your customer support goals.

Priscilla: 15:24

At Buzzsprout we keep our company values very front of mind. We talk about them a lot, and so it was pretty easy when I was sitting down to set these goals, for us to align those with our values, align those with our values. But if you don't have that, then sit down, define them for yourself, or meet with your leadership team and let them help you define them, because once you're comfortable with those, that will really help you in defining the goals for your team. The next thing I would do so after you've kind of you're comfortable with what your values are as a company, as an organization, the next thing I would do is look to your customers. So look to your customers' values. What are they looking for? Every product, online product is going to have a different set of customers that are going to be looking for different things, and so you want to make sure that your goals align with what your customers need and that it finds this balance between your company values and your customer wants and needs.

Jordan: 16:26

And the longer that you're working in this customer support or, you know, maybe if you've been doing it for like, let's say, a couple months, you're probably going to be seeing recurring themes or recurring requests from the customers. Absolutely.

Priscilla: 16:38

Absolutely, and your customer base might kind of change a little bit over time, and so you might. Important, because maybe your product has to do with some time sensitive work and so you need to have a 10 minute response time, or it might be that your customers don't value that time sensitive bit as much, but maybe they just need a really good, thoroughly explained answer. Or maybe they're looking for an expert. They need to talk to someone who is an expert in the field, and you need to make sure you're communicating that you are the expert. Those are all different things that when you look at your customers, you may be able to identify some of those things. The next thing I would say is keep your goals realistic. So setting these communication goals that are so specific that make it really hard to reach eventually that's just going to cause your team to burn out if they're never succeeding in communicating those things.

Jordan: 17:52

That's kind of like the. You know we're going to be the fastest customer support in the West. Everyone's going to be like just speedily trying to do things and they're going to get burned out.

Priscilla: 18:02

Right or, like you know, a two minute response time.

Priscilla: 18:04

Well that's not going to be reachable for so many people. And so you just want to be realistic when you're setting your goals, because if you set them too high or too ambitious especially if you're a new team starting out or if you're a lone support person for a smaller product or smaller company and you set these high goals for yourself, it's just going to be disappointing over time. And so I would just say be realistic about what you're setting your goals. You can always change them as things change, as you grow, as you add more people to the team, but be realistic so that you don't kind of undercut your own success. And then I would say, keep your goals manageable. So setting too many goals is going to reduce the likelihood of meeting any goals. We all know this when it comes to, like, new Year's resolutions.

Priscilla: 18:54

Yes, do you set New Year's resolutions Jordan.

Jordan: 18:57

I sort of do, but it's more just like, instead of being a new year's resolution of I'm going to stop doing this. I'm not very specific, to be honest with you. I kind of do like the general, like this is my year of fun or this is my year of mental health. Well, that's manageable. Very overarching, but that's manageable, exactly.

Priscilla: 19:18

And for a new year's resolution. I think that's a great idea. There's a book that I'm sure so many people have heard of called Bridget Jones diary. I read it for the first time a couple months ago, but it starts with her listing out all of her resolutions for her year and what she wants, and it's. It's very funny because she has so many resolutions and you are listening or you're reading through this and hearing her, you know, list out her resolutions and you are listening, or you're reading through this and hearing her, you know, list out her resolutions and you're like there's no way you're going to stick to any of these because you put out so many.

Priscilla: 19:51

I'm just going to read you a short, a short little excerpt from this list because I really thought it was very funny. She says improve career and find a new job with potential. Save up money in form of savings, be more confident, be more assertive, make better use of your time. Don't go out every night but stay in and read books and listen to classical music. Give proportion of earnings to charity, be kinder and help others more, eat more fiber, and it goes on and on and on. You're not going to accomplish any of those if you try to accomplish all of them.

Jordan: 20:24

That gives me anxiety.

Priscilla: 20:25

I know it's like stressful. I need to be all these things and now I'm going to be fresh. I mean, we talked about perfection last week. I'm going to set all these goals and if I don't meet them, then I'm going to feel bad about the fact that I didn't meet them. Well, you were never going to meet them because you set 12,000 of them, yeah. So all of this to say keep your goals manageable when you're setting them. Keep them small. Don't overcommit to what you're trying to communicate, especially if you're using email support. There's only so much you can communicate with email written back and forth. You just want to be really picky about what things are most important to communicate to your customers.

Jordan: 21:06

What's the sweet spot as far as goals go? Like, is it one of those things where you can do like too little. Like, maybe if you just have one goal, make people happy, is that too little. Or is there just kind of like a threshold where you're like all right, maybe that's too much. Like, maybe like five goals, is you're kind of pushing it where you're like all right?

Priscilla: 21:23

maybe that's too much Like. Maybe like five goals is you're kind of pushing it. We have four that we set at Buzzsprout and I do think it kind of depends on your product a little bit and you know what things are in kind of the top of that hierarchy for what's important to communicate to your listeners, for you, what's important to communicate to your customers, for your company. But I think within three, three or four is a good number, because anything above that I do think it can be difficult to kind of keep all of that at the forefront of your mind.

Jordan: 21:53

So you said that we have four pillars of customer support for Buzzsprout. I have to know what they are. Yeah.

Priscilla: 21:59

And I want to tell you also Well, when we go through these, you're going to notice all of them are quality.

Priscilla: 22:05

They're all about the quality of conversation. They're all about kind of feelings that we want to make sure that our customers understand whenever they interact with us through support or really within any kind of written medium. So a couple of years ago we, when we were first kind of like figuring out what this looked like, one of the things that was our driver for us was speed, and it was making sure we have a really low average response time of less than 20 minutes. And what we found when that was one of our pillars was that Our quality of emails, our quality of communication, went down because we were moving too fast. We were just moving too fast, so we weren't giving thorough answers. We were making silly mistakes because we were moving quickly. We would have more back and forth with a podcaster than needed to be because we were trying to move fast to make sure that our responses got to them quickly than needed to be because we were trying to move fast to make sure that our responses got to them quickly.

Priscilla: 23:07

Oh, so you were like not clarifying as much and being as thoughtful as you could have been to actually cut down on how much interaction you had Exactly, and so a couple years ago we stepped back and we kind of reevaluated what those goals were, and that's when we defined these like four communication pillars for our team, so that our focus shifted from speed to quality communication. And so these are kind of where we landed. These are the driving forces behind how we communicate and they really dictate so much of how we communicate the way we do with our with our podcasters in this case. So the first one is that Buzzsprout is simple. When Buzzsprout was originally developed, it was focused on kind of ease of use and making podcasting a more accessible platform for anyone to use, and so we wanted to make sure that someone with very limited or no technical knowledge could use Buzzsprout and feel confident in that, and so throughout the years, this idea of Buzzsprout being simple has remained a driver in the way we communicate with our users.

Priscilla: 24:13

I mentioned this one earlier, but Buzzsprout is on your team, so Buzzsprout is a podcasting product, and sometimes it can feel isolating to run your own podcast, especially if you don't have an awesome producer like Jordan to be here with you. A lot of people record completely on their own, so we want to make sure that our podcasters know that they have a team, a support team, that's here to help them and that's their team, and that when they reach out to us, they're not going to run into situations where they feel silly or embarrassed because we're here. We're on their team, we're here to help you and I think that helps when we run into kind of frustrating conversations with podcasters that don't like certain things or having billing issues. If we're able to remind them and use our communication to reinforce the idea that we're on their team, it really helps both parties have more grace for each other to get through those situations that might be a little rocky, with a really good outcome.

Jordan: 25:10

Yeah, I mean that sounds exactly like our entire episode on empathy that we had. It was, I think, the second episode with Brian, and if you're thinking about having that kind of thing as like a pillar, I would definitely go listen to that episode, if you haven't already, because it can fix so many things to have someone on your team or to be on someone's team. It can just like resolve so many issues that customer service representatives run into.

Priscilla: 25:37

Absolutely Empathy and customer support. I know we had a whole episode about it, but it's just so, so important. And then the third pillar is Buzzsprout is always improving. So a company value for Buzzsprout is that we value excellent work. So that means we're always improving our product, our people and our company, and so if that's a value of the company as a whole, then that means that that can trickle down into support in how we communicate with our customers. We want our customers to know that we are always getting better, that we are leading the industry when it comes to podcasting and that we're always improving our product, and so that dictates a lot of how we talk to customers about feature updates or how we talk to customers about new things that we're launching. All of that kind of comes through under that pillar of Buzzsprout is always improving.

Priscilla: 26:30

And then the last one which I mentioned really is very important is that Buzzsprout cares about your voice.

Priscilla: 26:36

This is really specific to Buzzsprout and the podcasting industry, because podcast is all about sharing your story.

Priscilla: 26:42

Right, it's all about having something you want to share with the world, and it's probably one of the biggest drivers behind the work that we do at Buzzsprout is that we want to make sure our podcasters have that platform and we care about our customers and giving them a way to do that, and so we care about your voice and if I care about you we were just talking about empathy, your voice and if I care about you, we were just talking about empathy. But if I care about your voice and care about your podcast and care about your stories that you're sharing, I am going to have so much more patience for you and you're going to feel that because I actually care about you, I care about your voice. Sometimes you'll be working with someone and you'll want to get defensive and you'll ask yourself okay, does this paragraph that I just wrote communicate to this person that I'm working with that I care about their voice? If it doesn't, then I probably need to rewrite it in a way that communicates that.

Jordan: 27:32

I think that you talking about how this is kind of like specific to podcasting. I was trying to think of like an example of like, let's say you're an event coordinator, you know, or you work for like some sort of like event rental company and your customer support is that you want to make memories for people or I don't know. I'm just trying to think like you could have this sort of interchangeable thing, and I was just trying to come up with examples that other people in different industries could use. You know, just to start like percolating some ideas for making their customer support pillars.

Priscilla: 28:05

Yeah, so let's say you work for a credit card company.

Priscilla: 28:08

Okay, and you are trying to define your goals for that credit card company. Speed might be in there. It might be very important that someone hears from you quickly, because if you're doing customer support for someone and they have their card hacked or fraud on their account, it might be that you really need to get back to them quickly. It also might be that you need to communicate that you are the expert or the authority when it comes to this kind of work.

Priscilla: 28:37

Right, your credit card, I mean this is very important stuff. It's your money, and so you want to make sure that whoever you're communicating with as the customer, I want to make sure that John in support is the expert here, that I can trust him, that he is trustworthy, that he is the expert. I may not care so much that this is simple, like so one of ours is that Buzzsprout is simple. It may not be that simplicity is something I'm going for when I'm working with a company about my credit card, but it might be more that that company is trustworthy. That might be higher on the list when it comes to your credit card.

Jordan: 29:10

Or that the customer feels secure with you Exactly, security.

Priscilla: 29:15

Right, exactly. Or transparency might be something that your company values honest and ethical communication. It might be that transparency then becomes one of your pillars and so maybe you're really honest and ethical communication. It might be that transparency then becomes one of your pillars and so maybe you're really honest with your customers in that way. And, to be honest, as I'm saying these, I'm like, well, buzzsprout values that and Buzzsprout values that, and all of that is true, but you kind of have to narrow it down to the ones that you want to be at the top, because, like we were saying earlier, you can't have 12 different communication goals, because then you're going to have a hard time communicating any of that to your customers.

Jordan: 29:51

Yeah, it's going to be like Bridget Jones's diary and pretty soon you're going to have all these different things which, yes, you will work on throughout the year inevitably, but maybe you don't have to, like, set them in stone, right.

Priscilla: 30:05

In a future episode we'll talk more about kind of writing tone, and within that you can kind of get more into that like nitty gritty communication styles, which will include some of these things that aren't necessarily your pillars, but they're still so much of how you communicate with your customers. Yeah, one last thing I want to talk about before we wrap this up is kind of the idea of how do you foster an environment where your goals are going to drive your work, because you can have these goals set, but if people don't know about them, if people don't keep them at the forefront of their mind, then they aren't going to do any good, they're not going to work for you, then they aren't going to do any good, they're not going to work for you. And so, as a leader on a support team, it's our job to make sure our team knows about the goals and understands them. But as a person who is just you know, working on a team as a support specialist, then it becomes your job to hold yourself accountable to aiming for these goals and holding yourself to a standard of communicating these kind of things. And so I'll speak kind of from a leadership point of view. But how do you keep your team focused on these goals, and I just have a couple kind of strategies. So the first one is to set your goals as a team.

Priscilla: 31:17

If you have, especially if you have a small team and you have the ability to do this, then bring your team together and have them be part of defining your communication goals.

Priscilla: 31:27

You can, as a team, look at the values of your company and figure out how that comes down into support.

Priscilla: 31:33

You can give your team members ownership of these goals, because, I mean, I find that when I am the one setting a goal, I am much more motivated to meet it.

Priscilla: 31:43

If someone else sets a goal for me, it's not that you can't meet it, but a drive is not going to be as strong, at least for me personally.

Priscilla: 31:51

So if you can't bring everyone together to set the goals with you, then at least make sure that you are very intentional about making sure your team knows why you chose the goals you did. If you have a large team, sometimes you can't have everyone meet and do a brainstorm session and define your goals together, but at the minimum, make sure that the reasoning behind the goals are clear. Make sure that that is clear to your team so that everyone knows what those motivators are behind the goals that you have in place. And then that kind of goes along with that is to clearly communicate those goals to everyone on your team and make sure that you're talking about it often so that it stays at the forefront of your mind and so that it stays at the forefront of their work every day and when you're working with a customer that that's going to pop in your to give out praise, reinforcing these pillars.

Jordan: 32:46

Like hey, jan, that was a really great example of being on someone's team when you did this with this person, or John in support the other day he did this and it really made our customer feel secure. Great job, john. And it's almost like these real life examples like reinforcing how important these pillars are Huge, absolutely.

Priscilla: 33:08

I mean it's positive reinforcement which is such a good motivator.

Priscilla: 33:14

Some of us are a little more naturally inclined to look at ways we can improve, and so I know for me I have a harder time identifying the wins for myself and for other people on my team sometimes, and so I do think it's so important to go out of your way and to celebrate your team members when they do something like meeting a communication goal, because especially when we're talking about communication goals, they're a little bit harder to quantify.

Priscilla: 33:41

And so when someone does a really great job of meeting that communication goal in their email, in the way that they respond to a customer, celebrate that, like show everyone what that looks like, because it can be hard to understand what that looks like if you don't meet it often. And so when it happens, share it and make sure everyone knows. And I think that kind of also aligns with reviewing work in general. Make sure that when you're reviewing your work with your team, that you are reviewing that against how you communicated and what you were communicating beyond just the process of how to log into your account. But did you do this in a way that reminded them that they had the support team in their corner, that kind of a thing. And so doing that consistently and having a consistent review process just of our work as a team, sharpening each other's skills, I think that's really, really important.

Jordan: 34:47

Yeah, I think that it'd be really easy to listen to that and be like okay, so every morning we're going to sit down as a team and go through the previous day's emails and I could see someone taking it. Imagine if you had that kind of time and your customers just knew don't write in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because Tuesdays and Thursdays are our days to review our.

Priscilla: 35:01

Imagine if you had that kind of time and your customers just knew Don't write in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because Tuesdays and Thursdays are our days to review our work. We're only available Monday, wednesday, friday. No, I mean, it would be lovely to be able to spend that much time reviewing our work, but the reality is there isn't that much time, no, and so I do think it's important to make it routine and consistent.

Jordan: 35:24

But you don't want to make it like counterproductive Right.

Priscilla: 35:27

Exactly. You don't want it to be like every email Then you go into a room and you have a meeting about that one email and then you come back and you write another one. But it might be. It might be something that's consistent, you know, maybe it's every week, maybe it's every other week, maybe for your senior members it's not weekly, it's monthly, and maybe for your newer members it is weekly. And so you know you, as the leader, will kind of you know your team best. But I would say the most important thing is that it's consistent and that it's somewhat contained. So the way we do it is usually every other week, sometimes for some people it's more monthly, but it's contained within a very specific time each week.

Priscilla: 36:07

So we're not letting it be these long three hour review meetings. It's a short email review. Usually it's about, you know, an hour if not less, and we're going through these emails together and we're measuring them against the content, but then also against these communication goals and our tone, our writing tone that we're aiming for. And so, just to kind of wrap this up, defining your communication goals is very important for your team. It brings your team together, it allows you to work for something bigger than just a back and forth email with a customer and ultimately, it will give your customers the best experience possible.

Priscilla: 36:46

So I hope that if you've gotten to the end of this episode, I hope that you are inspired to sit down and think about what the goals are, the communication goals are for your team and how you can best communicate with that team so you can all work together for this unified mission. All right, jordan, it's time for our support in real life segment, where we take real life support stories and we talk about them on the podcast. Today, we actually have a story that I am bringing from my own personal experience as a customer in a customer support situation.

Priscilla: 37:25

And it was such a great story that I just wanted to share it. Yeah, I know. So about a year ago, I bought a backpack from CalPak, which is an online luggage retailer. They're great, I love them, and I bought this backpack and I loved it. But when I got it, like one of the handles was a little frayed and then, over the course of like two months, it got really bad and then it fully broke and I was like, oh man, I really love this.

Priscilla: 37:49

I'm so bummed and I don't know if you know this about me, jordan, but I have like very little follow through when it comes to like sending things back, so returning online orders, or like following through when it comes to warranty things, and so I kind of put off using my warranty to get another backpack basically until last month, and so it had almost been a year since I bought the bag and I emailed CalPak and I said listen, I know that I'm so late on this and I know my warranty is up pretty soon, but is it possible to get a replacement of this backpack or at least get this fixed, because this broke?

Priscilla: 38:26

And they wrote back pretty quickly and they were very helpful and they gave me two options. They said you can either send us back the backpack and we will send you a new one, or you can keep the backpack and we will send you a new one. But if you do that, you can't use the warranty moving forward. And so when I read that, I went, oh shoot, that you can't use the warranty moving forward. And so when I read that, I went, oh shoot, that means I can't use their warranty program on anything else. That's how I read it, which I thought was a little bit strict. Yeah, but I figured that was their way of keeping people from keeping good products and getting another one for free.

Jordan: 38:58

Yeah, like abusing the system yeah.

Priscilla: 39:01

And so I was like I'll send it back to you. But we just talked about I'm not very good at this like shipping things back to companies. I just have very little follow through when it comes to that specifically and so I was like, OK, I'll take option one, I will send this back to you and get a new one. I would have expected that they said, OK, great, here's the form that you need to fill out to do that. Here's the way to send it back. But that is not what they did to do that. Here's the way to send it back. But that is not what they did. They wrote back and they said you can do that if you want to, but I just looked into your account and your warranty is up in two weeks.

Jordan: 39:32

Yeah.

Priscilla: 39:33

And so the likelihood of you needing to use this warranty again on this backpack is super low. You should just keep it and we'll send you a new one. Oh, and I was like, wait a minute, what I misunderstood that what they were saying was you can't use the warranty again for this specific item. I thought they were saying you can't use the warranty for other things I've purchased from them. And so I said I said back. I said I want to make sure that I'm not forfeiting my warranty for other items because I love your products and I buy a lot of stuff from you.

Priscilla: 40:03

And she was like, oh, definitely not, don't punish me, right? I was like I don't want to get stuck not being able to because I have abused the warranty on this backpack. But she went out of her way to explain to me what I had misunderstood and it was totally my misunderstanding and she pushed me in the way of getting that second one sent to me instead of me having to send one back. And I really thought it was such a good experience because I would have sent it back. Fine, it was a good experience before that. But she realized that she could save me work by clarifying something that I misunderstood. She could easily have said, all right, here's the code, send it back.

Priscilla: 40:42

And I would have known no different, said all right, here's the code, send it back. And I would have known no different. But when she looked at my account and saw that I was so close to the end of my warranty, I was like I'm not going to make you send this back. You're not going to need a new one after you send this back, so you might as well just have us send you the new, have us send you the old one or the new version. So it was such a good experience and it really reminded me that there's such a difference between a support situation and, like an education situation. She took the time to educate me, even though she didn't have to do that, and it really made my loyalty to CalPAC so much higher, and now I have so much more confidence in their warranty system and in their customer support and in their product as a reflection of that. And so, anyway, it was a great experience.

Jordan: 41:27

Yeah, it's funny because you telling this story, I literally, in the back of my head, was like I need a new travel backpack. I'm probably going to go through them, and that shows how important it is.

Priscilla: 41:40

Yeah, I wish they were a sponsor of this podcast. We could give you a code or something, but no, we don't have that. But I do think that you know we talked about this, I think, in our first episode that word of mouth, when it comes to customer support, has such a big impact on your product. If someone has a good customer experience with your product, they are going to tell people about it.

Priscilla: 42:00

I have told several people about this because I really thought it was such a good experience and she went above and beyond to make it easier for me and it didn't benefit them at all, and so it was great. So thank you, calpac, for having great customer support. So remember to share your stories and your questions with us by emailing us at happy to help at buzzsproutcom, and we may discuss one of your stories or one of your questions on a future episode, and we would love to hear from you. It's very fun to hear these support in real life stories, so please send those in. We would love.

Jordan: 42:33

We would love love, love to hear them, but that's it for today.

Priscilla: 42:36

If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review or follow us on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else that you get your podcasts, and you can find us on Instagram at happy to help pod. So thanks for listening. Now go and make someone's day.