Tips for hiring & management in customer support with Oleg Krasnov
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The fifth release of Support Heroes by Kaizo featured Oleg Krasnov – Head of Customer Support at Miro.
In this episode, Oleg shares his wealth of experience in hiring for and managing support teams. As well as providing actionable advice on how to deal with sudden, extreme increases in ticket inflow.
Key Takeaways:
1. Look for personalities & aspirations in interviews because motivated people can learn the skills.
2. Empathy + problem-solving skills = agent success. Having just one isnât enough.
3.What to do in crunch time. Dealing with an insane increase in incoming ticket flow.
Look for personalities & aspirations in interviews because motivated people can learn the skills.
âIf you are a really great specialist it doesnât mean youâre a great person; but if youâre a great person, you can easily excel and be a great specialist. Thatâs why Iâm looking for personalities rather than tech geeksâ -addressing hiring for technical support roles.
This quote is pretty self-explanatory, however, how does one quantify what a great person is? And what personality traits correlate with this kind of self-motivated success?
âI don’t wanna have people in the team who donât have a problem talking to customers. I want people who canât live without helping other people.â
Oleg doesnât look for profiles in his candidates. Sometimes the best candidates are the most unlikely people. Itâs all about quantifying their motivation for applying to the job. The same motivation that will carry them to success when working in a role day-in, day-out.
âYou just need people who are excited about the role and the company. When you can cross the aspiration of your potential employee with your own vision and mission, then you can have the greatest result.â
âAs a manager, your own investment in hiring would be returned as less things to do as a manager as soon as you have this [aforementioned] employeeâ
Empathy + problem-solving skills = agent success. Having just one isnât enough.
Olegâs general approach is based on looking for two core traits in prospective employees…
â1. Empathy. I want to see people who are excited about helping peopleâ
In order to identify this trait in people during an interview, Oleg asks his interviewees to present examples of situations where they helped others without being asked.
âThese examples are very powerful…if youâre talking to a really empathetic person, this person will definitely share multiple examples in a matter of secondsâ
Challenging these examples is also important to understand more about the factors that contributed to their empathetic response(s). Understanding whether these factors are, for example, intrinsic to the person or situational.
â2. Problem-solving mindset. This is complimentary to the empathy. If you have only one piece, it doesnât really work.â
Having brilliant problem solvers that donât want to help the customer isnât desirable for support. When coming across such people within support, Oleg suggested or facilitated a move to technical or management roles that are non-customer-facing. Which benefited the support department and the employee themselves.
What to do in crunch time. Dealing with an insane increase in incoming ticket flow.
âOn average we had 600-800 tickets a week..now we have 1600-2000. Miro [also] provides free educational licenses…before covid, we had 100 applications a month, now we have 2000-2500 applications A WEEKâ
Miroâs activity and user-base exploded due to the pandemic. As such, Oleg and his team had to deal with these insane upticks in their ticket activity. How did they deal with this?
â[The educational license applications] are not something where you can see a decrease in quality, so we outsourced thatâ
Essentially, you have to segment your requests and figure out whether there are easy tasks you can operationalise or outsource entirely in order to relieve the load on the support team and allow them to focus on the more complex tickets.
âIf we have an uplift in the overall workload, I would zoom out a bit and step back to understand what is actually driving those changes.â
âThe whole approach of expanding the team according to the overall growth does really make sense if itâs the only tool.â
Itâs all about understanding the âwhyâ and the âwhatâ. If thereâs a huge influx of tickets about a certain issue, support must affect the product roadmap- sharing insights on what obstacles customers are facing.
âI think the most powerful thing that any customer support team can do, is actually shaping the product roadmapâ
âAs support leaders, we need to make sure we have really great relationships with the engineering and product functions to be able to impact the roadmap and make sure the whole thing makes senseâ
In this regard, constantly growing the support team in response to constant growth in tickets isnât solving the issue…itâs creating greater costs on top of product, marketing, sales related mistakes, that still arenât getting solved.
âWhen youâre a product or marketing manager, youâre working in somewhat of a vacuum, I would say…when youâre dealing with customer support requests, youâre dealing with the most candid feedback you can ever getâ
So use that feedback Support Heroes! Make that feedback and your department an asset to your company. Youâll save money on hiring as well as make your product and/or service better for your customers.