112: Support Scope with Zeni Bandy

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and twelve of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is the scope of support. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Zenny Bandy. Zenny, would you like to introduce yourself?

Zeni Bandy: 0:39

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. I have been in customer support for over five years. I started as a freelancer and I am once again a freelancer. I my last two companies that I worked for were both in San Francisco, but I now live in Paris.

Charlotte Ward: 0:56

Awesome, thank you. This week we are talking about support remit. So this is how you define or when you define what your support team should and shouldn't be doing, what's actually in scope and what's out of scope.

Zeni Bandy: 1:11

That's right. Thank you very much for having me. And I'm excited to talk about this topic because support is often the most overworked part of the company. Of course, there are many people who work long hours, but support can be quite exhausting. So really have setting up appropriate boundaries for your team is crucial to prevent burnout.

Charlotte Ward: 1:35

Yeah, absolutely. So how how well I guess the qu the first question is when, right? When do you think it's appropriate to start having those conversations?

Zeni Bandy: 1:44

I actually think it's best to start them from the very beginning. Um it's really important to sit down with leadership and really get an understanding of what their expectations are for customer support. Um, because as customer support leaders, we often will put too much under our umbrella and actually over like go over the expectations. So that's really just the first place to start is really understanding what's expected, what's needed, um, and really creating these cross-functional partners at the beginning who can advocate for your team because it's the reality is is in in support, you're always going to need advocates in your company.

Charlotte Ward: 2:29

Yeah, that's that's a really good point. Finding the cross-functional partnerships really early, those cross-functional allies is is makes the conversations less difficult later down the line, even if you're not really being too specific early on, I guess.

Zeni Bandy: 2:45

Right, exactly. Um, so for example, at uh one of the last startups I worked with, um support often does technical calls, right? It's really a standard, a standard um support function. But what we would do is we'd actually bring on the um head of product to do these types of calls with customers. And so he would actually do the troubleshooting. So after uh maybe five or so minutes with somebody from the support or customer success team could not help the customer, the head of product would drop whatever he was doing to troubleshoot with them. And um, and so it's actually something that can be very interesting. A lot of larger organizations have a separate technical support. So when you're a small company, it's actually something that you could consider um not doing and working with other partners in the company to help with custom with technical support specifically.

Charlotte Ward: 3:50

Yeah. I I guess resourcing it is one thing and and getting those expertise is is a great way to build those allegiances as well early on, right? What about um as you go through the that the sort of awkward growing pains stage? So the conversations where you start to put boundaries around it. Yeah, yeah, it needs to be quite sorry, sorry, um, where you start to put boundaries around it. Um do you think that needs to be quite process driven? Do you think it needs to be quite formal? Do you need to start drawing drawing lines in the sand between all of that hard work and between all of those relationships that you've built up?

Zeni Bandy: 4:29

Yes, I do. I think it, but I also have a lot of experience working remotely. Um so I'm biased towards that because you just really need it in um those types of organizations. And I guess many people are working remotely now, so it's even more relevant. Uh, but it does, it does make it easier if things are really spelled out and are very clear, and um that there is there's clear processes. Um so, for example, if you have a partnerships team really, you know, sitting down with whoever is leading the partnership initiative and understanding what their expectations are for your team to assist with support on that. And if that's if it's not something that they can handle themselves, but really do encourage them to handle it themselves and even get provide them some basic training on how to do it, um, using, you know, providing formatting or um, you know, scripts that they can use, like working with them to give them the resources, but then allowing them to do it themselves. And so you create these little playbooks for them because the demand is low, it's it's not that big of a deal. And then they're able to quickly adjust and adapt their own programs and getting to talk to their own customers directly.

Charlotte Ward: 5:40

Yeah, I like that actually creating little playbooks for for other parts of the organization that are uh kind of doing support that um can take some of that load. Get getting other parts of the organization to take some of that load is one of the benefits of having a really well-defined remit, isn't it? What do what do you think are the other benefits of of putting the effort into this?

Zeni Bandy: 6:02

Yeah, so I would I already touched on a little bit, but um burning out the team um I think is a really is really something that needs to be considered. Um especially as your company is growing, you're off, you're often at such high utilization rates that people can't people aren't able to finish all of their work in a day.

Charlotte Ward: 6:24

Um just just makes it much more predictable, doesn't it?

Zeni Bandy: 6:28

Yeah, it does. And um, and then it also leaves room for your team to also maybe take on other things. Um, so by delegating away some of the responsibilities that um naturally could fall to other other groups, uh you give your team space to do more critical thinking and thought-provoking type of work so that they don't always have to spend time on tedious things that really aren't in their scope.

Charlotte Ward: 6:59

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one hundred and twelve for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.