61: Onboarding New Hires with Lauren Rose Eimers

Charlotte Ward 0:13
Hello, and welcome to Episode 61 of the customer support leaders podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is onboarding new hires. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I’d like to welcome Lauren Rose Eimers. Back to the podcast today. What are your biggest successes when it comes to onboarding?

Lauren Rose Eimers 0:42
We have definitely found I think kind of the sweet spot in building a foundation of knowledge about our tool, experience with that tool, and then having a senior support individual to help walk them through the process and the onboarding. I feel like onboarding really it happens honestly over the course of a month or two months. And then it’s again, that iteration process thereafter where we try to create a safe space where questions are always okay. And it’s always okay to reach out to an another teammate or a lead to make sure we’re all on the same track. And I think especially working remotely, it’s so easy for someone to get off kind of on a wrong track, and just keep chugging along until, if there aren’t any safeguards in place to guard against that to help redirect that, you know, there can be a lot of miscommunication occurring not only between teammates, but also between the customer support individual and their customers. So we always make sure we have a really super strong knowledge base that we make sure during the onboarding process, that is something that you have to be referencing, learning how to use. We Love Guru, we think that’s a great tool. We’re all have kind of the storage of information. So it’s not siloed with one or two teammates. That’s a great reference. We love slack too. We have our own dedicated channels for support. But that also was a great way to kind of search for fringe issues, looking at, you know, chats from the past to see if previous issues have been brought up. And we also use Basecamp, for issues that are being worked on currently. And that’s another way for people that are onboarding to kind of test the waters and see, you know, where they can find the answers to their questions. And then of course, pairing with a more senior support person, or reaching out to a lead. These are all amazing ways to start really learning the product, and learning how to support our customers and using that product.

Charlotte Ward 2:48
And that thought does some particularly remotely that does require a huge level of festival trust, but also the people that you hire have to Be self starters, don’t they, they have to be willing to not have everything spoon fed to them. Even if it’s available in the in the store cupboard as it were, you can’t have people who are just waiting to be given everything. So I guess I’m kind of interested in two things to that respect. One is that how do you hire for that level of self starter? rism? I’m going to go with that. And, and the self sufficiency. There we go. And the The other aspect is, how do you or indeed Do you at all have kind of formal checksums in place with that partnering that you were talking about with, with that partner with that more senior person on the team, that is budding would you say, you say it’s the kind of buddy system that

Lauren Rose Eimers 3:46
yes, and that is a formal process where you’re essentially walking hand in hand walking this new path, with a more senior support person for a good portion of time when you are onboarding and there are checks that we have in place. That we need to make sure you know, have you figured out how to search guru? Have you figured out how to use, you know, our internal database? Have you figured out, you know how to respond to tickets and make sure you’re, you know, just using tools in the correct way. And it’s really and it builds upon itself very much like a rubric that you would use at school. It’s very similar to that it sounds so stodgy and static. But really, it’s definitely helped us again, kind of talking more. I always kind of harken back to my counselling background, but we all our brains operate on frameworks and if we can help build that framework for us to build upon, problems are so much more easily solved, and we’re trying to impart those tools on these new hires. Now, kind of speaking to your first part of the question, how do you hire for these self starters? And I think that’s, that’s a more difficult question to answer because again, it’s more of that In tangible, like, it’s not something that you can just ask someone said, Hey, are you a self starter? But I think in the interview process, having questions where, you know, you ask someone to talk about projects that they have started and how they follow through on those or areas where maybe they were stuck and how they were able to either circumvent the issues solve the issue, reach out for assistance on the issue, I think these are all ways to kind of get a little peek into that. And of course you’ll once the person is on your team and getting to work alongside you, you’ll get to of course see that more but I mean, of course you want to hire for people that are the sales start

Charlotte Ward 5:40
expensive business if you hiring people, isn’t it?

Lauren Rose Eimers 5:44
Absolutely, absolutely. But I do think our we’ve had such great success, bringing in really kind and caring and empathetic hard working, teammates and I it sounds so simple. up, but we we didn’t realise how much we needed that person until they were a part of our team and how much it strengthened the team. So something’s working on our end being able to, you know, hire people. Again, without the line by line skill set, we’re still able to fill the roles on our support team. I’m pretty successfully I might say.

Charlotte Ward 6:24
That’s it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com/61 for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.