Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to episode 283 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today we welcome Connor Pendergast to talk about developing a strategy for customer support. I’d like to welcome to the podcast today, Connor Pendergrast. Connor, lovely to have you for the first time. I don’t know how we’ve waited this long, but here we are. I got you at last. I’m very excited about uh about having this chat today because I know what’s coming. But before we get there, and I will ask you to introduce the topic in a second, would you please introduce yourself for our list?
Conor Pendergrast: 0:54
I would be delighted to introduce myself. Thank you. Thank you, Charlotte. I um I’m excited to be a uh uh customer support leader podcast version. And um thank you for welcoming me in such a kind way. Uh my name is Connor Pendergrast, and congratulations, you got my surname right. I will tell you that that is a rare, rare event um because the R is in the wrong place, according to most most pronunciations. I um we were just talking about in the pre-show, we were just talking about where where my accent is from. So just let’s let’s point at somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at this point, but uh from England and Ireland, and currently in England. And I am what am I at the moment? I am a customer support leader coach and customer support leader consultant as well. So I my aim is to help people to deliver better business-to-business customer strategy. Uh customer strategy, customer support strategy is what we’re going to be talking about today.
Charlotte Ward: 1:47
But it is, it is. I I need to I need to touch on the accent slightly, not discuss yours anymore because we did that quite quite extensively before the show. However, I think what you the kind of mid-lantic, middle of the Atlantic that you touched on there. I don’t know if you’re aware, but um there’s no reason why you would be. But I came across, I don’t know if this is a an actually recognized syndrome. But bear with me. Bear with me. Um, I I have realized I suffer from something that I came a came across an actual name for. I don’t know if it’s official or if someone made this up. Wondering accent syndrome.
Conor Pendergrast: 2:27
Yes. Yeah, I don’t I don’t know if that’s a real syndrome. I did study psychology in university, Charlotte, so I should know, but I don’t recognize it from the DSM. But I do know what it’s about. But you should tell our listeners, your listeners, excuse me, not our listeners. Yeah, listening to both of us, I hope. Yeah, well, wondering accent syndrome is is.
Charlotte Ward: 2:48
Yeah, it’s it’s like when you have enough exposure to a particular accent, um, and maybe even not a significant amount, that you pick up the accent of the people that you’re surrounded by or speaking to. And I guess to varying degrees, to your point, pre-show, you work with a particular group uh, you know, a lot, it heavily influences. Um I I can I find I’m just after a couple of drinks, my accent’s quite easily influenced on a Friday night if the person I’m talking to has a strong enough accent. It’s embarrassing, honestly, but uh, but it is a thing. So I I understand exactly where you’re coming from.
Conor Pendergrast: 3:20
Yeah, it’s I I find myself doing the exact same thing. I I consider it uh as a fellow customer support leader, I consider it a uh a practice uh explicit or implicit or like accidental or deliberate of people with high empathy, is where I’ll go with it. And um people who are trying to create those relationships with other people, I without a doubt find it, find that I do that myself. I and I feel embarrassed by doing it because I don’t want it to come across as being uh mocking or condescending or anything like that. It’s just genuinely a subconscious thing. I find so I lived in Ireland for 15 years, which is part of where my accent gets a little bit more skew-a-s, um, and not not the British accent that I think I have in my head. Um, but when I speak to Irish people again, I can feel my accent getting closer to where I was between the ages of 10 and 25 or so, and uh and coming closer to that accent again. And I have to sort of deliberately stop myself and be like, Connor, use your own accent, please. Don’t just just just behave.
Charlotte Ward: 4:27
Yeah, I’m I’m with you. My my half of my uh well, my dad’s family is all from Yorkshire. I can really easily pick up that accent when I go up north and uh a little I I can hear a little twinge of it. No one else can hear it, but a little twinge of it every now and then on certain words. But um never lived up there. No excuse. No excuse for that at all.
Conor Pendergrast: 4:47
No. Your accent is not from up north.
Charlotte Ward: 4:51
It’s not, it’s not okay. Right. We do need to get to the topic at hand, which was uh strategy. I know, I mean we could talk all day, couldn’t we? But let’s actually uh let’s actually give the listeners what they came here to hear, uh, which is a conversation about customer support strategy and uh and kind of connecting the dots, right? This was a little bit about what we talked about pre-show. Um, so so I think strategy is something that particularly new customer support leaders um feel they need but don’t know how to access or develop or create, um, and certain and certainly struggle to figure out how what they want to do or what they need to do inside the function of support connects to the wider business strategy. I think that’s one part of it for me. Um, and then there’s there’s a a secondary part of this, which is once you know what the thing is that you’re trying to form as a support function, and maybe even got the experience or got the guidance to figure out how that connects to a wider business strategy, even experienced leaders can kind of fall down at some of the next hurdles, can’t they? So um I’m sorry if I front-loaded this quite a lot for you, but but I feel I feel like we need to talk about what let’s start with like what strategy actually even is and like how to spend a minute or two on like the different approaches to that, dependent on, I guess, you know, organization stage, career, you know, how experienced you are as a leader, etc. What’s your take on that?
Conor Pendergrast: 6:25
Yeah, so I I I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, or if it’s if it’s a a counter-take, or or if it’s just like actually widely expected accepted. But so you have your objectives, you have your strategy, and you have your tactics. And I think objectives are important. Objectives is where you’re going. Objectives is um your your company’s overall goals and what what it is you want as a bit of an outcome. Most people accept that. Most people, most people recognize that. That’s great. You could have you’ll probably have one for your company, you’ll probably have one for your support organization as well. And then your strategy is your broadly sweeping idea of how to get there. And then your tactics are the incremental steps to meet the strategy. And I think objectives and strategy are important. I think, however, they can be over-emphasized. So I so I I created this sort of uh 2025 plan um that people can can look at and download. And while that’s at where is it, customer success.cx slash 20252025.
Charlotte Ward: 7:32
Will it you won’t need to remember that. We’ll include a link, don’t worry.
Conor Pendergrast: 7:36
Yeah. And while so while I was doing that, I was thinking to myself, okay, well what what what do you do next? And I realized that the strategy is great, but actually your actual customer support experience is going to be far more influenced by the values that your team holds and that your support organization holds, the culture of the support organization, and the incentives of your support organization as well. Um so it’s basically saying that your strategy doesn’t matter at all if it’s not well executed on. And a perfect strategy doesn’t get you anything without uh a clear the the right conditions to actually drive you forwards. So I I think and maybe so I mentioned this beforehand, maybe this is just me being reactionary and and bitter about getting some feedback that I that I wasn’t thinking strategically enough. But it seems like um it seems like we are over-emphasizing strategy in and not thinking enough, as I said, about values, culture and and incentives. What are you like what are your thoughts on that? Do you does does that does that jive with you?
Charlotte Ward: 8:51
Is that I think it does. I think it does. I I I I um I look, I I think that I think you have to lead a function having a broad idea of what you want that function to look like. And I think that is essentially your strategy. Um does it have to be formalized? I’m not so sure it does. I I think that for me, when you’re talking about execution, it just really chimes for me that support is always, always such an operational part of the business. Um, even if we deconstruct it and we’re not even doing tickets, we’re doing conversations and we’re very high touch, you know, and or or it’s more, you know, it has more of a success bent than a question and answer bent. Like support can take many forms, but it’s always operational. And I think for me that is the grounding of any kind of fanciful or fancy ideas about you know, support having a strategic uh layer. Um, and I for me, I think that’s what grounds any strategy, and I think that’s what um first of all challenges the idea that you can write down a support strategy in one or two sentences. Um, because it’s it’s more of a feeling, but it’s also highly reactive and highly operational. And I think we all we all know, everyone listening to this call, know how quickly the support landscape changes as well. So any anything that I write down at the start of 2025 is probably going to be completely uh irrelevant by July. So, like, you know, I I’m I’m constantly re-evaluating that strategy, which I think is is why it’s hard to write down and why it’s hard to sum up in I think probably a different way to some other business functions. I think when I think about success, for instance, as something that’s also customer-facing, and you know, it for me the strategy is easier to write down because it it’s a longer play in every form, you know. Uh I would say the same about sales, I would say the same about product. Um But support just can’t make a long play, it’s too reactive, and I think you need you need strategy much more when you’re playing long plays than when you’re than when you’re agile, if that makes sense. Does that answer your question?
Conor Pendergrast: 11:17
Yeah, yeah. And so really the the experience that your customers are having, if you’re a support leader, the experience your customer is having is probably far more driven by that operational model and by and by what goes into that operational model rather than those long-term strategic um plans, really. Yeah. So maybe the advice Yeah. So maybe the advice then is no go on Charlotte. No, you go, you go.
Charlotte Ward: 11:48
I’ll go. It’s my podcast, I’m gonna do it. Um it was just to touch on that kind of by operations. I don’t just mean tooling, you know. I I and I I I think that there are so many aspects to operations, knowledge and everything else, right? And I I I think that um it’s interesting for us to unpack, is really where I was gonna go with this, like what we actually mean by operations and how that actually um drives the experience that you’re talking about.
Conor Pendergrast: 12:14
Yeah, yeah. Yes. Okay, so what like I guess the takeaway that I’d suggest for the dear listener um is like don’t you probably don’t need to spend like three-day offsites uh every quarter planning for your strategy. Like if you’re gonna do anything, spend the majority of your time thinking on how you actually execute that strategy, not how you set the strategy. And so I I’ve I think I’ve made it clear. My my thoughts around how you execute the strategy are with the values that your organization, your company or your support organization, they’re probably gonna be identical, if not pretty similar. The values they hold, the culture they have, and the incentives that you have as well. Um do you think I might go through and like talk about what what that means? Do you think that would help?
Charlotte Ward: 13:08
I think so. I exactly because I think I think connecting values to what we just talked about is because I think I think they are also values really drive those operations. They’re they’re really, really, really closely interlinked, I think. So so what what do we mean by values and and how does that how does that happen?
Conor Pendergrast: 13:27
Yeah, so there’s um it’s funny, a friend of mine sent a uh have you heard of Wankernomics? It’s just a real test for for who is an audience member of the podcast and whether that is a very offensive term or not.
Charlotte Ward: 13:41
I love it. I’ve never heard go for it, explain it to me.
Conor Pendergrast: 13:44
Australian Australian duo who do uh stand-up comedy uh through the lens of uh like business consultant executives. So imagine going to a stand-up comedy night and they have a PowerPoint presentation and they’re wearing suits and they’re talking about company values. And so a friend of mine, just by coincidence, sent a video of them and their little thing on values yesterday. And um, and it was a a total uh total tear down of what values are. And so your values actually do have to mean something. They are values are the principles that guide behavior. They should be actionable principles as well, and clearly help your team to understand what they what approach they should take and what approach they shouldn’t take. So um I I I like and respect Help Scout, so I I out of curiosity to research for this, I looked up their their values and not like I don’t think that they would actually surprise anyone who knows Help Scout. They have four values happy to help, craft over convention, progress not perfection, and own the outcome. And like that, those are those embody Help Scout in my mind. And they’re just they give me the warm fuzzies where I know the kind of product that Help Scout is delivering based on looking at those values. And the other way around, I kind of know the pro the values that Help Scout is bringing by looking at the product as well. And looking at the um the the the values of a company that delivers a different support product. Like I bet if you looked at Zendesk’s values, they’re being wildly different. I’ve looked at intercom’s values in the past as well, and they were totally different. They were uh customer obsessed, and I’ve forgotten the other six. I’m sorry. That’s a terrible example.
Charlotte Ward: 15:32
But I mean, six gives it away, doesn’t it? I I mean yeah, the important thing for me is about values is don’t have too many. Like you don’t need ten.
Conor Pendergrast: 15:42
Yes. No, absolutely. Yeah. And what they’re as I said, they’re they’re sort of the way of saying, okay, well, when you’re when you, member of a support organization, are working and you’re trying to decide what to do, even on the that like really granular operational level that we were talking about, it guides the behavior. If you’re uh if you’re a Help Scout customer support rep and you are talking to a customer, you know that these are the four things that should be got, and you should be happy to help. You should be going for craft over convention, so looking for interesting uh approaches that you can take, progress not perfection, not looking to like get 100% or 0%, looking to get 90%, let’s say, and help um that much, and then own the outcome as well, and not just like fire off something and be like, okay, well, that’s done, and I’m I’m never seeing this conversation ever again. And and I think the values are really, yeah, they’re really useful as a when they’re well designed and when they’re well crafted, they will drive you forward in that strategy much more effectively than just like having generic values that you grab off the internet.
Charlotte Ward: 16:54
And in the execution of that strategy, right? I think listening to Help Scouts values has really reminded me of something, uh, and I think I’ve just connected some dots, and I know that I’ve used this quote on the podcast before. It’s exciting, isn’t it? I I know that I’ve used this quote on the podcast before, but many years ago I went to um a uh I don’t know if you know Dixa, the customer support platform. They had a a small kind of event in London that I went to, and they had uh a guy whose name I’ve forgotten who was at the time, this is a very long anecdote, who was at the time leading customer support, customer service for Rafa, the cycling company. Yeah, and he’s he had he said something about process, which really struck with me, um, really struck a chord. Uh he said that they, yes, they’re very operational, they are very process driven. The support reps follow process, but they have freedom to zigzag across the process. And I really love that. And what I’m the dots I’m connecting here are like in the moment at Help Scout, these values actually do potentially give you the freedom to zigzag across a process, right? Because you know the direction you’re heading in, because you’re told that you’ve only got four of them to remember for a start, which is always a help. And they tell you the direction that you’re moving in. These values drive what you do, they literally drive what you do. Even if you’ve got a written-down process or a script that you’re following, if you have anything that overrides that, it’s the values.
Conor Pendergrast: 18:28
Yes. I I couldn’t agree more. I think you I think you’re getting exactly to the heart of it, which is that values are more important. You should be as a customer support leader, you should be empowering your team members, your colleagues, to tear up the process. And I am I love process. There’s nothing I like more than iterating on like a 13-step process to make it clearer and more concise and less less fluffy and making sure that everyone’s got the tooling that they needed. But if you’re going through the process and you’ve come to a point and you’re like, I’m not doing the right thing by following this process, your colleagues should be empowered to follow your values, not the process, and tear up the process and do the right thing. And I think that’s a perfect example of why the values are are important and are a great way of driving you forward as well. Yeah, yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 19:29
Yeah, yeah. Really good point. Really good point. So you had some other facets to this, didn’t you? So you talked about values. What are the other facets that we have talked about?
Conor Pendergrast: 19:38
So values are the principles that guide behavior. The second thing I said was was more important than strategy is culture. So culture is actually the reflection of your values. It’s um the the the the term I found was the observable manifestation of your company’s values, which is a bit too lofty for me. But it’s um think about. As how we do things here. That’s just that is the easiest thing. And that’s and that comes down to what we were just talking about, which is the processes that people follow, for example, to do a particular thing. And again, your your culture, your processes, how people do things at work, how people interact with customers has to be, which is your culture, has to reflect the values as well. So if Help Scout, uh let’s pick up, let’s pick on Help Scout. If uh if their values happy to help, but uh but they had a a culture. I don’t think that they do. I feel a bit bad for help scaling. Sorry, help scout. Sorry, help scaling. Um they’re they’re pretty thick skinned, they have to be. Um they if they had uh a process where they automatically closed out tickets uh or conversations after four hours without a customer response, and you had to create a whole new pro a whole new ticket, a whole new conversation, a whole new request if you hadn’t responded within four hours. That would be a clear sign that they are not that their culture, that the process doesn’t reflect that values. And so that’s it’s the um it’s the it’s it’s how your values are showing up by how people actually do their work. What’s it like what so what’s it like for you? Uh what what have you seen for this?
Charlotte Ward: 21:24
Yeah, I I really love the I mean it is a bit wordy, it’s a bit of a mouthful, the observable manifestation of your company’s values. Uh I I heard put a different way, which is that the culture is the sum of your behaviors, which is essentially saying the same thing. It’s what we actually do uh every day, it’s how we show up and how we act. Um, you can write down a culture, and if what you actually do every day doesn’t reflect that, to use your word, then then it’s not reflecting your values, and it’s not the culture you think you have. The culture you think you have is actually what people do. Um and what to the point we made before, what people actually do in the moment should be driven by the values. So I think for me, this is how they all really tie together. Um, and uh, you know, if you’re not enabling your team to drive forward on the basis of values, then you don’t have the culture you probably think you have, is what I would say. And I call that I have a lovely term for that. It’s my own my favorite, my favorite uh thing to tack on the front of a culture that I I observe from the outside, and I know this isn’t help scouts, um, but sometimes I look and I think that’s a bit of a painted on culture, you know. That’s somebody’s written down something lofty and it doesn’t actually reflect or isn’t reflected by the behaviors inside. Yeah, and I’ve certainly I’ve certainly been not where I am now, but I’ve certainly been in uh organizations, you know, maybe maybe 20 years ago, if people want to look back at where I was, maybe where there was a painted on culture, you know.
Conor Pendergrast: 22:58
We’re all going to LinkedIn now, Charlotte.
Charlotte Ward: 23:00
Somewhere in the tw 15 to 20. There you go.
Conor Pendergrast: 23:06
Uh yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, God, that’s um yeah, that’s such a great framing of it. Um, definitely. Uh so let’s like if let’s do a non-help scat example for people as well, just so that people. Yeah, I know. So um let’s say one of the values is continuous improvement, um, then the culture that follows continuous improvement, the culture that values continuous improvement could be that you are documenting common sources of product confusion. That when when a colleague, when one of your team members is talking to a customer and they’re like, I just don’t understand how to go from point A to point C, and and you have to explain it and it takes three paragraphs, uh, then your your culture should say, your process should say, This is confusing. So let’s make sure that we’re connecting this back to this particular product sprint that we’re going to work on and and improve this particular product or product. And if there’s no, we’ll get to this in incentives. You see, this is this isn’t the structure, it’s it’s useful. If there’s nothing to give someone the time to do that, you’re not actually valuing continuous improvement. All you’re valuing is the fastest possible support um support resolution without thinking in that long term, going back to the pushing towards the strategy, manifesting as your values and your culture.
Charlotte Ward: 24:37
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so let’s dive straight into incentives then.
Conor Pendergrast: 24:42
And uh I know I just finished my coffee and now we can get on to incentives.
Charlotte Ward: 24:50
Um uh yes, so you touched on something really interesting there because you used the word incentive and time in the same sentence. Um, and I and you know, I know that when we started talking about this and you said incentives, I thought, well, pizza, you know, Friday afternoon off or whatever. But what do we actually so but you said time, it’s a really interesting one. So let’s unpack what we mean by incentives then. What are we talking about? Is it more than pizza?
Conor Pendergrast: 25:21
I’d say it’s a lot more than pizza, although I am actually quite incentivized by pizza. Meeting, meeting. Not not always, but you know, sometimes I’m uh, you know, I it’s it’s early in the morning and I am doing a bike workout, and I’m like, yeah, I’m gonna be real hungry after this, and thinking about my my evening pizza. But mostly I’m thinking about incentive incentives, are actually I’m not thinking about, I’m not even thinking about compensation. When I say incentives, I’m talking about what we do that shapes behavior by deciding what gets praised in a customer support organization and what gets punished in a in a customer support organization. And punished, I it doesn’t like punishment can be uh punishment can be even the absence of praise as well. Um where where we’re saying when you do X, you get Y, and when you do Z, you get A. And so sorry, that was terribly phrased.
Charlotte Ward: 26:28
Let me try it really was. A whole new alphabet.
Conor Pendergrast: 26:34
So incentives are when you do X, Y happens. So for example, let’s talk about continuous improvement again. If we’re saying that we have a value, a value of continuous improvement, and if we’re saying that we have a culture of documenting confusing product flows, then you should also have a way of creating the space, and as we said earlier, as I said earlier, the time for people to be able to do that. So what you’re saying is your if we get into the granular, your metrics or your KPIs, your metrics, your measurement of interactions with customers, so customer tickets, customer conversations, should allow for the fact that people will need to document confusing product flows. As simple as that. That is how you incentivize people to act in a particular way. You incentivize people to value continue continuous improvement, you incentivize the process and the culture of documenting confusing product flows, and you incentivize that by creating more space for people to interact with customers and take that what sometimes is referred to as double loop thinking. You know, you’re solving the immediate problem and then you’re thinking beyond it to loop back around and solve it for future customers. And so you either incentivize that by creating the performance indicators that allow that space, or the flip side, you punish that behavior, you punish that culture, and you create it so that it’s not a culture and not valued by creating no space for people to have those customer support interactions, those and and then uh loop back around and and do that second pass. But like does that get to the source of it?
Charlotte Ward: 28:26
Like, is that it really does?
Conor Pendergrast: 28:28
It really does someone.
Charlotte Ward: 28:30
Uh it’s explaining it well enough for me, so we’ll go with that. Um, I uh I I can think of two really, really um uh good kind of parallel examples. What one is you know, you’re talking about uh you know improving product flows for me. Yeah, and even an even closer to home one is KCS, you know, knowledge centered service, knowledge centered support. If you don’t like this is entirely inside support, entirely something we have agency over. And if we’re not allowing our agents or our engineers time to document, I mean, this is a bit of the double loop, it’s fixing it for the next person, but it’s it’s even closer to home, right? It’s this isn’t something that’s leaving the team. Like this is uh creating time to do the work of improving knowledge is uh is something that um uh we need to uh like uh not put any barriers to in terms of setting, to your point, like setting the wrong KPIs and driving the wrong behaviors. Um and I th there’s ways to do that. You you uh build time into your KPIs to allow it to happen, or you set time aside where those KPIs aren’t counted. So you actually it’s like the Google 20% model. I don’t know if anybody ever actually gets 20%, but dedicated time a week to do other things, or however you want to, however, you want to engineer that into your people’s day, yeah, it it it’s it’s important to send the message that that is engineered into their day. Otherwise you end up with gamification of all of your other metrics, which is just Goodhart’s law, right? Which is that as soon as something becomes a a metric, as soon as something becomes you know, you’re measuring something, it becomes a target. So people will just work on tickets, try to solve them faster, pick up the phone faster, and just get through the day and not do all the other things you’d really like them to do.
Conor Pendergrast: 30:21
Exactly. You have to create that space. That’s a I think that’s a perfect example. By coincidence, I saw I was watching, I think it was a video by Intercom, and their senior knowledge manager, Beth Ansher, mentioned that they they give their support agents, a group of their support agents, dedicated time away from direct one-to-one customer conversations in order to work on both internal documentation and customer-faced documentation. Like that is a very direct way of incentivizing the right behavior, creating a culture around that, and then driving forward that value as a result as well. And and again, it it meets a long-term strategy for them, which is probably some somewhat alongside along the lines of scaling their customer support more effectively. But but if they have that as a goal and they do not have the value, the culture, and the incentives, then nothing happens and nothing changes, and you get no further to um to the right behaviors.
Charlotte Ward: 31:22
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so that’s something for us all to sit back and ponder, isn’t it? Are we actually creating space? Um and and you know, I I think there are elements of recognition, pizza, and other incentives in here, right, that that uh it’s worth touching on. But I I I think I I also think, you know, that if you create a culture where people expect uh, you know, a gold star for every small thing they do, then it’s just another effectively another KPI, right? How many gold stars did I get this week? You know, and uh yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. Um so outside of giving time, what are your thoughts on the the other aspects of incentives on compensation on pizza or on everything else?
Conor Pendergrast: 32:21
Yeah, I mean I again I do like pizza. Um, but I think yeah, it’s funny. I um so I was speaking with a coaching client last week, and they were talking about we were talking about the experience of burnout, and there’s there’s like six different ways, six different things that you can look at. And um, and one of them is is basically reward. Uh, and we we recognized that like they were being well compensated and well rewarded for their work, um, but they but we were still talking about high levels of burnout. And I like in that context, reward is not always going to be the thing that that really helps. It’s gonna be the other parts of it that helps. So it all comes down to to the team themselves and and what’s working well, but you can talk about incentives in terms it in terms of compensation, in terms of salary, in terms of equity, in terms of whatever compensation it is. Uh, you can talk about it in terms of like maybe that there are collective sort of team level goals and then rewards as a result of that, but probably it comes down to um who are you actually giving opportunities to and who are you like as a result of that, what are people looking like what are people learning from your choices as a leader? You know, if you’re if you are if you are trying to value, uh let’s just go back to the to the documentation improvements things. If you have a group of people who are consistently doing product product knowledge base updates and they’re doing great work, but none of them are actually getting rewarded or recognized by you in publicly or privately, however they prefer to be recognized, if they’re not being um given opportunities that are being created, then they’re gonna learn pretty quickly that actually, even though there is the extra time in uh to create the the knowledge articles and to create those updates, that’s not what really gets uh gets rewarded, and that’s not what really gets recognized. So it’s you can have financial incentives and financial rewards, but you can also have those sort of social ones as well. And I think beyond a baseline, like above well, sorry, beyond above a baseline, people respond very strongly to to those sort of social effects and uh and and it’s not really politics, but it’s more you know, how well how would you describe it? Is it is it it’s how people how people are being selected and and praised, really.
Charlotte Ward: 34:55
Yeah, yeah, it’s uh yeah, it’s it’s not politics. Um because politics is just another game, right? Um yeah, I I guess it is it’s it’s sort of social validation, right? Whether that’s done you know validation, you know, it it is. It’s uh it’s kind of uh focused on the needs of the individual.
Conor Pendergrast: 35:20
Yes.
Charlotte Ward: 35:21
And to your point, that recognition can be public or private, but yeah, but and so doesn’t have to be, you know, a photo on a slide at the next, you know, company employee of the month kind of actually employee of the month, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um doesn’t have to be a Perspecs trophy, which I definitely haven’t got behind me.
Conor Pendergrast: 35:39
Um I see dozens of trophies behind you.
Charlotte Ward: 35:42
Um dozens of trophies, none of them have a work. Maybe one of them is a lot. Um but um but uh yeah, I I think that understanding and and and delivering the kind of recognition, let’s use that word, whether that is the photo on the wall, you know, uh as you go in the office or it’s something else that your folk respond to best is is the one to use.
Conor Pendergrast: 36:14
Yes. Yeah. But uh I mean, uh and obviously you should pay people well enough to and you should pay people well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 36:21
I mean, I like a gold star, but I like I like to be paid well better.
Conor Pendergrast: 36:25
I know, yeah, I know. I I I am yes, I have to remember that I’m a very comfortably middle class man, and I and there is not very fair compensation for a huge amount of people in our industry, and that uh that that should be the first and clearest way to uh to to drive your values and your culture and your sentiments and your strategy. It’s like pay people way. Well, yes.
Charlotte Ward: 36:51
Pay people, treat them respectfully, yeah, give them the space to do good work, yeah. Exactly.
Conor Pendergrast: 36:56
Yeah. So that’s my that’s my that’s my hot take for for 2025 is strategy, strategy shrategy, um, values, culture, and incentives are are far more important, yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 37:11
It’s all the things, it’s all those things. Um I I I think this has been a great exploration of actually why why you know strategy actually should be more than just painted on. And um and like it needs a really strong foundation in in all of those things. Um so thank you for coming on the podcast and exploring that with me. Now I will put some links to all of the things in uh the show notes, of course, so people don’t have to remember. But did you want to just run through run through the link you gave at the start and anything else right now that you think would be useful to support our conversation today?
Conor Pendergrast: 37:49
Yeah, of course. So the the link I gave at the start was to customer success.cx slash 2025. That’s 2025. If you want if you do want to think about a bit of a plan and a roadmap and a bit of a very small strategy for this year, you can get that there. Or if you want to just hear hear from me every weekday, you can join my weekdaily email list, um, which is designed and written for customer support leaders. And um you can get that at customersuccess.cx slash daily. Daily. I feel like you need to weekdaily.
Charlotte Ward: 38:21
I should say I I I was just gonna say, weekdaily is a great word. Um I just don’t think it’s not a word, but I think it’s a word. Like it’s it’s not a word, but it is a word, and you definitely need to put an alias at the very least now.
Conor Pendergrast: 38:35
I’ll do weekdaily as well as daily. There’s a couple of different ways to get in there. Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 38:39
Nonetheless, I think you’re getting that five times a week, if I interpret that correctly.
Conor Pendergrast: 38:44
That’s absolutely correct. I I have learned not to use uh from working with Americans for nine and a half years. I learned to stop using Fortnightly, even though it’s the clearest way of framing it. Sorry, sorry, American, but you’re wrong. Bi-weekly is very confusing.
Charlotte Ward: 39:00
I stick to my cultural mark as very, very, very, very uh limpet-like. Uh so I still use Fortnightly despite working for an American company for five years. And uh uh people around me are learning British, that’s all I can say. Uh so thank you so much. Thank you so much, Connor, for joining me. Uh, it’s been an absolutely fascinating conversation um and enjoyable too, which uh which is what I strive for. So um thank you for fitting the bill. And um will you come back and do another do another one with me soon?
Conor Pendergrast: 39:33
Absolutely, where I’ll take everything I’ve just said, turn it upside down and say strategy is the most important thing in the world.
Charlotte Ward: 39:40
Why not? Why not? We’re here for we’re here for all all perspectives, right?
Conor Pendergrast: 39:44
Here to change my mind. Thank you so much, Charlotte.
Charlotte Ward: 39:47
No worries, thank you so much. That’s it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two eight three for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.
