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 Imers 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 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 for all of 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 is a great way to kind of search more 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, um, 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 in using that product.

Charlotte Ward: 2:48

And that that does, um, particularly remotely, that does require a huge level of first of all trust, but also uh the 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 c 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 to that respect. One is that how how do you hire for that level of self-starterism? I'm gonna go with that. And um and the self-sufficiency. There we go. Um, 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 a with that partner, with that more senior person on the team that is buddying? Would you say it's a kind of buddy system that you have in place?

Lauren Rose Eimers: 3:46

Absolutely, 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, things 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 um respond to tickets and um 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 it really um it's definitely helped us again, kind of talking more. I always kind of hearken back to my counseling background, but um, we all our brains operate on frameworks. And if we can help build that framework for us to build upon, um, problems are so much um 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 um that's a more difficult question to answer because again, it's more of that um intangible. Like it's not something that you can just ask someone, say, 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 followed through on those, or areas where maybe they were stuck and how they were able to either circumvent the issue, 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 um on your team and um 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 these self-starters.

Charlotte Ward: 5:41

It's an expensive business if you're hiring the wrong people, isn't it?

Lauren Rose Eimers: 5:44

Absolutely, absolutely. But I do think our um we've had such great success um bringing in really kind and caring and empathetic, hardworking um teammates. And I it sounds so sappy, but we we didn't realize 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 um, you know, hire people again without the line-by-line skill set, we're still um able to fill the roles on our support team um pretty successfully, I might say.

Charlotte Ward: 6:24

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash 61 for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.