Slides from my talk at Refresh 19 (London) on building room for career development within your customer-facing teams.

1. Uncharted Territory
Thinking differently about career development for
your customer experience team
LISA HUNT
Customer Success Engineer - Geckoboard

2. What do you want to be
when you grow up?

4. Who is a Customer Success
Engineer?

7. ● Understand how the product fits together
● Maintain existing code
● Investigate bugs
● Work under pressure to solve problems
● Set clear expectations
● Handle difficult conversations with customers

8. How did I get here?

9. 5 years as a bookshop
sales assistant
6 years as a part-time
computer science student
4 years as a customer
support rep
4 years as a
bookshop manager

11. Time to progress
to something “better”?

12. Myth 1:
Spending money on customer
experience is a waste of time

13. ● 80% of companies claim to provide a superior customer experience
(but)
● Only 8% of their customers are happy with the experience*
*Source: Bain CustomerLed Growth diagnostic questionnaire, n =
Satmetrix Net Promoter database, n = 375

16. “Customer Experience better be at the
top of your list when it comes to
priorities in your organization.”
-Steve Cannon, President & CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA

17. Myth 2:
Customer-facing roles don’t
require skill

19. “Customer service is hard.
Anyone who tells you otherwise
is in denial, bad at it, or both.”
— Jeff Toister, Customer service author, Consultant, and Trainer

20. Myth 3:
Customer-facing roles are
a dead end

21. “A dead-end job is a job in which
there is little or no chance
of career development and
advancement into a higher paid
position.”
- Wikipedia

23. “Support agents are very
attractive candidates for in-house
hiring, because they're
empathetic, they know the
product, and they know the
customers.”
- Martin Koiva, co-founder of Qualitista

24. Then why do my best
employees keep leaving?

25. 1. Exciting, challenging, or meaningful work
2. Supportive management/good boss
3. Being recognized, valued, and respected
4. Career growth, learning, and development
5. Flexible work environment
6. Fair pay
What makes an employee stay with you?*
*According to ‘Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay’ by Beverley Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 5 edition - 6 Jan. 2014).

26. Does progression look like this?

27. Agent
Or like this?

28. But what if there are
no roles to promote into?

30. Stop thinking that
progression must mean leadership

31. Don’t you need a fully
developed progression path?

33. Here’s what you need:
Employees who care about
progression and your
product
The ability to have a
conversation with your team
members
An idea of where your
customer experience can
improve

34. Step 1:
Ask team members what they
enjoy about their current role

35. Step 2:
Identify how their passion could
help improve your product

37. Encourage
specialization

38. Do not need to delay new
features
Bugs team within Customer Success
Improved communication
between success, product,
and engineering teams
Able to identify and fix bugs
more quickly
Enables the team to provide
better support

39. Specialization doesn’t
need to be technical

40. Training coordinator
Create training programs &
cycles for customer teams
“Trainer training” for leadership
to help them onboard new
starters or coach their teams
Know which skills are needed
for frontline staff and
encourage their progression

41. Encourage
diversification

42. Support Operations team
Focus on business needs,
not frontline support
Ensure that processes and
reporting are in place, freeing up
frontline staff to focus on the
customer needs
Understand the needs of the
customer support team

43. Diversification does not need to
involve one particular team

44. “Voice of the Customer” team
Ensures that tone is
consistent throughout the
customer journey
Create customer relationships
for case studies and increased
referrals
Able to raise customer needs
with other teams

45. Encourage
curiosity

46. Feature request research
Understand the need
behind each request
Build a better productImprove the experience of
requesting new features - make
the customer feel heard

47. Encourage
succession planning

48. Delegate leadership
tasks
Identify matches for management
Create room for skill-sharing
and promotion to leadership
roles as they become available
Enable existing managers to
take leave or vacations — no
one should be indispensable

49. If you create the opportunity,
your team will invent their
own paths

50. Careers are journeys taken together,
not ladders to climb alone!