SDX Europe 2019 - discover, adapt and grow
I spend the past two days in Belgrade at Support Driven Expo, immersing myself into the world of customers support. Four tracks with workshops and talks made sure that everyone could create a program that matched their interests and current needs.
I loved seeing how many workshops and talks evolved specifically around remote work. There is certainly a demand from (potential) support agents to be able to work from a place of their choosing, without having to add a commute on top of an already busy day. The question is not if remote work is the future, but rather how quickly your company will adapt.
How to organize support vs how to do support
The almost 240 attendees represented a healthy mix between those who organize support and those who actually work with customers. This combination was apparent in the programme as well as during coffee breaks. It is one of the best-kept secrets of this specific conference - encouraging people with different perspectives to engage with each other.
Those who organize support are interested in KPI’s (Key Product Indicators) and OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results). They want to find the perfect tickets solution and the best tracking software. They are searching for strategies and tools to increase quality and scale. Understanding these quests can help front line agents to influence and shape decisions, making their voices heard before decisions are made.
Those who work with customers need actionable advice and workflows to increase productivity, maintain quality and continue to grow their own career. They are looking for tools they can use, for strategies they can implement to make their day-to-day work with customers easier. Team leads and support leads that are aware of these needs are much better equipped to help their teams advance.
I hear you! The art of solving other people’s problems. Workshop Summary
This year I decided to offer something very practical: a workshop on how to de-escalate emotionally charged customer interactions. Instead of handing out a couple of snippets, my aim was to create a framework that allows the participants to create their own resource library.
The framework is based on the notion that a problem is “a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome”. This means, it does not necessarily require a solution, but it needs to be dealt with. To explain how emotions fit into this notion of a problem as something that needs to be overcome, I shared the following video:
[Source: Megan Devine and Refuge in Grief: https://www.refugeingrief.com/2018/07/19/help-a-friend-video]
If your customer writes or calls in with a perceived problem, they are grieving for something they lost. Sometimes that is time, energy or focus. Sometimes it’s money or an opportunity. Either way, you need to address the emotion first.
The group then split into smaller groups to work on a couple of exercises. Using a couple of (quite real) customer emails, every group defined the emotion, redefined the problem with the emotion in mind and then worked on a reply.
(If you came to the workshop and struggled with the vocabulary around emotions, this list is very insightful. There are many nuances to “angry”.)
As a wrapup:
Validate your customer’s feelings!
Acknowledge their problem!
Lead the way towards a resolution!
Here are the slides:
I Hear You! The Art Of Solving Other People's Problems from Valentina Thörner