— Growing People, Customer Support — 6 min read
Lately, the meetings I have led have been lacking in audience participation. I've led dozens of meetings in the past. Typically I need to invest prep time and create a fancy PowerPoint presentation or a document outlining the steps for a new process. I deliver my presentation, wrapping up with a summary of the most important points. Ultimately I ask if there are any questions with maybe one or two questions popping up, but usually, there aren't any.
But the fact that there are typically very few questions gives me an uneasy feeling and reduces my confidence that the topic of the meeting was grasped by the attendants. I know that I will need to follow-up with them or put in place measurements to ensure the message was received.
Since my messaging isn't reaching my team effectively, I started to ask myself how I can improve. What can I do to make my messaging clearer? Is my messaging too complicated? What can I do to get my team more engaged? How can I get acknowledgment that the message was understood?
Going through this process made me realize that the more engaged I was, the more questions I asked. The more I wanted to learn about what the real issue was, the more questions I asked. Maybe if I provide an environment that encouraged questions, or asking more questions, the more confident I would feel that my message was received.
Many management teams from older or traditional companies aren't open to receiving questions. The inquiries might be perceived as a challenge to their authority or even worse a challenge to their expertise. Leaders might feel they are expected to be all-knowing but questions can help leaders know what they don't know. I don't expect the CEO of a large company to know everything about every single job function. How could she? She relies on people to distill the most important information from those that report directly to her. For instance, a CEO might have many layers between them and the customers. Would a CEO have a better perspective about her customers by seeing a dashboard with a CSAT score over a frontline support team member who works directly with the customers every day?
When everybody wants answers, asking more questions can feel like a distraction. The management team could also feel frustrated by having to explain and rationalize all the things. But if you haven't provided enough information to your employees, how can they be expected to believe in the mission. The mind--at least my mind-- doesn't like unanswered questions and tends to create answers from the information at hand and use copious amounts of assumptions to fill in any missing gaps. Many of those assumptions come from the "the sky is falling" segment of the brain. Being receptive to employees asking questions can fill those gaps with qualified information.
Questions can disrupt long-standing processes, methods, and practices. I would argue that these practices should be among the first things questioned. Many times we habitually go through the motions of these processes without thinking. This blocks inspiration. Stepping back and questioning the process can improve your decision making.
Leveraging all the different perspectives, backgrounds, and unique experiences of the workforce can raise important issues, and focus resources are more important tasks.
Much of my background is in support so I relate stories to that specific department. I often see larger support organizations provide a more scripted environment for handling support interactions. They push reliance on tools like internal knowledgebases, runbooks, and response templates to provide a consistent support experience. I would first like to state that all these tools are important in any support organization and can greatly speed up the onboarding process for new employees. The downside of over-reliance on those tools is that they can reduce the ability of the frontline personnel to learn, master the service or product they are supporting, reduce their ability to view issues from a different perspective, and ultimately not inspire them to ask questions.
To illustrate what I mean, I can go over an example of following a recipe. Since I love curry, we'll use that. I'm hoping to avoid being flamed by Thai Curry purists, but to keep things simple, below is a basic list of ingredients for a Thai green curry:
The steps to actually prepare a curry aren't relevant to this example but you can make a good curry with that small list of ingredients. After completing the recipe a few times, you probably won't need to use the directions as you will have memorized it and be able to produce a good result consistently without thinking.
Now, what do you do if someone wants their curry with more spice? Or less spice? Or they were out of Eggplants at the market? Or out of the certified organic chicken breast you like? Many people will go search for another recipe. But what if I had originally provided you with the basics of what curry was and asked you to make a curry using that framework? A more generic ingredient list might be:
You would gain a better understanding through trial and error. Yes, the first, second, or maybe even third curry you make might be horrible. But that fourth one--amazing. Through asking yourself questions you learn more about how to be more flexible based on the available ingredients. What do I do if it's too spicy? How can I make it sweeter? Can I use some of the vegetables I found at the farmers' market? Can I use shrimp? Now you can make better decisions as you understand how all the ingredients relate to each other.
Answering a question doesn't always solve the problem. With support, you first need to understand the problem (empathy skills) and deliver the correct response (knowledge skills). Larger support organizations are looking for keywords in the text or prefabricated response. Sometimes a customer is only describing the symptom so asking what the end goal is (either internal dialogue or actually asking the customer) is key to figuring out what the real issue is and providing a knowledgeable response. So instead of handing them a script for every possible customer inquiry, provide them with a basic framework to start with and build upon that. An example customer interaction framework:
Checklists and processes have their place in basic operations like closing an account, updating billing information, or other tasked based operations. Most interactions with customers require empathy and understanding to start to solve their root issue.
For starters, we need to provide an environment that not only welcomes questions but encourages them. Facebook and Google (and I'm sure others do as well) have weekly question and answer sessions with the CEO. Questions are submitted through a message board and then upvoted by other employees. The CEO then takes time every week to answer the highest upvoted questions. The message board gives an opportunity for employees to ask questions whenever inspiration reveals itself. Often inspiration doesn't always follow after your manager asks "Are there any questions" in that late afternoon meeting.
Also important is to provide a safe environment for asking questions. There should be the ability to ask a question without fear of reprisal or having the question answered in a condescending or judgemental way. All questions should be listened to intently and answered with respect.
Perhaps the hardest questions for individuals to ask are questions that might cause more responsibility or work for them. "Why are we not are we not doing X?" can lead to "That's a great idea, now you do X in addition to your current duties". Which could make an employee less interested in asking good questions. To mitigate that feeling, you could follow up the "That's a great idea!" by asking how they would like to contribute to making that a reality or if they would like to contribute at all.
Offer training on asking questions. I find the best questions contain some or all of the following elements:
That's not a definitive list, and there are certainly more elements to qualifying a question as good or not, but it is a starting point.
Asking questions is the best path to learning, creativity, and understanding. Providing an environment that promotes questions has many advantages from growing frontline personnel as well as challenging upper management to communicate more effectively. Questions can strengthen trust between manager and employee and improve belief in the company or group mission. An insightful question from one individual can create an eruption of creativity from all parts of an organization making the whole stronger than the sum of the parts.