Just Support: 🗣 What We Talk About When We Talk About Support Work
When most people think of "customer support", they think of a person fixing something that has gone wrong. If you bring in a mention of tech, people think almost exclusively about someone who runs a virus scan on their computer. But break-fix is only a tiny fraction of the work we call support work. Customer support work, especially in the early stages of a company, almost always includes:
- onboarding and setup
- customer education
- product walkthroughs
- technical troubleshooting
- outage detection
- outage communication
- product feedback
- product testing
- finding bugs
- reporting bugs
- documenting workarounds
- filling in gaps between product capabilities and customer needs
- manual work that has yet to be automated
- internal support
- developing processes
- documenting processes
- peer training
(A lot of these things will become their own function inside of support or be pulled out of the hands of support as a company grows. Often, documentation & training will move to dedicated people inside of the support org, as will the segment of support that interfaces with the product/engineering organizations. Onboarding usually moves closer to the sales organization and may even become a paid service. If they're smart, they hire people out of support!)
In all of these activities, a simple philosophical mindset drives people engaged in support work. The unifying characteristics of this mindset are twofold: 1. helping the customer use the product & feel confident about using the product 2. solving problems with the product
Some people get into support because they love of helping people, and some people get into support because they love figuring things out.
The happy medium, your ideal support worker, is someone who takes joy in helping people and in finding a solution. Ultimately, these two characteristics are the intrinsic motivation that moves most support workers. This is why most people who engage in support work also will be the go-to person to answer questions for friends and family. In a sense, support work itself can be seen as altruistic. A support worker is making the world a better place: happier and working more smoothly.
In a sense, even these characteristics are two sides of a single coin--full awareness of complex systems. Helping people is knowing the effects a complex system has on a person, and what to change to make things better. Solving problems is understanding a complex system or process, and what to change to get things working.
Most support workers take these two key characteristics into any role they inhabit in work and in life. Someone with a problem solver mindset will develop the ability to keep the big picture of a system in mind while working on a small element, because they have seen how everything is connected. Someone with a focus on the emotional wellbeing of the end user will be keenly aware of how everything works together for a person, and will also have the added bonus of knowing that they may only be able to affect one small part of their life. It's also why support ends up taking things on that otherwise would have no owner--they understand the system, don't want it to break down, and will do what needs to be done to keep things running and keep people happy.
The huge downside of this support mindset is that it makes support workers super exploitable.
In a world where complex understanding of human systems is considered a difficult-to-quantify "soft" skill, the skilled are undervalued, especially when their work doesn't directly generate profit. And in a world where your workers have their own intrinsic motivation for doing their job, it's easier to get people to work with less financial motivation.
The core motivation of support workers is the two-sided coin of helping people and solving problems, and it relies on people who have an understanding of complex systems and a passion for making things better. People with this heart will improve your organization no matter where you put them, because they care about making things better. But these people need to be protected and treated fairly or they will burn out and you will lose a good person and a lot of complex system understanding.