Other than keeping my jobs through the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID layoff-a-thon, the most fortunate aspect of my career in SaaS has been the opportunity to work with a number of excellent managers. These men and women have taught me not only about how to become an effective support agent, but also how to create trusting relationships with teammates and foster a culture of world-class, customer-centric service and continuous improvement.

I’ve used many of these lessons in my own experience managing support teams, and have never stopped trying to learn how to be an even more effective leader. After many years working for SaaS companies both large and small, here’s what I’ve gleaned about how to be a good manager.

Clear Expectations and Accountability

From a day-to-day standpoint, the most important things managers can do for their teams are provide a clear set of rules and to keep an open line of communication with their team-members about how their work measures up. In order for support agents to know how to do their jobs, there needs to be a documented set of procedures, and it’s up to their managers to make sure everyone knows exactly what’s expected of them.

All support organizations should have well defined customer communication policies for their teams to follow. These policies should detail the timelines support teams must maintain for different types of customer requests, the information the they should provide to customers when communicating updates in tickets and other rules governing their regular work. There is always going to be some informal wiggle room in there based on a support team’s real-life relationships with their customers – some higher-value customers, for example, might expect more abbreviated response timelines regardless of the severity of their requests – but in general these communication policies should serve as the baseline performance standards for a company’s support organization.

Of course, workplace regulations mean nothing unless there are ways to assess whether they’re being followed. Companies everywhere like to brag about how responsive their support teams are, but when the rubber meets the road, a lot of their customers are left wondering if their requests have gotten lost in a proverbial black hole. The best support managers not only spell out exactly what they expect from their teams, but also periodically review customer tickets to see how their teams have handled them.

In a previous role, I was asked to create such a ticket-review program, initially to show our support teams precisely why customers were having many of the same complaints, but eventually to provide a wider view to my fellow support leaders into the trends among their team-members. To begin, I created a scorecard that would serve as the official documentation for each agent’s ticket reviews. The scorecard contained around 15 questions, each of which could be marked Pass or Fail. The questions covered the most crucial parts of the customer communication policy (responding within the required time-frame, providing the necessary details in customer-facing feedback, etc.) and some internal practices we’d developed to make sure our agents were providing truly world-class service. Our support agents’ tickets were then reviewed multiple times each year, after which individual and team-wide scores were collected and shared with support leadership, along with some analysis based on past assessments.

All of this is not to say, however, that a being a good manager actually means being a good micromanager. For each of the more than 100 support agents at my previous employer, I would review just ten tickets, twice per year. Ten tickets provided enough of a sample size for me to notice patterns in how specific agents did their jobs, and for many of our teams, twice each year was more than enough to provide some insights and then to allow them to make the appropriate adjustments.

When I was a teenager, my mom and dad loved to use the phrase “trust but verify” to describe their relationship with my social life. They were far from helicopter parents, but I always knew in the back of my mind there was a nonzero chance that they’d actually follow up with someone else about what I told them I was doing, which is why I generally kept my nose clean until I was out from under their roof. The same philosophy can easily be applied to a manager’s support team. That is, trust them to do their jobs according to the expectations you’ve laid out, but periodically verify they actually are with a handful of ticket reviews.

Servant Leadership

Clear expectations and accountability are great, but there’s also a significant personal side to being an effective leader. It’s not enough for managers to make sure their teams are following the rules. To truly cultivate a dedicated, hard-working, productive support team, managers must lead by example and always remain ready to help.

In my first software job, my manager’s most valuable quality was his ability and willingness to handle ticket escalations that had gone beyond the knowledge or authority of one of the members of our team. As our leader, he had the most experience working directly with our company’s customers and products, and because of that he knew how certain users tended to have less patience for our team’s troubleshooting process than others. When these customers would occasionally lose their cool, my manager would immediately “tag in” and take the request from the agent’s queue. He’d usually arrange a call with the aggrieved customer, talk them down in a matter of minutes and then work with them to come up with a reasonable plan of action. Fortunately for everyone, this situation didn’t arise all that often, but we always knew that our manager would step up for us whenever we needed him.

Another manager I learned a lot from – including the term “servant leadership” – was always looking for ways to further professionalize our company’s support organization. His overarching goal for our group was that each of our company’s customers should walk away from their experiences with our teams feeling reassured that they’d received the best service possible, and he considerably evolved the way we all did our jobs during the eight years he was my boss.

To begin, he created three new strategic roles in our support organization, recruiting me and two others to take the lead in putting his ideas into practice. In addition to our work formalizing our company’s customer communication and implementing the aforementioned evaluation program, this group worked to enhance our team’s ability to more thoroughly document customer requests and the solutions that resulted, which reduced our team’s need to repeatedly write down the same instructions for lower-touch tickets and greatly sped up the time in which those tickets could be resolved. Recognizing the need for a standardized training platform across our company’s 30+ products, we also began an initiative which resulted in a completely revised learning management system. This LMS contained a library of helpful training content that could be accessed by customers and internal staff alike, virtually eliminating the need for our support agents to take time away from their existing customer requests to conduct yet another training for a new user.

This practical growth certainly made a big difference in how our support teams were able to improve their service to customers, but it was a change having nothing to do with responding to tickets or answering phone calls that demonstrated this manager’s commitment to fostering an environment of trust and collaboration among his support organization. Our company’s primary growth strategy was to expand via acquisition, and while this always resulted in an expanded support team and another product for the company’s portfolio, the changes experienced by our new co-workers were not always so smooth. After a few less pleasant integrations with new teams, we saw a need for a heaping spoonful of friendliness during this challenging transition, and my manager asked me to create a video showcasing our support organization to the people who had just joined it. The video introduced the members of our group that the new support team would be working with during the integration period and beyond, it explained what they’d be learning over the next handful of weeks and it generally tried to make our support organization seem like a pleasant place to be.

The real stroke of genius – and my former manager gets 100 percent of the credit for this – was the idea to have 20 or so members of our team introduce themselves at the end of the video. These last few minutes consisted solely of people saying “Hello from [the place they lived] – welcome to our team,” and it was by far the most effective portion of the presentation. In a mostly remote support organization, seeing faces and hearing voices went a long way to assuring nervous newcomers that their team was our team, and that they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any bullcrap from us. My boss’s idea for this personal touch really softened the understandable blow our new teams felt during what was usually a fairly sudden change, and exemplified the kind of empathy that makes for an excellent servant leader.

The Power of Positive Reinforcement

My favorite part of being a manager has been getting to tell people how good a job they’re doing. Yes, it’s important for leaders to establish specific protocol for their teams to follow and it’s even more important for them to help their teams improve by identifying service elements that can be changed. That said, the easiest way that support manager can engender trust and loyalty among their teams is to also heap praise on them when they’ve done something especially well.

One easy way I’ve done this in previous roles is through a quarterly video newsletter. A few times each year, I’d reach out to our company’s other support leaders for some highlights from their teams. These good news items included things like summaries of recently completed projects, call-outs of team-members who had received new professional certifications and introductions of newly hired co-workers, and they were specifically meant to show our 100-person support organization that we as leaders were invested in celebrating our teams’ successes. The best part of making those videos was when I got to learn and share good news about specific people in our support group. Whether they were promoted into a new role, received a glowing compliment from a customer or just did something neat outside of the office, it was always a pleasure to be able to spend some of my time at work talking about my teammates’ achievements.

Managers also have the responsibility of conducting official evaluations for their teams, which provides another built-in opportunity to use positive feedback to improve performance. While it’s necessary for leaders to identify “areas of opportunity” where their teams can place a bit more attention, they should place equal emphasis on the things their teams are doing especially well. This not only shows support agents that their efforts to provide excellent service are not in vain, but also reinforces those positive behaviors so they know which things to keep doing in the future. Support agents learn how to do the job from their teammates, and by making time to call out those things their teams are doing well, managers can better ensure those work models will be followed by everyone.

Finally, and perhaps it’s because I’m a millennial, I’ve always believed in the tremendous power of an unscheduled compliment. People expect to hear how they’re doing at work during reviews or at company celebrations, but getting some of that same positive feedback after completing a random ticket or handling an especially complicated customer request is the stuff that makes them happy to be part of a team. It takes almost no time at all to shoot someone a quick email or chat message (or, as antiquated as this might sound, to walk over to their desk to tell them in person), but the impact these small gestures can have is massive.

Once, during a quarterly review, one of my other bosses (not mentioned earlier) asked the usual question of what they could do to make the office a better place to work. When I said they should take 30 seconds to walk over to the support department from time to time and drop a few kind words to make sure the team knew their hard work was being noticed, my boss acted like I had just asked them to double everyone’s salary. Anyway, not too long after that, a whole bunch of people ended up quitting that company in a very short period of time.

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In each of my professional leadership roles, I’ve tried to live by two simple mottos. First: Take the work seriously, but not yourself.

Just because someone is “in charge” doesn’t mean they know everything. The worst thing people can do with power in their hands is rule by edict while simultaneously closing themselves off to any sort of constructive criticism. Instead, managers should show their teams how to be great at their jobs through their own stellar work, and always keep their ears and eyes open when customers or co-workers have suggestions for improvement. The policies managers craft and the assessment measurements they use should always evolve as their teams learn more about what their customers really want, with continuous improvement as the overarching ethos. Leaders are imperfect humans just like everyone else, and the best ones are humble enough to understand that they’ll always have more to learn.

Second: People always remember how you make them feel.

Managers can implement the most buttoned-up support structure in history, but if their teams think they’re jerks, they’ll never keep anyone around long enough to see how well it can operate. The best ones will develop their teams’ existing talents while enhancing any weaker areas, focusing just as much on successes as on challenges. These managers provide outstanding customer service not via aggressive enforcement, but through servant leadership and productive feedback. By identifying situations where their teams could use an extra hand, and then providing the resources to assist, great managers will demonstrate their commitment to continuously improve how their teams do their jobs while showing they they’re actually listening to suggestions from the people who work with the customers most often.

Once again, though, and I cannot possibly emphasize this enough: Managers should tell their teams when they’ve done something especially well. Providing positive reinforcement should remain at the front of every leader’s mind, because it takes very little effort to have a very large effect on their teams’ morale, and it’s just a nice thing to do.

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