How to retain and develop customer service skills

Imagine a customer service team with high turnover and low tenure in all areas.

Your customers will only ever talk to people who haven't had the time or mentorship to become experts. They will receive continued poor service, be frustrated and, despite your great product, unsubscribe.

Then consider employee morale in an environment lacking strong team foundations or role models. Disgruntled teammates are less productive and the cycle of poor customer experience continues. Why do many support teams fall victim to this cycle? They fail to offer a promising career path to those who join.

Assistance at Intercom is not a career stopper. It can be a stepping stone to other departments or roles for those who want it, but we've built a team that nurtures customer service talent – ​​and where a long and successful career in support can be fostered. Many teams offer limited progression (agent → supervisor → cap) and experience high turnover, resulting in low support. Here's what we've done at Intercom to make sure Customer Service is a team where people can grow, develop, and take real pride in their work.

1. Create a plan to develop and nurture customer service talent

In the first few months, we expect everyone on the support team to become product experts and customer conversation ninjas, focusing on nothing else. Once a teammate has finished their daily work, we gradually involve them in other tasks. Some are building internal tools for frontline teams. Others write blog posts, create educational content, and mentor and onboard other Intercomrades. It gives them a taste of people management, a voice in team leadership, and helps them understand how and why we hire who we do.

"Ultimately, we try to find the balance between helping teammates develop their skills while staying focused on our customers"

As a small global team of five at the start of 2015, everyone was doing a bit of everything. But as we got older, things got more messy. There were too many cooks in the kitchen for certain tasks. Others would stagnate with little or no attention. So we started a project to define and assign Areas of Responsibility (AoR), which gives teammates full autonomy, ownership and control over their AoR.

Front line support is not something to be eschewed; helping others solve difficult problems is a valuable and fun skill! Ultimately, we try to strike a balance between helping teammates develop their skills while staying focused on our customers.

2. Define customer service success and paths to progression

Building teammate skills is all well and good, but you need to provide roles to put them to good use. When our team was very small, it consisted of support reps, support engineers, and support managers. As we grew and our teammates became more tenured and skilled, we had to start defining career paths while allowing people to shape their own progression.

Ensure that people management is not the only path to progression

We have moved people into leadership roles, which are mostly about people management and team leadership. But one of the most important things to consider when developing people is to make sure that managing people isn't the only path to progression. So many support departments promote good reps and engineers to management because there's nowhere to go. Having an amazing CSAT doesn't mean you'll be a good people manager. Likewise, you might not be the most technical person, but you could be a fantastic leader.

We were careful not to create roles just to retain our teammates, but we also found gaps in what we needed and filled the new positions with the right people. At first, we experimented with a primary support rep role, which was customer-facing but heavy on process implementation. It just pulled these people in two very demanding directions, so we built a focused customer service operations team instead. We moved some team members over there and reconsidered what a Senior Support Rep or Senior Support Engineer really should be.