On the subject of support and "relationship management"

While I was digging for some old lyrics, which I couldn't find, I stumbled upon this draft I was asked to submit on behalf of my boss, or more precisely, my boss's boss, at my previous gig. The assignment was to present my thoughts on "four pillars" of relationship management. The pillars were spelled out to me and I ran with them from there. I guess it's my best expression of what I've been doing in one day gig or another for a bit now. And I feel proud to have injected the term "mouse fart" into what otherwise is probably boring reading for the majority of humankind. So for that reason I will submit this to you, dear reader, in all of its glory and splendor:

Effective Relationship Management
Bill Swan – Technical Account Manager, [The previous company I worked for that dare not speak of]

Four pillars:

Responsiveness

Engagement

Prioritization

Follow Through

An organization is only as good as its support, and great support begins with managing relationships with customers effectively. There are many components to this, but today I want to talk about four: Responsiveness, Engagement, Prioritization and Follow Through.

Responsiveness

First and foremost: Show your customers you have a pulse. I think it’s important to respond to requests as quickly as you can, even if it’s only to let them know that you’ll get back to them shortly after you’ve had a chance to review the query. There is the auto-response in the CRM, of course, but I believe it is more important to respond with an additional message suitable to your personal style. First impressions are important, and there’s no reason to keep your customers waiting needlessly, or to allow them any inkling that their question or issue has entered an automated black hole. Yes, there are Service Level Agreements that can dictate the expected time of response based on specific tiered levels of support (As in: How much money they pay for support), and those levels should be set to a realistic target that accounts for spikes in customer activity, resource allocation etc. But then you should do this: Proceed to blow these targets out of the water every time. It is better to undersell the response time and consistently over-deliver than the other way around.
As a member of support, how do you do that, especially if you are getting backed up with customer requests? Consider this: It doesn’t take much to simply let them know you’re there, that you are indeed a living, breathing human being and you will be with them shortly. More often than not, the recipient will thank you for such a quick response. Once you’ve got them hooked, you can reel them in when you’re ready.

Engagement

Responsiveness leads to engagement. And engagement can mean a number of different things. You are essentially at the stage of coming to an agreement with a client to be with them at an agreed upon time to tackle the issue with your undivided attention. And as you are engaged, you are feeling out the customer and getting to know their communication style (this can be written or verbal). You engage in a meaningful conversation about the issue at hand, and the goal should be that, within reason, you can be yourself and not rely on canned responses. Some of this comes more easily as you gain the experience with and knowledge of the products or services you are supporting. There’s nothing like knowing the answer to give you confidence in dealing with customers, especially demanding ones. However, you can still establish a rapport with them by staying relaxed and focused, and being willing to tell the customer if you don’t know a particular answer to an issue or a specific component of the issue, that you will be able to find that answer. This tells that customer you are engaged. If it’s apparent the user has a sense of humor, don’t be afraid to tap into it (assuming you have a sense of humor too). Finally, engagement also means honoring your commitments. If you’ve set a deadline or goal and you think the timeline might slip, engage and let them know. That should be common sense, right?

Prioritization

Tackle the critical issues first, of course. But during your engagement with the critical issues, you can simultaneously cherry pick the low hanging fruit. In other words, if you’re in a long troubleshooting session on a challenging issue, inevitably there will be lulls (such as a re-installation or reboot). And during those lulls you can either sit and watch the paint dry, log onto facebook or you can lop off some easy questions or engage with clients that you know aren’t in a big hurry to let them know you’ll be “on it” soon.
After the critical issues, I usually engage first with any client that hasn’t been in touch for a while. If you’ve been in support for any reasonable length of time, you come to learn that the old adage “No news is good news” ain’t so. No news is no news, and while that could mean anything, it won’t hurt to summon a little paranoia and make sure you keep the quiet clients happy when they re-engage. It may be a client who is perfectly happy or unusually competent and only thinks to contact the vendor when there is an issue of real significance…but it also could be a client who is thinking of switching vendors. Think of these erstwhile quiet clients as a new customer. If you keep the mindset that you want to give this customer a great first impression, then you’ve done your job.
While we are boldly moving into a brave new world of collaboration and communication outlets that purportedly will supplant email, the simple fact of the matter is: Email isn’t going away tomorrow. Manage your inbox. Different people have different styles, but I am a filer. Personally I think it’s much more manageable if you create a system of categorization for incoming messages based by client, priority, product or other topic, whatever makes the most sense. Part of good prioritization involved getting into the habit of being highly organized. Knowledge work is all about organization: It’s what we do! Have some process of categorization, though. You never know when you’re going to need to know your History.

Follow Through

Once you have an engagement, it goes without saying that you need to back up your promise for elaboration or getting back to the client. Use any means necessary to keep yourself to it. Calendars and reminders are there for a reason! Even if there is an issue that you believe to have been resolved with a client, follow up and make sure no other questions have come up and to confirm that the issue is indeed closed. There are processes that can be built for this based on SLA, but I would also add the personal touch here.
Proactive communication is also part of follow through, especially if you are managing a set group of clients. You’ll want such communication to be meaningful and consistent. A new product release announcement is one example, and another is a periodic check in to make sure the client is doing okay, particularly with clients who haven’t been in touch. I would contact these clients individually, based on their communication style. Email is okay for some clients. Others like to chat on the phone, so be mindful of what method best suits each client. Do not send an email blast to all clients in the bcc field or through a canned CRM message all at once. Not only does it lack the personal touch I’ve been talking about, but it might just end up in the recipient’s SPAM filter.
Finally, document everything you do, every message, call or other means of communication should be put into whatever CRM you are using in a clear, organized and easy to read fashion. Even if you think it’s a mouse fart, document it. Think of how you would want to pick up a case where someone else left off, or what would happen if you were suddenly hit by a truck. Document, document, document -- rinse, repeat. You’ll want to cover yourself, too. If anything regarding an interaction with a client ever comes into question, you’ll be able to cite when, where and how the information was originally conveyed. Make sure there is a date and time stamp included in any documentation, such as if you are copying an email message or thread. Including the message header has saved me a number of headaches over the years (Hint: forward the email and then copy/paste from that message so you get the top header. If you were the last one to communicate, go to your sent items and get the header from there). Good documentation is probably the most important element of follow through. You can save this part for down time if things get busy.

Summary

The world of support is often reactive, that is inevitable. It’s human nature for clients to contact you more frequently as a member of support when something bad has happened. You don’t often get a message out of the blue from folks telling you what a great job you’re doing (except maybe during the holiday season), but if you keep these four principles in mind --Responsiveness, engagement, prioritization and follow through—chances are, when your clients get asked about the quality of support they receive, they’ll have nothing but kind words to say. And if they’re still unhappy, they’ll probably blame the product or how much it costs. But you can go home at night and sleep well knowing you’ve done your job.

90 days into the new gig

After seven years working for the same company (one that was bi-polar, slowly dying on the vine), I started a new gig at the end of April (a company that is growing lightning fast with maybe an ache or pain or two). The process to get here was long and arduous -- I had to fight a bit for it -- but I landed and I can honestly say I feel invigorated -- mainly because the role I am in now is the first of its kind, and I've long felt that I do best when I am allowed the opportunity to carve my own niche and find and manage work in my own way. Some people have said "I don't envy you, because you get all the problems and then the outcome of some of them are beyond your direct control." Truth is, I see myself as a translator. Not between actual languages but nuances of our own language. Engineers speak in one nuance, salespeople and customers and customer service reps speak in others. And each group has its own repository of information where they log their daily work - and I have access to all of it, a whiff of the omniscient narrator, perhaps, which is a rare position to be in. In some ways, I hope to be a diplomat, to help each group gain a better understanding of the others, and I am learning a ton in the process. Along the way the goal is to help people solve a problem or find a solution (depending on how you view the 1/2 glass). But it's also about managing relationships, helping shape expectations, and also rolling up my sleeves for a little grunt work which I don't mind. I feel lucky to have been given a lot of leeway to do my job as I see fit -- I do not have to spend a lot of time telling people what I'm doing, I can spend that time actually doing it. Although I am among the older side in age in this group, I am not made to feel that way. I don't know if that's because I don't come off as being that much older, or I'm just a late bloomer. I'm feeling this way because I just had my first quarterly review, and there were no negatives except that I may have to be nudged to say no to a few things in due course. I am also just happy to know that even in moments of self doubt, complacency and a fear of advancing age, I can still shake some shit up.

Presenting: The mother of all photo albums.

"Salvage Operation" Oyster Stew

Oyster Stew a la Wixsom via Swan

Ingredients:

-35 Oysters (20 steamed/shucked, 15 raw/shucked, water within the latter 15 strained and set aside)
-1 fennel, fat bit sliced and diced
-3 medium shallots (finely chopped)
-4 cloves of garlic (minced)
-10 medium Yukon Gold potatoes (or so), drawn and quartered to bite-sized pieces
-1 scallion (to be sauteed with the raw Oysters separately)
-1 stick of butter (or a bit more if you're feeling naughty)
-Salt/pepper to taste along the way
-Pinches of Cayenne to taste along the way
-Parsley, finely chopped (for garnish)
-1 QT of Half & Half (not heavy cream, this is for lightness)

Okay, so shucking oysters is a royal pain in the ass! I won't devote too much time to what's supposed to be the proper technique or the fact that you sometimes have to bend the rules a bit to get through the goddamned pile before midnight, and I won't say that was the reason why I steamed some of them beforehand to make the job easier, although the thought did cross my mind. The reason I did that was because my mother in law, Margo Wixsom, bought a boatload of them a couple of days earlier and we ended up with whatever she and a bunch of friends and family couldn't BBQ or eat raw on that first night, and she really wanted to make the stew with the rest of them after having had the dish at the Station Cafe at Point Reyes Station recently, so she called me to steam about half as she was heading to our place. I dutifully complied without knowing what was to come next. Turns out the cold she had kicked in a bit heavy so I took on the whole job of making the stew myself, purportedly as a salvage operation so all those wonderful oysters wouldn't go to waste. There was a period in between where I wasn't sure when she'd arrive so I started looking at online recipes for the stew. It was then that I realized that I should use some of the water from within the remaining oysters to strain and set aside to get that sea-salty deliciousness that you know and love about oysters. This was not as easy to do after steaming them, as the insides of the shells were pretty much dried out with the liquid below in the steamer tainted with all the dirt and crap from the outside of the shells. There were enough raw oysters left to get the good kind of water from within.

So...I had 20 steamed oysters chilling in the fridge, and another 15 raw, with the liquid separated out. Then Margo arrived and clued me in as to the rest of the game plan.

First, I took some butter (I just threw in a whole stick and said "fuck it" without asking exactly how much), and turned on a nice large sauteeing pan to medium low. Once the butter was melted I tossed in the garlic, followed by the shallots and fennel and made 'em sweat til they were kind of limp. I tossed in a bit of salt and pepper at this point before throwing in the potatoes, stirring them up a bit and covering the pan. With the potatoes in the fold, it was about 20 minutes or so of sauteeing time, with a check-in to stir each 5 minutes or thereabouts.

Meanwhile, at this point I thought it would be a good idea to cook the raw oysters a little bit to get them about par with the steamed ones from earlier. So I tossed in about two or three tablespoons of butter, one chopped scallion (aka green onion, without the really white part) and sauteed those for 5 minutes on low. I tossed in a pinch of cayenne to keep them honest. Then I set them aside until the potatoes and whatnot were done.

I then transferred the potatoes and whatnot from the pan to a pot, tossing in a full quart of half & half, warming that up (don't boil it or you'll be sorry, said my wife, Kiera, who stepped in as it started getting bubbly). Just as the potatoes/whatnot and the half and half was starting to feel like it was maybe halfway to the warmth I wanted it to be, I added the raw oyster sautee mixture, the strained water from the shells, and finally the steamed ones. I also added about six or seven grinds of fresh pepper and another pinch of cayenne. Five minutes later, it was ready to serve.

To garnish, I added the chopped parsley and a tiny pinch of cayenne for the finish. We didn't have oyster crackers, but Kiera had made some croutons from a baguette the other night so those got tossed in as well (her suggestion).

What I thought was going to be a salvage operation ended up eliciting the following comment from Margo: "This is better than the Station Cafe's!" I doubt that, but I'll go with it. I was skeptical about how it would turn out, especially after a day of watching Bowl games interspersed with beer and Kiera's world famous chili. I highly recommend topping off such a day with this stew, serving at about 10pm. Try and employ someone else to shuck the oysters if you can. If only I had "The Help...."

Toast

When I come back in here and look at all of my older posts, it's striking how involved, obsessed even, I was with the 2004 election (and look where it got us). Despite the network and cable news manufactured drama of late, the 2012 election looks to me like the 1996 one. Yes, Obama is not the savior everyone seemed to anoint him as (self included at times), and he may not be as good a salesman as Clinton was, but I don't think Clinton would have ordered the raid on Bin Laden's compound, among other things. Anyway, point is, this election was over already when you looked at the GOP primaries, with their whack-a-mole frontrunners. Romney's a shitty candidate and a shitty human being. We know it, and the GOP knows it too. As the Rude Pundit has said about Obama in general, Obama played rope-a-dope in the first debate. Romney's gonna wear himself out as a debater as with everything else. Romney won the first debate? If judging on style, maybe, but in the substance he basically backtracked on his positions, as Bill Clinton himself pointed out. And KOS has a great clip of Romney debating with himself. Dude's so toast you can't even stick a fork in him. We're talking serious carbonization here.

Roberts' quote of John Marshall

I've started reading the Obamacare ruling and the most striking thing, aside from the fact that Chief Justice Roberts came down on the side of the more liberal Justices on the Court in the first place, is this passage:

"Nearly two centuries ago, Chief Justice Marshall observed that 'the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted' to the Federal Government 'is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.' McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 405 (1819)."

In interviews I've read, particularly a long one from the Atlantic Monthly nearing the end of his first term as I recall, Roberts often name checks John Marshall as the model of Chief Justice he wants to be.

Now, I need to read the rest of the ruling before drawing any conclusions, but I thought that passage being cited near the beginning was rather noteworthy. This could mean Roberts
(and, for that matter, Marshall himself) is simply espousing the fatalistic view regarding the trajectory of all Empires, but I guess I need to go back and look at McCulloch after I manage to finish the current ruling at hand.

I doubt many in the coming months of hellfire 'til November will bother to do that, and certainly among the loudest of voices you'll hear. I am certain by the time he gives his speech, President Obama will have read it. And that is the kind of person we need to keep in office, certain disappointments notwithstanding. In fact, once Obama's second term is up, and maybe about fifty years or so have passed, 44 will go down as one of a very few voices in American politics with any dose of reality, or sanity, for that matter. As I've mentioned often in here, in today's climate, President Eisenhower (and the GOP Congress he had in 1954) would be considered a "tax and spend liberal." Obama extends that to Reagan too but that is a bit of a stretch IMHO. Summer reading, here we come!

Ah, the blog. Starting to gather dust. Still here for the ages, but rapidly becoming extinct. Most of my private thoughts I keep to my written journal, one I've kept since 1990. That had fallen by the wayside a bit as the online activity picked up, but now things are evolving back to public v. private. And that is a good thing. Because unless you can read my handwriting, it's like interpreting code.


A few things have happened in the past couple of months that could be considered "life changing" to a degree. Probably the biggest event was the burglary that happened at our house back on March 13th. We had this false sense of security that an alarm system would keep us safe. But the perps had obviously been casing all the houses on our block and in our neighborhood, because K & Brenna had left to pick up Livie from preschool and headed right back. They were gone for 15-20 minutes. When they returned, the alarm was beeping and the house was ransacked. All visible electronic devices were taken, but thankfully not my external drive with virtually all of our digital photos. K ran next door to our neighbor's house (he is somewhat older and hard of hearing so did not see what was taking place) and called 911. By then our neighbor on the other side of our house's alarm had tripped off, too, so the cops were heading their way. But it took 5-10 more minutes. See, this is also what the perps know: an alarm system is only as good as the police response time. And OPD is severely understaffed. It seems our society's zeal for "lower taxes" strikes again. Oh well, I guess the real taxation comes by way of private insurance, which thankfully was there for us to replace our (replaceable) items.


Two things cascaded from that event. The first is a brand new iMac which I am now devoting time to building a proper DAW studio once and for all. I was planning on getting Logic and building off of that, but then a friend of the family, Scott Ghene, who was visiting from Rochester, floored me with what was to come next. He was at guitar center and wanted to get me ProTools, so he showed up with Protools MP Fastrack Ultra the next day. This will help me get up to speed more quickly and start taking on more music. It has been tough since our house doesn't have enough room for me to set up all of my old (antiquated, but not vintage) analog gear...so I've sort of been lying in wait. And, it's time to wake up. Huge shoutout and thanks to Scott!


The second event was much bigger (for me): We got a dog. I was the firewall between the girls' desire to have one and the reality of us actually getting one. But the burglary breached that firewall in a big way. So we took our time to find the right rescue dog. We wanted one that was house-broken, good with kids, and also somewhat menacing looking. We found him through Coppers Dream Rescue. His name was Amos, but that name is unacceptable. So we began thinking...what would be a good name that sounded somewhat like Amos? Seamus!


And here he is.

Here are some more photos.