June 2021 Summaries

Many designers become managers for the wrong reasons, often incentivized by their companies to gain greater impact, influence, and compensation. However, people management is a vastly different job than being a designer, requiring a different set of skills and responsibilities. To help designers grow without having to drop their passion for design, companies can institute two parallel career growth paths: one focusing on people management and another on leadership as an individual contributor, often titled staff or principal designers. These roles require clarity around expectations and responsibilities, with varying levels of influence, autonomy, and leadership across different designer levels. By adopting these parallel paths, companies can help designers choose their career tracks for the right reasons and do work that they love while still being continuously challenged and growing in their careers.

The engineering team at Intercom, a software company, aimed to improve their incident reviews, which are meetings where they discuss and analyze errors or failures in their product. Initially, the format was focused on asking five questions, but it didn't facilitate open discussion, and engineers felt uncomfortable presenting. The team realized that the format made them feel like they were on trial and didn't allow for natural conversations to emerge. To address this, they started experimenting with new formats, such as using polls to guide the conversation and encouraging participants to practice good video meeting etiquette. They also aimed to make the meetings more safe, constructive, and valuable for engineers. By making these changes, the team saw an increase in attendance and engagement, with a 50% rise in weekly reviews attended. The goal of their program is to build an honest, accountable, and constructive culture within teams that care about customer experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of new technologies in sales, forcing companies to adapt their sales processes and adopt digital-first experiences. Buyer behavior has changed significantly, with 70% of B2B decision makers open to making remote purchases over $50,000. Sales teams need to bring their sales motion into alignment with buyer expectations, leveraging tools that allow them to meet prospects at the right time and deliver seamless sales experiences. The top three trends in sales technology include creating consistent customer-centric experiences, streamlining workflows with better tools, and fueling sales acceleration with advanced automation. Companies must adopt digital-first approaches to create a personalized experience for buyers, balance their resources, and drive better outcomes.

When analyzing a company, it's essential to focus on its trajectory rather than its current state. This long-term perspective helps companies avoid getting stuck in short-term thinking and instead, prioritize growth and improvement. When hiring candidates, evaluating their potential for future growth is crucial, as it determines who will be a better teammate in the long run. Assessing product quality also requires considering the trajectory of improvements, rather than just the current state of the product. Analyzing competitors should focus on their growth rate compared to your own, rather than just their current status. Ultimately, understanding and prioritizing one's trajectory is key to overcoming challenges and achieving success in business.

At WeTravel, a small support team adopted agile principles to provide fast, personal support at scale. By focusing on the customer's needs and embracing change, they were able to deliver big value to their customers while scaling their support to handle hundreds of millions of dollars annually for over 3,000 global group and multi-day travel companies. The 9 principles of agile support include: Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of support, embracing product change to provide better support, supporting product and developers working together, building a team around motivated individuals, nurturing your team with regular face-to-face conversations, solving problems as the primary measure of progress, simplicity being essential by automating where possible, collaborating in self-organizing teams producing better solutions, and finally reflection creating effective teams and processes. By adopting these principles, WeTravel's support team was able to create a high-quality support experience that helped their customers spend less time and money on admin, fostering loyalty, retention, and advocacy.

We're giving our employees the best possible start to their careers by adapting our remote onboarding experience, which was previously a three-day in-person program, to a completely virtual one within just three days. This pivot came as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting the way we work and forcing us to reinvent how we onboard new colleagues. Our remote onboarding program has come a long way since then, incorporating four learning pillars - core business learnings, skills and culture, support elements, and social and belonging - to provide a comprehensive experience for our new hires. We've also developed a six-month employee onboarding program with various sessions such as product demos, monthly social connects, Q&A's with product leaders, allyship training, presenting skills, building internal networks, and more. Through continuous feedback collection and iteration, we've learned that blended learning works, games and activities make the experience fun and engaging, and pacing ourselves is crucial to avoid overwhelming our new hires. As we approach another new way of working when our offices reopen in October, we'll continue to challenge ourselves to provide the best onboarding experience possible.

Conversational support has become a critical component of customer experience and business success, with 90% of consumers considering it an important factor in their choice of brand and loyalty. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, highlighting the need for digital-first solutions and personalized messaging. As businesses pivot to conversational support, they can expect benefits such as improved customer retention (60%), increased business efficiency (58%), and enhanced customer satisfaction (58%). To become an industry leader in support, businesses should invest in the right tools and frameworks, plan how their workforce will evolve with automation and bots, and re-evaluate how they measure support success. By adopting a conversational approach, businesses can connect with real people, add personality to conversations, and unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation.

At Intercom, a company with a strong focus on customer communication and support, aligning the team's efforts is crucial before diving into solutions. They apply a simple three-part framework to tackle problems, which involves considering innovation, investment, and urgency. The team ranks these elements as "low", "medium", or "high" to communicate their initial thoughts on what steps should be taken and how much effort each step should involve. This framework helps ensure that teams spend the right amount of time and energy solving every problem, taking into account factors such as the solution's potential for innovation, the required investment in resources, and its urgency. By considering these elements together, teams can prioritize their efforts effectively and maximize success.

The customer support landscape has undergone significant changes since COVID-19, with messaging channels becoming increasingly popular as the second most used support channel. Many teams are struggling to keep up with the rising volume and complexity of customer queries, with limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget being major challenges. To solve these issues, businesses need to optimize their resources with a Conversational Support Funnel, which combines proactive, self-serve, and human support to provide fast, efficient, and personalized support while ensuring that agents can focus on high-impact work. Additionally, teams need to address the "swivel chair effect" by using a tool that gives them a holistic view of the entire customer journey, with rich context into each customer's specific needs and conversation history. Furthermore, many teams are stuck on the reactive support treadmill, answering repetitive questions instead of proactively addressing recurring issues. To overcome this, businesses need to make the switch to proactive support, using the right mindset and technology to identify and address issues before they become problems. Finally, teams need a tool that allows them to capture and dig into the right information to leverage customer conversations for actionable insights and optimize their support strategy.