For this week’s Tech & Culture Blog, Zac Shannon, Technical Support Manager at Datto, gives some insight into molding an outstanding Customer Experience team.
There is little doubt that our Support Technicians are critical to Datto’s success. Keeping them satisfied and engaged is vital to maintaining an awesome customer experience; and measuring their satisfaction is important. As a new Manager in Tech Support at Datto, I wanted to know how to keep Datto Support techs motivated and happy. I needed to know what we were doing right and where we needed improvement. I met with Emily Glass, my boss, and we thought of a few ways to approach this: long form surveys, mass polls, and group meetings crossed our minds, much of which we had done in the past. All have given us answers to the immediate questions we had, but gave us little in the way of tracking and measuring trends over time, as a report card for how we were responding and adapting to the feedback.
We needed a trackable format. Preferably one that was quick and easy for our employees to participate in, and gave us a view of satisfaction across all locations and roles. We turned to Greg Collins, VP of Support for Zendesk. As Zendesk customers, and BFFs with Greg, we know that Zendesk is serious about customer and employee happiness. Greg told us how he has been issuing an Advocate Satisfaction (ASAT) survey to his team. Greg’s survey measures employees’ job and career satisfaction by tenure, role, and location utilizing a measurement scale similar to NPS. Greg has used this survey quarterly and was able measure trends quarter to quarter by asking the same core questions. We adopted Greg’s model for our own internal satisfaction survey. We decided to measure technicians’ satisfaction with their job at Datto, their career path, their likelihood to recommend a job at Datto (aka employee NPS or eNPS), as well as their relationships with other Datto departments.
We utilized Survey Monkey to deliver and collect our responses, and then organized the data in Tableau. We then delivered the results to the entire department, along with a Q&A. We also shared the results with Datto executives and managers. Soon enough, the concept was being copied in other departments! Needless to say, being open and transparent with the data helped keep us honest and we could enlist the help of others to make changes where needed. Giving us two separate channels of feedback to act on.
Our first attempt at measuring employees’ satisfaction has proven invaluable to us. We were able to collect 113 responses from our team, across all roles and locations. The Q1 survey taught us that keeping employees engaged and satisfied would take more than just good pay and benefits. Overall we had excellent job satisfaction and eNPS scores based on industry standards.This is reflected in our employee referrals. In 2015, 76% of our Support new hires were employee referrals (65% so far in Q1 2016). The survey also revealed areas that needed attention; interdepartmental communications and career pathing.
We will deliver this survey again in Q2. We will look for changes to the scores based on the plans we enacted in the last few months. We hope that enough time has elapsed for the team to see the impact of changes we’ve made, such as the introduction of additional levels within Support and guest speakers from other departments at our Support monthly team meeting. This will be our first step in recording trends in technician satisfaction quarter over quarter. Our techs need to feel respect and trust, while working in a fun and engaging work environment that provides opportunities to advance and grow. Delivering on these findings will lead us to a stronger, more successful Support department, that is better able to serve our partners.