One of the hardest parts of the work we do in customer success is, big surprise, dealing with customers. At times this is amazing and very rewarding. At other times it can be the worst.
Many support agents and customer success managers end up spending a lot of time with unhappy customers. The day after day grind of work can leave you feeling like all of your customers hate you and your product is trash. Intellectually you know that’s not true, but emotionally it can feel that way.
How do you avoid falling into this trap? One way is to consciously and consistently celebrate little victories. Here are some examples of how we do that at SpiderOak.
The User Olympics. (We should probably change this to Customer Olympics, haha.) When someone on the team finds a customer with something unique or outrageous about their account we add it to our User Olympics page. Have a computer with the system time 50 years out of date? Added 72 devices to your account? Contacted support 24 times this week? Congratulations! You’re on the way to a position of fame in the User Olympics!
Everyone enjoys the break and the humor of a user olympics announcement. Work stops while we ooh and ah at the absurdity of it, and we bond a bit during the break. Find something similar that works in your company.
Acknowledge Great Work. I run the social media accounts for SpiderOak, so I see the compliments and kudos that customers give. Screenshots go into our #staff channel so everyone at the company gets to see happy customers praising the team.
I also love making announcements to the company for big milestones like getting a big renewal signed, getting the support queues down to zero, or finishing a big project.
Shining a spotlight on small victories is even more important if your company works remotely. Little announcements and compliments about your team may be the only frame of reference other employees have about them. Make the time to shine a positive light on them and you’ll see great things happen as a result.
