A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining a fantastic group of female leaders at Women In Tech Panel presented by infra//STRUCTURE Summit. We were asked to share our personal experiences of gender biases in the workplace and the best way for businesses to address them. I decided to blog and expand on the subject a bit further. Hi, my name is Elya McCleave, and I’m a woman who spent her entire career of 17+ years in tech and let me tell you – it is very challenging to stay in the industry and keep moving forward. Tenacity no doubt is your best friend, but it also can wear out if you don’t build the right support structure around yourself. Lesson 1: Surround yourself with the right people, people that genuinely believe in you and support you. My first experience of gender bias in the workplace surprisingly came from the clients. I was working as a Level 1 Support Engineer, where I spent much time answering calls and tickets. Quite often, if it were a male customer calling, even though he'd already pressed 2 for Tech Support, I would get asked if it was, in fact, Tech Support. When I politely would say “yes”, the client would share how complicated the problem was, suggesting to get him transferred to my male counter-part. Over time, I learned how to make the best out of the conversations like this, put clients at ease and announce the name of the functional unit “Tech Support” as soon as I picked up the phone. Lesson 2: Work hard, upkeep your education, and stay relevant. It’s ok if people don’t take you seriously right away, surprise them and they will pay you back with gratitude and loyalty. As the years went by, and I grew through the leadership ranks, I still struggled to find my true communication style. In certain situations, when I stood my ground, I would get called direct, bold, or borderline masculine. However, when I was nurturing and emphatic, I would get called a “mother,” and my direct reports “dragons.” You know it would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Lesson 3: Not everyone will like you, and it is ok. Remember this is not a popularity contest. Drive positive impact and let your work speak for itself. You might think that I’m discouraged from having gone through all these experiences, but I must say it is quite the opposite - I’m grateful for the journey and people I worked with. I grew stronger and as a result, started a business of my own. It also helped me understand what it meant to treat your staff right and how much support women required in the workplace. Here are things businesses can do to help women strive and succeed in a workplace: - Hire more women for your front-line technical roles - Introduce voluntary “Gender Diversity and Inclusion Program." - Introduce “Executive Sponsorship Program.” This is especially important for women at mid-management level going up. Statistics show that a senior sponsor could make a world of a difference - Introduce “Leadership Development Training” specifically for women in leadership roles - Be transparent – know your numbers and share them with the rest of the company regularly. It has to start at the top. “We need to resist the tyranny of low expectations. We need to open our eyes to the inequality that remains. We won’t unlock the full potential of the workplace until we see how far from equality we really are.” — Sheryl Sandberg

My quick LinkedIn post on Customer Success vs. Customer Support drew thousands of views within a matter of couple days. The subject of blending Sales and Services is indeed fascinating, so I decided to expand on it a bit further. Many argue that the concept of Sales & Services in modern technology was pioneered by IBM in the 1960s when they came up with the first enterprise-grade computers.  And from the 1960s all the way to 1990s Service was typically part of a Sales organization, ran by regional managers.  In the 1990s we went through a process of separating Services from Sales; Support became a global function, Professional Services became a global function, and it lasted all the way to 2017. And now we are looking to bring Sales and Services back together again - build a United customer growth engine. My career in IT started in the late 1990s. As a result, I experienced services being regionally managed. At the time services were unprofitable, of low quality, inconsistent and post-sale resources were pulled continuously to pre-sale activities.  The model was unsustainable and drove poor Customer Experience.  As a result, most companies started segregating service resources into stand-alone independent functional units, pulling them from the regions.  The process of globalization and centralization of services has begun in the early 2000s. I spent many years helping technology companies to centralize and globalize their service organizations. Some great things have been achieved in the process of services being separated from sales - services became more profitable, globally consistent and of much higher quality. The only problem we were not able to address was an extremely disjointed Customer Experience (CX). Sales would take the clients up to a certain point, handoff to Professional Services, handoff to Education Services, handoff to Support Services, etc.  The clients felt like they were dealing with multiple different companies. And don't forget about the "turf wars" between Sales and Services that made Customer Experience (CX) even worst. And now in 2018 we came a full circle with most companies out there already working on bringing Sales and Services back together, but on what terms?  And why they are doing that, you might ask?  The economics of our business models are changing. The ability of a company to drive Adoption, Expansion, Renewal is essential to business success. In the context of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), I can see the traditionally stand-alone service organizations introducing Adoption Charters of Customer Success and developing a robust Adoption framework as the very first step growing closer together with Sales.  If Adoption is done, right Renewal responsibilities will come naturally. As per TSIA research, Sales and Services organizations in the future will still run as two separate entities, but they will come together near the top rolling up to a Chief Revenue Officer or a Chief Customer Officer. Sales will continue being regionally managed, while Services and Success will be highly converged. Services, including Success, will be monetized. Clients will be requesting to talk to people that are responsible for delivering the outcomes before they sign the contracts. As a result, we will see more services experts involved in pre-sale environments. Services will begin to be rewarded and measured on the ability making the company LAER-efficient (Land-Adopt-Expand-Renew), including improving the Land function. Everyone in the company is going to come together in their compensation around a unified set of Customer Health and Growth metrics. I must say I'm super excited about the next stage of service evolution, and seeing Sales and Services working together as real partners.            

Monitoring the quality of a support center is an extremely crucial part of Customer Experience (CX) being effectively and deliberately engineered. There are several ways running a QA program: call or chat monitoring and/or recording, ticket review and/or monitoring, coaching for quality, and many other measures, all aimed at creating great customer experiences, providing consistent and effective support. In an effort to uncover the state of quality assurance (QA) in technical support HDI has conducted a survey with 330 support organizations and here are the key findings:

• More than half of respondents are doing QA work and have formal processes in place, while almost one-third have no formal processes. About one-sixth (16%) aren’t performing QA.
• The top three purposes for quality review and monitoring are customer satisfaction (86%), training and/or coaching (77%), and performance review (67%).
• More than half (57%) of support organizations record technical support calls, and 26% review all recorded calls. 54% review randomly selected recorded calls.
• Almost three-quarters of organizations (72%) that do QA review both open and closed tickets in quality reviews, and they most commonly use randomly selected tickets for review. More than half of support centers that provide phone support (57%) record some or all technical support calls.
• Almost three-quarters (72%) of organizations review randomly selected tickets, while only 11% review all tickets.
• Only 13% of organizations have a dedicated quality manager or similar position; in most organizations that do quality monitoring, it’s done by the support center manager or a team lead.

The research confirmed that almost half of organizations were not running a formal QA program. Many respondents indicated that they would like to have a dedicated QA team or manager, but either can not afford it or didn’t know where to start. Let's not forget that Millennials and Generation Z have high expectations for their employers and motivated by the challenges, as well as opportunities to learn and grow. Organizations that strive to retain the best talent should continue staying creative delivering feedback, coaching and training their staff. And I’m not referring to the annual reviews many still exclusively rely on.. QA gets done consistently when an outsourced partner is involved. There are could be variations of business-critical, customer-critical or non-critical QA scores as well as CX QA scores, depending on the methodology applied. The challenge then lies in the fact that the sampling pool is limited, requests are randomly selected by the partner and scorecard introduction drives almost robotic responses within the frontline... the frontline that is already removed from the rest of the business. If you are outsourcing your support to a third party provider or even if you are building a program internally, keep an eye on the following elements: QA Attributes: attributes should be tailored to each function and role. Furthermore, they should be fully aligned with your brand promise and culture. Don't over complicate it, the attributes should be simple, precise and easy to remember and understand even without the guide. QA Score Card: was it built around customer experience or the employee performance? It should not be focused on individual employees, as much as your customers being fully taken care of through every channel. I like to look at the QA program as an internal CSAT tool - when you cross reference it with the external CSAT and NPS scores you get a much better view into CX. Scripts: try minimizing usage of the scripts, or at the very least request your partner to develop a wide variety and allow their staff to improvise. Coaching: how soon the feedback gets delivered to the employees? In what format coaching is done and how progress gets tracked afterwards? Customers: how sessions below 85% get handled to make sure the clients were fully accommodated? Who notifies the account management team? There needs to be a solid process in place of closing the loop with the customers. Sampling Pool: this is a tough one, as sessions get randomly selected and in most companies only 5% of total interactions are evaluated. Ask to sample based on criteria that is most relevant to your business and problems you are facing, for example only escalated cases, cases with more then X number of staff involved, or where customer lifespan is greater then X, if you have LTV per client even better. In my experience developing and managing QA programs, it has a huge impact not only on customer retention, but the level of employee satisfaction and engagement. When done right, I’ve seen support engineers being excited to receive their very first QA scores and waiting for the results to arrive each week to follow. The sense of ownership and pride gets built through QA. I'd say if not already, make it happen for your clients and employees. Please don’t hesitate to share your experiences and thoughts on QA. Would love to hear from you!