Bret Piatt

We’ve all been there….something we have is broken, we can’t fix it on our own and we dread picking up the phone to call technical support because we know it won’t be a good experience.  Many of you think, “It’s tier 1 support, how hard can it be to learn this stuff?”  The truth of the matter is that for many people it isn’t hard but those people are rarely the people you get on the phone.

A tier 1 role is by definition an entry level position.  Based on the stats from Top Grading only 25% of the people hired into any role will excel at it.  So at first glance you should have a 1 out of 4 chance of having an excellent tier 1 experience but the hiring only tells half the story.  Some of the people hired in at a tier 1 level aren’t complacent and don’t want to stay at that level if they are excellent — they took the tier 1 job to get in the door and from there they want to move to other roles.  Other people hired into a tier 1 role are only a C player even in that role and they aren’t qualified for anything else — they’ll be a tier 1 forever.  This leads to eventually the tier 1 ranks of a given support center filled with B and C players (some C players will become B players in a role but very rarely do they turn into an A player) as the A players are promoted to other roles and the others remain.

Have agents identify themselves, anomymity promotes mediocrity

So how do you fix this if you’re a company with a support organization?  A few options exist and the easiest to implement is hiring the right people in the first place.  This will end up sounding like a promotional piece for Top Grading but if you hire A players 75% of the time instead of 25% you’ll always have a good amount of A players even in the tier 1 ranks.  Another option is to hire for a tier 1.5 role that is customer facing and if people turn out to not be an A player in that role give them a lateral/demotion to a tier 1 role where they perform non-customer facing non-time sensitive tasks — your B/C player at the more difficult role will have a much better chance of being an A player at the easier job.

A third option is to provide training or teaming.  Training is useful where somebody enjoys the tasks they’re being asked to do but they aren’t very good at them.  Training is not going to make a person an A player at things they don’t enjoy doing — this is where teaming comes in.  As a manager people on your teams will have different strengths and by teaming people with complimentary strengths together you can improve both of their performances.  As an example assign the analytical person the task of building a score sheet to measure performance and ask the empathetic woo person to try and rebuild a relationship with a disgruntal customer.

At the end of the day though you have to be willing to have difficult conversations with people, especially difficult in an economy like today — that they may not be a fit for the role their in and that you need them to find another role in the company or looks elsewhere.  While it may be hard for both parties to have the conversation in the long run it is better for everyone — people want to be an A player in the role they fill when they wake up each day — it isn’t fun waking up and knowing you’re headed to a job where you’ll struggle for the next 8-10 hours.

So next time you talk to that tier 1 support person don’t be so hard on them.  They applied for a job, they were hired — somebody told them they could be successful and good at it.  When you ask for a manager instead of yelling at the manager about how bad their tier 1 was ask them if they use a Top Grading style interview process, if they provide training or teaming, if they are doing anything to make that tier 1 successful — if they aren’t doing any of that feel bad for the tier 1 as they’re working for a management team that accepts mediocrity or doesn’t know enough to fix it.