[Originally posted 3/7/2023 on LinkedIn]
I love baseball and I love spring training because after a long winter it means warm summer games are just around the corner, and Sunday, we got to see the Cincinnati Reds play the Oakland A’s in an exhibition game. It reminded me how much baseball is about strategy- changing up your batting lineup, pitching rotation, field positioning and base play to take advantage of an offensive strength or bolster a defensive situation.
As a set of aligned plans intended to achieve a specific set of outcomes over some defined period of time, a strategy serves to align people, teams, processes and resources around those outcomes, and they have to be adapted or pivoted as internal and external environments change.
In fact, there are lots of famous strategy pivots in business- Starbucks embrace of technology and their mobile app (today, driving over 26% of sales and the most regularly used restaurant loyalty rewards app), Slack, initially only a user chat feature in a failed online game, now a successful collaboration tool, and the decisive Netflix pivot from physical DVD rental to streaming that made them the industry powerhouse they are today.
The urgent case for change
Teams and organizations can also set and pivot strategies in support of the larger business or company playbooks, and 18 months ago, our Advanced Tier and Enterprise support teams, part of the organization I led, were struggling to deliver against the needs that customers- and the broader customer support division- had of us. We had capacity and process bottlenecks driving up the time to resolve complex technical issues, which in turn caused a growing backlog of unresolved issues, all of which were increasing the frequency and thrash of customer and executive escalations. As the leader of the organization, I knew we had to change course quickly, and do so with creative approaches to overcome existing business constraints.
Playing the long game
In my last article, I talked about support as part of the brand promise, and from that charter, I engaged the team to build the case for a strategy that would make our customer support more proactive and responsive with less friction, in order to meet our brand vision for innovative healthcare technology and services with better outcomes. Key to the strategy we built was a holistic approach- rather than quick fixes to immediate problems, the team made sure we sought to solve for end-to-end customer experience and identify structural improvements that could also serve longer term as the foundation for broader and more impactful capabilities across the team.
Out of this came two connected pillars- aligning resources and capacity across the end-to-end support model, while optimizing throughput (issue resolution) efficiency for the Advanced Tier teams.
Collaborating with frontline support teams, we invested heavily in training, process and agent enablement to resolve significantly more issues at tier 1 and tier 2 – driving a total shift year over year of more than 50% – which had the added benefit of improving customer experience with earlier and shorter resolutions. All in, it not only addressed our capacity deficit at the higher tiers, but also availed an 18% increase in Advanced tier FTE capacity that we were able to re-deploy to product level engagement for defects and support collaboration with much more beneficial synergies.
For those complex and emerging issues that were incumbent on depth technical resources to resolve, we undertook journey mapping, process auditing and step-tracing to find gaps and blockers driving up resolution times, backlogs and escalations.
There was no silver bullet- we made dozens of changes and iterations which cumulatively began decreasing our Advanced Tier backlog, eventually by 65%, and increasing our service level resolution by 23% to a consistent monthly delivery at 95%. (I outline some of the methodologies we leveraged as a team in my previous post, “3 things my team has learned to do well that have a big (and measurable) impact on customer experience”).
Take the win, and keep adapting
Pursuing a bold strategy with an enormous amount of hard work from a smart, engaged and dedicated team, we not only solved the operational issues facing us but were able to re-align around a better customer experience with support and shift our resourcing from costly reactive functions to a proactive, future state orientation. I’m incredibly proud of my team, at the same time knowing that our customers, business and internal dynamics will continue to evolve, and we’ll need to continue evolving strategically with them.