It's no surprise that staffing is the most critical part of creating a winning technical support team. You can make mistakes in other areas and still come out on top if you hire the right people, but not the other way around. This article will focus on how to staff your team as well as how to manage and retain them in the long-term.


Getting The Team You Want

Each new employee you hire will bring their own set of technical skills, personality quirks and emotional stability to the table, which is why your decision is such an important one. The first step is to make a list of the minimum technical skills that your new team must contain, and then narrow it down to determine which skills are necessary for each specific job. Finally, you should consider character traits that are important to you. Here are some that I find very useful in a technical support candidate:

1. Easy to Train - You will have to train each new hire to be prepared for all kinds of problems you cannot predict today. This means that you will need a person who learns new concepts quickly. Find a few puzzles that build upon each other in complexity and bring them to your interviews. Show each candidate the first puzzle, and then ask him/her to solve the second. Can this person digest the information and apply it in a short amount of time? The answer will provide insight into what it will be like to train this person as part of your team.

2. Responsible - You can measure a person's sense of responsibility by asking about their connections to others in their personal lives. Can they tell you about a time when a mistake they made hurt someone? Candidates who do not have a strong emotional reaction to telling you such a story or who have taken no action to rectify the situation described are not people you should consider hiring.

3. Empathetic - It is imperative that you hire a person who will be able to deal with angry customers on a regular basis. During the interview process, I generally ask references if they found the candidate to be an empathetic person. You can also require your candidates to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test. 'F' personality types are often the most empathetic. I didn't give my team members personality tests until after they were hired, but as it turns out, they are all 'F's. What does that say about me? It says that I'm an INTJ, and I over-analyze everything.

4. Curious - Technical support is all about problem-solving, and a person who is curious will always keep at it, even when the problems are difficult and complicated. During my interviews, I ask candidates about their hobbies. A person with an active hobby involving learning something new or figuring something out will likely be driven in figuring out how to solve technical support issues as well.

5. Logical - Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A logical person will approach ostensibly magical systems and say to themselves, "I can figure this out. This is why I test for logic during interviews. All it takes are a few logic puzzles to determine if your candidate will be capable of solving tech support problems.

6. Trustworthy - You will need to trust the people on your team, so imagine that the person you are interviewing is a friend of yours who has offered to take care of your house while you go on vacation. Would you trust him/her to collect your mail, feed your pets and visit your father in the nursing home? If not, don't hire this person.


Managing Your Team

Hiring the right people is important, but so is what you do with them once they are on board. Cultivating a winning management style must also be a priority while you reorganize your technical support department.

" Effective Training

Good training leads to capable support people. You are going to be hiring people to figure out problems, so clearly you can't train them on precisely what they are going to be working on. The objective here is to do the best you can. Don't, for example, put them into entirely unfamiliar systems and ask them to demonstrate proficiency right away.

Your current staff are probably under-trained as well, so as you work on creating a winning team, get real product training scheduled for them. You should also make ongoing training a priority, especially when it comes to new product and version releases.

" Goal- and Boundary-Setting

Setting goals for your staff is easy so long as you make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely - do a search on this concept if you are not familiar with it). Boundaries, however, are slightly more complicated. I usually explain them to my staff like this: "That decision requires a context of information that you don't have. It's not a matter of trust, but a matter of knowledge and responsibility. Right up to the boundary, do what is right for the customer and the company. When you are asked to cross a boundary, come to me. I'll take the responsibility for making those decisions.

" Open Communication

Unfortunately, many managers treat their staff like servants (or worse) despite the fact that the goal of management is actually the oppositeto help people do their jobs better. This is why I tend to consider myself the one-man technical support team enablement department. My team knows that my door is always open. They have my cell phone number and are not afraid to use it. Allow your team to do the same.

" Performance Reviews

Everybody needs to know how they are doing, so give your staff their appropriate praise and correction. As a rule, praise should be public and correction should be private. I like to publicly praise twice for every time I privately correct a staff member. You should also do regular performance reviews and have a job growth plan in place in order to keep the best people around.

Holding regular team meetings will promote communication and let your people know how they are doing collectively. If there is a problem, you can address it without assigning blame to anyone in particular. Tell your team that you want to discuss the process they are having difficulty with in order to ensure that it is the best process. Take comments and suggestions on how to improve. I have always found this kind of input to be priceless.

" Trust

If you have done everything else, the final step is to let your people do their jobs. Don't try to micromanage them, tempting as it may be. Give them the self-confidence they need by showing that you trust them.


Maintaining Morale

It is always important to do things that will boost morale. If you wait for it to sag, it will be too late, so be proactive in keeping your team happy. For example, you can buy lunch for your team more often than other department heads do. You can also be sure to spread the news when one of your staff members does an excellent job for a customer.


Sustaining Your Team

Retention is much more important in a technical support team than anywhere else, so have a plan in place for retaining your best people. It will likely include the management style I just described, as well as giving raises, bonuses and promotions. As for me, I would much rather pay more, train more and do more with my current people than have to deal with hiring and training someone new. The overhead costs and ramp-up time alone are daunting. This is one of the reasons why an effective hiring process is so important.