There's a famous Santa Monica-based study in the world of computer programming that was designed to uncover exactly how much better the best employee for a job is from the average employee. The setup was simple: give a group of coders a list of coding tasks to complete, and see how many they can complete within two hours. Most people expected the best programmer of the group to be only marginally better than the average programmer, but the results dramatically differed from expectations; in actuality, the fastest programmer was up to 25x faster at certain tasks like debugging than the lowest performing coder. The conclusion was simple: paying the salary necessary to make sure you're hiring the absolute best candidate for a job pays massive dividends.
I would like to propose there is one job field that this principle is, for the sake of dramatization, more true for than any other: customer support.
From purely an efficiency standpoint, a customer support rep that can look at a problem and immediately have a sense for what's going on can get through many more cases than someone who has to click through their support resources and take twenty guesses as to what the problem is. But I think the real benefit is in customer retention. Going to customer support and having your problem solved really quickly is, in my experience, a net positive on the brand image. Anything less than this is by definition a net negative since you're experiencing problems with the product.
In the last 48 hours, I was on the phone with Xfinity four different times trying to get my internet setup correctly in my new apartment. I was just trying to transfer internet service from my old address to my new address, an extremely normal request. The first two reps were amiable but in retrospect had no real idea what they were doing and hung up the phone saying they solved the problem when really they just screwed it up more. The third rep seemed knowledgeable, but in the midst of untangling the mistakes the first two reps made, he made some mistakes of his own. By this point I was ready to punt my modem off my balcony and pray for relief from the AT&T gods, as if there was any solace to find in that.
But then I called for a fourth time and the rep picked up the phone, said, "Oh, I am positive I know what the problem is," proceeded to chat with me about her love for curling and her days making money doing tech support for her neighbors in the early PC days, and before I knew it, she went, "Alright, it should be all fixed. I even restarted your modem for you a few minutes ago. We should be done here." I checked my phone and sure enough, the WiFi was working just fine.
I don't know how much she's making an hour but it's not enough. Saying she was 25x better than the other reps even seems like an understatement because some of those reps actually created more problems. She could have answered the phone, aggressively burped at me, and hung up, and she still would have been no lower than third on the Xfinity support rep depth chart. But instead she decided to actually make me admire Xfinity for even a snapshot in time, and how the flip do you possibly price wizardry like that?
I know it's pretty standard in Silicon Valley to pay top dollar for the best programmers money and complimentary Clif Bars can buy, but maybe we should make it more commonplace to pay top dollar for insanely great customer support reps too.
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