Rosemary Cheredaryk, PMP

Learning and development should be incorporated into regular operations for all roles, at all levels. There are some super easy ways to do this, including: - Providing audible subscriptions to all employees or just to managers, then having manager shared feedback from books - Add learning goals into quarterly career goals and assign 5-10% weight. You can include training, reading books, certifications, courses, etc - The manager sets the tone: they need to set a standard of continuous learning and training, and share it regularly with the team - Add an opportunity to weekly/monthly update meetings for sharing extracurricular learnings - Set a culture of researching ideas, practices, etc. outside of the company, instead of remaining within

A customer sending negative feedback can actually be a blessing in disguise. When I'm involved in product development, I always ask people to provide feedback, both good and bad, because I can actually implement improvements through feedback from users. A customer sending me negative feedback gives me direct line of contact for ideas to improve the product. Furthermore, I have an opportunity to turn this customer into a key user stakeholder to receive continual feedback, for the purpose of making this application better for them. It's direct voice of the customer and it's extremely valuable.

Firstly: I consider the point of contact, how do we prepare support agents to handle high volumes of customers? Make sure support is adequately staffed, use automations to direct messages to the correct teams, give agents a repository of macros to respond quickly and correctly, train agents properly on customer issues, and provide an updated, regularly-maintained knowledge base for agents to reference. Secondly: it's important to turn customer support tickets and feedback into data that can be shared with teams outside of customer support. For instance, if there's an issue with the product, contextualize the issue (# of tickets, support cost per ticket, etc) and give it to the product team as a requirement to fix, to prevent future tickets

Personally, I find employment rewarding when my contribution positively impacts other people. If I was working in a warehouse, it would be motivating for me to know how my effort impacts the customer. In the same way that traditional customer support agents receive ratings and feedback from customers on their solved tickets, it would be great if the same could be set up for warehouse employees. Additionally, working an entry-level role can get very samesy, with little variation day-to-day. Giving employees unique and/or project-based tasks can be a great way to motivate them and build their career, gain skills, and flex different muscles.