Michael Moore

Promotions should be an ongoing process. Besides understanding your teams aspirations, those that you target for possible promotion based on performance, culture and drive, should be on some sort of developmental track - formal or informal. The identification and development are part of any good manager's key responsibilities. in addition to this employee or group of employees, you need to prepare for the conversations with others - "what about me" - and ensure you have constructive discussions with them. Lastly, make sure to consider the role completely and whether you have prepared the employee(s) for the promotion.

User experience is one area I don’t believe enough time is spent on - for internal users. While demo’s and trials sound good, your ability to easily modify (not customize) the system to meet your business needs and interaction journey. Also, depending on the stage of your business, your requirements today will change as your business is successful and grows, and often changes your requirements. Lastly, make sure there is alignment on who the primary user group will be and weight their needs higher than others.

My experience with this is not as a traditional training exercise, but to make them part of the process - supporting or providing input on escalations specific to their area. Again - have them shadow your top service/support employees and follow up with the discussion. I. Observations etc.

For existing organizations, the following 2 exercises have been incredibly eye opening. 1) very simply ask potential team members their opinion of your customer service. You will quickly be able to separate the team into the “haves” and the “have nots” with respect to customer service attitude. 2) whatever method of customer service you provide, have prospective team members observe/shadow/sidejack etc. the service and support group for a day. Then, have either a group or 1x1 sessions to evaluate the observations and feedback. Secondarily - and important - have similar discussion with service employees who were shadowed for feedback on the prospects.