Kyara Andrews’ career story represents one of the things I love most about startups: if you have passion, drive, and initiative, you’ll rise up fast.
Kyara was hired as the fourth Customer Support Agent at Tradesy, a Kleiner-Perkins backed luxury resale company. 9 years later at the end of her tenure, she was VP of Operations, managing over $7 million in budget.
Kyara managed to scale herself alongside a rapidly growing company — not easy to do. There’s tons to learn from Kyara’s journey.
There was an inflection point early in her time at Tradesy: As the company was scaling, the support function wasn’t, and Kyara was tired of using band aid solutions to systemic problems (raise your hand if you’ve worked in a startup like this — all hands are up, yeah?). Deeply frustrated, she handed a resignation letter to her CEO. Most companies would’ve let Kyara go on her merry way. But her CEO, Tracy DiNunzio, did not.
Instead, Tracy chose to mentor Kyara, teaching her everything from financial modeling to communicating with her product team in a language they understand. With each year, Kyara took on more and more responsibility, rising up to that VP of Operations role. Tracy and Kyara then went on to take Kyara’s success, and build a formal program to help other support reps do the same.
Given her own career trajectory, Kyara fundamentally believes that support agents are a wildly valuable talent pipeline for the rest of your organization – nobody knows your customers and product issues better.
And yes, of course, Kyara is available for fractional work through HG to help you implement this inside your team. Enjoy! — Shaina
Drop 1. Turn support into a value driver, rather than just a cost center
I worked at a SaaS company where support was treated like a necessary evil. The team was burnt out. Resolution times were weeks long. Customers were churning left and right. So when I joined, I:
- Paid them more money and invested in them so they’d reinvest in us
- Set higher behavioral expectations from them
- Added more structure with new workflows
- Dove head-first in the backlog of ticketsImplemented Zendesk
- Established KPIs for the team and individual agents
Within three months, we dropped churn by 30%, improved SLA from 7% to 95%, and improved employee engagement by 35%.
Take it back to your team:
- Take a look at your support team and backlog and ask yourself if you’re investing in your support team with the appropriate compensation, tooling, documentation, and training.
- A good support team keeps your customers happy in the long-run and improves retention and can increase LTV.
- First-class customers deserve first-class support.Do you have the right metrics in place to measure success for your support team? This helps you identify opportunities for rewarding great performance as well as who needs to be coached and supported.
Drop 2. Your support function is a talent pipeline gold mine
At Tradesy, we created the Tradesy Apprenticeship Program or TAP (around our Series B), where folks in support could intern in other departments. They took on projects, did experiments that others didn’t have time for, and graduated from the program into new functions. Instead of recruiting externally, these graduates moved into new roles from engineering, product management, marketing, and HR, saving the company both money from recruiting and ramp-up time.
Take it back to your team:
- Your support team are your product and customer experts. Leverage their skill sets in other functions where possible.
- Create opportunities and pathways for your customer support team to explore other departments and career paths. Not only will you save on recruiting costs, but you’ll increase employee engagement and retention.
Drop 3. If you want Louis Vuitton level customer service, you need to pay your Support team Louis Vuitton level compensation
At Tradesy, we were a luxury marketplace for reselling. Our intention with our support function was to be Louis Vuitton, but for resell, which means that customer support has to provide service at the level of Louis Vuitton. That means that you are not going to have entry level $13/hour customer support answering the phone. You need to have experts.
Take it back to your team:
- Ask yourself what type of product are you selling: Forever 21 or Louis Vuitton? Make sure you invest in support accordingly as that’s what your customers expect.
- When looking at your customer support issues, categorize them accordingly both on complexity and whether your client is a high-paying client. If it’s a low complexity, low LTV client, you can outsource those support issues to a BPO. But if it’s a high-priority client, keep that support in-house and hire a specialist.
- Incentivize providing top-tier support into your business model if that’s a priority. Kyara highlights Zappos as an example of a company that prioritized support, making sure that reps were rewarded for providing a best-in-class experience for customers.
Drop 4. Bring support into account within your long-term strategy
A lot of folks don’t include support in their strategy. They’ll say they want to treat their customers well, but what does that actually look like? What does customer focus mean? Does it mean we prioritize product requests from our customers? If it does, that has a cost. Think about long-term strategy in advance and don’t be reactive.
Take it back to your team:
- Peak 5 years into the future, and ask yourself: How do you want customers to feel when they turn to you with a problem or need help? What does that imply for SLAs and tooling? Work backwards from there.
- Identify how much you’re willing to invest and build your strategy from there. You can start with a system that places tags on tickets and routes to the right person. You don’t have to go all in on customer segmentation or filtering and tier routing yet.
- Don’t treat support as an afterthought. Bake it into your business model upfront.