Okay, here goes. I just took over a software startup, and right now the team is just me and a developer friend who is handling support and bugs. We’ll call him Ken. This is both of our part time jobs with the goal to grow it to our full time job. EDIT: I’m handling marketing, ops, literally everything else. I can’t code and 90% of the support requests require a bug fix. If I could code I’d handle the bugs and support myself. I have worked customer service in multiple industries, starting with Chick-Fil-A 10 years ago, and am very good at responding to customers, diffusing situations, all the normal stuff. This is Ken’s first time in customer support and I am at a loss for how to train him to hit the level of CS excellence I’d like to see. So far I’ve tried: - explaining my rationale for answering different CS questions different ways - how to put yourself in the customers shoes to write empathetic replies - a list of example scripts - giving him “if-then” decision trees to help him know when to rope me in I know he’s trying, but the responses he gives customers aren’t empathetic enough and he doesn’t accurately prioritize which tickets are most important - all of them feel like a 10 to him (even though I’ve explained this is not the case). For example, this morning in a reply to a customer (who has had a DB issue for 2 weeks and correctly identified the problem with a gracious and understanding email that he added me to because he had been getting nowhere with support (UGH!!!) Ken included the line “I haven’t done it yet, but I haven’t forgotten, I’ll do it today.” That’s…not gonna cut it and isn’t empathetic or respectful to the customer (IMO). Also - why wasn’t it done?! I have regular calls with Ken to troubleshoot and get updates, but a good half of these kinds of messages aren’t mentioned to me in those calls and I only find out because the customer had gotten so frustrated they email me directly and I pin Ken down and follow-up with him until there’s a fix. I know there’s a disconnect between food service customer service and technical customer service, but I don’t know how to bridge that gap and train him to the level of customer service I (and the customers) are expecting. The product is buggy and the core customers know that and stay because customer support was always great (before I took it over). I’m 6 weeks into Ken running support and I’m unimpressed. We both know and have discussed that we need to make enough money to hire a better support person so Ken can focus on new features because he hates CS, but that won’t be in the budget until April/May at the soonest so we have to make this work until then. I know that I had a leg up because the customer service training I got was so damn good, but I know there’s a way to train him and I’m at a loss - my brain just has customer service mode built in at this point.