“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”
A man tried to teach me to fish once, and 5 hours later neither of us were fed. You can’t eat saltwater. Or most kinds of seaweed.
I suppose that the proverb technically still holds true, but it would be quite a short lifetime.
Still, the point is well made. It is better that people learn to do something for themselves than have to rely on others every time. Generally.
Customer support involves quite a lot of both fish-provision and fishing education, but reality is never as simple as the proverb makes it sound.
When a customer arrives in the queue desperate for help, they may have no interest at all in learning to fish. They need a fish immediately so they can eat and get back to their actual job.
If you try to leap straight into teaching, it can feel unhelpful and condescending. Nobody learns well when they are hungry1.
When I ran a team I taught a simple model: “Answer, elaborate, anticipate.”
- First, answer their direct question. Give them the specific information they asked for, or take action for them. Meet their immediate needs first.
- Then, elaborate. Explain the “why” behind the decision or behavior. This is also the time to give them the tools to self-serve in future. Share a knowledge base article, explain how to find it. Include links to other resources.
- Finally, anticipate. Think about their likely next steps, and give them the information they might need. You probably know where people get stuck, so you can often predict their next question and get ahead of it.
It is a solid model that you can apply in most cases, and it pays off in multiple way:
- Your customer gets immediate help, but can be self-sufficient rather than waiting next time.
- Your support team reduces both the volume of incoming questions and the grinding tedium of answering the same thing over and over.
But applying that model effectively requires careful judgment. Is this specific person ready to learn, or are they too angry or stressed or time-poor to listen right now? Would it be a better experience to provide the "fish" and let them get going as quickly as possible?
People have to want to learn, you can’t make them do it unwillingly. What differentiates decent, helpful, but mediocre support from excellent support is that level of applied judgement. Meeting each person where they are right now and giving them whatever is most helpful.
You probably do this instinctively already, but it’s worth paying attention to identify how you make those decisions. Discuss it with your colleagues and compare approaches.
As self-service becomes an increasingly larger component of support, helping customers learn to self-serve becomes a critical team skill.
Speaking of learning, this month my colleague Alison and I will be talking to Drew from the University of South Carolina about how they support thousands of students in university accommodation.
At a university there might be less teaching to fish, and more teaching to sometimes please clean the dishes please 🙏 , but the idea is the same. See you there.
1. Another reason free school lunches can be so important to equalizing outcomes for kids in all sorts of situations
