No rockstars allowed 

If you want to be a superstar, customer support is probably not the career path for you. The clue is in the name. Support. To reinforce, or hold up. To assist. It’s a role that by definition elevates something else. Certainly there are influential people in the industry and there are regular attempts to rebrand customer service professionals as “heroes”, but that’s about it for prospective glory or glamor.

Even when customer service is delivered exceptionally well, it’s usually the customer who gets to shine. They have their roadblocks removed, their problems solved, their path smoothed and signposted, and they go on to do whatever they were doing before they got stuck. This is as it should be; service is about the other person. But it sure feels better when the value of that service is recognized.

Given that many of us live in, or work with, individualistic cultures, it should not surprise us that support roles are undervalued. Individualism celebrates individual achievement and focuses less on the interdependence between a wide range of people. Helping other people doesn’t create visible signs of individual success.

We do already have a model for recognizing and rewarding supporting roles — in basketball. John Stockton holds the NBA record for most assists, throwing the final pass before a basket is scored. Assists matter in basketball (and football, among many others) because they make it more likely that points will be scored.

Players who deliver great assists help their teams win, and that makes assists worth measuring. Unfortunately in customer support, the basket equivalent is not so obvious, and the points scoring is not so immediately connected to the assist. Measuring the ROI of customer service is a more complicated matter. 

Still, we can all personally give recognition to the people who assist. Who are the people on your team quietly helping their colleagues behind the scenes? The person answering questions for the new starters, or the person offering to step in to cover a shortage. We can all benefit from a well timed assist. 

Even if that assistance comes from a new AI tool in your inbox and not a human at all. You can still say thank you to the AI, by the way, but it won’t care.

Hopefully.