36: Looking Beyond the Numbers with Ash Rhodes

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. This is episode 36. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is the rather enigmatic looking beyond the numbers. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today we revisit my conversation with Ash Rhodes when we were discussing what you can read into a spreadsheet and what you can't read in a spreadsheet.

Ash Rhodes: 0:44

When you spend a certain amount of time not interacting, and it's not even from a from the point of view of the customer, when I spend too much time not dealing with tickets, you forget how long it takes to do a ticket. And so you're like, ah, these the reps can do it in, you can do a ticket in five minutes. So reps should be able to do X number of tickets a day on average. So you start setting um really uh unobtainable type of um goals, basically. Not basically, you start sending you start setting more and more unobtainable goals. Uh, if you are not in there doing tickets, you start forgetting about like burnout or needing to troubleshoot things and so on and so forth. Whereas if you are actually in there doing the tickets once a week or once every month or something, you remember like, oh shit, no, this is really something that is much harder than that. Like, there's a much broader story.

Charlotte Ward: 1:55

So because when you start when you start looking at individuals as numbers on a spreadsheet, you're you're effectively reducing them to cogs on a machine. Right. Yeah, cogs on a machine, exactly. So if that's how that's how you you view them, you're only ever looking for efficiencies.

Ash Rhodes: 2:14

Exactly. You are yeah, you're saying it's so much prettier than I could, but that is exactly what I would if anybody in my life takes anything away from anything I say, is that don't treat your employees as numbers, please, for the love of God. Like treat them as human beings and don't do that. Please.

Charlotte Ward: 2:39

And there a