Keys to Retaining Technical Support Professionals
By Kurt D. Kirstein, Ed.D.

Over the past several years, technical support has become an integral part of the products that technology companies offer – for many, support is what differentiates them from the competition. With products becoming more complex and users becoming more sophisticated, the need for technical support is growing. Many companies have also structured support to be a significant revenue generator. Because of the importance placed on technical support, the teams that provide it need to be highly skilled, motivated, able to learn, and willing to lead their companies in providing world-class service.

Yet, traditional technical support departments have seen high annual turnover rates as high as 30% or more annually. Providing world-class support isn’t easy. A support rep’s primary duty is to resolve problems that are frequently reported by angry or frustrated customers. Support is also stressful. Support departments are frequently under resourced and the support reps often don’t get the respect they deserve from their peers.

In recent years, the employee attrition rate has dropped somewhat but there is some suspicion that this has more to do with a slow economy than with any changes in the typical support job or any specific actions that managers have taken to curb employee attrition. To address the problem of attrition, I was recently involved in a study to determine leadership actions that managers could take to address the problem of employee retention. The study looked at these key areas and the correlation between them and staff retention:

• Technical training
• Procedural training
• Professional development
• Understanding the company’s vision
• Participation in the decision-making process
• Participation in developing departmental objectives
• Taking the time to reflect on past mistakes and successes
• A positive approach to mistakes
• Ensuring that employees have tasks that challenge them
• Intrinsic motivation

Support leaders face a variety of challenges which include (but are not limited to) recruitment, training, quality of support, and employee attrition. Of these, perhaps the most troubling and costly is employee attrition. It’s estimated that the financial costs to replace and train a technical employee can run from 1.5 to 7 times the departing employee’s annual salary and this estimate doesn’t include the costs of knowledge lost.

To retain staff, support managers need to discover specific methods to enrich the jobs of the technical support personnel, expand their skills, provide excellent customer service, and to find ways to motivate them to remain in support with the company.

This research sought to discover the specific actions technical support leaders could take to minimize employee attrition in their organizations. The focus of this study was the support departments of small to medium-sized companies but many of the actions would apply to support organizations of large companies as well. The retention issue was examined at these companies from three perspectives which were employee development, organizational learning, and employee self-leadership – all areas leaders can impact within their organizations.

This project sought to determine if development, learning and leadership were correlated to higher employee retention in technical support organizations. It also sought to determine if such strategies could be successfully implemented in technology companies to offset any potential retention problems that these companies were likely to encounter.

To establish a relationship between each quality and employee retention, a survey was conducted of 43 support team managers in the Seattle area. This survey asked respondents to cite their attrition levels and to rate the presence or absence of leadership qualities within their departments. Correlations were drawn between attrition rates and the leadership qualities to determine which qualities were more frequently present in departments that were able to better retain their support employees.

This article examines the relationship between employee development and employee retention. Three leadership qualities were identified as part of employee development for technical support departments: technical training, procedural training, and professional skills development.

Technical training

Every support department has some form of technical training. It’s essential and all support professionals benefit from a formal training program, a structured process of learning from peers, or a combination of the two. Though some industry sources suggest that those companies with formalized mechanisms for technical training are likely to see higher job satisfaction resulting in better employee retention, this wasn’t the case with the respondents in this study.

For the survey respondents, there was no relationship between the presence of technical training and longer employee retention. Technical training did not appear to be associated with longer or shorter employee retention and, as such, could not be supported as a tool the managers could use to enhance employee retention.

That doesn’t mean that technical training isn’t important. It may be that nearly all support organizations must have some type of training to be successful and that technical training doesn’t stand out as a unique quality. Another factor is that technical training has traditionally focused exclusively on the knowledge needed to support a company’s products. That limits the extent to which the training provides skills that impact future opportunities – an important factor in the study as to why employees join and remain with employers.

Procedural training

It’s also necessary to educate all support employees on the processes and procedures used to run the support organization. These include skills like call logging, knowledge management, the ability to answer and respond to requests for support using whatever methods the department has adopted, and the importance of performing one’s job within the scope of the department’s standard operating procedures. Each of these skills is important to support staff’s ability to succeed in their jobs yet different departments place different levels of emphasis when designing employee procedural training.

Not surprisingly, procedural training doesn’t have a strong relationship to employee retention. These skills are even less likely to provide long-term, marketable skills for support employees because departmental procedures are largely proprietary.

Professional development

For the purposes of this study, professional development was training that was intended to expand the practical job skills of employees even if those skills were not directly applicable to the employee’s present duties. Some managers voiced concern that training employees in new skills prepares them to leave and take that new knowledge with them. However, studies show that technical employees tend to stay longer in their present jobs when provided with professional development opportunities. Does the same hold true for support?

The study did not show a strong relationship between professional development and support employee retention, yet the relationship was stronger than it was for the other forms of training. A closer examination of those companies who reported high levels of retention found that most encouraged or provided professional development which suggests despite a weak relationship, professional development is one area that deserves a closer look as a tool to retain staff.

Though these three forms of training are important to developing effective support representatives, only professional development seems to impact staff retention rates. Next week’s article will describe five factors in the study that have a stronger correlation with staff retention.

Kurt Kirstein has 17 years experience working in technical support, mainly in telecommunications and biotech companies, with the past 12 years in leadership positions. Over the past 5 years, he’s managed the customer services and training group for a small biotechnical company. He earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at The Evergreen State College and holds a master's degree from Seattle University in adult education, and training and a doctorate in organizational leadership from Nova Southeastern University.