Customer Support is one of those fields people initially discount as a career path, maybe because it feels like the department where all the angry calls get routed. But Customer Support roles can be rewarding as you solve problems schools and teachers are having, either directly by talking or chatting with them or by identifying common problems and creating support documentation or trainings to enable them to solve problems themselves.
Customer Support roles provide different levels of support and higher-level tier representatives work on higher-level problem solving. While entry level roles will work with basic, frequently encountered problems, more senior-level team members will be assigned to more meaty problems. One role (at Amplify) described the problems their representative fielded as “inquiries which require pedagogical experience and training.” If you enjoy solving problems that directly impact students and their teachers and analyzing why certain issues repeatedly crop up, your teaching expertise is not just valued but it will be actively utilized in these roles.
That said, entry level Customer Support roles can pay a pittance so I often don’t share them. When I do share them, the role involves this more complex problem solving and companies are often looking for candidates who have been educators or have higher ed experience. I end up sharing at least 10 Customer Support roles each month. About 25% of those roles were looking for educator or higher ed experience, but nearly half of them were looking for relevant experience, typically customer-facing support but I also saw training or project management experience crop up as well. If you’re trying to determine if your experience aligns, remember that customer-facing support doesn’t have to be in a call-centered environment – many school support staff have very similar technical onboarding and troubleshooting experience for example.
And educators can leverage many classroom tasks to show that you have similar experience. About 20% of these roles were early career roles which means organizations were looking for 1-2 years of experience. Here are some examples that an experienced educator could leverage in their application: creating documentation for parents (or students) on how to use the edtech platforms at your school; being the point person for troubleshooting implementation of a pilot program; leading trainings for teachers on how to integrate new technology into their classrooms; or convening a weekly tech troubleshooting group during Covid for fellow teachers. The key is to focus on your experience helping others use technology rather than on pedagogy or curriculum training or documentation.
You might wonder from some of these examples what the difference is between a Customer Success Manager and a Customer Support Representative. These are members of two different departments because Customer Success helps implement the particular programming, tech, or curriculum while Customer Support helps solve problems that pop up during that implementation – things like trouble logging in, forgotten passwords, identifying bugs, and so forth.
Where there can be some apparent overlap is in the more knotty technical problems that combine pedagogical know-how with technical savvy. That Amplify role I quoted earlier is a good example – their Customer Support representatives were offering assessment assistance, data interpretation, and general guidance to clients.
This highlights the biggest distinction between Customer Success and Customer Support: the former is proactive while the latter is responsive. A Customer Success and a Customer Support representative might come up with a similar solution to a client’s problems but the Success person would bring it to the client before they had the problem whereas the Support person would work with the client to figure out the problem after the client had identified it.
Customer Success’s primary goal is to retain clients by making sure they’re getting the most out of a product, which requires more bigger picture strategy. Customer Support’s primary goal is to retain clients by making sure the key functions are working for them. This also means that Customer Success develops an ongoing relationship with the client whereas Customer Support engages with a client on a limited basis.
Customer Support can be technical, requiring deep product understanding or technical know-how, or it can be more customer service-oriented, focusing more on billing or account issues. The roles I share typically fall into the former category because they require more specialized knowledge and are a higher tier of support – which is why they pay a higher salary and are looking for (former) educators rather than candidates with customer service experience more broadly.
If you’re interested in Customer Support, it’s worth considering contract roles. Many companies scale their support operations around back to school season, for example, and this can give you valuable industry experience. If you’ve been following my series this week on LinkedIn about how folks made their first edskip, many folks started with contract work or they used contract work to move from a bridge job post-teaching into their dream role.
You might also recall in my last newsletter, I shared how Customer Support is not as competitive as other job categories. That means they’re hiring candidates at the same level as what they say in the job description (rather than candidates who have twice as much experience). If you’re worried you may find Customer Support mind-numbing after a year or two, it’s okay to think about it as a bridge job that allows you to move into a different role in 9-12 months. This is very common for transitioning teachers!
But the career path in Customer Support also is interesting! Customer Support Manager roles often are not looking for a significant number of years experience – you can move into Team Lead positions fairly quickly with your teaching experience and then on to Manager roles – so there’s a clear career progression that moves from problem solving to more strategic problem solving roles. One thing that teachers often underestimate is how valued your soft-skills are after you’ve been hired; characteristics that were hard to demonstrate in a resume become apparent on the job and lead to more responsibility and promotions quickly.
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