“As a manager, your job is not to teach people talent. Your job is to help them earn the accolade by matching their talent to the role.” – Marcus Buckingham
This quote is one of my favorites. It highlights arguably the most important responsibility of managers: helping individuals align their unique talents with roles where they can thrive. In practice, this isn’t always straightforward — especially in customer support, where roles evolve over time.
When one of our customer support specialists was promoted to a senior representative, she raised a thoughtful question: How is my work beyond the queue being tracked? She was still mainly working in the queue, but her role had expanded to leading new projects and even owning a company OKR. These contributions were impactful and aligned with her talents, but our evaluation system wasn’t designed to formally recognize this type of work.
She wasn’t alone; around the same time, another senior lead on our EMEA team shared similar concerns. Both were excelling in “extra-queue-ricular” activities, but our performance rubric didn’t reflect their broader impact and fell short of providing a clear pathway for growth beyond the queue.
So, we developed a brand new performance rubric: designed to help senior agents especially align their unique talents with expanded responsibilities.
Here’s why it matters, how we approached it, and how you can create a similar framework (or use ours — download it here) for your team.
Why invest in a talent development rubric?
Introducing a new framework for talent development can be time-consuming, but it’s worth the investment. With a rubric that reflects work outside the queue, you can:
Encourage retention: Retention is a challenge in customer support when work can feel repetitive and growth opportunities unclear. A talent development rubric offers a framework for growth, whether through mastering new skills, stepping into leadership roles, or working on more outside-of-queue projects.
Promote cross-functional collaboration: Partnerships with other teams (e.g., product feedback loops or cross-departmental training) encourage employees to engage beyond their immediate responsibilities — which lets reps flex different skills, learn how other departments operate, and build better relationships.
Support meaningful goal-setting: Let’s be real, not every company or team goal is going to perfectly match what someone wants to work on. With this type of rubric, we discuss and find out, what are they great at? What gets them excited? By tapping into their strengths or areas of interest, you can find ways for them to contribute to those big goals in a way that feels meaningful to them. It’s a win-win: they grow, and the team benefits too.
Empower autonomy: A rubric puts team members in the driver’s seat of their own development. It strikes a balance between structure and flexibility, giving reps the freedom to make decisions about their path while staying aligned with team goals.
Recognize diverse contributions: Not all impactful work is easy to quantify. A talent rubric makes “soft” contributions, like team morale, mentorship, and knowledge-sharing, acknowledged and rewarded alongside tangible outputs.
The six building blocks for a great rubric
Sold on the idea of a senior support talent development rubric for your team? There are six main building blocks that serve as a basis for creating a solid framework. Read on👇
Consider future growth from many angles
Many senior representatives are eager to grow, but not all aspire to leadership or management roles. It’s important to consider alternative pathways for growth, like project ownership, mentorship, cross-departmental initiatives, and specialization in technical areas. For example, one Front team member moved from customer support to her current role in product education, and another moved from queue work to support operations, managing all of our help center documentation.
In our rubric, we lay out six unique skills (queue expertise, mentoring, process improvement and optimization, product and knowledge development, leadership, and contribution to company-wide goals) along with a space to fill in hours spent on each skill. This way, we can get a good sense of where our support teammates are spending time on a weekly basis and ensure it aligns with where they want to grow.
Balance queue and non-queue work
Senior agents will always juggle ticket responsibilities with strategic projects, and you want to make sure their diverse contributions are fully acknowledged. A well-designed rubric reflects this balance by including metrics for both. In our rubric, we define success in:
Queue work: We look at maintaining response times, quality standards, or customer satisfaction scores.
Off-queue work: We look at leading projects, mentoring teammates, or driving internal initiatives, like “Hop in the Support Queue.”
Contributing to company-wide goals is one of five “off-queue” sections of our rubric, for example:
Leadership behavior spotlights
Senior reps are often informal leaders, even if they’re not in a management role. Incorporate expectations for behaviors like team representation and guiding peers through complex workflows.
We have a separate leadership section dedicated to leadership in our rubric:
For example, our senior support specialist Phoebe Killick takes on a leadership role through her management of “Hop in the Support Queue,” a program designed to give everyone the chance to spend time in the queue and learn what providing customer empathy really takes.
A focus on impact, not just tasks
Rubrics should emphasize outcomes over activity. Instead of counting how many shadowing sessions a senior rep hosts, for example, evaluate the impact of those sessions on team performance or knowledge-sharing.
One of our senior support leaders has an individual OKR to revamp and update support’s onboarding program, which has a significant impact on setting up our new hires for success. I work with each leader to come up with a way to score OKRs by individual projects so we can track success towards projects week by week. See the third tab in our rubric for guidance on how to set this up!
Ongoing partnership with your team
Involve your senior reps in designing (and iterating on!) the rubric from day one. They understand the role’s demands better than anyone and can offer valuable insights. This way, the rubric is realistic and creates a sense of ownership.
I meet with two of our senior support reps and discuss their rubrics with them weekly, asking them questions like: what is working, what needs improvement, are there gaps that can be filled? How should we score individual project OKRs and should we measure them weekly, monthly, quarterly? These open conversations help us make the rubric the best it can be.
Adapting, testing, and refining
No rubric is perfect from the start. Once implemented, gather feedback from your team and refine. Are their contributions being accurately measured? Does the rubric feel fair and relevant? Make ongoing adjustments with their input.
Try our rubric on your team
The future of support is about much more than resolving tickets — it’s about empowering individual support leaders in their careers, promoting cross-functional collaboration and career development that tracks with each individual’s needs.
If you’re ready to implement the framework on your team for your senior agents, we’ve got you covered with a sample of our rubric:
worksheet: Talent development rubric for senior support leaders
Naomi O’Neal Nunnally, customer support manager at Front, shares her tried-and-true rubric to drive senior support talent development.
Looking for other ways to take your team’s support to the next level? More resources here:
A guide to building your very own “Hop in the Support Queue” program by senior support leader Phoebe Killick
Thoughts from Kenji in his newsletter, Top-Tier Support, on paving a path for support agents to feel fulfilled in their roles
Take your customer support to the next level by trying Front.
Written by Naomi O’Neal Nunnally
Originally Published: 17 December 2024