Studying the human behavior of successful people, Malcolm Gladwell proposes in his book, Outliers, that 10,000 hours of practicing your craft is the magic number for achieving great success. Gladwell adds that his case studies are not singularly dependent on the 10,000 hours alone. The quality of learning, and the unique and extraordinary opportunities seized, coupled with the 10,000 hours are what his book claims made the Beatles the music legends that they are, and the same reason that Bill Gates and Bill Joy are considered fathers of today’s technological world. Even if we don’t buy into the notion that exactly 10,000 hours = success, what we can digest from this idea of practicing something in monstrous quantity is that ultimately: success takes time, intentional focus, and a willingness to respond to opportunities in extraordinarily high quantity to become a true expert at something. In HCSS Support, we have a milestone for support technicians that have answered and helped 10,000 support calls from our customers.
Kevin Thomas is one of the few Support Technicians to have reached that 10,000 marker. He began supporting HCSS customers in 2014, and he reached that goal back in February of this year. This milestone is highly respected in the support department for several reasons: 1) It means that he has a relationship with many HCSS customers that trust him to give quick and sound advice, 2) No support tech gets to this number alone, so his ability to collaborate well with others and willingness to take full advantage to answer every phone call, chat, e-mail and face-to-face interaction that has crossed his path proves his dedication, 3) Every case he has logged has presented Kevin with the opportunity to verify that there is a documented article of the case resolution in our support library that is shared with our customers.
Kevin’s contribution to the support library is actually part of the reason that he was awarded the Support Belt Champion. As a department, we give this award for exceptional acts of service to our customers. His contribution, on top of his regular duties, has been the creation of helpful articles on the subject of our new Employee App. To add to this, Kevin maintains long days in the office to help other support techs when they are in need. He will even go as far as making himself accessible to others when it is outside his office hours. While we do not normally make a practice of showing favoritism of the Dallas Mavericks over our hometown Houston Rockets, we will make the exception for Kevin, who is a die hard Mavericks fan. His consistent exceptionalism, concerted effort to continually create helpful content for HCSS customers, and his steady accumulation over that 10,000 mark has earned him the titles of Support Belt Champion, HCSS Support Expert, and the respectful moniker from his peers as the Dirk Nowitzki of HCSS Support.
If you have any stories of how our support has gone above and beyond for you, we would love to hear it and share it. Please feel free to e-mail: daniel@hcss.com.
