Maya's eleven bullets, and what she pasted into her review.

Self-evaluation — Maya R., Customer Support Team Lead, 2026

Key accomplishments

I took over the support team in February when Dan left, and my first job was to keep the service steady through a handover nobody had planned for. The team has grown from six to nine people since then, and every measure we track is better than it was in January.

Customer satisfaction rose from 86% in Q1 to 93% in Q3. The biggest single driver was a change to the queue rules I proposed in March: tickets are now routed by product area and age rather than first-come, first-served, and the median first response time fell from about four hours to 51 minutes. The second driver was the macros library. I wrote the first 60 macros myself, set a format for the rest, and the team now has 140 that everyone uses; new starters are answering tickets unaided within their first week instead of their third.

I hired three people this year, Priya, Tom and Jules, and all three passed probation on schedule. I ran the hiring loop end to end: the job description, the take-home exercise, the scoring sheet and the final interviews.

With the sales team I ran the churn-save pilot from May to September. Support flagged accounts showing early signs of leaving, and sales followed up within 48 hours. Sales attributes about $210,000 of retained annual recurring revenue to the pilot; that is their figure, and the process is now standard.

In August I led the migration from Zendesk to Intercom. We did it over one weekend with no customer-facing downtime and no lost ticket history. I also introduced a fifteen-minute Monday stand-up in April, which the team has asked to keep.

Strengths

Fixing the system rather than the symptom: the queue rules and the macros library were both answers to a pattern, not to a single bad week, and both kept paying back after the work was done.

Hiring and onboarding: three hires, three passed probation, and a repeatable loop that another team lead has since borrowed.

Working across teams: the churn-save pilot only worked because support and sales agreed on a shared definition of an at-risk account and a 48-hour clock. I set that up and kept both sides to it.

Calm delivery under change: a lead leaving, a growing team and a platform migration in the same year, with the numbers moving the right way throughout.

Areas for development

Q2 was the hard part of the year. Two people were off sick for most of May, the backlog reached 900 open tickets, and it took five weeks to bring it back under 200. I kept the team going and I was honest with customers about wait times, but I should have asked for temporary cover in the second week rather than the fourth. Next time I will set a backlog number that triggers that request automatically.

I also say yes to too much. In Q3 I took on three product requests for support input at the same time as the migration, and two of them slipped. I am now keeping one list of commitments, reviewing it with my manager every fortnight, and declining or deferring anything that does not fit.

Goals for next year

1. Keep CSAT at or above 92% for all four quarters while the team grows to twelve, and hold median first response under one hour.

2. Build a second tier of the team: by the end of Q2, two senior support specialists trained to run the queue, the stand-up and the hiring loop without me, so the function does not depend on one person.

3. Turn the churn-save pilot into a measured programme with the sales and customer success teams: a shared dashboard by the end of Q1 and a quarterly retained-revenue figure both teams sign off on.

Given the scope I have carried this year, a team of nine, hiring, a migration and a cross-team programme, I would like to discuss moving to the Senior Team Lead title and the pay band that goes with it.