Customer Support is an essential pillar of Customer Success. It’s the yin to Customer Success Management’s yang. They are opposites in their function but together balance out the reactive and proactive assistance that all customers need.
Our clients often ask us about how to scale their Support team. There are many ways to approach this. What avenues you choose can depend on your business type and the stage you are at so be forewarned, there is no one size fits all. However, you can use this list as a guide in your evaluation to consider what strategies and tactics to adopt to help your organization scale.
As with all things, there are best practices of ‘what to do’ and traps to avoid and knowing ‘what not to do’. Here is our guide to each.
What To Do:
Customer Support Software
Implement a customer service software that will centralize your support communications with clients. The benefits of support software are many. You can create various tags, such as, by customers, issue type, product type, call type, and by reps. These tags will enrich your data and exposes the trends that can enable leadership to make decisions that will have a positive impact.
In addition, having support requests going to someone’s email inbox is risky business. It doesn’t give your organization real-time visibility into customer interactions. Help desk software enables team collaboration and improves the customer experience by providing consistency and clarity on previous interactions between an agent and a customer.
You get all of these benefits with support software without having to compromise your personal touch.
Multi-Channel Communication
Provide customers with multiple communication channels to get in touch with you. Email, phone, chat, and social media are effective and popular ways to help your customers. For example, you can manage multiple chat and social conversations at once as opposed to having one phone call at a time. It also allows you to automate responses with helpful information, provide support hours and gives your customers options on what channel is best for them to answer questions through.
Automation
I mentioned automation above. This is a big one to call out specifically and dig into a little more. Automation can help to improve the customer experience and resolve issues more quickly. By implementing a chatbot or an Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution you can provide suggested responses to Support Agents or serve up relevant content to your customers directly. Automation can also help direct support inquiries to the most appropriate person. You can leverage the speed and efficiency of automation while making the most of the personal touch, experience, and knowledge people provide.
For internal operations, automation can facilitate ticket routing, tagging, and real-time reporting freeing up valuable time for problem-solving and other important business matters.
Self Service & Knowledge Base
Work with your Customer Education team to create content that will allow customers to self-serve. Help customers help themselves with tools such as videos, FAQ’s, and contextual guides. Many issues are easy to solve as long as customers are provided with the right information, when and where they need it. Self Service + Automation can help create customer happiness and free up your human resources for more complex issues that are best solved by 1:1 interaction.
Ticket Queue Management
Create a ticket queue management process that will allow your team and company to scale. Determine what ticket management process you will put in place that will allow your team to respond to customers in an effective and appropriate way. Your ticket management process should help increase response time and resolution time. This should be a consistent process across your entire team so customers get responded to in a timely manner and appropriate order.
What not To Do:
Knowing mistakes to avoid and what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do. So we’ve included five bonus tips so we can guide you through some pitfalls to avoid.
Don’t Over Automate
Automation doesn’t mean depersonalization when done right. Consider what the Required Customer Journey is and where it is appropriate to automate. Automation is not a way to avoid talking to customers. It’s a way to provide valuable information to customers in a helpful efficient way. It helps to solve problems and encourage product adoption. Automating the appropriate points of the customer journey allows team members to tackle more complex issues that are best tackled with a human touch.
Don’t Lose Flexibility to Adjust and Adapt if You Are in The Early Stages
If you are in the earlier stages of your business and are still adjusting your go-to-market strategy you need to maintain flexibility so your organization can adapt as needed. Evaluate where you can scale but still swiftly adjust when needed. Scale is still important but be careful not to handcuff your team by too many processes that are difficult and time consuming to change.
Don’t Forget the Feedback Loop
Don’t forget to continue the customer feedback loop from support to the rest of the organization. While you automate and scale your support operations ensure you create (or maintain) a process that shares feedback from customers with the rest of the organization. If the feedback flow stops at the Support Agent it becomes obvious to customers pretty quickly.
Don’t Suffer From Analysis Paralysis
Customer Support software platforms can give you deep insights but beware of getting plagued and slowed down by analysis paralysis. Decide what metrics matter most to your business. There is a very long list of metrics to track and you should align the metrics you look at on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis with your overall strategy and operational goals. Stay focused on the metrics that matter and that allows you to make quick and impactful decisions.
Don’t Over Complicate Things
While support operations can become complex don’t over complicate the process or else the customer will be in for a bumpy journey. Think about streamlining your process, customer experience and leveraging technology where it makes sense to given the stage your company is in. Ask yourself if the process is providing the Three C’s: Clarity, Consistency, Continuity. Ensure customers and Support Agents have clarity on what to expect and the process. Create a consistent customer experience. Provide continuity in communication and with the flow of information to customers, support team members, and leadership.
Questions on how to make your support pillar scale? We have years of experience tackling this issue so reach out and see how we can help.
