How To Scale Customer Support Through Effective Processes
in Insights - Last updated January 31st, 2023
The question of how to scale customer support rests on the lips of many ambitious organisations and service leaders.
In the early days, when the number of showrooms, or volume of customers is limited, it’s easy to provide highly effective, personalised support.
However, as business starts booming, it places greater pressure on the resources you have at your disposal.
“You have more requests coming in and you need to address them quicker to keep your customers happy.”
Super Office
With customer experience being a key competitive differentiator, it’s vitally important you maintain the high levels of service that led you to expand in the first place.
So how to tackle these, albeit nice to have, problems? As an organisation, how can you scale customer support?
Get Organised & Aligned
Without organisation, and company wide alignment on customer support best practices, you place yourself at significant risk.
An ad hoc approach will no longer cut it.
When customers begin to stack up and multiple members of staff are handling their service queries, you need an effective process.
The first step in doing so is to identify and document your ideal support workflow.
This then becomes your “cheat sheet”.
A go to record of best practice; ensuring that no matter who customers engage with, or where they do so, the experience retains the same level of quality.
Take your learnings from the early days and evaluate what was most effective and efficient for both yourself and the customer and double down on it.
Occupy Customer Spaces
Secondly, to avoid spreading yourself too thin, define which support channels will best serve your customers.
If requests always come through via phone or email, there is little point investing significant time and effort in maintaining a Facebook support functionality.
Focus on the spaces your customers occupy so as to answer any support queries more quickly.
Establish A Single Source Of Truth
Nothing facilitates alignment like a single source of truth.
“A single source of truth allows a company’s data, for a particular purpose, to all be found via a single reference point.”
Mulesoft
As well as saving time in searching for up to date records and accurate information; a single source of truth allows senior leaders to gain more insight into the performance of the support function.
And without being able to perform a quick health check, it becomes impossible to understand how effectively you’re answering your service queries.
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Analyse and Review
Inherently linked to your single source of truth, to scale customer support you must analyse and review all the available data you have at your fingertips.
Assign and track key KPIs such as ticket volume and time to resolution to better understand where the service function is excelling, or where it needs improving.
“90% of customers rate an “immediate” response to a customer service question as “important” or “very important”.
60% of customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less.”
Hubspot
Likewise, don’t be afraid to tweak your process as more data is collected.
You should certainly root your initial best practice approach in what worked early on. But as time passes, you may discover it is no longer the best way for you to operate.
Only through analysing and reviewing key customer service data can you refine your process to best serve new and existing customers alike.
Automate Activity
As queries mount up, and resources become stretched, pressure can begin to build.
One sure fire tactic to retain a personal touch, and scale customer support, is through the power of automation.
“Automation is proven to boost productivity by 14.5% and can lead to a 14% reduction in sales administration time.”
ADOHM
Automation can work to alleviate constraints on customer service in a number of ways.
Namely, in providing automatic responses to common queries or in sharing useful install or setup guides to recent purchasers.
Adding feedback surveys into your workflows also helps to create a personal connection without cutting into the amount of time your staff have to handle more complex queries.
In using the right technology, you can remove significant pressure from your teams.
All it requires is an automation software to take responsibility for manual, repetitive support tasks.
Empower Your Team
Last of all, nothing helps to scale customer support like empowering your team to perform.
In the simple act of supplying outstanding product knowledge, you can ensure all service issues are handled in the most effective and efficient manner.
“It’s a mark of respect on the part of management to empower trusted agents to exercise their best judgement.”
Aircall
Providing support teams with individual dashboards allows them an element of agency in their actions.
They can prioritise their time to best serve clients and provide the faster possible response times.
Without the right tools or knowledge, your support function is, in essence, left to do their job with one hand tied behind their back.
Empower them to succeed, and everything else will simply slot into place.
Updated 31/1/2023
Interested to explore how Anthill can help you scale customer support? Schedule a demo today.
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- January 31st, 2023