10 errors to avoid when building a customer operations organization

Want to disappoint your customers? If your operations aren’t built to deliver, you will do. Are your customers expecting video verification, instant customer service or next-day delivery? To fulfil your promises, your customer operations team needs to build a factory that ships happiness all day long, not disappointment. You need three well-oiled geer wheels for this: your global front-end and your back-end operations teams, which together form your Customer Happiness Factory, and enabler teams for the factory (see blueprint below).

Here are the 10 most common errors and how to avoid them when designing your growth company’s customer operations organization.

1. You do not specialize your front-end teams enough. Front-end teams deal with customers directly. Growth companies often have them specialize only when it is too late. You need to have experts based on markets or languages, which means assembling teams with dedicated team leads for individual countries or languages. This makes performance management far easier. For example, if you have multiple teams for the French market, you can compare their performance, set goals for your team leads, and ensure the latest market-specific information is shared rapidly. Within your market teams, you also need dedicated specialists for customer journey groups. Say a UK customer has an onboarding issue: they would be served by a different specialist to a UK customer who has a payment problem or wants to leave your company. When your teams work on the same type of customer journeys over and over again, this can lead to 3–5% more customer satisfaction and first contact resolution.
2. You do not build enough escalation structures for your front-end teams. Your growth company is bound to receive ‘edge cases’. Example: a customer with an Indian passport living in the UK is travelling in the US and loses her phone. In a rapidly growing company, cases like this will fall outside your standard processes. Not having enough escalation teams for these cases can lead to some painful public complaints. Here, a “traditional” second-level complaints and VIP team may not be enough, which is why it is essential to set up additional escalation units. Also known as a ‘SWAT team’, these colleagues take care of edge cases from end to end — for as long as it takes, and whom customers can contact directly, e.g. through dedicated email addresses.
3. You don’t have an external partner network in place. As a growth company, you will probably need external contact centers to pick up the slack. Trying to serve customers in house for too long will have you swimming behind the wave. A “hybrid model” usually works well to scale up (and down) quickly. Under this structure, your in-house centre acts as a quality benchmark to measure your external partners’ performance, while your external partners provide cost-efficiency and flexibility. Nearshoring in Europe to countries such as Greece, Portugal or Georgia often provides a good balance between lower labor costs and a well educated workforce. One partner will make you too dependent, while five partners can be too complex to manage. For a 1000-person operation, three partners are a good benchmark. The success of a hybrid model depends on having a separate, strong vendor management team to oversee your external partners on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Check out the essentials for effective partner management here.
4. Your workforce management is not up to speed. For your global front-end to really sing, you’ll need a strong workforce management (WFM) team. Ignoring WFM leads to high costs and a customer service that takes too long to react. WFM is responsible for ensuring front-end colleagues are on hand in the right language for the right case every minute during opening hours. WFM turns your growth forecast into a three-month customer contact projection, supports with scheduling & shift planning and performs intra-day resource management to allocate your service specialist between channels. Your marketing or growth team needs to provide your WFM team with a weekly update of the forecasted contact volume for the next six weeks — and marketing should be billed if the forecast ends up not being accurate. Having integrated WFM tools in place, such as Verint, NICE, Aspect, and Teleopti, is also essential. Check out the expert tips of DougCasterton on taking WFM to a world-class level.
5. You don’t invest enough in your back-end teams. If you grow your customer base quickly, you run the risk of your back-end teams ballooning or breaking down. However, your back-end powers your customer happiness factory just as much as the front end. Say a customer wants to reclaim money from a disputed transaction a year ago. As you can’t automate everything from the start, you will likely need support from both the front-end and back-end teams to solve this. In a growth company, there are five keys to creating a back-end that does not grow substantially with your customer base: 1. A structure where centers of excellence are dedicated to specific case types (e.g. payment operations, card operations). Ideally, you have front and back-end teams working on the same customer inquiries in the same room to boost productivity. 2. Continuous process optimization and proper documentation for your knowledge base (e.g. with a workflow tool). 3. Weekly reports with a focus on backlog size, time-to-resolution and accuracy. 4. Strong investments in automation in close cooperation with your product and tech teams. Your aim is here to enable customers to serve themselves and eliminate the associated back-end steps. 5. Outsourcing simple tasks that you are unable to rapidly automate to external partners, such as digitization and classification of (paper-based) mail.
6. You don’t take process excellence seriously. Launching new processes and entering new markets will cause your process landscape to grow rapidly — and become disorderly. Ignoring this for too long will create very unhappy customers. For your front-end to keep resolving customer inquiries, you need to invest in process excellence. An operational excellence (OpEx) team can be made responsible for designing and updating process maps that list all key customer-facing processes. For each process, the OpEx team identifies a ‘process owner’ at management level who ensures the process is up to date and documented in a knowledge base. Usually, a ‘process champion’ will help the owner to continuously tweak the process. OpEx should also conduct Lean Six Sigma process improvement sprints on key processes that have the greatest impact on service quality, costs and operational risks. Here, the OpEx team acts as a coach and offers process optimization expertise, while the process owner and champion provide in-depth knowledge. A process flow chart with actions and decisions is one essential outcome from this.
7. You do not invest enough in consistent quality communication with strong coaching, training & content teams. Your front and back end need support to deliver the right message in the right tone of voice to your customers consistently in each market. If you don’t achieve industry standards in coaching, training and content fast enough, your service experience will suffer. This starts with having a quality framework in place that may cover standards in customer verification, confidentiality, resolution orientation, adherence to processes, tone of voice, etc. Every front and back end member should undergo at least one coaching session per month based on their personal quality score, which is calculated according to the quality framework. You need to do this on a weekly basis for poor performers. To deliver on this, each team should have at least one coach whose impact is measured based on how well they have improved the team’s ASAT, productivity and first contact resolution scores. You should also have an effective training team to provide onboarding, microlearning and e-learning courses. These teams should measure their success with a post-training satisfaction survey, test pass rate, and ASAT and first contact resolution scores 30, 60 and 90 days after the training. In other words, the success of your trainers should be measured on how well they train your employees. Donald Kirkpatricks’ “Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels” is still the touchstone here. Finally, you will have to update your customer communication in all target languages each time you launch a new product or enter a new market. Here, a dedicated content team is worth its weight in gold. Their task is to update the customer-facing support center and native app, the internal knowledge database, communication templates and quick texts.
8. You are not ready for frequent market & product launches. Your customer happiness factory has to be ready for frequent product, market and brand campaign launches. Not investing in this will create a storm among your customers during each launch. A strong operational readiness team helps to prevent this. This means having adequate capacity planning so that your front end and back end can take care of additional tickets during a launch, updated customer communication on new products, and new articles in your internal knowledge database. Your operational readiness team has to provide launch readiness check-lists, keep an updated list of internal stakeholders, and put in place an official gate process for readiness approval. Operational readiness is a topic to think about at the discovery & planning stage of the product or campaign, not right at the end. The team responsible for this also needs strong (informal) links to the rest of the company and should be able to monitor and guide launches that don’t follow the usual rules.
9. You have not established delivery teams to drive structural upgrade initiatives. Frequent structural upgrades matter much more to a growth company than an established one to keep its operations on track. These upgrades may include launching a workflow tool, conducting back-end automation sprints or creating a network of external contact centers. Generally speaking, putting this all on the plate of your operations leaders who have to fight the business-as-usual battles and manage crises will not get you the results you need. Separate teams that deliver upgrade initiatives such as an in-house ‘Strategy and Operations Delivery Unit’ is one way to go. These colleagues are like a third pair of hands for top-priority projects, as its members can take care of those tasks that the operations leaders don’t have time for. This includes analytics, concept development and project implementation. If a delivery team isn’t an option, you should have at least 1–2 analytically strong colleagues per department to work on structural upgrade initiatives. They report directly to your front-end operations and back-end operations managers. A lean Program Management Office can also help to keep initiatives on track and coordinate crisis management.
10. You don’t have performance data to close feedback loops. Without consistent, real-time performance data, you can’t spot machines in your factory that are at risk of failing early enough. That’s why you need to have your key metrics on your radar all the time. The most important metrics are: volume (e.g. tickets per customer journey), stability (e.g. incidents), availability (e.g. average speed of answer), quality interactions (e.g. FCR, CSAT, NPS), productivity (e.g. AHT, utilization, cost/contact), back-end performance (e.g. backlogs) and employee happiness (e.g. sickness, attrition). You need to look at most of these per market and per customer journey. Consider setting up an Operational Intelligence (OI) team with 2–3 FTE who collaborate with a company-wide central data team and one business analyst in each operations department. While the central data team takes care of data infrastructure, company-wide data consistency and setting up complex queries, OI focuses solely on data queries relevant to operations, e.g. a real-time performance dashboard for backlogs and service levels, operations reports for the executive team, and ad-hoc analyses.

Your tools landscape matters, too. Here is an overview of the key tools you need for your customer operations.

Avoid these ten errors and you’ll have a good basis on which to build a customer operations organization that fuels your growth story. And always remember: you’re dealing in happiness, not disappointment.