5 Steps To Scale Your Support Team within Months Without Increasing Costs

Are you in charge of your company’s support infrastructure? Has your company on-boarded more clients that it can handle in terms of support? If so, you may be now in the unenviable position of supporting all the new clients without an equivalent increase in the size of your team. This can be a daunting task especially for software companies that are early in the growth stage.

Most of the attention in your company thus far has been on getting new customers - and understandably so. The viability of the business and product-market fit needs to be proven before stakeholders invest any more into the business. However, it is now time to shift the focus on supporting these new customers before they cancel. After all, churn is the next most important metric after sales that ultimately drives the overall profitability of the company.

In this article, we would like to share a 5-step process to help you scale your support infrastructure using your existing resources and budget.

Over the last couple of years, we have helped several companies scale their support teams and in this report, we would like to share a proven process with you. After conducting over a million conversations over the last couple of years with a 90+ customer satisfaction score, we have learned how to scale within a short period of time without increasing expenses.

Here is the 5-step process:

The First Step is to split your phone and chat team. If you have agents who do both phones and chat it causes a lot of stress and pain for those agents. The most effective way to handle the two channels is to have your internal team focus on phone support and engage with an external team to handle chats. The next question, however, is how do you train an external team to perform at the same level as an internal team? This is what brings us to the next step.

The Second Step is to create a transferable training and quality process. Most of the customers we work with do not have a dedicated quality team. After working with several customers we have seen the importance of setting up a highly effective quality process that analyzes each chat and phone conversation.

We also need to ensure that we cover adequate volume so we have a good sample size of the chats and phones. We typically suggest at least 5% of all conversations to have a statistically significant sample size. Once the quality team completes the analyses, the team leader conducts a one-on-one feedback session with each agent on a weekly basis to discuss what they could have done better to improve the conversations. Doing this weekly ensures that the agent is able to learn quickly from their own mistakes and apply and test the changes often.

The Third Step is HR and Hiring. We follow a 7 - step process to hire agents. For every 3 agents that join us, we interview over a 100 people and put them through 7 steps, or what we like to call the ‘7 Gauntlets’, to make sure that we have the best of the best. It starts right from the culture fit with our own company and with our customers’ company, to make sure that their core values align. We look at their competencies right from how they type on chat, to whether they have an ego that’s bigger than their body because that can spoil the environment pretty quickly. Each of these steps is conducted via structured tests. Once we go through all 7 steps, the ones that finally make it through are better quality, offer better customer experience, and stay with us longer. The entire purpose of the rigor of hiring, training, and quality is to make the process seamless between the internal team and the external team. That is how we ensure that the external team performs as well or better than the internal team.

The Fourth Step is to deflect incoming support conversations before they get to the internal phone team. What we attempt to do is get as many support requests to go through self serve and/or chats first. The goal for the company should be to monitor and train your customers to use self-help and chat support as a way to get their answers quickly. Remember, chat is much easier to manage and scale so the idea is having fewer relevant phone calls coming to your internal team while having most of the basic conversations handled by the chat team.

The advantage of chat is that the customer has a much lower wait time than with a phone. The customer can actually be doing the steps and not be rushed by someone on the phone because the chat agent can provide steps, screenshots, and links right within the conversation. Through chat, we are also able to share other resources and links to additional value-added services that can help the customer get even more value of the software.

The Fifth Step is what we call AI2 (AI - Square). Now we have all have heard of AI but what is AI - Square? Bots are only as smart as you make them. People talk about Artificial Intelligence but there still is no bot that truly self learns how to troubleshoot problems and answer questions its own. Until that day comes, our experts ensure that the bots we use remain smart and can help the agents by taking chats or calls efficiently. We need to update the bots on an ongoing basis - it is not just a one-time set it and forget it process. We set up the system so that the customer is provided with the right information at the right time using a combination of bots and humans. So we use the AI2 approach, where we use bots as a “co-pilot” for our agents to become super agents and a result provide the best experience for the customer.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help your company scale your support infrastructure while saving money, email our co-founders at [email protected] or [email protected]

Thanks!