Who, What, & How to Hire for Your Customer Support Team

How to Scale Customer Support

How did our hopes for development come to fruition so quickly, only to dissolve into four months of customer service chaos?

It’s uncanny how quickly things deteriorate when they are damaged, isn’t it? Looking back, it is especially eerie to consider that this could have been prevented. We had to figure out how to enlarge our system before it became overloaded, not afterwards.

We could have efficiently overseen the process of gaining new customers and revising the platform if we had been aware of the rules and structure that our support team followed, and had anticipated the whole thing. But, we didn’t, and we got crushed.

If you are in the beginning or middle stages of your development, it is the perfect time for you to learn about developing and enlarging your support services so you will not encounter these issues. You should be sure that your model and comprehension remain solid so that when your sales and marketing teams are starting to make progress in the development of your business, or if you need to revamp your entire platform, you are equipped and ready to go. This will help you minimize customer loss, unhappy buyers, and complications with scaling up.

Who to Hire for Customer Support?

Business proprietors normally ponder, “Which people should I employ to construct my client service group?” Customer service representatives can frequently be formed of persons of dissimilar backgrounds, each playing a crucial role in offering distinct techniques to the collective. Although they may specialize in different areas, there are some typical traits that many customer service staff members have in common.

Problem-Solving

If you are employed in a customer service role, then your task is to provide solutions for customers’ issues. The job requires employees to be ready to quickly take on new tasks without warning. You cannot skimp on dealing with the issue or hand it off to someone else. You need to come up with a resolution regardless.

Successful support reps are excellent problem-solvers. Even though they may not be able to pinpoint a response straight away, they possess the skill of investigating the problem and coming up with a solution eventually. As a customer service representative, you may not be immediately familiar with the solution to the customer’s issue, but you must be capable of employing the available resources to determine the answer.

Adaptability

Customer service requires quick responses, so the most effective representatives must be able to easily change to address any difficulty that arises. An adjustable customer service representative recognizes that even though two people may be having the same issue, their individual circumstances cannot be completely identical. Each customer has particular requirements that must be taken into consideration by your representatives. Those who are capable of changing rapidly can identify these requirements and alter their problem-solving techniques to match the customer’s needs.

Tenacity

Customer support can be frustrating. Your work is to search for sometimes non-existent solutions, as well as to satisfy a customer whose patience is running thin for a resolution. Customer service representatives must be persistent and resolute in order to overcome any obstacles. If they are quickly discouraged by not succeeding, they will struggle to come up with imaginative solutions for customers who need quick outcomes.

You now have an idea of what qualities to search for in your customer support team, so you must be aware of what tasks each individual will carry out. Let us examine the subsequent part to go over the three major customer service roles that should be employed by your crew.

What to Hire for a Customer Support Team?

1. Customer Support Rep

The main responsibility of a customer support team is the customer support representative. These employees are the first people that customers come into contact with, answering phones and communicating with clientele. They are responsible for highlighting and informing management and product development teams about any major issues.

2. Customer Support Manager

The customer support manager is responsible for supervising the whole or a portion of the customer support staff. These employees are responsible for making sure the support team is satisfying customer needs and helping the company reach its present and future objectives. They accomplish this goal by organizing personnel’s working hours, dealing with problems that need immediate attention, and stimulating representatives to reach their daily objectives. This role involves a lot of involvement in hiring new support representatives whose qualities will match the team in the best way possible.

3. Customer Support Specialist

Someone on the customer service team who has detailed knowledge about a certain aspect of a product or company is referred to as a customer support specialist. When frontline representatives are not able to fix customer dilemmas, specialists are summoned to rectify the problem. The workers can serve as an effective benchmark for customer service representatives either brand new to the job or facing a very challenging customer obstacle.

Among these three functions, your assistance crew should be able to address most of your customer’s inquiries. Nevertheless, if you lack a sufficient number of representatives, it will be difficult for you to meet customer needs. In the following part, we will go over how to best select personnel for your support staff and how to make sure that you get the optimal amount of representatives.

How Should You Hire for Your Customer Support Team?

Calculate your incident rate
Calculate your customer count
Calculate your total monthly tickets
Calculate the average number of tickets a customer support rep can handle (Tickets/Rep/Month)
Divide the number of total monthly tickets by the average number of tickets a customer support rep can handle

1. Incident Rate = Total Monthly Tickets/Customer Count

The incident rate is a straightforward ratio which can be used to calculate how many tickets the sales team is likely to receive each month if they add 50 new customers.

If you have customer segments with wide variations in behavior:

For instance, when you have a free service with a very low demand for support, you will need two incidents per month per customer for the freemium item compared to 1.00 for another product.

2. Customer Count

You may also want to consider:

What is your net customer count growth rate (i.e. adds minus churns)?
How predictable/steady is that growth (i.e how good is your sales and retention forecasting?)

Watch out for making your initial model too complicated without need. It is a good idea for you and your business to start considering ways to increase dependability with regards to this model.

3. Total Monthly Tickets

I wish that you have a main system installed which is taking control of your customer service requests! However, even corporations that are equipped with resources often have leftover assignments that need assistance.

4. Tickets/Rep/Month = The Number of Tickets the Average Support Rep Can Handle

This is a bar that is achievable by anyone who is employed. So how do you determine this number? Take a look at historical reporting, and be conservative.

As time progresses and your group becomes more developed, you will desire to refine your model in relation to output and contraction. It is unlikely that a perfect representation of an “average rep” exists, and it would be unreasonable to believe that any new employee would become the very best after only three months of training. Plan accordingly.

Once you have recruited the right personnel for your customer support team, it is essential to develop a plan that states the aims and objectives of the team and how they can track their progress.

Tips On How To Manage Your Customer Support Team

It is said by Sam Walton that the only superior is oneself. The client is quite literally in the driver’s seat, being able to terminate any staff from the head of the business to the lowest ranking. Nevertheless, first-class customer service is only the beginning – integrating analytics and other techniques for tracking the results render it possible to measure the success of the incredible customer service team’s hard work.

Some of the things that annoy customers so much that they switch to another company, include:

Unhelpful or rude staff. 68% of customers believe the key to great customer service is a polite customer service representative. – AE
Being passed around to multiple agents. 72% of consumers see having to explain their problem to multiple people as poor customer service. – Dimensional Research
Being kept on hold for too long. Consumers will wait on hold for an average of 11 minutes before hanging up. – Channels
Feeling unappreciated. 48% of consumers expect specialized treatment for being a good customer. – Accenture
Ignoring customers’ feedback. 52% of people around the globe believe that companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers. – Microsoft
Not being present on the channels your customers are. 68% of consumers say it increases their perception of a brand when companies send them proactive customer service notifications. – Microsoft

Empower Your Employees

Giving your staff the authority to make decisions and direct their own work is a great way to enhance the level of service. Handing authority to employees to allow them to take some decisions without needing to request permission. By doing this, they can act quickly to address customer concerns instead of making the customer wait around. By giving decision-making capabilities to frontline personnel, you can remove the barrier of having to ask a manager or higher up for permission. Providing employees with the data and resources they need to tackle customer problems is essential for enabling them. It is vital to make certain that limitations are accurately specified. This might mean that a worker has the authorization and is resourceful enough to resolve a customer inquiry up to a predetermined monetary figure.

Supervisors must be taught the degree of authority to grant their staff and where to do so, then they can teach their staff how to attain mutually beneficial decisions that are satisfactory both to the customer and the organisation. Employees who possess the power to handle customer issues swiftly and effectively will satisfy or surpass customer requirements by providing fast and efficient service. Those who are content with the assistance they are given may form a lasting connection and may even suggest others to come.

Make Doing Business Easy

Simplify the process for customers to interact with you. If conducting business with you is too complicated or difficult for customers, they will take their business somewhere else. That could involve simplifying the navigation of your website, providing a shipping option, or allowing for multiple payment options. Make the processes customers use easy and clear. Clients who think that they spend an excessive amount of energy waiting in queues, being moved from one employee to another, lingering for answers, or looking for data on websites and documents to determine what they need to do to return a product will surely become annoyed and possibly take their economic activity and endorsements somewhere else.

Provide Employees with Feedback and Training

Train staff as required and give useful criticism in an encouraging way consistently to personnel. Offer comments that are thoughtful, whether it is for praising a job well done, or for offering constructive criticism for an improvement opportunity. Providing employees with specialized training may be necessary when you notice they don’t possess the required abilities in a particular area and their lack of knowledge is having a detrimental effect on service delivery. Onboarding training is not only useful when new employees join, but when any changes to systems or processes occur, they should also receive training to ensure they are providing the highest quality service to customers. The success of an organization is dependent on efficient communication between managers and personnel to guarantee that all staff comprehend what their role entails, the company’s laws, and how to confer with customers in accordance to company requirements.

Implement an Effective Rewards system

Reward your team for providing excellent service. An employee bonus program which rewards customer service can lead to increased motivation and job contentment, yet there are some weaknesses that should be avoided. Putting money as the primary source of motivation will not guarantee the desired outcome. At the outset, it can seem beneficial, but it usually fosters an atmosphere of rivalry between team members and makes them compete against each other. Creating a compensation approach that matches up with distinct objectives is the most effective solution when it comes to offering financial rewards. Many companies call this compensation based on performance results. Monetary incentives are offered to individuals who meet the goals set for them. In contrast, financial incentives that create rivalry have diverse implications. If you give a reward to the individual who has the highest amount of sales, then only a single person in the group will come out as a victor. This arrangement causes the team to be at odds with one another, which impacts team cooperation negatively. Rather than giving rewards to all your employees, you might set a bar that needs to be reached in order for an employee to receive a reward. If this approach is taken, it is likely that multiple employees will reach this threshold. The threshold must be achievable; if it is too challenging that no one can achieve it, this will impact worker inspiration in a negative way.