Customer expectations are evolving and expanding. Today’s customers want more than reliable, friendly services from customer support. They expect a personalized service experience as well as convenient access to support when and where they need it. While it sounds straightforward, it’s not as easy as you might think. In this guide, we review 10 ways to effectively scale customer support and improve the customer experience.
1. Defining excellent customer support
Start your scaling initiative by defining the components and goals of good customer support. This will be your foundation. Then you can build upon it, shaping your strategy and selecting the tools and methods that will best help you accomplish your goals.
- Speed/Responsiveness: With modern technology, we’re used to having nearly everything at our fingertips, when and where we want it. So, it’s not surprising that customers expect support to be speedy and responsive. Most customer support managers indicate that of all the KPIs (key performance indicators) they use to measure how their team is doing, response time is usually at the top of the list. We’ll touch on this in more detail later in this guide.
- Personalized service: Customers want to be known by the brands they choose and find comfort in personalized interactions. It makes them feel connected and that their experience as an individual matter. Simple things like referring to a customer by name and having an exchange that’s genuine and feels natural versus a scripted, contrived, impersonal dialogue make a difference.
- Quality engagement with customers: Look for ways to actively listen, provide contextualized engagement, and build an emotional bond with your customers.
- Giving the customer self-service options: Gartner predicts that 85% of customer service interactions will start with self-service by 2022 and the use of virtual personal assistants will result in a billion service tickets being raised automatically by customer-owned bots in 2030. Plan for growth and flexibility in customer support delivery by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled automated customer support systems into your scaling strategy.
2. Centralize all requests into a single access point
Data-driven decisions aren’t easily made if your data is scattered among various systems and databases. Using a single platform makes sense instead of trying to aggregate data from multiple sources, which can expand and change over time anyway. Many cloud-based SaaS (service as a software) vendors specialize in customer service and support applications that address support across multiple channels. They can help save time, lower costs, and enhance productivity by using AI, automation, and workflows to connect the customer to the right agent.
Moreover, viewing all support requests and interactions in one place on a customer data platform provides invaluable insights that may not be readily available otherwise. It makes it easier to identify common customer questions, concerns, and problems, enabling you to take a proactive versus a reactive approach to customer problems.
3. Develop processes for your current customer support team
Adopting a systematic approach to everything from procedure documentation to customer service skills and product training helps ensure your agents are fully equipped to provide consistently superior customer support.
- Create written and video documentation. Use documentation to help your customer support staff learn the details of your product or service, deliver a personalized customer support experience, handle angry customers, turn a negative experience into a positive one, and more.
- Have procedures for common questions. Identify the top questions customers ask when they contact customer support, then create strategies for handling and resolving each of them. Let’s say you sell software products, and one has a glitch that’s easily identifiable when customers contact a support agent. Documented customer support procedures may include a set of questions to ask to identify the problem. Once identified, agents can send the customer a link with a fix.
- Develop procedures for escalation to managers. Sometimes agents don’t know how to resolve a unique problem and need assistance, or perhaps they can’t authorize a customer account credit over a certain amount. And there are times when an angry customer will demand to speak to a manager regardless of what the support agent does. Define issues that can be escalated and which problems the support agent is expected (and trained) to handle.
4. Hire more customer service reps with experience
Hiring seasoned customer support representatives with a proven track record may result in better overall support experiences for your customers. When reviewing customer support job candidates, consider:
- Years of experience. Generally, customer support agents who have established themselves in the field have demonstrated the ability to effectively handle customer questions and complaints professionally, efficiently, and effectively. Consider aiming to hire candidates with five-plus years of experience.
- Roles and responsibilities. There are different degrees of complexity among products and services. Just having experience alone may not be enough. Look for candidates with the right background, aptitude, expertise, and knowledge base to adequately interface with your customers and their sophistication level.
- Experience with CRM (customer relationship management) platforms. The skills to look for in a customer support agent include familiarity with CRM software to access and log information into customer profile records. Inputting erroneous data may be worse than having no data at all.
5. Develop faster and more efficient onboarding for team members
There will be some churn in your customer support workforce regardless of the measures you take to limit turnover. Being understaffed can hinder your ability to provide excellent customer support. Get a clear picture of the processes required for onboarding new agents and look for ways to make it faster and more efficient.
- Create internal documentation. Chances are you have developed documentation for training and as reference material for existing agents. You may be able to modify some of it to make it appropriate for new hires. Tap into other departments to help you create this material, such as human resources, product marketing, technical support, and even your CRM system vendor.
- Video training. The beauty of training videos is that they can be watched anytime, anywhere, and by multiple people at one time. Investing in an orientation video for new agents makes sense, and more specific videos cover support methods and product/service training.
- Standard process and procedures. How to update your CRM system, when to escalate to a supervisor, when and how to get an SME or an engineer involved, how to open a trouble ticket—all of this and more should be documented for existing and new customer support agents.
6. Find scalable efficiencies
Automation helps you scale while containing costs. Look for ways to automate certain functions within automation platforms, such as triggering emails that answer specific customer needs or providing important information such as the availability of a software app upgrade that fixes a technical problem. Consider using chatbots that support an omnichannel approach to customer support, handle common questions, and provide basic customer support services 24/7/365. Be sure to delve into chatbot capabilities. For example, AI chatbot software can simulate user conversation using machine language (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to deliver near-human conversation.
7. Develop a self-service resource center
More customers prefer a proactive DIY approach to customer care. Develop your self-service resource center by identifying all the documentation a customer needs to perform their support and then promote self-service options to your customers. Use data from your current customer support methods to determine the most vital information to include. Consider providing this content via multiple mediums such as:
- Articles: Written documentation can include content created in-house as well as articles written by external subject matter experts or provided in a public customer forum. For example, if your company recalls a product, proactively providing information via an article that answers questions and provides detailed information on the recall may reduce outreach to live customer support.
- Videos: How-to and troubleshooting videos are often preferred over written documentation. For example, let’s say your product requires assembly yet despite step-by-step written instructions, your customer support agents regularly receive inquiries about assembly. Creating a captioned video that walks customers through assembly could efficiently and effectively answer their questions without needing to involve a customer support agent.
- Audio versions of articles: Audio articles are helpful tools for building audience loyalty and are essential for visually impaired customers. Suppose you have an online marketplace that sells living aids. Transcribing written text into audio will enable visually impaired customers to learn more about how products work and their features without requiring live customer support.
8. Focus and prioritize on high-value customers
You may prioritize customers who have a higher potential for an upsell or who have a long history of buying new products or services from you. This doesn’t mean you’ll be ignoring other customers; it can mean simply offering a different level of service to higher-profile customers, such as the ability to transfer to a live agent from a chatbot seamlessly. Customer segmentation can be based on demographics, but you’ll need to use your CRM data as well, which will delve into details on a customer-by-customer basis. For instance, knowing a customer has been loyal to your brand for 20 years and has made multiple purchases from your company over that timeframe is likely to be more valuable than their zip code.
9. Consistently review KPIs and customer feedback
If you don’t set KPIs and establish ways to measure and analyze them, how can you identify success or identify areas that need improvement? Selecting the proper KPIs for customer support helps businesses and managers determine whether their support team is performing as planned. It’s also an effective method to motivate employees with incentives and rewards when goals are met or exceeded.
Customer support KPIs vary from company to company, but some are almost universally measured.
- Response time. Customer support studies indicate that one of the most important attributes of a good customer experience is a fast response time. Stephen Panico, Chief Revenue Officer at Buzzstream, says, “For individual agents, we like to focus on lead metrics (metrics that they have direct control over). In our case, we’ve found that the time to first response and time to full resolution correlates most strongly with customer happiness and retention.”
- Customer satisfaction. CSat scores are a great indicator of customer loyalty and brand advocacy, both of which affect your sales. Measuring customer satisfaction enables companies to identify dissatisfaction and implement improvement initiatives before customers abandon their brand.
- How long it take to solve a problem. Getting back to Stephen Panico’s quote above, in addition to response time, time to resolution is tied to customer satisfaction and retention. If a customer receives a quick response from customer support, but it takes multiple attempts and a long time to obtain a resolution, it’s tempting to replace that product or service with another brand.
- How many touchpoints did the customer need? This is linked to time to resolution. Let’s say you start your customer support experience with a chatbot, but there’s no resolution, so you try a live chat. If the systems aren’t tied together, the chat agent will ask for the information all over again. Still, if live chat doesn’t resolve the issue, you may demand to speak with an agent over the phone. After a lengthy saga, you’re not likely to feel positive about your customer support experience, even if the issue was eventually resolved to your satisfaction.
Identifying and tracking essential KPIs can highlight where improvement is needed, what’s going right, and how you can best scale customer support to meet your customers’ needs. For example, suppose most of your customer support requests mainly originate online, and your phone-based customer support KPIs are similar to those for online support. In that case, you may decide to primarily rely on AI and chatbots for the majority of customer inquiries. Or, let’s say you determine customer satisfaction is lower when you use a chatbot but perfectly fine when your customers use a self-service approach. In this case, a scaling strategy would include a greater focus on self-service support.
10. Empower your support team
Empowering your support agents to do what needs to be done creates satisfied, happy customers and agents, too. Or course, there will always be general guidelines to follow, but give your team the room to make their own decisions while staying within these guidelines. Listen to your agents and seek their input. Keep dialogues open and exchange ideas and suggestions. Encourage independent thought whenever possible. Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities. All this and more builds trust, teamwork, and confidence.
While all of this sounds great, sometimes empowerment doesn’t necessarily boost performance. It may end up increasing job level stress. Careful experimentation with empowerment can help you avoid this.
Examples of businesses that have successfully used empowerment to elevate the customer experience include Zappos, Trader Joe’s, and Ritz-Carlton. Zappos, for instance, encourages customer-facing employees and customer support to do things like offer free exchanges, and their customer support team is happy to help 24/7. Trader Joe’s enables their employees to open a package so a customer can try an item before purchasing it and accept returns of opened or used items. Ritz-Carlton empowers its employees by giving them the latitude to spend up to $2,000 to solve a customer service issue without obtaining permission from a supervisor.
Next steps
Scaling customer support can be challenging, with many options and components to evaluate, implement, and monitor. Part of the path to success is engaging seasoned customer support specialists who can provide your customer with the support experience they expect.
If you don’t have the available staff or staff with the appropriate expertise to scale customer support, Upwork is here to help. Browse through the largest pool of proven independent talent that will enable you to engage customer support professionals with confidence and ease.
