Scaling customer support- why do you even need to?
Well, that becomes inevitable when your startup finally starts blossoming into a full-fledged business and your customer base grows. This not only leads to an increased demand for your products and services but also the customer queries.
This calls for employ strategies to adapt to all these changes. Here’s how you can do that:
Provide self-service:
As your business grows, you’ll notice an increase in the number of customer queries popping up every now and then. These queries tend to pressurize your existing staff and may affect the quality of your customer service as well. What you can do is cut down on the number of incoming requests by providing self-service to your customers. The best way to do that is putting up a knowledge base with the answers to frequently asked queries so that customers can help themselves and the support agents can focus on more complex queries.
Leverage automation:
Automating various steps in your support request lifecycle is yet another way of scaling customer support. That’s because automating even a single step can speed up the entire process. This further helps in saving time and money in an efficient manner.
Empower your team:
Consider empowering your support team. This will help your support agents do their jobs more effectively. Moreover, it will eradicate any sort of inefficiencies coming from a manager having to approve every request for various issues like refund or credit.
Hire new agents wisely:
It’s no brainer that as your business grows, you’ll need to make your support team bigger provided that you make wise choices. You’ll need to start with figuring out the estimated number of your customers. You’ll further need to consider your scale and the average number of cases your current team can handle. Once done, compare the number to the growth of your customer base and then you may go on hiring the best candidates accordingly.
Be where your customers are:
Scaling customer support is not only about increasing your support staff and self-service but also to make boost the convenience level for your customers. In other words, be ready to help out your customers right there where they need you. Include live chat assistance and other channels to reach out to you directly on your website or in your mobile app so customers can easily access it exactly when they need it.
Now that you know how it’s done, are you ready to rock?