How to Scale Customer Service While Maintaining Executive Visibility
The growth of an online business can be bittersweet: Seeing a vision come to fruition is invigorating, but scaling to meet current demands can be difficult. Depending on the stage of the business, here’s what this could look like for customer service:
⏹ Founder transitioning service to an employee or VA
⏹ Single agent transitioning service to a team
⏹ Team transitioning service to a BPO partner
These transitions can be scary. What if they don’t treat our customers as well? What if I lose sight of who our customer is? What if I’m not able to see what our company’s problems are?
Here’s how you can maintain visibility into customer service as you scale.
Develop Reporting
Founder to Single Agent
Chances are up until this point, you’ve been pretty scrappy, interacting with customers over gmail and using templates from a Google Doc. The best investment you can make at this point is in a ticketing system like Zendesk, Gorgias, or Freshdesk. These products don’t have to be big investments - they can be purchased on a month-to-month basis and are priced by user or inquiry count.
Using these platforms, you can create shared visibility and start collecting data on service performance and inquiry content. By creating predefined reason codes, and having your agent tag each ticket with the impacted product and reason for contact, you will have a high-level view, with the ability to access specifics, or respond yourself at any time.
Single Agent to Team
As the sole service agent preparing to hire additional hands, you may be sharing a user license with temporary or part-time help, not necessarily sticking to defined processes because it’s just you, and reviewing only some metrics on an occasional basis. Your best move is to clean up your data.
When multiple agents are responding to tickets, individual licenses are a must so customers are interacting with the same agent, and agent performance can be measured. Decide which metrics are important for your team’s success and create dashboards or reporting to review on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Make sure your data is measuring what you think it’s measuring. This may require a call with an account rep. Mistakes are made when we assume data is reflecting one thing, and it’s really reflecting another.
Team to BPO Partner
At this stage, you probably already have your systems, processes and reporting in place. As you begin to outsource a portion of your service to one or multiple BPOs, you’ll want to easily slice that data in such a way that you can look at each component’s performance as well as the service experience as a whole.
Because you’re adding another degree of separation between you and the customer, initial and ongoing training is critical to ensure agent-collected data is correct so you can base decisions off it.
Leverage Agent Feedback
Founder to Single Agent
One of the benefits of having a small team is that each contributor is at arm’s reach. With this luxury, you can meet personally each week with your dedicated support agent and discuss the trends they’re currently seeing, and their recommendations for improvement.
Supplement your weekly meetings with a dedicated channel where your agent can reach you at a moment’s notice. Some service issues can’t wait a week.
Single Agent to Team
Leave space in your weekly meeting for team members to express concerns. Have a set of questions you can use as a prompt. Consider giving team members the prompt beforehand so they have opportunity to consider.
“What issues are you seeing this week?”
“What in the customer journey could use some improvement?”
“What is broken that you keep stepping over?”
“What new questions came in this week?”
“What issues are you seeing the most?”
“What issues come up that you have no solution for?”
Team to BPO Partner
BPOs work best when they act as an extension of your team. Establish direct communication channels between you, your internal team, and your BPO agents. This could be a regularly scheduled call, a Slack channel, or both. Encourage and be responsive to feedback as it comes in. It may take a while for your partner to understand what feedback is new vs what’s already known, so be patient.
Use Google Forms to regularly collect agent feedback. This could be an end-of-day or end-of-week report with prompts similar to above, an issue tracker, or a suggestion box.
If you have the opportunity, meet with your BPO agents in-person. This will further your relationship with your agents, establishing greater trust, and increasing the chances your agents will raise their concerns.
As a final note, it’s important that you still pair agent feedback with numerical data so you can accurately measure volume. A service agent may feel they see a problem “all the time,” when the reality is they just happened to solve all three tickets with that issue this week. Similarly, an agent may feel something only occurred once, when really every agent had this experience.
Respond to 3 Tickets Yourself Each Week
Whether you’re transitioning your service from founder to agent, agent to team, or team to BPO partner, responding to tickers is a great method for keeping your finger on the pulse.
Here are just some of the learnings I’ve gained from doing this:
Your policies can seem fair on paper, but can quickly lose their luster when you’re enforcing it with real-life customers.
One small process inefficiency becomes a big process inefficiency when you’re having to repeat it x times per day, where x is your daily productivity target.
One small process inefficiency becomes a big process inefficiency when you’re having to repeat it x times per day, where x is your daily productivity target.
Want content like this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for The CX Coach Newsletter, where each week I’ll share how you can scale top-notch service efficiently!
