How to Do More with Less with Your Support Team

If you’ve worked in small-mid e-commerce for more than a few years, you know there are some years where you’re ramping up (the top talent, the cool office space, the world-class systems) and other years you’re cutting costs (we pay how much for snack delivery?). 

At some point, you’ll be asked to do more with less on your CX team. If you’re in that stage of business, here are a few directions you can take:

Audit Your Team’s Time

This is a great place to start. Have your customer support team spend a week documenting what they’re working on, down to 15 min increments if able. It may be a little tedious, but it’s incredibly eye-opening. Within those timesheets, you’ll often find tasks that are no longer a priority, or lengthy processes that could be eliminated, or meetings that take up too much of everyone’s day.

Look For System Integrations

If your agents are still starting their day by opening 6+ tabs on their computer screen, that’s a good sign there’s opportunity for more streamlined workflows. Integrating your ecommerce, returns, reviews, and marketing platforms with your customer service platform may only save a few seconds per ticket, but those seconds add up when you consider one agent’s daily ticket count, and then the number of agents on your team.

Set Up Automations

You may be surprised to learn there are a lot of service teams out there still manually following up with customers when they don’t hear back! Follow ups, ticket closures, where’s my order inquiries, partnership requests, surveys, thank-you replies, and more can be automated, often with the communication platform you’re already using! This can reduce your agents’ volume significantly!

Invest in AI

You don’t have to go all-in to see the benefits. In fact, you don’t even have to make it customer-facing. If you’re hesitant about your customers receiving emails from a bot, you can use it to make your agents faster. Two of my favorite use cases for AI in CX right now include Co-Pilots (that range from feeding your human agents information to answer the ticket, to actually drafting a response) and Call Summaries (so your agents don’t have to spend time writing them).

Outsource to a Call Center or VA

If you’re needing to maintain or decrease headcount, the right call center could be a great option for your business. Operational costs (like those associated with a call center) and payroll costs (like those associated with employee salaries) are two separate parts of the company’s budget, so if hiring employees is not an option, hiring a call center could be. Call centers may have resources an in-house team your size doesn’t have (like trainers and QAs) as well as expertise in strategy, best practices and trends from servings a wide span of clients. 

Simplify Your Offerings

Just because other businesses offer 24-hour phone coverage, or live video support, or a 30-minute email response time, doesn’t necessarily mean your business has to. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of businesses want things another business has, and post launch, discover it doesn’t actually work for them, and may not have worked for the business they saw offering it either! Evaluate the experience you’re offering, and whether what you’re offering is being utilized, against the cost of offering it. You may be over-complicating your service ops.

Find Individual Productivity Gains

There are plenty of things that can prevent your team members from being as productive as they could be: a noisy workspace, a slow computer, a Slack channel that never sleeps, too many meetings, and lots more. They may be different for each person. Ask your team what you can do to ensure they’re their happiest and most productive selves!

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