Business Practices | | Published November 12, 2015

Scaling Your Customer Support: 5 Things to Remember

When you're scaling a business, it's difficult to make sure customer support keeps pace. The difficulty stems from the fact that as a business grows and evolves, so do your customer support needs. This means your support team is always changing and evolving. As it does, make sure you don't lose sight of the value a strong customer service team has to your business. Here are five things to remember when scaling your customer support:

1. Outsourcing customer support eliminates valuable feedback
Many businesses reach the scalability dilemma and decide to outsource their customer support to a specialized company. While this produces immediate results, it eliminates a valuable form of feedback from your customers, according to ReadWrite.

"The more contact you have with your customers, the easier it is to see how to better serve them."

The more contact you have with your customers, the easier it is to see how to better serve them. This can mean updating your products or services, or simply providing them with better support. However, if your business chooses to outsource your customer support, it is much more difficult to identify how to improve, because you no longer have a direct connection with customer issues. 

2. Hiring in-house customer support reps is an investment for the future
Although it can seem like a long and difficult road to take, developing an in-house, well-trained customer support team will pay off in the long run. Customer support reps who respect and are enthusiastic about the business they work for will help that business retain more customers and increase revenue by providing wonderful support. When a customer support rep feels a strong connection with the business they're working for, they will go the extra mile to ensure customers are happy, because they are personally invested in their employer's success. In-house reps will also learn and grow with your business, so you don't have to invest in constantly training an outside team.

"Even the best team of reps will fail at providing great service if they don't have the right customer support software."

3. The right customer service tool makes all the difference
Similar to hiring the right people is the need to equip your customer service reps with the right tools for the job. Even the best team of reps will fail at providing great service if the business outgrows the software and they can't properly  manage tickets as demand increases. The best software tool is one that can scale with the team as the workload grows. The solution also needs to work with multiple channels of customer service so that no customer requests or issues fall through the cracks.

4. Collaboration can help your team handle more
Collaboration is often the key to scalability. When your team can work together on tickets, you will improve productivity so they can effectively manage more customer issues. A customer support software solution that supports collaboration can do wonders to improve your team's success rates and allow for greater scalability as time goes on.

5. Self-service can deflect some customer service tickets
Customers don't want to wait for answers. They want to have access to information whenever and wherever they need it. One of the best and easiest ways to support customers is to give them self-service options like FAQs, a searchable knowledgebase they can utilize before submitting a customer support ticket, or a community where they can connect with their peers.

When your company provides customers with self-service options, you're giving customers what they need without doing much more work. Because customers can help themselves, your support team doesn't need to worry about them, and you can move on to additional tickets. It's also a way to expand your support hours without having to hire more staff.

Scaling your customer support in the right way comes down to having a team of individuals with strong service skills and the correct customer support tools at their disposal. While it might seem easier to outsource support as your business becomes more complex, making an investment in-house will help keep customer satisfaction rates high and yield better results in the long run.