B2B Customer Support | 4 min read | Published June 11, 2020

Part 2: Clearing the Clutter for Customer Support Processes

Removing or altering support workflow clutter can have an immediate impact on how you interact with customers.

Did you miss Part 1 of this series? Go back and take a look for some great tips on taking a step back with the way your customer support team operates and identifying areas to make your support workflow more efficient. Once areas of clutter are identified, it’s time to begin truly making changes to the way your support team works and interacts with customers.

Clear out clutter and make new processes.

Decide internally to remove or alter inefficiencies – Below are two common examples of removing and altering a process:
- Removing an inefficient ticketing process – A ticket management technique may have been established under previous leadership where a support manager needed to review every ticket marked “high importance” before it was delegated to an agent. This may have been necessary when you had a lot of inexperienced agents, but now that your team is more experienced, this step in the process can be removed.
- Altering inefficient support staffing – Your customers are clearly the top priority—as they should be—but you’ve created a precedent with all customers of all sizes that you’ll respond within minutes of a ticket being created. This is stressing out your support team and has elevated staffing costs because of overnight scheduling.
If you are altering a process, define the purpose – Referring to the altering example above, reducing support costs and improving employee happiness are both important to successful support operations. You obviously still need to respond to customers, but you can set better boundaries around when customers should expect a response. The solution? SLA management built directly into your support software.
Create a timeline for altering the process – Sticking with the example, create an SLA template for customers to agree to when they choose to work with your business. For example, it can contain language that issues determined as “mission critical” get a response within one hour, but all other issues will be responded to within 12 hours.
Test to ensure the new process works – Once the SLAs are finalized and fully executed with customers, get them set up within your support software so you know exactly when you risk violating the SLA. This technology lets agents know when they need to respond to a specific ticket. This way, your company is updating customers in a timely fashion.

Getting rid of the clutter in your support workflow can be easy or difficult depending on what specifically you’re trying to remove or alter, but in the long run these changes often improve both customer and agent happiness.