Customer support structure: How to structure a customer support service
Providing quality customer support to your customers should be a priority.
After all, your customers need you the most when they need support.
These moments create a great opportunity to wow your customers and earn their trust through superior customer support.
The best way to do this is to structure your client team properly. This way, you will be able to efficiently and quickly solve any problem your customers may face.
Today we’re going to take a look at our top guidelines for building a customer support team that’s set up for success.
Defining KPIs and Support Standards
Before you get started, you need to consider what KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators) you want to track and measure in your team.
After all, it’s pretty hard to figure out what’s working and what’s not on your team unless you track and analyze certain metrics or metrics.
How quickly does your team close support tickets? How many tickets are reopened due to a poor solution?
This data will help you identify problem areas and change strategy on the fly to better serve your customers.
Want to get started with KPIs? Read our a guide on customer support KPIs and how to calculate them.
Hire the right people
Now that you’ve found a good pool of candidates, how many should you hire?
In most cases, the answer can be found using simple math.
All you need to know is the size of your customer base, the growth rate of your business, and some of the KPI benchmarks we’ve already mentioned (at this point, you should know what KPIs you want to achieve!).
You can then easily calculate how many customer service representatives you need.
Want to know more? Find out, how to calculate the required number of support staff for your company.
Create sub-teams with specialized skills
Next, you need to make sure that you have created subgroups within your team to address various issues.
This may look completely different for each company, but, for example, you can divide the team into customer support (deals with orders and invoices) and technical support (deals with more technical issues, such as product repairs).
This will allow both teams to specialize in processes that are unique to solving the problems they deal with. This will be especially useful for companies offering complex products and services.
Want to know more? Read our guide about the differences between customer service and technical support.
Choose the right customer support model
Next, you need to choose a customer support model for your team.
Will you choose a call center? Maybe implement a self-service strategy?
In most cases, it may make sense to turn to digital solutions.
Fortunately, we have compiled a detailed a guide to all the different types of support models, their pros and cons.
Final thoughts
At this point, you will be ready to build a client team that is set to succeed!
However, remember to periodically monitor and adjust your KPIs. After all, your user base and your company’s needs will change over time.
Ready to get started?
The translation of the material was prepared as part of the course “Head of User Support in IT”…
We invite everyone to an open lesson “Digitizing Support”. In this lesson, we will talk about metrics that will help us understand how well we are doing. Or not. And let’s also think about why sometimes metrics tell us that everything is fine, when in fact it is not.
