Providing great customer service is one of the best ways for a company to achieve success and ultimately, grow. But with that growth comes the challenge of maintaining it without sacrificing the very things that made you successful in the first place. And since having a bigger team doesn’t automatically mean you’ll perform better, companies that scale well learn to strategically organize their support team in a way that increases efficiency and reduces costs. As the demand for support grows, it’s not always practical to hire more and more agents, as the cost can become prohibitive. Instead, to effectively meet customer needs, you need to ensure your support agents are set up for success.
This can be achieved by automating and streamlining the agent’s processes.
Initiate action before a human gets involved
Customers expect you to respond to them. When they reach out for support, they want to know that their issue is being looked into, and they want to be kept up to date on progress. Manually reaching out to each and every customer to let them know that their issue is being worked on is costly and time consuming. But there is a better way to update their tickets.
That way begins with triggers. Triggers—business rules that can automatically take an action on a ticket—can be set to keep customers in the know. For example, a trigger can be set to automatically let the customer know that a ticket for their issue has been opened, or to let a customer know that their issue will take some more time to solve. Triggers ensure that as support requests grow, your team only has to deal with real customer problems, instead of having to send mundane status updates to customers.
Making quick work of the most common tickets
While triggers ensure your customer requests stay on track, your agents still need to actually resolve the request. With macros, you can simplify answers to customers’ queries into single, standard responses. For example, if support teams have identified common, specific ticket requests—“what’s your return policy?” or “do you ship internationally?”—they can also create pre-written responses, or macros, to address these questions. Macros can also be used for ticket actions like setting the status to “closed” and redirecting the customer to other topics. This is another crucial tool that saves agents valuable time, while keeping customers engaged.
Getting the right tickets to the right agents, automatically
As companies grow larger, triggers and macros allow them to streamline incoming tickets and speed up the overall workflow. But having those tickets go to agents who can best deal with them ensures customers get their answers quicker and agents waste less time transfers issues. With skills-based routing, you can group agents by capabilities that are relevant to your product lines, customers, and overall business. For example, a customer who reaches out in French should automatically be routed to agents that speak French. No matter how many customers contact you, skills-based routing lets you reduce overall ticket resolution time.
Never stop optimizing
Using triggers, macros, and skills-based routing, you can ensure tickets reach the right agents and agents can focus on solving the customer’s issues. These are just a few of the ways you can maintain or even improve service standards while your business grows. There are additional strategies to consider as your business scales, including changing the structure of your support team and supporting multiple channels for more efficient service.