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KEY STRATEGIES TO SUCCESSFULLY SCALE YOUR CUSTOMER SUPPORT TEAM
Kaitlin Pettersen
Former Senior Director of Customer Support, Intercom
@kpetterman
Main illustration: Anastasia Tumanova
Table of contents:
* Your options for scaling customer support
* How to scale your customer support
* Continuous iteration is key
* Maintaining your support principles
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How do you scale great customer service without blowing the budget or killing
the quality of the customer experience?
It’s an age-old question for anyone leading a customer support organization, the
sort of challenge that requires continuous innovation as a company and its
customer base expands.
With more than 25,000 customers and over 90 people on the Customer Support team,
we’ve come a long way from the team of just nine when we first shared a blog
post on using Intercom to support our customers. Our belief in a modern support
model will never change, but we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on how best to
scale our support department.
> “There is more to scaling up than just machine learning and bots”
A key part of our conversational support strategy revolves around automation,
but there is more to scaling up than just machine learning and bots. Here’s a
look at how we have managed it and how you can too.
YOUR OPTIONS FOR SCALING CUSTOMER SUPPORT
When companies face the prospect of supporting rapidly increasing numbers of
customers, they are faced with three fundamental choices:
1. INCREASE HEADCOUNT TO SUPPORT CUSTOMER GROWTH
This option brings the benefit of maintaining a top notch level of service, but
it also comes at a hefty financial and operational cost.
2. DEGRADE THE SUPPORT EXPERIENCE
This option relies on tactics like no-reply email addresses and endless
wait-times, without taking a strategic approach to prioritization. It is cost
effective in the short term but understandably unpopular with customers – and it
is potentially detrimental in the long run due to its impact on customer
satisfaction (CSAT) scores and employee retention.
3. LAUNCH INTELLIGENT AND COST-EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS THAT COMPLEMENT YOUR CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCE
Clearly, the first two options have serious pitfalls. Luckily there is a third
option. It includes using real-time automation with bots, strategies to drive
customer self-service, and customer prioritization, alongside reasonably paced
hiring.
This approach to scaling customer support, however, is tough to get right as it
requires an excellent set of tools, intelligent experimentation and a fair
amount of cross-functional partnership.
HOW TO SCALE YOUR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
In scaling up our own customer support team, we have aimed for that third
option, an intelligent combination of approaches rather than throwing money at
the problem or letting our standards slide. We’re using our own product
solutions, of course, but I believe this balance of strategies can be adopted by
any company facing the scaling challenge.
Here’s how you can scale customer support without ballooning your headcount or
sacrificing your customer experience:
1. EMBRACE AUTOMATION TO STRATEGICALLY FREE UP YOUR TEAM’S TIME
The foundation for modern, scalable customer support is automation. At Intercom,
we look for ways to automate responses to common questions and routing customers
to the right team for support, using customer service chatbots.
While it might seem like the use of bots is a less personal experience, in
reality chatbots can powerfully augment a great customer support team and allow
your team to focus on moments where a personal human touch really matters.
USING BOTS TO AUTOMATICALLY RESOLVE QUESTIONS
The primary chatbot in our toolbox is Resolution Bot, which automatically
resolves customers’ most common questions in real time. We’ve found that on
average, Resolution Bot instantly resolves 33% of your customers’ most common
queries and improves customer response time by 44%.
0:08
Training our Resolution Bot was a simple process. From our experience, the
upfront time investment that our team put into training the bot by way of answer
curation and improvement more than paid itself back. The bot successfully
reduced the repetitive questions our support agents were answering, freeing them
to take on more technical support issues. Over time, we saw significant
improvements in how Resolution Bot recognized similar questions from past
conversations. Furthermore, resolution rates steadily climbed as we used the
bot’s reporting to identify monitor which answers aren’t delivering and trained
Resolution Bot to provide better answers.
USING BOTS TO AUTOMATICALLY ROUTE CUSTOMERS
We use another one of our automation tools, Custom Bots, to efficiently triage
inbound conversation on our website. It ensures that lead questions flow to our
Sales team and customer questions flow to our Support team. You can set it to
guide customers through a set of structured questions so that you’re collecting
pertinent details about their issues right away. Once team members pick up the
conversation, they can get straight to work on resolving the issue, speeding up
your resolution time.
As long as you focus automation strategies on solving the right problems, you
can scale your support in a way that doesn’t put the customer experience – or
your CSAT scores – at risk. They can even improve it!
2. EMPOWER CUSTOMERS TO FIND ANSWERS QUICKLY WITH CONVENIENT SELF-SERVICE
Some customers don’t want to talk to you, so it is important to provide
additional support channels such as an FAQ page or help center so they can find
answers to their questions independently. But once collated, these answers and
resources can also be suggested to customers who do reach out for assistance –
for instance, Intercom’s Operator taskbot can suggest Articles in the Messenger,
encouraging customers to find answers while they wait on a Support team reply.
This approach has saved my team and our customers countless hours.
Modern support solutions should also easily integrate your help center articles
with your team’s inbox. This kind of integration saves a tremendous amount of
time since it gives your team instant access to the knowledge they need for
their conversations with customers. They no longer have to open a separate
window or tab just to search your knowledge base.
3. PRIORITIZE THE RIGHT CUSTOMERS
As your customer base and product suite grow, you will have an ever-widening
range of queries and customer issues to resolve. This means that constantly
refining how you prioritize those conversations is of fundamental importance.
Intercom’s Inbox allows for smart team and customer segmentation through the use
of multiple shared inboxes. They enable your team to easily prioritize
conversations as well as quickly pass them to other teams for attention.
> “By routing eligible new customers to a dedicated inbox and improving our
> first response times for them, we were able to drive 30% higher rate of trial
> conversions”
An example of where this worked well for us is the launch of our real time
support strategy for new customers, a tactic that drove improved customer
conversion and meaningful revenue wins for the business. By routing eligible new
customers to a dedicated inbox and improving our first response times for them,
we were able to drive 30% higher rate of trial conversions.
Making smart use of Intercom’s Inbox routing rules, internal notes and @mention
features have also been great time savers for our team.
CONTINUOUS ITERATION IS KEY TO SCALING CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Maximizing the benefits of automation, self-service and customer prioritization
requires continuous iteration – after all, support looks a lot different at 10
people than it does at 100, and so on.
To ensure continuous iteration on our support model, we did the following:
* Constantly evaluate current processes and admin tools for inefficiencies
* Regularly experiment with a variety of new inboxes and response time
strategies
* Periodically assess our support department productivity metrics and analytics
* Continually identify key areas that impact employee engagement
At a minimum, I’d recommend an annual evaluation of each of these areas to
ensure you’re effectively scaling your Customer Support team. This process takes
a village and is a great way to engage your top performers and management team
in evolving your organization.
SCALING SUPPORT WHILE KEEPING YOUR PRINCIPLES
Finally, it’s important not to lose sight of your principles in this process.
One thing that hasn’t evolved in our path to 100 support team members and
25,000+ customers is our commitment to great customer and employee experience.
> “Adopting tactics like automation shouldn’t come at the expense of your core
> values”
In this regard, our cultural tenets are our greatest tool. We are driven by a
commitment to connect personally and with empathy, and we believe in treating
the problem rather than the symptom. Adopting tactics like automation shouldn’t
come at the expense of your core values. These modern approaches and your
principles are not mutually exclusive.
Remember, if your business is growing, your Customer Support organization will
scale whether or not you intend it to. However, how you manage this scaling
process, and how it will impact your budget and employee engagement, is your
choice. Choosing the right tools to help you effectively automate tasks, drive
customer self-service, and make it easier to segment your team and customer base
will be key to that process.
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