How To Scale Your Customer Support

As any business owner knows, keeping your customers happy is essential to your bottom line. Not only do satisfied customers provide valuable word-of-mouth advertising, but they are also less likely to churn. However, many fast-growing companies run into capacity issues when it comes to customer support, as their user base grows faster than their support team. This can lead to unhappy customers and eventually cause the business to lose money.

As a business grows, your customer support needs to grow with it. We've already covered how to structure your SaaS support team as your company grows in previous articles.

In this blog post, we will discuss exactly how to scale customer support and some of the methods that have been proven to work well. We will also offer tips on how to implement these methods successfully.

So if you are looking for ways to scale your customer support operations, read on!

How to scale your customer support

There are many different ways to scale customer support, but not all of them will work for every business. It's important to find the right mix of methods that will work well for your company specifically. Here are some of the most effective ways to scale customer support:

Scale In A Linear Fashion

One of the easiest and most effective ways to scale your customer support is to do it in a linear fashion, meaning that you add support staff at the same rate that your customer base is growing. This ensures that your support team can always keep up with customer demand without getting overwhelmed.

However, in order to do this, you'll need to invest in various tools, processes, and systems that will help you manage your customer support more efficiently and ensure customer needs are consistently being met.

Consider how to structure your support team

It's essential to consider how you want to expand your support team when scaling. For example, are you trying to grow by support tiers, geographical regions, or product lines? There are pros and cons to each option, so it's important to choose the structure that makes the most sense for your business and the direction you want to take it in.

Use data to back up your choices

Blinding trying to scale your customer support without any data to back up your decisions is a recipe for disaster. You need to constantly monitor various metrics in order to make informed choices about how to best scale your team. For example, understanding your team's average resolution time can help your team staff appropriately and set customer expectations.

Additionally, data can help you identify problem areas in your support process so that you can address them before they cause bigger issues. Make sure to regularly review your data and use it to guide your decisions about scaling. Here are the top 15 customer support metrics you should consider tracking.

How using technology can level up your customer support efforts

While adding team members can help increase the amount of support your business can provide, it's not the only way to scale your customer support. Utilizing technology will help bring your customer support efforts full circle—not only will it help you support more customers, but it will also improve the quality of your customer service.

Here are a few ways that technology can help level up your customer support:

Cut support time in half

Technology like Fullview's cobrowsing, session replays, and console logs can help you reduce support time and customer churn by giving you context on customer issues without going back and forth.

With session replays, you can quickly review a user's latest sessions in your app to see bugs and issues in context and gain insight even before jumping on a call with them. And once you've identified those issues, you can hop on a cobrowsing call, gain control of your user's screen, and solve  issues collaboratively with multi-cursor control.

With these tools, you can quickly and painlessly solve customer issues, reducing the need for long support chats. In addition, by understanding the root cause of customer problems, you can avoid potential future issues, further reducing support time. And even implement product fixes with all the increases visibility and insight.

Increases the productivity of your existing team

When you have the right technology in place, it can help your team work more efficiently and get more done. This is especially important when you are scaling your customer support, as you don't want your team to become overwhelmed by the increase in workload.

In a recent survey, 23% of workers saw increased productivity levels as a result of using software tools.

Reduces incoming requests

When customers can find answers to their questions on your website or through a FAQ section, it reduces the number of inbound requests your team has to deal with. This gives your team more time to focus on complex issues that require more attention.

Creating a comprehensive knowledge base or content library can be time-consuming, but it's worth it in the long run. With the ability to automatically redirect customers to the right content, you can take some of the pressure off of your team.

Automation tools can handle basic requests

Customer support involves a lot of repetitive tasks, such as answering common questions or resolving simple issues. This can take up a lot of your team's time, which could be better spent on more complex tasks. Automating these processes with technology can help free up your team's time so they can focus on more important tasks, like strategy, reporting or even offering proactive support to customers.

There are a number of ways you can automate your customer support, such as using chatbots or setting up automatic responses. Automation doesn't mean that you're completely removing humans from the equation—it just means that you're using technology to handle the more basic tasks so your team can focus on more complex issues.

Remember, too much automation can backfire and frustrate customers, so it's important to strike the right balance.

Conclusion

Scaling your customer support doesn't have to be a daunting task. With the right team in place and the right technology, you can scale your customer support efforts without sacrificing quality. Use these tips to level up your customer support and keep your customers happy.