How to set up a thriving customer support team from scratch?

Sam started building a treehouse for his children. He needed no instructions and kept doing the

set up a thriving customer support team

Sam started building a treehouse for his children. He needed no instructions and kept doing the necessary until halfway through; the pieces stopped fitting together. He realized he might have made some critical errors at the early stage, so he had to start building all over again.

There are several ways to build; however, lacking strategy and logical steps will make your process come apart at the worst possible time. Same with building a customer support team from scratch. Setting up a successful CS team is best done with a clear plan. If you look forward to providing your clients with solid, reliable, and effective customer service, then you have to follow steps that help you build a strong foundation and achieve an efficient process.

6 effective steps to build your customer support team from scratch

Whether starting a new business or managing an existing team, make sure you structure your process to succeed. To help you do so, we’ve listed effective steps to follow in order to build a thriving customer support team from scratch.

Step 1: Define what ‘great’ customer service looks like for your company

Any company can promise great customer service to its clients. However, are the customers having a great experience using those services? Companies should ask themselves this question before they start promising anything ‘great’ to their customers.

While you set up a customer support team from scratch, sit with your entire group and focus on determining the level of service you’ll provide. Once you have defined ‘great service’ for your company, you’ll have a standard against which you can measure your team’s performance.

Step 2: Choose key channels to support

Being a small business, it’s ideal to provide quality customer support on a few channels first instead of giving inconsistent services on multiple channels. Research and identify the channels that your customers are using the most. Jump to social media, and see which platform your customers are obsessed with. You can choose from various options available, including email, phone, or live chat with a skilled agent. While email is best used for technical support, live chat can be the best platform for assisting retail-related queries. Choose what suits you and your customers.

Step 3: Pick the right talent

Here comes one of the crucial steps in building your dream customer support team. To provide quality and reliable customer support, you must find and hire the ideal personality suitable for your support role. But how would you know they are the right people for your company? Well, you need to ask yourself the following questions when hiring support team members:

What skills are you looking for in the candidate? The key focus area of your business will decide what skills you need to look for in your support candidate. Are you a tech-based company, licensing or the one providing software services? Make sure you mention the required skills in the job description and ask relevant questions from the candidate during the screening process.
What is the ideal support personality? Look for the best communicators, and empathetic and emotionally intelligent candidates, then further add factors specific to your company culture.
How many professionals do you require? Not many companies can figure out how many agents they should start with. It purely depends on the number of queries you receive every day and the number of days you work. For well-established companies having to work 24/5 or 24/7 might require at least 4 to 6 agents to handle the queries. On the other hand, if you are building from scratch or working only during business hours, having two agents on board should work for you.

Step 4: Pick your tools

The world is changing, and so does the way of delivering customer service. Companies that have started adopting several tools and technologies for delivering exceptional customer support are winning compared to companies that don’t. In addition, it’s essential to ensure that you invest in high-quality and sophisticated technology instead of some slow and unhelpful tools that cost you your time, money, efforts, and especially your company’s valuable customer experience.

However, most companies building from scratch or running on a limited budget are not a big fan of investing in tools. It is crucial to know that even for a small team, using these tools daily can help improve your team’s speed, accessibility, time management, and productivity. Your customer support team can improve their performance by using internal systems such as custom database searches, configuration pages, and logging systems that allow them to access customer information, fix issues, and more.

Step 5: Measure your support team’s performance

Once you are equipped with the right tools, you must set performance expectations for your customer support team. Once you have set the standard, your team will know what is expected from them and how far they have to push themselves to meet the performance expectations

In addition, you need to set some objectives for your company to drive better performance. Determine which metric is most significant for your company so that you can measure your overall brand’s performance periodically. Also, set customer feedback and employee feedback systems to improve your customer service frequently.

Read our blog, ‘What is customer satisfaction score (CSAT)‘ to measure customer satisfaction for your business.

Step 6: Create your knowledge base

Creating a knowledge base can prove to be beneficial for both your employees and customers in the long run. While a knowledge base can be the best way to teach self-help to your customers, your employees can also expand their knowledge by identifying how specific issues are handled and how to use different tools. The knowledge base software will help representatives resolve the customer’s queries quickly and show where the customers are getting stuck and what documents need adding or updating.

Ready to set up your dream team?

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour”

A dream customer support team is not built overnight. It is an ongoing process that requires excellent strategies and logical steps throughout its development. While you develop your customer support team, always ensure to bring frequent improvements as the market, customers, and team change.