08.29.2023 Jonathan Kirkland
When your company is just beginning, it’s difficult to imagine that you will ever need a large customer support team to resolve customer issues and queries. Most companies soon find, however, that a call center is needed to keep up with requests.
As your organization’s customer base grows, so will queries and issue requests across your website, social media platforms, email accounts and phone numbers. Successfully keeping up with those queries is the key to a superior customer experience (CX) that improves customer satisfaction and loyalty.
To ensure that your company evolves with its expanding customer base and changing customer needs, it’s crucial that you create a strategy focused on scaling up your customer support team.
Why scaling your customer support team is important
Scaling your customer support team not only comes with a range of benefits for your organization, it’s also crucial for your businesses’ success as your customer base begins to grow. Without it you simply cannot meet your customers’ expectations, and you will be inundated with queries.
By having a customer service team that’s able to support your customers as your business grows, you will be able to improve customer satisfaction, improve customer loyalty, encourage word-of-mouth marketing from customers and build a world-class customer experience strategy.
All of these things help you to drive your business forward, increasing your number of customers and boosting profits.
How to scale up your customer service team effectively
When looking at how you can effectively scale up your customer service team to support a rapidly increasing number of customers, your business will be faced with three options:
- Increase headcount: Increasing your headcount to support customer growth comes with the benefit of having full control over your customer service program. However, this comes at large operational costs and a lack of customer service strategy expertise (for most organizations).
- Complement your existing agents with customer service technologies: Call center technologies are a fantastic way to complement your existing customer support teams and boost the customer experience. However, when used in-house they can be expensive and complex to use.
- Partner with an outsourced expert: Last but not least, you can partner with a nearshore outsourced contact center to fulfill your customer service needs. This is often considered as the most effective and economical solution.
To ensure you make the right choice when considering how to scale up your company’s customer support team, Advantage Communications has listed the top five questions you should consider:
#1 - How many customers do you expect to have over the next year?
The decision to scale up your customer service team shouldn’t be forced, it should be a strategic decision that is influenced by a data-driven approach and customer number projections.
How you will scale up your organization’s customer service team should be guided by how many customers you have now, how many customers you expect to have in six months, and how many customers you are projected to have in one year. This will give you an idea of the resources you need not just now, but in the near future as well.
#2 - What technologies will improve the performance of your customer service agents?
To improve the performance of your customer service agents and boost those increasingly-important customer satisfaction metrics, it’s important that your customer support team has the IT infrastructure in place to enhance the operational performance of agents.
Backend technologies such as operational intelligence, quality assurance and live-call guidance help to ensure customer service requests are being sent to the right representatives, and that agents are performing to a high standard.
#3 - Do you experience seasonal demand?
One important thing to remember when scaling up your customer service team is seasonal demand. If your organization experiences seasonal demand, it’s important that you don’t scale up your customer support team during these periods of increased traffic, only to find that you can’t afford to pay for the additional resources in the long term.
Scaling up for seasonal demand is expensive. You have to source the right workers, pay their wage, and invest in the technology they need to complete their job. Letting these workers go once your seasonal demand has ended is an expensive strategy.
#4 - What technologies can help automate the customer experience through self-service?
Customer service is now about providing a superior customer experience. There’s no better way to improve your company’s CX than by integrating self-service technologies into your customer service strategy that help to reduce customer effort.
Think of technologies such as contact center artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots and omnichannel service. These customer-facing technologies help customers to answer their own questions, improving how satisfied they are with your brand and, at the same time, reducing strain on your customer service team.
#5 - What are the benefits of partnering with an experienced outsourced contact center?
Scaling up your customer support team in-house is not only highly complex, it’s also incredibly expensive. You will require highly-skilled customer experience experts who have years’ of experience developing customer service strategies, as well as the ability to invest a large amount of money into both backend and customer-facing technologies.
By partnering with an outsourced contact center, you can access this expertise and technology at a fraction of the price. A nearshore contact center will give you access to state-of-the-art technologies, world-class customer service agents who can be scaled up and down depending on your company growth, as well as industry experts who have extensive backgrounds in creating successful customer experience strategies.
Ready to learn more about scaling up your customer support team and how a professional outsourced contact center can help? Contact Advantage Communications today. Our team of highly-skilled customer experience experts would love to help.
