When you start your business, you have an endless drive. You know you’re onto a great idea and it’s fun to see people responding to it. That makes it easy to cope with incoming inquiries. But things become harder as your business grows.
You and your team start to put out fires instead of focusing on growing your business, and growth starts to stall. Worse still, customers can become disgruntled because they’re not getting the service they expect, and this hurts your company’s reputation.
Signs that you’re starting to struggle are slower response times, growing numbers of unanswered inquiries, and repetitive customer complaints. And, in Arizona’s diverse startup environment, you can’t afford to give your competitors an edge.
The best way to avoid these issues is to start planning before the cracks start to show. Look at building customer support as a scalable function rather than an administrative afterthought.
Understand the Limits of Your Current System
Is there a growing backlog? Is your team scrambling to answer questions, and not giving out accurate information? If the answer is yes, you’re probably losing customers.
Your team has better things to focus on, which means that it’s important to take action as soon as things start to slow down. You need to keep an eye on:
- Number of inquiries received each day or week.
- First-response time.
- Average resolution time.
- Backlog of unresolved cases.
- Customer satisfaction and repeat-contact rates.
Monitoring these will tell you whether you need to look at better processes, more staff, automation, or a combination of all three.
Are Your Customers Getting Frustrated?
Most people complain to their friends when something goes wrong, but that doesn’t mean they’ll contact you. If you’re lucky, they’ll shoot you an email and give you a chance to fix it, but many people will simply give up and look for another supplier. That means you can’t rely on complaints alone to see how your team is doing.
What you can do is look at the questions you get on a regular basis. Are customers having to explain themselves to a few different people? If so, they’ll wonder if your business is organized enough to look after them. Repeating yourself is frustrating enough. Being passed from one person to another makes it even worse.
It’s also a good idea to see what happens after the request is resolved. Did the customer get the information they needed or did the ticket close because the client hung up? These situations look similar in terms of reports but have a very different impact on your client.
As an Arizona startup, you need to keep your existing customers happy. It’s just as important as attracting new ones. Look into retaining customers before you increase your marketing spend. It’s a more cost-effective approach.
Build a Repeatable Customer Support Process Before Hiring
It’s tempting to try and deal with the issue by quickly hiring more people. This can be a mistake if you don’t have the right organizational infrastructure in place first.
Start with a central hub to manage your queue. Then create clear processes for dealing with questions and complaints, being sure to have clear procedures for escalating more complex issues. Do create a list of frequently asked questions and their answers so everyone is on the same page.
Next, you’ll want to create workflows that set out who is responsible for each request and when it’s time to hand a query over to someone higher up. You’ll also want to establish realistic service standards, like how long it should take to answer inquiries.
Set up an accurate and easy-to-navigate knowledge base that includes:
- Product information
- Troubleshooting instructions
- Account guidance
- Policies
Say, for example, that an Arizona software startup lets billing and technical questions go through to separate email threads in the beginning. This is okay when there are a few queries, but becomes problematic when there are lots. They can improve productivity by using a shared ticketing system and clear procedures.
Prepare Your Support Team for Product Changes and New Customers
You don’t always need more consultants when your inquiries start increasing. It all depends on why you’re getting more calls. Maybe it’s a product update or a new service launch. Or maybe a marketing campaign that’s working a little too well. Whatever the reason, you need to look at why your clients need more help.
Maybe they need help understanding a new software update, or maybe they want to use a new feature. A small change can lead to a surprising amount of extra work.
You can plan for this by including customer support from the beginning. Before making any changes, let your team test the relevant features and see how they go. They can highlight potential issues and come up with workarounds and, potentially, prevent issues in the first place. And you’ll see if you need to train your team.
You’ll do something similar when it comes to marketing campaigns. Work out what help all those new customers will need and prepare your team accordingly. You don’t need to make a big production out of it, just have a meeting with the relevant departments and discuss your growing needs.
Choose Customer Support Technology That Can Grow With You
You don’t always have to rely on a human team for everything. Using the right technology makes it easy to streamline service. You’ll start with a CRM system that creates a shared inbox and uses a simple ticketing system. This can send out automatic acknowledgments and assign each query to the right person.
You can even use an AI-based chatbot to help guide customers through simple queries. It’s also useful to give them access to your knowledge base in case they want to look for the answers themselves.
That said, don’t rush into buying an enterprise-level platform before you understand your exact support requirements. You want technology to ease the workload and simplify your processes, not create more work.
Decide When to Hire, Train, Automate, or Outsource
So, it’s time to build capacity. Which way do you go? You can train your team to be better at dealing with queries if you have the spare people. Some companies choose to hire a dedicated support team when the incoming inquiry volume is consistently high. This is a good option if you need your core team for more important work, but it can be expensive and difficult to find the right consultants.
It does make sense to use automation for simple tasks like ticket routing and appointment reminders. Chatbots can help out with routine, boring queries but always let your customers speak to a human if they want to.
Many companies today outsource their startup customer service to get additional capacity and instant expertise. It’s a cost-effective solution because you don’t need to onboard, train, or house your own team. It’s a great way to get round-the-clock or multilingual support as well.
You’ll have to work out which option suits your business best.
Scaling Customer Support When Money Is Tight
If you’re like most Arizona startups, you’re running on a tight budget. Maybe you know that you need to beef up customer support, but you’re wondering where to find the money to do so. It’s not always realistic to hire new people, and even if you can, you might not be able to find the right fit.
Don’t increase your wage bill without thinking about how that team will be spending their working hours. Could customers get the information from a well-written FAQ? Are your product instructions not clear enough? If you fix these issues, you’ll reduce the queries naturally.
And then, of course, there are those tasks that don’t require individual attention. Someone looking for opening hours or seeing if you have an item in stock doesn’t necessarily need to speak to a human agent. A good AI-based chatbot can handle these queries at a fraction of the cost.
That said, you need to be careful not to cut costs at the expense of the overall customer experience. You don’t want customers caught up in endless chatbot loops or searching for information that isn’t on your page. That means thinking through any resources you provide so that they are genuinely useful.
Next, work out when your busiest periods are and, if necessary, arrange temporary support during these times. If you’re outsourcing, you can talk to your provider about saving money. Maybe you can use a dedicated team during high-traffic periods and switch to a shared team during off-peak times.
What you want to do is spend your money where it’ll make the most difference. This can mean streamlining procedures or improving your knowledge base instead of hiring more people.
Create a Support Strategy That Fits Arizona’s Business Environment
Do you sell all over the States or internationally? Then you’ll need a team that can work outside of the Mountain Standard Time we use year-round in Arizona. The type of support you need also depends on what industry you serve. A company selling computers or software might need more technical support consultants than one selling simple tools like screwdrivers.
Even if you only sell locally, you’re likely to need bilingual staff thanks to Arizona’s high proportion of Spanish-speaking residents. Maybe you’re in Phoenix or Tempe and need extra language support. It makes sense to consider outsourcing to a company that has multilingual consultants.
It’s worth networking with other Arizona business owners to get insights into the latest best practices and identify potential service partners.
Measure Performance and Improve the System as You Grow
This isn’t a one-and-done project. You’ll want to keep an eye on metrics like resolution time and customer satisfaction to make sure the support team is working out. You’ll also want to identify common customer inquiries or complaints so that you can make improvements to your product, service, or onboarding process.
Watch out for emerging bottlenecks so that you can change course before massive issues crop up. Also keep an eye on customer feedback and consider reviewing some customer conversations to make sure things are going well.
Your goal is to improve wherever possible so you can deal with increasing demand. Finally, you need to forecast future support demand so you can plan upgrades before problems start to appear.
Say a startup notices that there’s an increase in onboarding questions after each launch. That’s a sign that it needs to make its materials clearer or build a more structured customer onboarding process with guided tutorials. It also makes sense for the team to contact customers to provide additional support to them.
You want to get to a point where you are proactive with customer support instead of trying to deal with emergencies all the time.
Make Customer Support Part of the Growth Plan
You need to keep an eye out for the warning signs that your team is beginning to struggle and have a plan ready to implement when that time comes. If you plan from day one, you’ll be able to upgrade your support quickly and efficiently.
This doesn’t mean creating an elaborate strategy, but rather just planning your next steps when things start to go wrong. That way, when you see the signs that your support team is struggling, you know exactly what to do.
Whether you decide to automate, hire more people, or outsource, you’ll be ready for the new challenge.
