How do you handle a surge of customers by scaling your customer service?

Change is inevitable. But how do you keep your business humming smoothly? How do you avoid the pitfalls that can derail both your customers’ experience and your sanity? This guide will explore some important principles of running an effective customer support outsourcing operation while scaling customer support.

How to Scale Customer Support

Defining a Standard

The first step to scaling commercial customer support is defining a quality standard based on your business requirements and goals. Measurement scales like CSA (Customer Service Accountability), NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Client Satisfaction Assessment Tool) can help companies measure and improve their performance, but they’re not really about quality. Companies may give out awards based on how much people like them, but those aren’t necessarily good quality measures. For example, if someone gives out an award for “the best company in the world”, then maybe the winner is the worst company in the world for someone else.

Improve Auto-Replies

Small teams or low-volume support contexts can afford to do without a reply system. As volume grows, however, that automatic response is one of the best tools in your arsenal for keeping the customer happy and gaining their trust. Let them know you’re on the case, set accurate expectations, and offer self-help options.

Invest in the Right Tools

If you’re wondering how to scale your tech support outsourcing team, investing in better tools is a good place to start. Having the right mix of software and technology assistance can help make any support team more productive and will typically make it easier to create a consistent quality customer experience. For example, if you employ AI to boost human resources, you may benefit from it. However, chatbots to talk to clients aren’t ready, so applying AI to improve suggestions or categorization might work best for you.

Scale your Knowledge Base

The most scalable support service is one that does not require any customer support. A user-friendly knowledge base provides an easy source of information for users, saving them a lot of time and energy. Knowledge bases are useful for providing instructions and support documentation and creating online tutorials for your product. A beacon on your website can alert visitors when they’re about to leave the page, giving them the option to reach out for help.

Build a Large Customer Service Team

An understaffed team that can’t keep up will not deliver consistently good service, no matter how good the team members are. It would help if you tried to hire your staff in advance of growth. For starters, give them time to get up to speed before the real rush. Also, if you plan to grow, there are more ways than directly hiring to add new members to your customer service team.

This includes outsourcing customer support from third-party service providers such as Helpware that help you scale your business without compromising on what matters most.