Customers service operations help your company scale and improve customer service. They include process and workflow efficiency, quality management, and shift scheduling. Your customer service operations will ensure your support operation tasks are well planned and executed to ensure that your customer service standards are maintained. Among their responsibilities are agent hiring, agent training, shift management, and knowledge management, which set the foundation for the customer service team to succeed. Besides helping to optimize customer support productivity, they are also responsible for eliminating roadblocks that may cause performance bottlenecks. Support operations are not front-line with customers nor supervise agents or manage accounts. Instead, they provide insight into the workings of support teams and make the necessary decisions to improve them. Here in Part 1, we will discuss the importance and how to build a support operations team.
The Importance of support operations team
1. Establish Protocols
Every business must bring structure and coherence into its support team to become more organized. Establishing protocols - processes and defining agent roles creates a smoother, more efficient customer service process.
2. Scaling with efficiency
The growth of a business leads to more tickets, and this volume of tickets requires more resources. Hiring ad-hoc in response to rising demand is unsustainable, resulting in last-minute scrambles to fill the gap in supply and demand. Hence, building a support operations team is crucial for scaling efficiently and predictably rather than on a whim.
3. Performance and productivity improvements
An essential objective of the customer operations team is to improve the support team's performance continuously. Your support operations team can help you improve team productivity and performance by having both internal and external indicators checked and balanced.
How to build a support operations team
#1 Get an Operations Manager
The first step to building your support team is getting an operations manager with expertise in improving support team performance. As a customer service operations team, our core principle is to improve performance, which is why this job is so important.
#2 Pull together the rest of the team
Moving a few members with relevant skills to the support operations team depends on your current support team's strengths and personnel. It is also possible to hire externally but hiring people who know how your support team operates is better.
#3 Delegate responsibility
The process is simple enough. Assign the right roles to the right people based on their skillset, from operations specialists to support trainers and process trainers.
#4 Give access
Make sure members have access to appropriate tools, such as analytics and dashboard, but the access is restricted according to their role and hierarchy.
Final Thoughts
Support operations are the driving force for customer service.
The support operations team is responsible for streamlining internal processes and ensuring smooth operation of all activities. But most of all, they improve customer service responsiveness and quality. Customer operations teams have a tangible impact on customer experience, so having one versus not having one is significantly different. Customer operations are the driving force behind your support team's excellent customer service.
Customer support software, like our DSM 2.0+ Omnichannel Support (powered by Zendesk), can help get your team started, enabling them to collaborate and seamlessly improve customer experiences across chats, messages, and support tickets. It also integrates seamlessly with your eCommerce site, CRM, and ERP, so you'll have a complete digital solution all in one place. Alternatively, if you want to start immediately (without integration), you can use Zendesk Suite (Support, Chat, Talk & Guide). Our partnership with Zendesk allows us to assist you with everything from sales to implementation support and integration. Please get in touch with us at sales@zooloo.asia.
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Tags: #zendesk #omnichannel #digitaltransformation #digitalintegration #digitalsolutions #smestrategy #ecommercestrategy #emarketplace #customerengagement #customerretention #customersuccess #edg #psg
