How to scale customer service when your company grows

As a company grows so will the need to provide customer support. Unfortunately expanding a customer service team can be quite expensive, especially if the new arrivals need to be trained on the details of the product. Expanding a team also requires the addition of more physical space and resources as well as an expansion of the management and supervision teams that oversee the new agents.

There is, of course, the age-old method of outsourcing customer service to some cheap location in a faraway land, but the results are often questionable. In outsourcing scenarios, it is hard to control service quality and customer satisfaction often suffers.

A smarter, and cheaper way to expand customer service

In customer service teams there is often an imbalance between the skill level required from an agent and the amount of time they actually have to use those skills. Or to put it in other words, although a good customer service agent needs to be qualified enough to handle the most complex cases, these only represent a tiny fraction of the total.

As a result, an agent’s skills are underutilized during the vast majority of the time they spend talking to customers. If your company is growing, chances are that you are already sitting on a goldmine of skills that could handle a volume of complex cases far higher than what you will ever need to handle in the present or in the future.

Therefore, if you manage to find a cheap, reliable way to remove the simpler problems from these agents’ workload you will be able to improve the overall volume at a much lower cost.

How automation can help

To remove the simpler problems from your agent’s workload you could add more, less qualified people to your team, but this would not solve the issues of space, and management resources and would still not be a scalable solution.

A much better option would be using chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that have the unique ability to handle conversations with humans. They come in all shapes and sizes and are ideal for tasks like providing customer service on platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, or even your company’s website.

Depending on your requirements and the level of questions that you’d like to automate they can be as simple as a chatbot that answers only FAQs or as complex as systems capable of interacting with company systems like reservation engines and CRMs. Unlike human-based systems, chatbots can handle an almost unlimited number of conversations simultaneously, work 24/7, and they never get tired.

When needed, chatbots can also seamlessly transition the conversation to a human agent, providing them with all the case details and allowing them to focus only on the part of the process where they add more value. A well-designed chatbot system can be a key asset for any growing company, reducing costs and making support systems more scalable.

To learn more about how your company could take advantage of these opportunities, reach out to our team of experts using the contact link below.