When talking to newer companies, the typical approach to customer service is reactionary. X number of contacts come in, ABC is the strategy used to take those calls. While this is effective (at first), it circumvents the kind of proactive thinking that can ensure that, in periods of rapid growth, change, or other disruptors, there is a common strategy to revert to when making decisions.
Simply put, the plan in your head is great. But when your responsibilities and your customer service group grow, it won't always be you making the decisions. That's why I recommend designing a plan that answers the following questions, and is focused on building a simple, easy-to-use access strategy for your customers.
Define your customers: Do you have different customer segments? Is there a paid group vs. a free user base? Do you sell to both end users and resellers? Do you have different product lines that need different levels of support? By profiling your different segments of customer, you can figure out what channels of support to make available to whom, make staffing estimates, and understand what metrics you should be measuring for which calls.
Define your interactions: Determine what channels of support you are going to offer. This is important formalize – as smaller teams grow and become more specialized, understanding who touches what can eliminate a lot of confusion. Common channels are phone, email, web chat, social media, and online content moderation. You should also take this opportunity to parse out sales vs. service, retention, and other categories.
Hours of Operation: It sounds simple, but define this early on. It has a huge impact on staffing, especially if you eventually decide to offer 24/7 support.
Service Level: Too many companies wait until they are completely swamped to set service level goals. As this ties directly into staffing levels, it is difficult to make a business case for your department if you fail to include one of the most important metrics. For phone, does the common standard of 80/60 (80% of calls answered in 60 seconds or less) work for you or is something like an 90/30 or 80/30 more appropriate based on the categories of customers your decided on above. For email, service levels are typically more relaxed, often anywhere from 2-8 hours for first response.
Routing and Cross-Training: Often your first few CS agents are cross-trained on all your contacts. Is that an effective strategy if you make it to 100? Figure out what skill sets go well together early on and you will benefit from higher SLA adherence and CSAT down the road. Commonly phone and chat agents will be cross-trained on email, which helps increase utilization by giving them work that can be done at a lower service level in between more demanding contacts, but you need to figure out what makes sense for your business.
Hiring Profile: What does your perfect agent look like? If you don't have one now, building a defined profile makes it easier for your team to continue to grow itself, even once your past the point of handling the interviewing and job offers for every single employee.
Technology Requirements: What information do you absolutely need to be able to gather and access on each contact? What technology needs to be available for agents to get to the contacts? By building out this profile, you will have established guidelines for any future expansions on your CRM, ACD, order management tool, as well as associated pieces of hardware that are essential to the success of your department.
Change Management: How often do you analyze and assess your results and who takes part in that process? Especially as you grow, it can be easy to let this assessment fall by the wayside. However, by creating a formal processes for steady slow adjustment, you can often avoid major course corrections that can come along down the road.