Shaun Spivak
There are many things I wish I knew when starting out with my small customer support team at RingCentral, but in the end, we figured it out. I’m going to share some critical lessons I learned along the way that I wish I had known at the outset, so that when it comes to scaling your own support team, you’ll have an idea of what to expect.
When I first started with RingCentral, we were working with a small-scale support team undergoing rapid growth. Our main goal was to maintain an excellent level of customer service with smart operational decisions.
You have some choices when it comes to scaling up customer support:
- Increase your employee headcount to cover the increase in customers. This is an expensive option, and onboarding employees too quickly can result in lower-quality training that results in lower-quality customer service.
- Operate with a reduced staff and rely on decreased customer interaction. This increases wait times and can prove catastrophic to customer satisfaction.
But the real strategy to embrace, and the one we instituted at RingCentral, was investing in the employees we were onboarding and ensuring all our existing processes were running efficiently.
While automating processes and developing new strategies to address customer support is essential, building an efficient and empowered support team is the real key to scaling your customer support operation.
Hiring the right employees is critical. You want to find people with the right foundational skill sets and not necessarily the technical know-how to execute the job.
A foundational skill set combined with robust training enables employees to thrive with whatever is thrown at them, like adapting to remote support in the past year. An enabled employee can resolve support issues faster, making your whole operation more efficient. That’s a real win-win.
As you scale and onboard employees, make sure they know their importance — emphasize the stakes in their role related to the business and value that responsibility. We want our employees to feel engaged, so we offer them opportunities to pursue passion projects tied to business initiatives and the opportunity to shadow across different organizations.
As you adapt to growth by scaling your support team, you’ll develop operational elements and firm work streams that increase efficiency, enabling you to further grow without the need to hire additional support.
It’s been a team effort to get to where we are now, so keep that in mind as you plan your growth scaling. Your support team is your most important asset.
Lesson 1: Go beyond simplistic support
While it’s convenient to buy into the accepted truth that customer support consists of only two departments — inbound and outbound, at RingCentral, I encouraged diversity within our support teams.
With different skill sets come support agents who bring something unique to the table. While developing our support frontline, I soon learned that talents could be utilized in a query-specific function. By placing the support associate in the most suitable role, we increased job satisfaction for employees while remaining highly focused on the customer experience.
Here’s an overview of the teams we developed:
Professional services team
Our professional services team mainly focuses on project management and onboarding. Perfect for multilocational businesses, our professional service team members are industry specialists with the ability to travel to any location on the globe and stay onsite for the duration of a customer’s professional services engagement.
Customer care organization
Our customer care organization (CCO) is an essential component of the support department and has been integral in growth scaling. Our CCO team members are there to build an emotional connection with customers. We encourage active listening to our clients’ pain points and offer sympathetic solutions.
Enterprise support organization
Launched in December 2016, the role of the enterprise support organization (ESO) is to offer enterprises a service that is more like a mentorship from our team of ESO professionals. The ESO offers enterprises premium support in the form of both a dedicated technical account manager and a customer success manager. The team aims to provide complete mentorship through every stage of deployment and integration.
Technical account management
Providing third-level support, our technical account management team takes ownership of escalations from first- and second-level support. Serving as the intermediary between clients and service engineers, our technical account management team balances customer-facing communication skills and deep technical knowledge. Besides offering video conference software fixes and providing support for the trickiest of problems, our technical account managers also investigate and reproduce possible product defects.
Customer success organization
Our customer success associates are encouraged to think creatively to ask the right questions at the right time and to the right people. The primary contact point of RingCentral, customer success associates focus on client needs, have deep product knowledge and offer innovative resolutions.
Global support organization
Our global support organization (GSO) has associates dotted across the globe who are on hand to deal with local problems by employing an international outlook. Simply understanding a customer’s language is not enough — our associates are all also culturally aware and we scaled the GSO from a multilingual and polycultural perspective.
Lesson 2: Allow teams to show empathy and vulnerability
By just offering automated customer service, both your customer service agents and clients are missing out on the holistic application of customer service that is as effective as it is enjoyable. There’s merit in using chatbots, but customers deserve more, which is why we offer an omnichannel digital engagement solution.
With empathy at the core of your service department, you can work outward while encouraging a culture of experimentation. When building our service teams, I discovered the value of allowing yourself and your support team to be vulnerable. If you’re asked a question you don’t know the answer to, hold your hand up and say, “I don’t know; let’s find out together.” This instills trust in your co-workers and fosters a culture of openness and learning.
How quickly can we resolve customer issues and communicate with customers all over the world? If we’ve answered those questions well at the end of the day, we’ve done our job. By seeing problems through the eyes of the customer and understanding their unique priorities, you’re a step closer to developing a long-term, satisfying client relationship.
Lesson 3: Start planning now for the future
One of the main takeaways was to stay on top of your plan for the future. Don’t wait until you start seeing an increase in complaints or high customer churn. If you don’t monitor your support team functions, you can run into obstacles down the road when you need to scale for growth.
Use customer feedback to address any problems in your support operations. Are response times working for customers? We have a stringent SLA response time for answering calls, but getting there took some time.
Get employee feedback to evaluate how support operations are running. Can anything be done more efficiently? Are processes you put in place hurting or helping your team? Use reports and analytics to see where you might need to do some work or adjust support processes.
It’s basically about staying on top of your game. You don’t want to get complacent; that’s when little things crop up that will be harder to fix in the long run. Stay engaged with your employees, and above everything else, focus on your customers.
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