Building a support operations team

During company growth and rapid change, it is important to keep delivering exceptional customer service. The key for doing this is very often providing operational support to your customer support team. Your agents might be great at customer service, but this doesn’t mean they can do everything. They will eventually need support, especially if your company is growing. When the time is right, you bring in support operations: a team of experts whose job is to provide agents with the tools they need to do their job.

Determining the exact time to do this can be difficult. How can anyone know when their company is ripe for this sort of change. According to Zendesk, it’s simple. Whenever an agent is moved off of ticket duty and customer assistance, and onto process and workflow tasks, it’s time.

Supporting the support team

A support operations team will ensure that you will never leave an agent or a customer hanging. Support operations teams are meant to support the front lines, which means agents who are directly interacting with customers.

These teams have many responsibilities, which can include defining and streamlining processes and workflows, building tools to help make delivering support easier, and providing education and training to customer support agents. Support operations teams also evaluate all of the support data that’s available to help assess the organization’s performance.

Putting one of these teams in place has many advantages. First of all, these employees have a different perspective on customer support and can analyze things in a different way. Their understanding of the business is based on direct experience supporting agents. This allows them to help in building new processes and workflows. Possibly the most important thing about support operations is time to thoughtfully process, measure and analyze customer support metrics. Normal agents can’t take the time to analyze what’s working and what’s not. This is an important function of any support operations team.

Structuring your support operations team

A support operations team also provides flexibility and opportunities within your customer support department. Experienced agents who want a new challenge will often make great support operations team members. At Zendesk, many members of the customer support team moved there after working as agents in the lower tiers. Roles within a support operations team usually require more expertise and senior-level experience. Zendesk came up with a  team structure that works great for them. The team has three types of jobs, which are system specialist, system analyst and tools developer. Each job has three levels, manager through director. With a tried and tested structure, Zendesk know exactly what to look for when hiring for positions in the support operations team.

Source : Zendesk

 

Demeter ICT Co Ltd.

Zendesk Partner in Thailand
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