Scaling customer support without significantly increasing costs requires a combination of strategic planning, technology adoption, and operational improvements. When you scale customer support, you can’t just spend your way out of every problem by hiring more and more agents — the goal is to support more customers, not to build a massive team.
The key to scaling customer support is to get more efficient as you grow.
As a general rule, the more customers and products you add, the more support contacts you’ll get, requiring some additional support capacity. But as your business grows, you should be able to leverage economies of scale, improve efficiencies and invest in technology to scale your customer service without a straight-line increase in costs.
In the example shown in the graph below, the operation that doesn’t improve efficiency needs 10 new reps for every 1000 customers it acquires, and that never changes. But the efficient operation needs incrementally fewer reps for every 1000 new customers, adding up to long-term savings. This type of gain should be your goal as you scale your support function:
So how do you scale customer support cost-effectively? Here are some key levers for scaling customer support:
Implement Self-Service Options
Knowledge Base/FAQs: Create a detailed knowledge base or self-service portal to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs). Customers can resolve common issues without contacting support, reducing the workload for agents.
Interactive Troubleshooting Guides: Use decision-tree-style troubleshooting guides to help customers solve more complex problems independently.
Community Forums: Create community forums where customers can help each other. This encourages peer-to-peer support, reducing the reliance on customer service teams.
Automate with Chatbots and AI
Chatbots for Basic Queries: Deploy chatbots to handle repetitive, simple tasks like tracking orders, answering FAQs, or basic troubleshooting. This frees up human agents to handle more complex issues.
AI for Ticket Triage: Use AI tools to automatically categorize and prioritize support tickets based on urgency and complexity, directing them to the right agents.
Leverage Omnichannel Support
Unified Support Platform: Use an omnichannel platform that integrates support across email, live chat, social media, and phone. This reduces duplication of efforts and allows agents to handle queries more efficiently.
Social Media Support: Engage customers through social media channels where many queries can be handled quickly and publicly, reducing the volume of direct tickets.
Outsource Customer Service
Outsource: Outsourcing allows you to access infrastructure, process, technology, specialized skills and people more efficiently than you can in-house. Ability to scale cost efficiently is one of the several benefits of outsourcing customer service.
Use Offshore Support: Consider using offshore support teams that provide support at a lower cost. Offshore teams can also provide support beyond normal business hours due to the difference in time zones between US and outsourcing locations like India.
Invest in Training and Agent Productivity Tools
Training: Well-trained support agents resolve issues faster and more efficiently. Regular training sessions improve productivity and reduce the time spent on each ticket.
Productivity Tools: Implement customer service management tools that streamline the support process, giving agents access to customer history, common solutions, and communication templates. Use AI-powered virtual agent coach that help agents respond faster and accurately to customer queries.
Analyze and Optimize Support Processes
Ticket Deflection: Use analytics to identify common issues and find ways to deflect these queries through better self-service options or proactive communication.
First Contact Resolution (FCR): Focus on resolving issues during the first interaction. This reduces repeat contacts and overall support volume.
Proactive Support: Anticipate customer issues by monitoring feedback and proactively addressing potential problems before they become widespread.
Use Customer Feedback to Improve Products and Services
Continuous Improvement: Collect and analyze feedback from customer interactions to identify and fix recurring issues. This reduces future support requests as the underlying causes of problems are resolved.
Product Updates: Implement changes in your product or service based on customer issues to prevent repetitive problems, which in turn decreases customer support demand.
Offer Tiered Support Options
Premium vs. Basic Support: Offer different levels of support based on customer type (e.g., free users get access to self-service and chatbots, while premium users get personalized support). This reduces overall support load while still providing high-quality service to your most valuable customers.
Integrate Customer Support with CRM
CRM Integration: Integrate customer support with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to give agents instant access to customer profiles, history, and preferences. This reduces the time spent collecting information and leads to faster issue resolution.
Encourage Chat, Email, and Ticket-Based Support Over Phone Support
Async Communication: Chat, Email and ticket systems allow agents to handle multiple requests simultaneously, unlike phone support, which is one-to-one. Encourage customers to use email or chat support where possible, leading to more efficient use of resources.
Use Data to Optimize Staffing Levels
Predictive Analytics: Use historical data to predict peak times and staff your customer support team accordingly. This ensures that you’re not overstaffed during slow periods or understaffed during busy times.
Flexible Workforce: Use part-time, freelance, or on-demand customer support agents during peak hours or seasons.
By combining self-service, automation, outsourcing, and optimization of existing resources, you can scale customer support effectively while keeping costs under control.
How to Develop Your Strategy for Scaling Customer Support
Start by making scaling up customer service a strategic, proactive process instead of a reactive one. In this article, we’ll walk you through the big aspects of scaling strategically:
- When to scale
- What to scale
- Where to scale
And we’ll show you how to handle each efficiently, so you can limit your growth in support reps and save money.
When to Scale
If you already see any of the issues listed below, it’s time to grow your support team, now:
- Lost customers due to poor support
- High volumes of bad reviews and complaints
- Increasingly long wait and handle times
But if you don’t see these issues yet, don’t wait until you do. Scale proactively to prevent the bad reviews and lost customers, while also capturing savings. Here’s a game plan:
- Identify past drivers of new customers and support contacts (product launches and improvements, marketing campaigns)
- Track when your company plans these initiatives and how much customer growth is expected
- Using your historical contacts/customer numbers for each channel, and considering upcoming initiatives, model the expected growth in support contacts
- Calculate how many support staff you’ll need to serve these customers
- Workforce management software can help – this list covers some great solutions)
- Keep in mind how many staff you need to meet your customer satisfaction metrics — e.g. CSAT, NPS, FCR. For more on this, see The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support Metrics
- Identify the key “trigger points” you will use to determine when to start scaling your operation
- Determine how long it will take you to expand appropriately on a per-channel basis as you hit these trigger points, so you can scale proactively
Once you’ve modeled out how many people you’d need, take a step back.
Before you throw money at hiring more agents, try to solve more customer issues before they arise (reduce your contacts/customer) and do more with what you have (handle more contacts/agent).
Once you know how much customer growth to expect and have an idea of when to expect it, strategically plan major investments in efficiency and contact reduction.
For example, you can plan an investment in a major website or mobile app version update that addresses known causes of support contacts. Some other ways to reduce contacts/customer include:
- Closed-loop systems to track and eliminate root causes of contacts
- Self-service — creating a robust FAQ section and knowledge base
- Chatbots and IVR systems
- Strategically using proactive chat on key pages
- Basic automation, such as pre-written responses to specific inquiries
The more you grow, the more you save by proactively investing in solutions that reduce contacts. By modeling when to scale, you can strategically time contact-reducing investments so they pay for themselves.
What to Scale
As you scale, consider precisely what you need more of. The most common examples include:
- Agents: do you need more people to handle growing volume?
- Hours: do you need 24/7 coverage? Many companies, particularly SaaS firms, require off-hour support for global customers.
- Channels: do you need expanded capabilities within existing channels or additional channels (e.g. adding live chat to reduce call volume, potential savings)?
- Languages: do you need to add support in English or other languages as you expand globally?
A game plan to manage “the what” is to take stock of the basics:
- Track use patterns across channels and hours
- Learn what your customers expect — surveys can help — in our experience, customers expect at least live chat and email
- Log where you’re deficient (pushing the limits of what your team can handle) and strong (can add more support interactions with your current team)
- Model costs to expand
- Invest in solutions
A big key in determining what to scale is continuously measuring and improving your team’s performance and efficiency, which will allow you to add less over the long run.
As you monitor that performance and add customers, keep investing in training and mentoring for your team. Set up systems to reward agents for excellent performance and efficiency. Give your team increased ability to resolve problems with strategic escalations and arm them with better and better tools as you go along. In other words, never stop improving your operation, and you’ll need less of “the what” than you otherwise would as you add more and more customers.
Pro tip: one costly trap is not covering enough hours. For example, if you’re only available from 9-5, you may see surges during peak times, possibly resulting in the need to hire more staff than if you offered more hours. Again, we recommend exploring workforce management. Our support experts can help you with this.
A big key in determining what to scale is continuously measuring and improving your team’s performance and efficiency. #CustomerSupport
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Where to Scale
You effectively have three options to scale your support capabilities:
- In-house scaling with your existing team
- Team scaling with an existing vendor
- Scale by adding a new external vendor
The choice of in-house vs. outsourced support depends on your budget, strengths, company culture and values. But broadly speaking, successfully scaling a sizeable support operation is no joke. It requires:
- True support and operations experts
- Robust processes and accountability
- Investments in the right technologies
- Serious hiring and training programs
- Tracking and measuring results
Internal scaling may make sense if you have:
- No existing pressure to reduce overall support costs
- Room to grow within your existing location/infrastructure
- A locally available workforce that would support an expanded operation (i.e. if you’re adding a 3rd shift, could you easily staff that shift from your local workforce?)
External scaling with an existing vendor may make sense if you:
- Already have a backup/secondary support coverage in the case of an emergency or a disaster
- See past and current performance of your existing vendor that exceeds your expectations
- Have a strong relationship with the vendor
- See metrics all trending positively
- Can confirm they have a proven ability to scale quickly with qualified staff
You might consider scaling with a new vendor if:
- You’re looking for additional opportunities to cut costs
- You need a new channel capability, process or technology that isn’t offered by your existing support organization
- You’re looking for improved performance over what is being delivered today
- You would like to mitigate your risks by adding another vendor/location to your support mix
- Your relationship with your existing vendor is more that of a supplier than a partner
There are trade-offs with each approach, such as ramp-up time, the effort it takes to replicate your company culture off-site (it’s doable with a good team) and the likelihood you’ll need to send someone on-site if you outsource. But the savings can be well worth it — at GlowTouch, we often cut our client’s support costs by 70%.
If you outsource, you can go onshore, offshore or both. Onshore vendors provide accents native to your customer base, key for phone support — but not important for chat, email or social channels. Offshore vendors can deliver major cost advantages; in India, support agents often cost 1/3 of U.S. agents.
Focus on Efficiency
No matter when, what and where you scale, if you focus on efficiency, you’ll have a better shot of building a sustainable operation. At GlowTouch, that’s what we’ve done since 2001. Today, we handle more than 10,000 contacts/day for clients worldwide with more than 4 million customers. We live, eat and breathe support and love helping our clients.
Check our Customer Support Services Guide for even more great information!
