Optimizing Customer Support Assignment with a Lean Team
For a lean customer support team, managing global timezone coverage can be a daunting challenge. However, with the right strategies in place, it's possible to deliver outstanding support and ensure customer satisfaction across various time zones.
Understanding the Global Customer Base: The first step towards efficient support coverage is gaining a comprehensive understanding of your global customer base. Analyze customer data to identify regions with the highest concentration of users and highest volume of inbound requests. This insight will serve as a foundation for your support scheduling.
Implementing Staggered Shifts: To accommodate customers in different time zones, consider implementing staggered shifts for your support team. Assign agents to shifts that align with peak customer activity in specific regions. This approach ensures that you have representatives available to respond promptly to customer inquiries, regardless of the time of day.
Organize Group Assignments by Language, Not Region: As you grow as a global organization, you will face challenges around delivering support in the language of your customer’s preference. Some countries have a high level of English proficiency despite their national language being different (Germany). Other countries have a culture that is strict about the use of their native language, despite having a high English proficiency (France). Whatever the case, you will need to decide where to invest additional resources, and which languages to prioritize if you are keeping a lean team. By organizing assignments by languages, you can keep efficiency high and time to close low during high volume periods, and even your French support team can pick things up for the English team. I’ve found both a round-robin and a balance-approach (where new chats are assign in the interest of balancing ticket load) can work with a lean team.
Automate and Educate: Invest in self-service options and a comprehensive knowledge base to empower customers to find solutions on their own. Automation can handle routine queries, freeing up your support team to focus on more complex issues. Your customers are most concerned with getting the answer to their question quickly and correctly, if your automation is good enough to achieve that, your customer won’t care where the answer is coming. If your automation isn’t good enough, they will punish you at best with low CSAT and at worst potential churn.
Monitor First Response Time and Handle Times: Regularly monitor support performance metrics and customer feedback to identify areas for improvement. Listen to your customers' needs and adjust your support strategy accordingly.
Even with limited resources, a thoughtful and proactive approach can make a world of difference in optimizing customer support assignment.
