Product support and customer service
Few parts of any businesses are more subject to the dynamic change of needs as product support and customer service. These can include (but are not limited to) overall staffing, shift staffing, number of tiers, agents per skillset, and more. The approach to solving for these variables should be a three pronged approach - process, data, and agents. Processes that are documented and trained ensure a uniform outcome. These processes should be compared to data gathered, to ensure they are driving in the predicted direction. They should also be revisited often, to identify any opportunities for improvement.
The third piece are your agents, be they front line or escalatory. They must be provided with clear and well defined processes, so that they may have confidence as they perform their duties. The agents will always have a different perspective than management, so taking their point of view into account is critical to ensuring a process that works as well on the ground as it does on paper. Additionally, agents must be well informed as to the priorities of the department; priorities which need to work hand in glove with the processes in place. Lastly, they need to be recognized for their hard work, and rewarded to the extent possible. The result of these measures is the difference between a bunch of people who happen to do the same thing, and a team working as a cohesive unit toward a common goal.
During my time as Director of Support and Service at Host.net, I had the opportunity to help build a business from the ground up. Over the course of four years, we built a company that went from 1.2MM annually in sales, to 56MM. This necessitated the formation of a multi tiered, skills based technical support, an understanding and empathetic customer service department, and other departments such as physical security, VoIP development, and more. As the business grew and needs changed, so too did our processes. A support manual and FAQ were established to ensure consistancy of support information and transfer guidelines for customer service. Agents were sent for Cisco training, and recognition programs set up. All this resulted in a workforce that was dedicated, knowledgable, and nimble in their response.
As a Senior Business Analyst, I had the opportunity to put several of these principles to work. While at Citibank, I created the Process Improvement Team, also known as the PIT Crew. The PIT Crew was comprised of agents from several areas of collections, and was tasked with interfacing with their fellow agents, for the purpose of identifying procedures that were cumbersome, outdated, or flat out didn't work. Once identified, the PIT Crew and I would work to build an optimized process, and present that new process to upper management. An example of these processes include the justification for dual monitors for all agents. This resulted in a 15% reduction in average handle time, and a 50% drop in wrap time. This generated a new reduction of 2.25MM annually. All of these undertakings were the result of, and driven by, collection of relevant data, thus demonstrating that you can apply customer support and service best practices even outside a formal support environment.