MBA1469 How Many Support Agents Do You Need?

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Hey all, welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because business is never usual, that's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how many support agents do you need? Recently I was at a conference with many entrepreneurs and somebody asked the question when do I need to start hiring somebody to take care of my customer service tickets? When do I need to hire an agent? How many agents do I need? And the first question I asked was well, how many support tickets are you getting right now? And he responded 200. So that's a lot of support tickets regardless of your response time. So we're going to be talking about how do you know when it's time to hire your first agent? And then also how do you know how many agents do you need? Depending on your ticket volume, we're going to talk whether you are offering phone support or email support or chat support, what kind of customer inquiry agent ratio are we looking at here? This is a very common question because people don't want to have customer service agents twiddling their thumbs up but at the same time they don't want Them to be overwhelmed and can't answer with quality responses. In addition, support agents often do more than just answer customer support concerns. They create support tutorials. They might do some testing. They might help you build out documentation like FAQs. So how do you balance the other responsibilities as well as answering customers in terms of how many hours they're going to need and how many agents you will need to hire? That that's what we're going to be covering in today's episode. This is a really important one because as your company grows, one of the things that can easily slip up is your customer service. You need to make sure your customer service is your hallmark. It's how you get judged by your customers. It's how your customers are going to remember you and talk about you with other customers you're looking to attract. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The first thing we're going to look at when it comes to knowing how many customer agents do you need is let's take a look at what kind of customer service are you delivering. Most customer service, the baseline is email support. Then they might throw in chat support and then maybe even phone support. Chat is actually quite interesting because it will resolve a problem for a customer faster than email because email is back and forth and you may not be checking your email all the time. So. So it may take a few days for you to actually resolve your issue or to get your answer. Often the agent will need to ask questions to fully understand the problem they're trying to solve to help the customer properly. Now, chat support sits somewhere in between phone and email because you're with them live, you're going back and forth and it may take longer than the phone, but in a lot of ways, chat support's a lot more accurate. You can show screenshots, you can send them links, and it can actually approximate being on the phone and sometimes even better because you're able to hang on with them while they're doing the actions they need to do in their account or to solve the issue they're looking for. And it actually sometimes is better than phone support because you can be with them holding their hand as they go through their account, and you solve the problem with them. Phone support can be deceptive. People think that phone support can be very fast and it's a quick response, but there's a lot of back and forth that happens in conversation. Things can get lost in accents and the way things are said, maybe the way people are pronouncing certain things. They can't just send you a link or you can't send them a link where they can click and easily do something. So many people think that phone support is going to cut down on the amount of agents they're going to need, but it's very deceptive. And phone support does take time. Just think about when you needed to get something resolved and you contacted support. Often being on the phone might take longer. In my experience, it takes longer than live chat. I always prefer live chat over phone to resolve my problems as soon as possible. So if you're just starting out, whether you're using email or chat, there are great softwares out there. We use Intercom. And what's great about this software is that it actually can calculate your average time to resolution, so how long it takes for you to resolve a customer concern and close that ticket. So, for example, you might find that your time to resolution is about 15 minutes or something like that on average. Now, I actually recommend using a software like Intercom, even just to get this data, just to trial it out. Try it for a month or two so you can understand how long it takes for you to close a typical customer ticket. So remember, this is you who's answering the ticket. If you're just starting out. If you're going to hire somebody else or hire multiple agents, it may take them longer. You probably know the product a whole lot more than than anybody else because, hey, you're the founder or you're the one who started this business. You know it inside and out. So tack on another maybe 25 to 30% more time. Now, of course, agents can probably handle a couple tickets at the same time while they're waiting for response, especially for chat. But for the most part, you want them to focus and give great answers and not lose track of conversations. And basically, you could do some rough math, like it takes 10 minutes for an agent to close a ticket. That means they could probably answer around six tickets an hour. They're working eight hours a day, six times eight, 48. Right. So they can handle about 50 tickets a day. So if somebody's getting 200 customer service tickets a day, they know they need at least four agents. And that's if the agents are not going to be doing anything else in their job description. So we have a bit of fluff room at our company because we want our staff to constantly have training and attend that training and they have meetings, as well as the fact that some of their hours are being used to test the product to write documentation. And we always want to prioritize quality answers, quality responses, quality conversations, and helpful support over time to resolution. We're not trying to answer and close as many tickets as possible. We're trying to give each customer the right amount of time so we kind of over hire in this area so that our customer service agents will, you know, prioritize quality. But also there's enough agents to make sure that customers are not waiting that long to get a response. This is an investment that really is worth it because it's a differentiator between you and your customer service. This is an investment that's really worth it because it's a huge differentiator between you and your competition. I can tell you firsthand in reality, with Webinar Ninja, our webinar software, we have competitors where their customer service is lousy. And a lot of customers come from our competitors that have lousy customer service just because of that reason. They want quality support, they heard about our support, they try us out when they ask questions on our website and they're like, hey, this is amazing. And they sign up purely off that. It's like a value metric that you really can compete on. But if customers are waiting long periods of time, you know, hours to get an answer, if they're getting rushed answers, if the customer service agent is stressed out and is not in the mood to be friendly, you got a problem, right? You're gonna shoot yourself in the foot. It's a double edged sword. Either it's gonna serve you or it's gonna hurt you. Customer service needs to serve you. Always with customer service, you wanna plan for the future. If you know you're growing at 5% every month, you know that you're gonna be getting new customers, maybe you're gonna be doing a big launch, a big offer, maybe you're releasing a new version, maybe you're offering a free plan. You gonna need to really beef up your customer support team to make sure that you can accommodate all these customer support conversations and tickets. So it's good to plan ahead so that way your customer service agents are trained up and understand what they need to do before they hit the ground running and need to be answering questions from customers. At Webinar Ninja, we actually train our customer service agents for a solid two weeks before they even answer a single customer service agent ticket. So they're learning about the product, they're learning about our tools, our services. They understand our customers very well. They got customer orientation, they watch customer interviews, they understand really who they're serving what they're serving them with, how they're supposed to serve them, our values, our mission, all that kind of stuff. So that when they're actually answering customer service tickets, they have a good understanding of who they're talking to and how to serve them best. And even when they do that for the first time, the first couple weeks, they're being shadowed by a buddy so they can ask them a question so they ensure that they're giving the right information all the time. So as you can see, it takes about a month to ramp up and even after that month they're going to be slower than your, you know, more senior agents that have been doing it for some time. So keep that in mind when it comes to the number of agents you need.

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Some products are going to lend themselves to very low volumes of customer support. Maybe digital goods like E courses or digital downloads like books. Things that are self explanatory and don't really require much support or guidance or even training. So many of you might just need one customer service agent that can also do other duties for you. It could double as a VA as well. Most people think that customer support is all about billing and refunds and password resets. I can tell you from years of experience that's a small fraction of what real customer support is. Customer support is all about what it sounds like, supporting the customer, making them feel like they can do it, motivating them, helping them along the way, giving them the tools and the resources they need to be successful with your product, guiding them, really being like a mini coach, somebody who can help them out, get the most out of the product. The whole point of having customers is getting them to get to a point of success so they can validate their purchase so they can be like, yes, I made the right purchase. Next time this person offers me something, I'm going to buy it. Because it gets results and Your customer support team is all about that. Your customer support team is trying to get them to that result. So your support team has to be proactive sometimes and try to figure out what the real problem is before just assuming what they're saying is what they need. This is why we tell our agents to always ask customers questions, get as much information out of them so you can make the best conclusion and give them the best advice to steer them in the right direction. Yes, we have help articles and tutorials, and we give it to our customers as a reference. But we don't just shoot them the link and say, hey, this is the answer to your question. We actually say, hey, here's a reference guide that you can follow, but let's go through this guide step by step. Let me show you how to get there and tell me if you need any help along the way. I'm happy to hold while you, you know, fix that setting or you change that little thing that you need to change in our account. I'm happy to hold so we don't just give them the tutorial and they're like, hey, go ahead. That's the answer to your question. No, we say, hey, you, here's the reference. But let me walk you through that reference. Let me hold you by the hand, step by step, until you get your result. I'm here to help you to make sure you change that setting or get what you need out of this conversation done. You want to make sure it's done before the conversation is over. That way the customer can feel, wow, that was great support. I actually got things done rather than just been left to get it done myself. I hope that really helps you in your journey of building out your customer support team. Knowing how many agents you need, understanding your response time or your time to resolution, all that factors in as well as any other responsibilities you want your support agents to take on. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. Make sure you hit that subscribe button to subscribe to the show on whatever you like to use to listen to podcasts, whether that's Spotify or Stitcher Radio or Apple Podcast or Overcast. It costs nothing to hit subscribe. It's absolutely free, but you get a ton. You get over 1400 business lessons. Our 1400 episodes in our archives. When you hit subscribe, that's the only way you can get all these episodes. So make sure you do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When we hire any new customer service agent, in fact, we just Made a couple hires this week. It's very important for you to tell these new, new hires, these customer service agents, what it means to win at your company. How do they succeed? What's the metric of success? And we make it very simple. One simple metric. And it's your job is to be helpful and to care for your customers. We say your customers because this is their company too. These are the people they're serving. You know, we're a private, self funded company, so our stakeholders are our customers. Right? We don't have a board of directors or investors. We only answer their customers. So they're our boss, really. So we tell our new hires, hey, to do a good job here, you got to care. You got to really care to help our customers. You got to make sure that they win. If you do that, you'll do very well here. You'll succeed and we'll make sure that you'll succeed with training and support. But we don't have time for somebody who is lazy, who's not going to care, that's going to try to just answer the question quickly so they can, you know, move on to something else or maybe browse Facebook. You need to find a different job if that's your M.O. and they understand very clearly, hey, if I want to win here, if I want to do well at Webinar Ninja, I have to care about the customers. I got to go above and beyond. I got to make sure that the customer feels like they're taken care of. So give them that blueprint at the beginning so they understand, hey, this is how you win. And if they don't do that, there are no surprises. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

Thanks for watching.

Can't wait to check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.