MBA1652 How to Start a Customer Support Team + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our five hundred dollar course over at EasyCourse Co to help you build your online course. If you want to win it, just leave us an iTunes rating in review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just go over to Apple Podcasts, leave us a review and you automatically enter and you're in the draw until you win. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show your business building partner every single day with our 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 episode you will learn how to start a customer support team. If you're answering all your customer support emails right now or chats or even phone calls and you're starting to get overwhelmed or you just feel like it's taking too much time from the important things you need to do, it's time to start a customer support team. In today's episode, I'll show you exactly how and when you should start considering this. I'll walk you through how we started our support team of over 10 members, how we built a system to train them and find great talent to join. Customer support can be your differentiator. It can really allow your customers and potential customers to choose you over the competitors. It's one of the ways small businesses really can compete with larger ones. It's one of the big reasons why our customers choose Webinar Ninja, our software. So in this process of starting your customer support team, you're adding so much value to to your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. To begin, when should you start building your customer support team? Well, in my opinion, if you're getting 30 or more messages from customers a day, whether they're emails, Facebook messenger, you know, messages, chat messages, phone calls, whatever it is, 30 or more, it's time to start a team. Because to really take care of your customers at a high level, that's going to take a couple hours a day. Even if you're the most efficient worker in the world, I would say at least a couple hours a day. So now that we've established that, how do you get started? Well, when it comes to hiring your first customer support team member, it's really critical. It's really important for you to choose the right person. They need to be flexible, they need to be adaptable, they need to be organized and self motivated. Why? Because they're going to start building your team with you. Yep. They're going to help you build that team and I'll explain how. So basically your first hire is like a super duper customer support agent. Why do I say super duper? Because they're not only going to be answering your customer support emails or tickets or whatever they are, they're going to be helping you build a customer support system. You need to build the system so that you can start building a team. And the system includes how your company is portrayed to your customers, what are the protocols, how do you greet your customers, how do you close tickets, how do you make sure that your customers are satisfied? This also includes, you know, how to use the customer support software you're using, whether it's Intercom or Zendesk, or maybe it's just email. This also includes standing operating procedures. What do they do when there's a problem, Whether it's billing or a technical problem. So this first agent is not Only helping customers. They're also documenting the system, documenting how to do the job. And from the start, you need to tell them, hey, you're my super duper agent. You're going to be doing all this stuff. But the next person I hire is going to be somebody on your team and you're going to have to train them. That's going to be a responsibility. So get ready, have your training materials ready. In my opinion, this first hire needs to be an experienced customer service agent. Somebody that has done customer service, knows the job, has done high pressure situations, and is above and beyond qualified. Right? You want someone who's really good at this, has done this before because this is going to be a challenging position. You want somebody who's hungry. Our first customer service agent was Cindy. She was highly experienced, highly motivated, just a super hard worker. The reason why this is important is because they're gonna help you find other agents. They're in the market, right? Other people that do their job. And they're gonna know what it takes to work in your company to deliver great customer support. And they're gonna be able to really pre qualify people and tell them in advance, hey, this is what it's like to work here, and this is how you win and this is how you can be successful. And that's exactly what happened with us. Cindy actually had a sister who was in customer support. Her name is cj. So when CJ Joined our team and Cindy trained her, she hit the ground running. She knew exactly what to expect. She knew exactly what the company's like because Cindy told her. And even if your second hire is not, you know, somebody's sister or somebody who's relative, they will tell them in the first interview. So what's important here is to set the tone with a great first hire for the second hire. Now, funny enough, C.J. who joined us over five years ago, who started as an agent, then became a customer support lead, then a senior lead, and then now she's the customer support manager for the last couple years. She's moved up in the company and she's really been a great hire because of the foundation we built. And she's helped us hire the rest of our team, nine other people on the team. But it all starts with a strong foundation, with great training materials, with great standard operating procedures, and that's how the team is built. Now you're gonna do some work at the start because your first hire needs to understand the product, needs to understand the system, the tools, and you're gonna shoot some videos. So you're just gonna do some screencast videos on your computer. Or better yet, you can do a meeting and record the meeting with the new hire and train them step by step. The first week, you're gonna do a whole bunch of sessions and record these individual videos and put them in your, you know, team collaboration tool, whether it's Basecamp or Jira or whatever it is, or even Trello. And now you have a database of training. They can go ahead and create documentation off that training. They can then start creating some training materials. About six months ago, we hired five new customer support agents. And guess what? Who trained these agents? Well, CJ did, our customer support manager. She created all the training based on the trainings that we had in the past. She created all the SOPs. She created a whole Trello board for their first week of training. Actually, the first two weeks and all is because we started with one solid hire that trained CJ and then later on trained the rest. And of course, it started with our documentation and recording of the procedures at the start. Now, obviously, if you look at our first videos and how things were done, it looks nothing like today because they've evolved and the people on the team have improved it, have taken it to the next level and made decisions that really have helped the business in a big way.

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You don't need to build your customer support team all in one shot. You can go as slow as you need and as much as you need for your business. If you don't have a lot of volume, that's okay. If you don't have a global customer base where you need 24. 7 support, that's fine as well. For a very long time, we had a very small support team of three or four people. But as our company grew and served more and more customers around the world, we had to grow as well. One last piece of advice is you need to project with customer support because it takes time to train new agents on your team. It could take about three months for them to be fully ramped up and know how to answer every question a customer throws at them. Obviously, this is going to depend greatly on your product and your business itself. But this is just an estimation. But the point here is that you want to hire before you need it. Okay? You want to make sure that, hey, this is where I am right now. Where am I going to be in three months? In six months and 12 months, how many agents will I need? How many support tickets will I have? How many do I have now and how many customers do I have now? How many customers do I think I'm going to have in 12 months? Double three times? Well, you're going to need to beef up your team. You don't want to be caught on your heels. You want to make sure that your customers are always served efficiently, effectively, with care and patience. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Timmy B. Kona. Timmy B. Kona says bribery works. Winky five stars. I've been listening to the $100 NBA show for about a year now and I'm constantly amazed how Omar always comes up with a 10 minute nugget of goodness every day. Even when the lesson doesn't pertain to my business, I could pick up something useful. Thank you so much Timmy for that amazing review. You are a free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me@omar mba net so I can hook you up with the free ride with the free access to easy course, our $500 course over at Easycourse Co if you want to win a free ride. Just leave us an Apple's Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Freeride Friday. And once you submit a review, you enter the draw every single week until you so I wanted to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I can't endorse this statement enough Customer support is one of the best investments you can make in your business. Making sure your customers and potential customers are taken care of, treated with respect, treated with kindness, and gets the answers and solutions they're looking for is a game changer. There's a reason why Zappos was number one customer support. There's a reason why Disney is amazing. Their customer support. Their customer service. There's a reason why people pay crazy, crazy amounts of money for luxury hotels because of the way they're treated. People want to be treated well, and if you could do that along with a great product or service, it's hard to lose. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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