MBA2250 Q&A Wednesday: How many support messages is too many for one team member?

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Hey. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Power to the people. The business people that is 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 Webinar Ninja, an in depth software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask just go ahead and email me over at Omar100, MBA NET today's question is from Candace and Candace asks, hey Omar, I am looking to hire another customer service agent. Currently I have one team member that does support messages but I'm not sure if we need to hire a second one but because we have too many messages or the support agent is not being productive enough or maybe just not good enough and I need to replace them. I have no way to gauge because when I ask my other friends in business they have different types of businesses and different support requests so I can't really compare. Would love your help on this question. Thanks so much for everything you do with the podcast. Candice. Thanks Candace for the great question and I got your back. I'm going to show you exactly how you can know how many messages is too many messages when it comes to support requests. So you can be able to know should you hire, should you replace your current team member, or maybe they need some training, but you should have some sort of barometer, some sort of minimal number of messages. Of course, these are averages because some messages are going to take longer than others. But in today's episode, I'm going to give you a really good way to find out how many is too many. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So in today's Q and A Wednesday, Candace asks, how many is too many support messages for my support team member. And I love this question because I know that everybody at some point is going to have to deal with this situation in their business. Because every business has some customer support, customer success, customer service element, whether it's chat, email, phone, there is going to be that element in your business. And you kind of need to know how many messages are you getting, how many people you need to man those messages so that you could be efficient. There are two things you need to look at when it comes to your customer support team and standards to make this decision to know how many messages is too many for one person? The first one is obvious. How many messages, how many customer support questions or queries or tickets or whatever you want to call it? How many of those can one person handle in one day? That's pretty basic. But if you want to take this beyond that, you got to ask yourself, what is the average response time you want to hold as the standard in your business? So for example, some companies have a policy that they want to return all messages within 24 hours. That means if a support email comes in, it needs to be replied to, it needs to be responded to before the 24 hour mark. Before 24 hours elapses. Of course, you need to consider holidays and weekends, but you got to kind of establish what your policy is. And I would say no later than 24 hours. I think that really beyond that, two days, that's just too much. That's just too long for you to get a response, especially if it's a sales query. Maybe a customer is asking for urgent help beyond 24 hours is kind of too long in my book. If you want to have excellent customer service, that should be the bare minimum. So for example, in my company, my software company, Webinar Ninja, our target for our first average response time is five minutes. We want to make sure people get a response quickly so that customer Service is part of what they're buying. How many of you love a good company with great customer service like Disney or your favorite local restaurant? We just love being treated well and promptly. But if you're in Candice situation, you're probably just in that 24 hour mark and you just want to make sure you're not overwhelming this agent in terms of how many support tickets they're able to finish in one day. And if there's too many tickets, meaning there's tickets they haven't responded within a day at the end of their day, meaning they have so many tickets they can't keep up with the 24 hour response time. How do you know how many is too many, is 40, too many? Is 50 too many? Well, this is an easy way to find out and I highly recommend everybody does this. Take three days out of your schedule and be a customer service agent 24, 7. Okay? You want to do it during the peak times, like during the week. So it's a real indication of what real volume is like. And ideally you can just maybe relieve your current agent while they're on holiday or something like that. Now, I know that you got a lot to do and ideally you probably did this before you even hired them. So if you didn't, then you're going to have to play catch up. And why do I say three days? Well, you need to have some sort of aggregated average. One day could be a little bit busier than the other. And you want to make sure that you're being fair. For example, my co founder and partner Nicole and myself, we did all of customer service for Webinar Ninja before we hired anybody. And then even when we hired people and had two agents, there were moments where we were so busy I had to be a full time agent for a few days. So I basically answered so many customer service tickets and questions and emails and chats for maybe eight, nine hours straight for a few days in a row. And I got a good understanding of what this job entails. So it was easy for me to hire new people and know what to expect. Now in my experiment at that time when I jumped in, when we had agents, there were days where I did 200 customer service tickets. Okay, Every single day. That's a lot. Some days I did 180, some days I did 150. But I say on average I was able to do about 100 to 110 tickets a day. And when I say ticks, I mean messages or chats or emails, some sort of correspondence with a customer or potential customer. Now you have to factor in a few things. Number one, you probably know the product better than anybody else. You don't have to look anything up. You have all the information in your head. Okay. At least I can speak for myself. That's what I was dealing with. I never had a lookable help article. I never had to check the app itself. Maybe on a rare occasion it's a kind of hidden feature or something that's not used that frequently. I would have to kind of double check, but I probably did that. Maybe I would say once a day, not with every conversation. And even once a day was a lot. But the point here is that I have a lot of information and I know how to answer these questions very easily and fast. The other thing is that I'm a native English speaker, actually. I write a lot, I type a lot, so I can be economical with my language. I know how to write quickly. You know, I'm not working in my non native tongue, so that speeds things up a little bit for me as well. Also, it's my business. Of course I'm going to work hard. Okay. Of course I'm going to hustle. Of course it really matters to me to give great customer support because these people are paying all the bills for the business, the customers, right? So I'm going to have a little bit more oomph. It's not that I don't expect that from my team members. It's just that I know that I'm probably going to push harder than most people. I'm just going to hold myself to that higher standard as the business owner and so should you. So I would say that after doing this experiment, I would take your numbers and divide them by two. Okay? Cut them in half. Because that really is a reasonable number, comfortable number for one person to handle. You're going to double the average person's number because of your knowledge, because of your skills, because of your motivation. Even if they're a native speaker, you're probably a better communicator because you've been doing this for a while and talk about your business and your product all the time. So this is why this experiment is so helpful. Because you can do an average over the three days. How many support tickets am I doing every day? Let's say it's a hundred. That means the average person that I hire should do 50 a day. So take a look at your team member. Are they hitting those milestones? Are they hitting half of what you would do? If they are, awesome, maybe they need some help. Maybe they need to hire if your company's growing, it's better to hire and lighten the load a little bit on people. Even if it's not like a pure 5050 split to agents, they'll grow into it as you get more customers and more leads. But if they're not hitting your numbers, if they're not hitting half of what you do, then it probably means one of two things. One. They need training. Maybe you should cowork with them one day and find out what's taking them so long. Maybe you can give them some helpful tips techniques. Show them how to use text expander. Show them how to use canned responses or saved responses that you can edit and modify. Show them how they can just respond really quickly to a chat without having to write paragraphs of information as their first response. Show them how to handle several conversations at once. Maybe they just need some training, some tips, some tools, and maybe just a few days with you. They can really benefit from these strategies and your practices. That's worth a shot. Helping them get better. Train with them so that they can then teach somebody else when you hire your next hire. But what if that doesn't work either? What if you train them, you help them, and they still don't Cut the.

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Well, if they don't cut the mustard, it means they're not a good fit. They're not good enough for what they need to do in your business. And that's going to happen. Sometimes that means you're gonna have to Find somebody to replace them. And the hardest part about this is that often these people that don't cut the mustard are good people, nice people. But if you've tried to train them, you've tried to help them to get up to snuff, get to your standard, and they just can't do it, or they're not willing to do it, or they're distracted or something else is holding them back, that's not on you, okay? Your job is to do what's best for your customers, to do what's best for the business so that everybody can succeed. And sometimes you just are not a good fit for each other. In my experience, when I have team members that don't hit their KPIs, that don't hit their standards or what they need to hit to do their job properly, about 50, 50, 50% of the time, training helps and they get better and they improve and they become a rock star, right? The other half of the time, there's nothing I could do. And it's time for me to say goodbye to them and find somebody who can do the job. Listen, this is why entrepreneurship is hard. This is why people get jobs, right? They don't start businesses because they don't have to deal with these types of challenges. But these are the challenges that are going to differentiate you from the competition because you are going to not sacrifice your quality, not sacrifice your service, not give your customers less than what they should get. They're counting on you. They're counting on you to make the right decisions so that your business can grow and that you can serve them properly every single day. Thanks so much for asking your question, Candice, here on Q and A Wednesday. If you've got a question you want to ask, email me@omar mba net so I can make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you're a listener of the show and you haven't followed us yet, if you haven't subscribed, make sure you do that right now on your favorite podcast app. Whether you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio. Hit those triple dots in the top right hand corner of your phone and hit Follow or find it wherever you're listening to us right now, on your car, on your computer, go ahead and follow us so you get our next episode automatically. And you get access to our over 2200 episodes in our back catalog. You only get access if you follow us. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You are only as strong as a team you build. The best entrepreneurs, the best founders, the best business owners are the ones that know how to recruit the best team members and know how to say goodbye to the ones that don't work out anymore. That's our responsibility. And if you choose to be a business owner, you gotta accept it. You gotta accept that responsibility. Say, yep, I know it's tough, but I gotta do it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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