MBA867 Building a Customer Support Team

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I'll be sharing with you real examples from our own business, webinar Ninja, where we have a support team of seven people, from managers to lead agents to what we call customer success Ninjas. But it didn't happen overnight, it happened over time. And I'll share with you how we built it, how we built this team. But let me first start off by saying the first ever customer service agent for the company was yours truly, me. I handled all the customer service tickets at the start. And then me and Nicole, my co founder, we started doing it ourselves before we hired a single person. But at some point we realized we need to hire somebody to do this for us. Our first customer service agent. But when you hire that first person, it's just not one single hire. You're creating a whole department now. And procedures have to be in place. Things need to be documented and things need to be recorded. So when you hire the next person, they're trained properly. And, and by the way, if you do need customer service help, whether that's one person or a team of people, that's good news. That means your business is growing. People are emailing you, they're asking you questions. Communication's always good. So this is a good problem to have and a good problem to solve. So we got a lot to cover. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So when do you know when to hire your first customer service agent? Well, in my experience, I found that if you're getting 20 to 30 emails a day, I say emails or support tickets, whatever you decide to use. But if you're just getting started and you're using like a support email for your help desk and you're getting 20 to 30 emails, that's a good time to start. Why? Because, you know tickets are gonna take you about five to 10 minutes, and if you're getting 20 to 30, that's about two hours a day of work, maybe even three, depending on how challenging each email is or each problem you're solving. And that's worth hiring for. I mean, as the leader of your company, spending two, three hours a day is a lot of time on support. I know. I've been there. Now, once you're hitting that mark, I would highly suggest start considering hiring somebody. Now, before you start looking for somebody, what you want to do is put some procedures in place. You want to document how you actually answer your tickets. Right now, how do you answer these emails? Are there some default responses that you can jot down and make a bank of default responses? Is there a certain way you like to greet your customers? How do you like to close your emails? Are there some things that you do every single time you get an email from a customer? Like check their account, see if they're active, check their billing, whatever it is, jotting these things down, making note of these things is going to make your life a whole lot easier when you make a hire. And we have to train them now, remember, we take for granted what we know. So you've been answering these emails for a while now, maybe, and you know your stuff inside and out. But when you hire somebody new, they know nothing about your company. They know nothing about your product or service. They got to learn from scratch, and they got to learn how to answer these questions and how to deal with customer service. One of the things we found very helpful is to write down what our goal is when it comes to the customer experience. Write down your goal. You want to make sure that your new agent, your new customer service person knows how to win in their job. So for us at Webinar Ninja, we make sure that every person we hire in customer service understands their job is to wow each customer. Every time you interact with any customer, you have to wow them with your service. You have to make them feel or say, this is the best customer service experience I've ever had with any software. That's the goal. Now, the reason why we have a goal like this is because we want to make sure people understand what the end goal is. And there's a lot of things that come into play to get to that end goal, including the way we address our customers, how polite we are, how friendly we are. The reason why we set up a goal like this is so we make it clear to our agents, to our customer support team that, hey, this is what we want every customer to experience. There's going to be different things that we have to do to get to that, you know, result, including how we address our customers, how friendly we are, how quickly we respond to them, how we actually solve their problem in a simple way, how we provide the right information and all the information they need. So I'd highly suggest to write down a goal for your team. I know you don't have anybody hired yet, but you have to say, hey, this is my goal for every time a customer interacts with me and my company through customer service. Now, when we made our first customer service hire at Webinar Ninja, it was Cindy. And Cindy now is one of our managers at customer service. But when we went through the hiring process, we got her to do a task. We got her to answer some fake emails, some typical emails that we would get from customers. There were about three or four of them. So before we even hired her, we gave her some tasks that she would have to deal with, and we gave her some resources to find the answers. Again, she's new to the company or she's not even part of the company yet. She's just interviewing for the job. She doesn't know anything about web on her ninja, we give her our FAQ page, We give her our actual website with all the sales copy, and we say all the answers to any of these questions are. Are on these pages. Now, her job is to find them, research them, and reply to the customer, the fake customer, in this case, in a way that wows the customer and gives the right response. I don't have to guess anymore. I can know if Cindy's a great hire or not because she's resourceful. She's looking at the actual answers. She's trying to find a most cohesive answer. She's linking up to the answers in her response. So when we saw that kind of result or those kind of answers to those questions, we knew she was a Great hire and we made the hire. And this is a great way to filter out people before you interview them. My co founder and partner in life and in business, Nicole, set up this great Google form where these typical customer service questions live. We put these fake questions and it's part of the form of applying for the job. We give them the resources and they give their answers right in the form so we can review the candidates answers in the form before we even schedule an interview. And really the interview just to make sure that they're normal, they're a great person to work with, that there is, you know, know a good match when it comes to culture and attitude. And the interview is just to make sure that everything is fine, that the person's normal, that they've their attitude matches our business culture and that they're a good fit. And luckily, Cindy was more than normal. She was sweet, she was fantastic. And we made the hire one of the best hires we've made in our company. Now we handed over everything that we knew, all those notes that we took about, you know, how to answer questions, all the, you know, the default responses to Cindy. And the first couple weeks we said, hey, if you have any questions, ask us on Slack. We use Slack to communicate as you're answering tickets. Now this is a little bit labor intensive for us at the start, but after that she gets used to it and she knows how to answer every ticket. Now one of her major tasks was not only to answer tickets but to document her procedure and to create a training program for our next hire. And this is why it's good to hire somebody. When you only have 20 to 30 tickets or emails a day, it's not a full day's work, but she's going to be working on something else or he's going to be working on something else. Building a training program for the next hire. And that includes understanding the product. So, you know, Cindy created a training program about how to use webinar Ninja, understanding our company, how we got started. She also created the training for the software we're going to be using for customer service. At the time it was Zendesk. It's always good to plan for the future because as your business grows, you're going to need to hire more customer service agents. So when you make that next hire, they're ready to go and there's a training plan ready to go. And recently when we were growing our team and Cindy became a manager, she started training two people at a time. When we were hiring people to be part of our Team. Now, I know you have questions like, where do I find these people to be customer service agents? Now, there's plenty of places to look. There's Freelancer.com, there's Upwork. There's a lot of great customer service talent in the Philippines. And if you want to check out onlinejobs. Ph. But the hardest part about growing a team is choosing the right candidates. And you're not always gonna choose the right candidates. I'm gonna tell you right now, the seven people we have on our team are not the only people we hired. We hired other people, but we had to let them go. They weren't a good fit. So I know that not every single hire is gonna be a lifelong hire. Sometimes they'll work out for a couple months and then you'll have to let them go because, hey, they can't cut the mustard or they are great for a year or two and they get another opportunity. That happens. That's why it's very important to pass on information to everybody. So anybody's ready to train anybody. So when it comes to hiring, you have a plethora of places to look. We have a plethora of episodes on the 100 MBA show about how to hire a new employee, the process of hiring a new employee, our whole sequence when we how we actually create our job description and these forms. We talked about Google forms as well as the interview process. So check out those episodes. Just search for them on itunes or on our show page. 100 MBA net show. Now, this leads me to tracking the progress of your new customer service agents. Now, what we do at Webinar Ninja is in their first year, we do three month evaluation. So every three months the agent has an evaluation with me and Nicole directly with the founders. We take a look at their performance, we take a look at how they're doing. And what we do is we do some sort of incentive or increment in their salary when they do exemplary work where they're doing outstandingly well. And this happens every three months for the first year. And after their first year, their evaluations are only six months apart. And then in their second year and every year after that, their evaluations are every six months instead of three. Now, these evaluations are also for them, for the employee to ask questions, to give feedback, to tell you how it's going with them, how they feel the job is going, but it's also for you to give feedback. And you're going to want to cultivate some information from maybe their manager or from some data that you have from your customer service software. How many tickets are closing? Their average response time? Maybe a satisfaction rating, something like that. Ask them what areas they feel they can improve. Where are they struggling the most? What's their biggest challenge? Sometimes a challenge has nothing to do with the actual job requirements, but more have to do with maybe working remotely or working from home. Keep that in mind. But if your agent is doing well overall, keep it positive, keep it upbeat, and make it conversational. Make sure they understand that this is an open conversation, a chance for everybody to kind of just give feedback and talk about how it's all going. And now by doing this every three months, you make sure everybody's on track. They understand what their goal is. You make sure they understand what wowing your customers mean in our case, and also gives you a chance to praise. Praising is so important when you're in this process of growing your team. You want to make sure everybody feels like they're valid and that their work is appreciated. And these evaluations are a great opportunity for that.

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A couple more tips when it comes to building your customer support team, it's really a good idea to promote somebody to a manager role or to hire a manager. When you get your team up to two to three agents, you're going to need somebody to manage the day to day management, make decisions on your behalf. The whole reason why you hired your first agent is so you can free yourself up and be a little bit free. You want to be able to get on a plane and not have to worry about answering tickets, right? You need somebody to make decisions for you and there's going to be some decisions at the start that you're going to have to make all the time. You want to delegate those decisions to somebody that understands your methodology, understands your decision making and can take on a managerial role. And this could be an internal promotion like what we did with Cindy. Or you can hire somebody from outside that has managerial experience. Now this person can answer tickets as well, can answer support emails, but have a lighter load because they're taking on managerial duties. And I do recommend, no matter how large your business becomes or how large your customer support team becomes, that you have your manager work on tickets. They need to understand the nature of your customers. Even if it's a lighter load, it's fine, but they need to be in there. They have to understand what the other agents are going through and what kind of questions are getting. The manager can also help you out with evaluations. Those, you know, three month evaluation, they can give you some data so they can tell you, hey, this is how this person's doing. This is what they did last month. This is what they're doing this month. The manager can also give you an overview of the whole team. This is what Cindy does. She gives us a great overview every month of customer service ranking, how quickly we're answering tickets, some great comments from our customers. This is extremely helpful for you to get a good snapshot of how you're doing with customer service, a huge part of your offering in business. All in all, I highly recommend you, you invest time and money in building a great support team. Customer support really is a differentiator when it comes to being competitive in your marketplace. You know, people can compete with price and features and all this other stuff, but at the end of the day, if your service is superior to your competitor, you win. You win the long game. Make customer support and service a priority. You have to make it a priority in your business and investing in building a great team is a great way to do that. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you loved it. I hope you found it useful. If you did, let us know in an iTunes rating and review. Just search us on iTunes $100 MBA and leave us a rating and review. If you want full Instructions, just go to100mba.net show and remember to hit subscribe on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. So you get all our episodes automatically. You'll find them right on your device and you don't have to chase them down. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you've built a great customer service team or you're building a great team, make it a part of your offering. Show it off. Let People know your support is awesome. We make this a big part of what people are getting when they buy Webinar Ninja. When they become a member of our service, we let them know, hey, our customer service reps, they're the best in the business. They're going to help you tremendously. They're not only going to help you with the software, they're going to make sure you win with webinars. And we have tons of great feedback and reviews from our current customers about our customer service, and we display that on our website. We say, hey, this is what people say about our service. People want to know that when they join a company, when they buy a product, that they're going to be taken care of. And if you can show that through your customer service, they can say, hey, this is a great choice. It's going to lower the risk and make them feel comfortable with making a purchase from you and not another person or another business or another competitor. You get the point. If you're working hard on building a great customer service team, show them off. They're amazing. They deserve it. And your customers need to know they're getting amazing service with your product. All right, guys, that wraps it up. I'll check you in. The next episode. Take care.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit? It finally is. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can.