How do you scale great customer service without blowing the budget or killing the quality of the customer experience?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an age-old question for anyone leading a customer support<\/a> organization, the sort of challenge that requires continuous innovation as a company and its customer base expands.<\/p>\n With more than 25,000 customers and over 90 people on the Customer Support team, we\u2019ve come a long way from the team of just nine when we first shared a blog post<\/a> on using Intercom to support our customers. Our belief in a modern support model will never change, but we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on how best to scale<\/a> our support department.<\/p>\n “There is more to scaling up than just machine learning and bots”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A key part of our conversational support strategy<\/a> revolves around automation, but there is more to scaling up than just machine learning and bots. Here\u2019s a look at how we have managed it and how you can too.<\/p>\n When companies face the prospect of supporting rapidly increasing numbers of customers, they are faced with three fundamental choices:<\/p>\n This option brings the benefit of maintaining a top notch level of service, but it also comes at a hefty financial and operational cost.<\/p>\n This option relies on tactics like no-reply email addresses and endless wait-times, without taking a strategic approach to prioritization. It is cost effective in the short term but understandably unpopular with customers \u2013 and it is potentially detrimental in the long run due to its impact on customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and employee retention.<\/p>\n Clearly, the first two options have serious pitfalls. Luckily there is a third option. It includes using real-time automation with bots, strategies to drive customer self-service<\/a>, and customer prioritization, alongside reasonably paced hiring.<\/p>\n This approach to scaling customer support, however, is tough to get right as it requires an excellent set of tools, intelligent experimentation and a fair amount of cross-functional partnership.<\/p>\n In scaling up our own customer support team, we have aimed for that third option, an intelligent combination of approaches rather than throwing money at the problem or letting our standards slide. We\u2019re using our own product solutions, of course, but I believe this balance of strategies can be adopted by any company facing the scaling challenge.<\/p>\n Here’s how you can scale customer support without ballooning your headcount or sacrificing your customer experience:<\/p>\n The foundation for modern, scalable customer support is automation<\/a>. At Intercom, we look for ways to automate responses to common questions and routing customers to the right team for support, using customer service chatbots<\/a>.<\/p>\n While it might seem like the use of bots is a less personal experience, in reality chatbots can powerfully augment a great customer support team and allow your team to focus on moments where a personal human touch really matters.<\/p>\n The primary chatbot in our toolbox is Resolution Bot<\/a>, which automatically resolves customers\u2019 most common questions in real time. We\u2019ve found that on average, Resolution Bot instantly resolves 33% of your customers\u2019 most common queries and improves customer response time by 44%.<\/p>\nYour options for scaling customer support<\/h2>\n
1. Increase headcount to support customer growth<\/h3>\n
2. Degrade the support experience<\/h3>\n
3. Launch intelligent and cost-effective solutions that complement your customer experience<\/h3>\n
How to scale your customer support<\/h2>\n
1. Embrace automation to strategically free up your team’s time<\/h3>\n
Using bots to automatically resolve questions<\/h4>\n