How To Scale Customer Service Businesses.

As your small business grows, customer service & account management can be one of the harder elements to scale. For many small businesses there appears to only be two options, outsource customer service, or bring in a new member of staff. 

Scaling a High Touch Business 

If your business is a high touch business, requiring a lot of customer service, it’s vital that this part of your business is scalable. 

By putting the right tools and processes in place, you can make scaling your customer service team a painless process, enabling you to provide excellent personal support at every stage. 

You can ensure you maintain customer loyalty, and that you avoid damaging the customer experience, through turning your business into a support powerhouse. 

We’ve seen many ask about outsourcing this element of their business, especially solo entrepreneurs and small businesses, where one or two people are having to manage the entirety of the customer support function within the business. 

A recent and relatable example of this was a merchandise agency. Their team was small, as were their margins, but their industry was a high touch one. Not many customers were willing to purchase thousands of pounds of custom merchandise via a web shop, they wanted to speak to a person to ensure their requirements could be met. Whether it was asking about fabric weights or having designs checked, there was a LOT of customer service required. However, that customer service, lead to revenue, making it unavoidable and something they were keen to keep in-house. There are many business cases exactly like this, which is why today, I’m sharing 3 pillars to help scale your customer service before you make a new hire or start outsourcing.

Simplify

Simplifying your processes especially when it comes to repeatable tasks will help ensure you’re spending less time on each customer, without a decrease in the quality of service. There are a few effective and low cost ways you can simplify things.

1. 1. Canned responses or templates in place for frequently asked questions. Tweaking or personalising templates can drastically reduce the time spent on each customer without compromising on the amount of information you give them. Having canned responses lined up can be a great & simple way to speed up the process of responding to customers.

       

   2. Create Resources. Got a certain service or product that needs a lot of explaining? Create a guide for it. Send it if alongside the answers to their first question, and you potentially save yourself having to answer any follow-ups. If the guide is easy to find, you may even avoid the interaction, as the customer can self serve.

       

   3. Make it easy to self serve. Having a knowledge base is vital whatever industry you’re in, many customers would prefer to find information themselves, especially if they’re in a rush and don’t want to wait on email responses. With this in mind, ensure you have a knowledge base, and that it’s easy to find, put it in your main menu on your website and in the footer of emails. Make self service a breeze, and save yourself and your team time answering questions.

       

   4. Make frequently asked questions, calls to action. If you’re getting asked the same thing a lot, make it easier for customers to resolve this themselves. For example if you’re being asked for sample products everyday, maybe have a button for people to order samples right on the home page or the product page. Make it easy for customers and they won’t need your help. Great user experience is everything, and it doesn’t need to be complicated.

       

   5. Everything is a process. Make everything you do in your business a process, as soon as you can map out the process you can assess ways to simplify it, or ways it can be automated. Process mapping is invaluable, and doesn’t cost a thing.

Automate

Once things are simplified you can then look at ways to automate things, removing yourself and your team from needing to manually manage processes. There are a few simple low cost ways you can automate things.

 

1. 1. Use chatbots. Using platforms like Tidio.com you can easily setup a workflow or automation rules for a chatbot, allowing your customers to get questions fast without having to hunt through a long list of FAQ’s. This can be much lower cost than you’d expect and can save hours if you’re able to automate the question answering of some of your most common questions. You can even have live chat alongside this, again helping to enable your customers to get answers fast. More efficient customer service, can also be better customer service.
      
   2. Set up rules & workflows. Whether it’s in your emails, helpdesk software or overall business structure rules and workflows allow for speed and scalability. It could be that you create a form that automatically calculates pricing for your customers, rather than manually quoting them. You may set up a rule that guides all customers with a specific question to a specific page or area of your knowledge base. Whatever it is, rules and workflows ensure efficient processes that can work at scale.

       

   3. Let your customers generate your answers for you. Software companies are very good at this. Colorlib have a great example of this being done right, they provide wordpress themes (among other services), and have a support forum for customers to ask questions. On many occasions you can find answers being given by others in the community, alongside Colorlib staff. This also comes with the additional benefit that customers can browse through other peoples questions to find answers for their own problems. This is essentially a knowledge base built by your customers, with customers also helping to answer each others questions. If you can build a tight knit community that want to help each other, you not only make customer service easier, but you increase brand loyalty.

Outsource

Once you’ve simplified everything as much as possible and automated the tasks that can be automated, the next step is to outsource where possible. There are a number of elements you can outsource at a relatively low cost before you go all in on outsourcing your customer service, or bringing in a new hire. Here’s a few things we’d advise outsourcing before your customer service:

1. Anything you can’t do exceptionally well. As a general rule, if you’re bad at it, you’re likely better giving the job to someone who knows what they’re doing. Even if they don’t understand everything about your business, they’ll still likely do a better job at it if it’s in their remit. A good example of this is marketing; freelance marketers and agencies may not know the in’s and out’s of your business, but they will likely have a good idea of how to attract your ideal customers onto your website. That’s money well spent, and one less job for you and your team to be focussing on.
   
2. Web Development. If you’re not a pro at building and maintaining websites, yet it acts as the first thing your customers see, it’s worth hiring a pro. With  globalised world and offshoring easily available you can send tasks like this overseas and get good results for a fairly low price.

    

3. Marketing. Whether it’s blog writing, SEO or PPC campaigns, these all need to be regularly managed and maintained. Marketing is one of the most important business functions, as it’s this which drives customers to your website, and encourages them to purchase your products or services. With that in mind, it’s worth investing in this where you can. It’ll help you then be able to focus on the bigger picture, to grow your small business.
   
4. Blog writing service. This can be very time consuming, and if you know nothing about SEO and inbound content marketing you may be better off handing this over to a team of professionals. While we could write all day about the business and SEO benefits to blogging, one of the often hidden benefits is the fact it can help reduce your customer service costs and time. If you’re able to answer questions your customers are asking in the format of blog posts, they’ll not only find you while searching for answers to these problems in Google, but you may also avoid customers emailing you that very question you’ve answered. If you do get emailed a question that your blog has the answer to, you can point them in the direction of a well written blog post that covers everything they may need to know – meaning you don’t have to write as much and your customer gets lots of information. If using a blog writing service like ours outsourcing this can be super easy and economical.
   
5. Design work. Great design creates trust, and conveys your message to your target audience. Combined with great marketing this is another vital part of your business. Most first impressions are made on a visual basis, so if your marketing collateral or your website doesn’t look the part, you’re not going to be off to a great start. This is another vital business function that’s worth outsourcing early on if you’re not a designer or don’t have an in-house designer.

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Making customer service a priority is crucial to getting it right at the start of your business, and when done well, scaling the customer experience within your business can save you time and money by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty rates. Maintaining high quality services will only help your businesses as they grow. Make sure you don’t lose sight of the value of a strong customer service team and make it easy for them to deliver great service through simplifying, automating, and outsourcing.