You should not immediately introduce a 24/7 support format. If the number of requests at night is small, this will entail unnecessary expenses. With a normal daytime work schedule, you can get by with 1-2 specialists. If the customer support phone is active at night, you will have to attract an additional 3-4 employees.
Remember that there are real people working in the support service. If you only hire one person to work night shifts, they are unlikely to work for long. No one wants to constantly answer calls at a time when most people are sleeping. In addition, night hours are paid at a higher rate, so the corresponding costs must be taken into account in the budget.
As the number of staff in the support service grows, it becomes necessary to assign an employee who will be responsible for organizing its work, drawing up shift schedules, training and retraining support specialists, and processing and systematizing the results of reviewing requests.
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Step 4: Set up KPIs and a motivation system
For the support service to work productively, it is necessary to establish a system of performance indicators and organize such working conditions under which they can be actually fulfilled. It is necessary to determine which KPI criteria are important for a specific business. This could be waiting time, the number of requests reviewed.
It would be useful to use such an indicator as CSI (customer satisfaction index). It is necessary to request feedback from the consumer and find out whether he was satisfied with the quality of support. This technique helps to understand which moments negatively affect loyalty and to eliminate the identified problems. In particular, a striking example could be the inability to call customer support during the day for a consumer from another time zone. When it is 13:00 in Sakhalin, it is already 21:00 in Moscow. Clients from the Far East will probably complain that they have to communicate with SP only in the morning.
Motivation measures for support service employees do not necessarily have to be expressed in monetary incentives; bonuses can be provided in other ways. In any case, special attention should be paid to creating comfortable working conditions.
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Step 5: Develop a policy for handling requests by support staff
Customers call SP with a variety of questions. Some are interested in how to correctly fill out an order form on the website, while others are interested in the meaning of some indicator on a device. It is difficult for one person to embrace the immensity and answer all the questions.
If the support service employs more than two specialists, then the regulations should indicate who to contact for which issues. At the very beginning, it is necessary to clearly define how to build interaction between the SP and other departments of the company. Assign responsible persons and indicate them in the regulations.
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