Customer Support Team Structure: How to Build a Customer Support Operation

Providing great Customer Support to your customers should be of high priority.

After all, your customers need you the most in those moments when they require customer support.

These moments create the perfect opportunity to wow your customers and earn their trust with outstanding customer support.

The best way to do this is by structuring your customer team correctly. This way, you’d be better positioned to tackle any issue your customers might run into efficiently and quickly.

Today, we will go over our best tips for structuring a Customer Support team that is set for success.

Establish Support KPIs and Standards

Before getting started, you’ll want to consider which KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators) you will want to track and benchmark within your team.

After all, it’s quite hard to know what is and isn’t working in your team if you’re not tracking and analyzing certain indicators or metrics.

How quickly is your team closing support tickets? How many tickets are being re-opened due to poor resolutions?

These insights can help identify problem areas and shift your strategies on the fly to better serve your customers.

Want to get started with KPIs? Read our guide on Customer Support KPIs and how to calculate them.

Hire the Right People

This one is easier said than done.

But hiring the right people for your support team can make a huge difference for the team’s performance.

After all, one under-performing employee can do much more damage to your team and company than you’d think.

We also know that interviewing and training potential employees can be a long process. So you might want to do it right from the very beginning.

As a result, we’ve put together a guide on the best Customer Support interview questions to find the proper candidate.

Hire the Right Number of Reps

Now that you’ve found a good pool of candidates, how many of them should you hire?

In most cases, the answer can be found by using simple math.

All you need to know is the size of your customer base, the growth rate of your business and some of the KPI benchmarks which we mentioned before (at this point, you should know what KPIs you’re looking to achieve!)

You can then easily calculate how many Customer Support representatives you need.

Want to learn more? Read about how to calculate the right number of support agents for your company.

Create Sub Teams with Specialized Skillsets

Next up, you’ll want to make sure you create sub-teams within your team to tackle different kinds of issues.

This might look drastically different for each company, but for example you might want to separate your team into customer support (deals with order and account issues) and technical support (deals with more technical product issues such as repairs).

This allows both teams to specialize in processes that are unique to solving the issues they handle. This will be especially beneficial for businesses with complex product and service offerings.

Want to learn more? Read our guide on the differences between Customer Support and Technical Support.

Choose the Right Customer Support Model

Next up, you’ll want to make sure to choose a Customer Support model for your team.

Will you go for a call center? Maybe introduce a self-service strategy?

In most cases, it might make more sense to go for digital solutions.

Luckily, we’ve put together an in-depth guide on all the different types of support models and their pros and cons.

Closing Thoughts

At this point, you will be ready to build a Customer Team that is set for success!

However, you need to remember to track and re-tune your KPIs periodically. After all, your userbase and your company needs will change over time.

Are you ready to get started?