Well-implemented customer support operations are always valuable when developing and expanding.
A company must be prepared to provide customer support when and how required to keep and gain clients.
In this blog post, I will walk you through the importance of customer support operations personnel in improving your support team.
What are support operations?
Support operations are the environment, strategies, policies, and standards needed to meet the expectations of customers seeking support in interacting with a company or its products.
A team dedicated to support operations keeps track of and updates processes, rules, and technologies related to the functioning of the company’s support system.
When do you need customer support operations team?
Companies might need a customer support operations team under several circumstances. Following are some scenarios.
Scaling to manage a high volume of customer requests
When a company experiences a high volume of customer inquiries, it can become challenging to maintain service quality and response times without a dedicated operations team.
This team can implement processes, oversee workflow automation, and ensure that the infrastructure is in place to handle large numbers of tickets efficiently.
Expanding to new markets
As companies expand into new geographical markets or launch new products, they encounter customers with different languages, cultures, and support expectations.
A customer support operations team can help adapt their support strategies to meet these new demands, ensuring that all customers receive high-quality service regardless of their location or the product they use.
Implementing new support technologies and channels
Implementing new customer service technologies, like customer relationship management systems, requires a team that can manage the transition, train staff, and optimize the use of these technologies.
Furthermore, the addition of new support channels such as social media will need a customer support operations team to integrate these channels into the existing support ecosystem.
This team can facilitate training, design workflows, and monitor the effectiveness of these tools.
Scaling operations to meet growth
When a company is scaling rapidly, it can quickly outgrow its initial customer support setup.
A customer support operations team is needed to manage this growth on the support side, ensuring that the infrastructure, processes, and workforce can handle the higher volume without sacrificing quality.
It can streamline processes, implement new technologies, and ensure that the support team grows in a way that is sustainable and maintains high standards of service.
In crisis management
In the event of a product recall, security breach, or PR crisis, a support operations team can devise protocols for ramping up quickly to manage increased call volumes and provide clear, consistent information to customers.
In these and other situations, a customer support operations team can provide the backbone for a company’s customer service strategy, ensuring that customers receive timely, helpful, and satisfying support interactions.
What do customer support operations managers do?
Customer support operations managers play a critical role in ensuring that a company provides good customer support. While the specific duties of support operations can differ based on the company’s size and industry, common tasks are typically:
- Overseeing the customer support operations team.
- Developing and implementing strategies to improve service quality, response times, and customer satisfaction.
- Tracking customer service performance metrics.
- Designing protocols for escalation management and service-level agreement (SLA) violations.
- Collaborating with product development teams to understand and provide feedback on how product changes affect the customer service department.
- Providing guidance to staff for continuous improvement.
- Analyzing customer feedback to identify customer pain points.
- Contributing to the design and implementation of technological tools and platforms like help desk software to facilitate better customer interactions.
- Analyzing data and reports on support operations to identify trends, and pinpointing areas for improvement.
By continuously refining processes and integrating customer insights into broader business strategies, support operations managers bridge the gap between a company’s offerings and its customers’ needs, working toward a seamless and satisfactory customer experience.
Why are customer support operations important?
Customer support operations are critical to the governance and management of the customer support team.
The following are some of the key roles that support operations play in a customer service team.
Aiding in consumer retention
According to a study by Zippia, 93% of customers are likely to repeat purchasing from a company after experiencing excellent customer service.
Another Forbes study revealed that 96% of customers typically leave a business if their demands are not addressed.
Therefore, customers become more devoted to your business when your customer support system is well designed by the operations team and well implemented by a trained workforce.
The more devoted your customers are, the more your firm may grow to its full potential.
For example, if your customer service team has a streamlined process in place that allows quick and easy returns, you are more likely to retain customers and build a loyal customer base that appreciates your no-hassle policy and smooth implementation of it.
Increasing employee retention
Employees like to work for organizations that make their jobs easier to perform well.
Therefore, when your organization has strategically planned customer support operations, your staff will be more comfortable and confident doing their jobs.
They have all the technology and training they need, plus the reassurance of support from the operations team if a unique issue presents itself.
Carefully planned and managed customer support operations encourage your employees to stay with your company and fully commit to their careers.
Producing recommendations
Having a good customer service system keeps your customers satisfied. This results in positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations from current and former clients who have enjoyed working with your business.
Their connections are then inspired to make a purchase from you. The most effective and affordable type of marketing for a business is often the expression of positive opinions by your customers.
Competitive advantage
Great customer service through customer support planning, like proactive customer outreach, helps bring in new customers and keep old ones.
Moreover, it sets you apart from your competition. By having a customer operations team making strategic moves, you can improve your company’s reputation.
You prove by example that you care about the individuals who buy your products by offering best-in-class customer service.
How does BoldDesk facilitate support operations?
BoldDesk is modern, cloud-based help desk ticketing software that can handle a variety of customer support tasks.
It helps you manage support requests, collaborate with customers and teammates, automate repetitive tasks, and improve overall customer satisfaction through enhanced customer support operations.
Robust help desk software
The BoldDesk help desk is a tool used by organizations to manage support tickets, optimize agents’ efforts, and improve performance with the help of analytics to achieve efficient customer service.
Within a single platform, it offers a smooth ticket management solution to handle customer inquiries through email, thus streamlining the support process.
Efficient ticketing system workflows
BoldDesk’s ticketing system tracks and handles customer concerns as tickets. The ticketing system functions by converting issues raised by consumers through emails into tickets.
The created tickets are categorized based on the urgency and type of issue, and then they are assigned to appropriate agents or groups to resolve.
Using the BoldDesk ticketing system, your customer operations team can far more easily set up workflows for common and specialized issues, ensuring those issues are assigned to the proper department, resource, or agent.
Automation capabilities
Certainly, automating some of your workflows and processes can help you iron out inconsistencies and gaps, thus allowing your team to focus on its core responsibilities. This lightens the load for the people planning these processes.
BoldDesk provides you with other features that streamline support processes:
- Use no-code automation to create a business-specific operation workflow. It performs recurring manual tasks at each stage of the ticket lifecycle, thus saving you time at work.
- Use service level agreements (SLAs) to set response and resolution times for your tickets automatically.
- Create automated rules to perform a predefined set of actions when an existing ticket is updated based on selected criteria.
- Use webhooks to notify and transfer real-time data automatically between a help desk and external tools when certain event occurs.
- Send an email to the support team informing them of SLA breaches and the stipulated time remaining.
Insightful reporting and analytics
BoldDesk uses built-in reports and dashboards to gather insightful real-time data and display it in useful metrics. Reports with these metrics can be used by support operations managers and development teams to assess the health of the support system quickly.
The following are some of the example reports and dashboards that can be created in BoldDesk to help in support management:
- Support traffic dashboard: A dashboard that tracks the current status of support tickets.
- Support monitoring dashboard: This dashboard is helpful in tracking and analyzing the inflow of tickets over time.
- Satisfaction survey report: This report tracks and analyzes ticket response ratings as they are submitted by customers.
- Worklog report: This report tracks the total time spent on each ticket by agents.
- Conversation report: This report allows you to review ticket updates.
- SLA dashboard: The SLA dashboard provides insight into how a team has been meeting SLA policies.
- Agent performance dashboard: This report tracks and analyzes the performance of the agents and groups.
- Contact performance dashboard: This dashboard tracks and analyzes tickets and updates made on them by agents and customers.
Elevate customer experiences with refined customer support operations
In summary, customer support operations serve to organize your support process and increase customer satisfaction.
Try Syncfusion’s BoldDesk to see how you can better your customer support operations with a sophisticated help desk.
Contact us to schedule a live demo to experience BoldDesk’s features first hand. Or, sign up for a 15-day free trial to gain instant access, today!
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