Three easy steps to scale Customer Support Operations in 2024
In today’s competitive business environment, driving continuous growth by scaling up is key to success. In fact, “grow to survive” is a better description of today’s business environment. This is especially true for Enterprise SaaS, where slow growth or stagnation – either due to lack of customer acquisition, revenue growth or via churn or downsell are often viewed as predictors of poor performance and eventual downfall. This may sound dramatic, but if stock market valuations of public Enterprise SaaS companies in 2023 are any indicators, this is not too far from the truth!
On the other hand, businesses that scale up successfully, are rewarded handsomely – via revenue, profitability, and high stock market valuations. Thus, to drive growth, business leaders are constantly looking to scale up cross-functionally. Customer support is a particularly important area as it is often the first customer touchpoint post-sales.
Firstly, what does it mean to scale customer support operations?
Scaling support operations means growing, expanding and optimizing resources, perfecting processes and adopting automation tools and technology, and doing so in a manner that helps the business go from a small entity to a large one. To summarize, the three key areas drive scale are,
People – This involves the C-suite, support operations leaders as well and frontline support representatives. Leaders need to understand the key needs for customer support and how the frontline support team fits into it. They need to embrace technology and process changes and establish the right KPIs to achieve scale. They need to help staff up, train and equip frontline teams accordingly.
Processes – Support operations are highly process driven. To scale up, organizations need to be open to adapt and change processes to scale up.
Technology - Support teams constantly need to have the right tools at their disposal, whether it’s centralized knowledge bases, CRM systems, support automation platforms, self-service tools, GenAI self-service bots, etc. With the right tools organizations can empower support teams to scale up rapidly and cost effectively.
All of the above need to operate in tandem to scale up successfully. Tools and technologies like IrisAgent AI Support Automation Platform tie these together for optimal outcomes that we discuss in the next section.
Three easy steps for scaling customer support operations
Great customer experiences keep customers coming back but just one bad experience can send customers to a competitor. The good news – tools and technologies exist that can help deliver awesome customer experiences. IrisAgent team has deployed the IrisAgent AI-powered Support Automation Platform for customers large and small and have seen the following three steps work best with highest impact to scaling support operations
Step I - Deploy GenAI Self-service bots to helping customers help themselves
According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of all customers attempt to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to a live representative - across industries.. Thanks to ChatGPT, customers are very willing to engage with bots as long as the bots are accurate and respond in a human-like manner. A CX Trends report for 2024 by Zendesk confirms that 70% of CX leaders thus plan to incorporate generative AI technologies for customer service. IrisGPT – tailored for enterprise support can easily help you get started. Read our detailed article on how to use Generative AI and IrisGPT - Deploying GenAI chatbots in fact has gotten so easy that this single step delivers very effective self-service - thereby helping save cost, scale up and keep customers happy! A free deployment of IrisGPT is available here as well.
Step 2: Implement Agent Assist - Improving Agent Enablement
“Happy Agents leads to Happy Customers” - simple but true! Scaling a support team means empowering support agents with the right tools they need to feel enabled to do their jobs the best way possible. AI for customer support can help improve agent lives and create a better CX as support leaders look to scale support automation. Irisgent provides Agent Assist right inside CRM tools – Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom and more.
Step 3: Use automated tagging for efficient workflows
As leaders look to scale up support operations, easy to solve tasks are often automated and more complex tasks or issues thus ghetto agents and from there on to more experienced subject matter experts in engineering or DevOps. IrisAgent recognized that this needs efficient triaging and end-to-end integrated workflows between front office and back office functions. Infact, IrisAgent is truly unique in helping connect Engineering and DevOps to front office functions via automated workflows.
Automated tagging for intent and helping configure workflows to connect the right people and processes is a key step in ensuring the fastest and most accurate response to customer issues. Fortunately, IrisAgent makes this highly configurable. A recent article by Palak Dalal Bhatia - CEO at IrisAgent explains this in detail.
Scaling Your CX With IrisAgent
As daunting it is to scale customer support while maintaining a great customer experience, it’s not impossible. With the right tools at your fingertips, you can succeed in meeting customer expectations at a consistently high level all while enabling your agents to do more and do it well.
IrisAgent can be one of the many tools used to improve your CX offering and improve your agent experience.
Interested in learning more about IrisAgent for customer support? Contact us today.
