How to get from Zero to One Customer Support People

When starting a company, roles like sales, marketing, development, and account management are typically well-defined. However, customer support often lacks its own dedicated role, with responsibilities falling to the account manager, an intern, or even the founder.

As customer support requests pile up, employees often become frustrated, feeling it's outside their role. This frustration ultimately impacts the customer experience. To avoid this, thinking early about who and how your customers are supported is crucial to your success.

Here are some practical tips for when transitioning from handling support yourself to bringing on your first dedicated support person. These tips, from experience, will help you build a strong foundation and help you keep more customers happy.

Hire the Right Person

Sounds obvious but when hiring your first support team member, look beyond just technical skills. Seek someone who embodies your company's values, who loves the challenge of working for a growing company and has excellent communication abilities. The ideal candidate should be:

Empathetic and patient
A quick learner with strong problem-solving skills
Adaptable and comfortable with change
Passionate about helping customers succeed

Remember, this person will often be the primary point of contact for your customers, so their attitude and approach needs to align with your company.

Foster a Customer-Centric Culture

As you grow your support team, it's more important than ever to maintain a customer-centric culture across your entire organisation. Encourage all team members, regardless of their role, to:

Spend time interacting with customers
Share customer feedback and insights
Contribute to improving the customer experience

This approach ensures that customer needs remain at the forefront of your product development, customer touchpoints and business decisions.

Establish Clear Processes

Before bringing someone on board, document your existing support processes. This will help your new hire get up to speed quickly, ensure consistency for your customers and allow your new employee to identify areas for improvement easier. Key areas to focus on include:

Measures of success
What is expected of the support team. Outlines key performance metrics, why they are important and how they are currently being worked towards.
Ticket Management
Define how support requests should be prioritised, categorised, and escalated. Establish goals for different types of inquiries.
Knowledge Base
Start building a comprehensive internal knowledge base. This should include product information, common issues and their solutions, and company policies.
Communication Guidelines
Establish clear guidelines for tone and style in customer communications.
Give access to the right tools
Trust your support team to do the right thing. By giving access to all the information and tools they need they can better support your customers. Avoid being a gatekeeper to things like searching the database, refunds and exchanges.

Implement the Right Tools

Investing in the right support tools from the start can significantly improve efficiency and scalability. The right tool for one may not be for another so think about your customers and how they want to be supported before making any decisions. Typical tools include:

A robust help desk system for ticket management (Hubspot, Intercom, Zendesk etc.)
Live chat software for real-time support
A knowledge base platform for self-service options
Customer feedback tools to gather insights (something like DolphinAI where all your customer feedback can be analysed in one place)

Choose tools that integrate well with each other and your existing systems.

Focus on Self-Service

Empower customers to find answers on their own by creating a comprehensive self-service knowledge base. This not only reduces the workload on your support team but also can improve customer satisfaction. Typically these are:

Detailed product guides and FAQs
Video tutorials
Troubleshooting steps for common issues
Chat bots linked to your own knowledge base

Regularly update this content based on customer feedback, support trends and product updates.

“81% of all customers attempt to take care of themselves” (Harvard Business Review)

Emphasise Proactive Support

Train and empower your support team to identify potential issues before they become problems. This might involve:

Monitoring product usage patterns
Reaching out to customers who haven't logged in recently
Providing tips and best practices to help customers get more value from your product

Proactive support can significantly improve customer retention and satisfaction.

Measure and Analyze Performance

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the effectiveness of your support efforts. The KPIs must reflect what your customers expect. Some important metrics to consider include:

First response time
Resolution time
Customer effort scores
Customer satisfaction scores
Self-service success rate

Regularly review these metrics with your support person and use the insights to continually improve your processes.

Stay Agile and Iterate

The needs of your customers and your business will evolve as you grow. Regularly reassess your support processes and tools, and be prepared to make changes as needed. Encourage your support person to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement based on their day-to-day experiences.

By following these tips, you'll be well-positioned to build a strong foundation for your customer support team. Remember, excellent customer support is not just about resolving issues—it's about creating positive experiences that turn customers into loyal advocates for your brand.

If you are looking to go from zero to one support person then please reach out. Book a call or DM me and I am happy to advise.