Setting up support tiers

Structuring your enterprise customer support team

As your enterprise scales up, you also need to set up your customer support team for success. Structuring the team effectively contributes a great deal in delivering great customer experience amidst the continuous changes that come along with the scale up. Structuring your customer support team starts with identifying the needs of your organization and possible circumstances.

For instance, you need to identify the kind of issues your customers might have, volume of conversations your support agents might need to handle on a given day, etc. A strong understanding of your situation, acts as a starting point to set expectations, define roles and responsibilities, and tier your support team based on the specific aspects they will be supporting.

Why should you tier your customer support team

As the number of support requests grow, you need to take a strategic approach to addressing the needs of your customer. As the complexities of each support request tends to vary, you need to streamline the process for handling different kinds of tickets. In other words, you need to match the requests to the expertise of your support agents, and also at the same time ensure the agents aren’t overloaded. This is where creating customer support tier really helps. Tiers refers to categorizing support agents based on the kind of issues/requests they would be handling. Creating tiers for customer support such as L1, L2 and L3 helps supports agents to divide and conquer, improve the speed in resolving issues, and also build expertise on the go.

Role of support agents in each tier

L1 Support

Support agents in this tier are usually the first point of contact for a customer. These agents typically handle most general support tickets related to your product, ranging from helping your customer in setting up your product to billing issues and more. A rule of the thumb to classify a support request for the L1 category is it can be resolved quickly. To improve the efficiency, you can set up a process where all the requests falling in this category can be assigned to the support agents based on their expertise and the load of requests they are handling at any given point in time.

L2 Support

Support requests that tend to take more than 15 mins to handle are moved from L1 to L2. The team members in this category tend to have a deeper understanding of your product in terms of its technicalities. The kind of issues moved to this category typically include integration issues, issues related to data upload, etc.

L3 Support

The support agents in this category tend to have the highest level of technical expertise with abilities to handle the toughest of issues. Support requests in this category are generally one-off issues and might not carry a time limit for resolution of the issue. The issues assigned to this team can also occasionally be escalated to the software development team, before they resolve the issue for the customer.

Next topic- Single point experience - an advisor for your enterprise customer

What next?

Should you use pseudo names for your customer support reps?

Pseudo names refer to the usage of “alias” names, usually used to protect the identity of your customer support agent. Pseudo names have a direct impact on how transparent your organization is considered by your customers.