How can I scale my customer support operations whilst maintaining my team’s productivity, performance level, service quality… oh, and keep it all within budget?
For any customer support manager of a growing company, this is a question they have asked themselves more than once when trying to expand their teams’ operations.
So what’s the answer?
Whilst there are a number of different approaches any support team can take when scaling their operations, what it comes down to, is whether you need to expand in-house or outsource your growth.
Both options have their pros & cons and there is no single correct answer. It depends on a number of objective factors, both with their own challenges.
These include:
- Maintaining service quality and team performance
- Employee churn
- Cost of expansion
- Operational capacity
Kaizo’s approach to scaling
Whether your support team decides to scale in-house or outsource externally, the key to scaling successfully comes down to maximizing your operational capacity whilst continually improving your service quality. Simply put, doing more with less and doing it well.
Our bottom-up approach to scaling focuses on empowering agents to make a greater impact on their company from the moment they are hired to the moment they leave the company. Kaizo helps teams:
- Save time and resources on onboarding/training with agent self-management
- Ensure growing teams maintain a high level of service aligned with company KPIs with an integrated QA system
- Retain regular insights into team performance in real-time with the Scorecard
- Reduce employee turnover by creating an engaging, motivating and interactive digital work environment
Outsourced scaling
When someone says ‘outsourced customer support’, what image comes to mind? Most likely an outdated call center filled with tiny cubicles and a vintage desktop with Windows 95′ software.
This isn’t always the case anymore. Outsourcing customer support is actually one of the more desirable and lucrative ways to scale your customer support operations. It’s cost-effective, saves support managers time and administrative efforts, and allows customer support to stay aligned with the rapid growth of the business.
However, that’s not too say it doesn’t pose a number of issues, such as:
- Maintaining service quality and team performance
- Employee churn
How Kaizo can help scale your outsourced team
Maintaining service quality and team performance
A common issue whilst scaling through an outsourced service provider is ensuring that your external team is performing to the company standard and providing the quality of service that is expected to your customers.
Factors like varying location and timezones, pose as restrictions for customer support managers to stay in control of their team, leaving a significant amount of uncertainty for managers as they bestow trust on the appointed leader of their outsourced team.
Scorecard
Scorecard that provides a list of 50+ metrics giving actionable insights into each agent’s performance.
The Scorecard allows managers to see, in real-time, all of their agents’ performance no matter where they are situated. This ensures that there is no-miscommunication between in-house and outsourced team leads and ensures that the customer support manager can maintain control and monitor their team’s performance from anywhere, at any time.
Internal QA
To confirm that their outsourced team’s quality of service is of a high standard, managers can utilize Kaizo’s full integrated QA system.
Managers can set their own customizable quality criteria to align with their company goals and implement routine QA procedures within their outsourced team to ensure their company’s service quality is uniform both in-house and externally.
Employee churn
Perhaps the greatest challenge when it comes to outsourcing your support team’s growth is the high rate of employee churn amongst call centers. Research suggests that whilst the employee turnover rate for outsourced customer service centers is dropping each year, in 2019 it still stood at a significant 30%. For managers trying to scale their operations, employee retention is crucial in ensuring sustainable growth and minimizing continual onboarding and training costs.
To understand how to combat call center employee churn, you need to understand the main reasons these employees leave their jobs. These reasons include:
- Lack of engagement with job
- No opportunity for career development
- Absence of purpose and autonomy
- Lack of workplace happiness
In-game experience
Kaizo’s platform takes a bottom-up approach (like always) to ensuring a company not only retains its employees but that these employees are engaged and high-performing. Kaizo provides an in-game experience that engages agents with their work, allowing them to self-manage their goals and quantify their impact on the company both remotely and in-house. This gamified work experience ensures that agents are more fulfilled in their roles, can pilot their own career development, and hence are more likely to stay within the company.
In-house scaling
In-house scalingIn recent times, there has been a noticeable increase in companies scaling their support operations internally.
There are a number of benefits a team stands to gain from scaling their support in-house. Teams are able to communicate directly with the rest of the company and they are often are more thoroughly educated on the company values and product/service they provide.
However, in-house scaling also poses a number of issues including:
- Cost of expansion
- Operational capacity
How Kaizo can help scale your in-house team
Cost of expansion & Operational capacity
One of the biggest challenges when scaling your team internally is the cost, both financially and time-wise. Scaling in-house often affects the operational capacity of managers and team leads as they need to spend a lot of their time [micro] managing their staff when their resources could often be better used elsewhere.
Kaizo has pioneered the idea of self-management for support agents to minimize these financial and time costs for managers. Our app shifts away from micro-management and allows agents to utilize their own time for self-improvement, allowing managers to focus their resources elsewhere.
Assessment week
From the onset, Kaizo saves managers hours on onboarding with our self-onboarding assessment week. This an intuitive 7-day course within the product that teaches agents (without any need for manager’s input) how to optimize their use of the app to develop their support skills, self-manage and provide a continually improving level of service on behalf of their company.
Personal goal-setting
Once agents have passed their assessment week, they are on-boarded, in-app, on Dojo freeing up time and resources for managers to utilize in other areas.
Kaizo helps 100’s of customer support teams around the world scale their operations. See how Kaizo we can help your team grow!
