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This is the third in a series of blog posts that we will be releasing. It’s geared towards founders who are trying to set up a ticketing system for their business.
Now that you know how to measure the performance of your support team, it’s time to talk about who is on the team. You should not have a dedicated support team at this stage, so who handles your support tickets?
The short answer is everyone at this point.
Since you don’t have a dedicated team handling support, it’s especially important to be disciplined in how you’re handling support so that it doesn’t become a hot mess with no one to clean it up.
To organize your team around support, you need to know:
- what are the jobs to be done by support
- how should we coordinate our work
- when should we hire our first dedicated support role
🔨 Job to be done
Your goal at this stage is to understand your customers’ pain points and needs and get them through those as painlessly and easily as possible. The jobs that you will need to do to accomplish these goals fall into two categories: reactive tasks and proactive tasks.
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The underlying jobs to be done are:
- reactive tasks:
- respond to tickets
- solve tickets as quickly as possible
- proactive tasks:
- talk to your customers regularly about their pain points
- analyze how your customers use your product to accomplish their jobs to be done
- distill your learnings
- share what you learn with your product and engineering, sales, and leadership teams
- find ways to help your customers get more out of your current product
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Reactive tasks take precedence over proactive tasks, but you should keep the proactive tasks in mind since you can often get the information you need for proactive tasks much more easily if you’re talking to a customer who has already asked you a question.
🏗️ Coordinating your support efforts
To coordinate your support efforts, you need to:
- designate a support owner
- clarify the processes internally
Designate an owner
Very early on you should decide who your support owner will be and make sure they understand that it is their responsibility to respond to and solve customer problems, or to explicitly delegate to another team member when appropriate. They own the associated performance metrics.
Clarify processes
As important as deciding who will run support is deciding what support will do in a very specific way. Here’s what you should be doing:
- [if you’re a B2B startup] include engs in shared Slack Channels
- review urgent tickets in daily standups
- summarize customer pain points on a regular (weekly or biweekly) cadence
- celebrate customer praise in a #celebrations channel
đź‘” Hiring your first support role
Once you’ve organized your support process and your team is still getting overwhelmed, it’s time to call in the recruits.
When to hire
Hire your first dedicated support role when more than 50% of your time is spent solving customer tickets.
Freeing up your time won’t come for free, however, as you’ll be adding latency to your customer feedback loop. The danger here is that your product improvements could become less attuned to your customers’ needs, so you should be intentional about looking for feedback from your customers (good ticket categorization helps).
Who to hire
At this stage, you’re not looking for an expert, but rather someone with some experience but who is extremely flexible and adaptive. Like other roles at your company, they need to be extremely oriented towards delivering results quickly (since speed is your secret weapon) and constantly trying to understand your customers’ underlying motivations and pain points.
Conclusion
Once you’ve setup your support team, the cheapest and best way to get more out of them is to give them the right tools. We’ll go over the types of tools you should be using that in our next post.
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