I am a head of Customer Support and Customer Success teams at Oberlo/Shopify currently leading remote and in-house teams of 40 employees in 3 time zones. I have worked on org. design and rollout of knowledge management, social care, training & onboarding, escalated support, proactive support and quality assurance team formats.
Over the past 3 years, I was passionately focusing on scaling the team while maintaining operational excellence, innovation and high-quality support standards at Oberlo.
With the right people, and led by empowerment as a core value and deeply ingrained extreme ownership, we have helped thousands of eCommerce merchants to achieve their business goals.
I'm mostly involved with:
- Business Process Management
- Project Management
- Cross-Organizational Collaboration
- Workforce Planning
- Quality Assurance
- Organisational Design
- Operations Management
- Strategic Planning
- Team Leadership
- eCommerce
It would be a generalist support role that is 100% reactive focused on putting out fires.
Such companies have huge support teams that are under strict workforce planning with well though trough (to the minute) scheduling and multiple support channels (email, chat & phone) that requires reps to be always logged to their scheduled channel on time.
Metrics like average handle time & idle time become very important as big support organisations are under strict financial investment plannings and have to monitor costs.
It also involves managing remote & scaling overseas teams if company is chasing the sun (24-7 support).
One of the bigger challenges then becomes front line workers tenure, turnover, employee attrition and retention.
I’d recommend Intercom as it is a perfect platform to start and then scale both, customer success & support teams without a need to develop custom features.
Asynchronous chats and automated messages that if emoloyed properly can help reduce support debt by sending out tailored recommendations, onboarding or announcement messages.
Wonderful tool for both, proactive and reactive customer support.
It all starts with a proper Quality Assurance proccess in place. Benefits of having QA in place are twofold: it can act as a tripwire to capture knowledge gaps or discrepancies with a product itself. So not only reducibg support debt, but closing support to product feedback loop.
While automation is the best option it usually starts with agents tagging conversations manually and doing monthly or quarterly deep-dives to identify top call drivers (areaa of the product that creates friction and stops customers from achieving their goals).
While you can set up conversation-topic tagging by keywords automatically - it’s far from accurate and data on trends become too clunky.
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