Scaling support teams is a challenge for any growing company. The productivity of support agents and their capacity to provide the right answers to customers overtime has a tremendous impact on both costs and keeping a high customer NPS. However, while companies are getting bigger, issues start to appear that prevent support team from being efficient and the overall productivity and quality of agent tends to decrease. With Stonly, we are working on tools that makes it easier for support teams to scale efficiently.

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The main challenges for scaling support team

Here are a couple of issues companies face as they get bigger:

  • Their offer becomes more complex:

    Companies usually start by solving one use case and test their solution with a few customers. As these companies expand, they add new capabilities here and there or compatibility with different tools and what was the whole product at the beginning becomes a feature in a product line. Therefore, the learning curve to master the overall product is getting a lot steeper.

  • Their customers have more specific requests:

    Even companies with one size fits all offers are struggling with specificities of their users. Whether this is because they are from another country or because they bring new use cases on the table, more customers mean more specific questions that can be hard to track.

  • Small issues get more important:

    At the beginning of the life of company, if there is an issue affecting a small portion of the user base, it can be ok if it is not solved perfectly. However what used to be a small portion can easily become an important absolute number as the user base grows. This also adds complexity for agent to answer as even relatively small problems boost tickets numbers.

These issues lead to longer on boarding training but also longer time to get productive and stay productive as new features are developed. This coupled with high churn rate in support team can become a nightmare to manage.

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Interactive guides to help agents

Stonly offers a way to create scripted guides for agents. Any agent stuck while facing a ticket can open a step by step scripted guide that will show the path to the right solution. These guides can be contextually integrated into support tool so that agent do not have to leave their work environment to get their documentation. In addition, as the agent progresses through the guides, actions can be triggered directly in support tools such as Zendesk.

Here is a quick video showing how this works in Zendesk:

5 main benefits of using Stonly guides for agents

Having these guides at the disposal of agents provide many pros:

  • Faster on-boarding:

    Agents can be operational very fast as they can follow guides on topics they are not yet experts while training themselves by doing.

  • Faster on-boarding:

    Better answers to customers: not only stonlies can help refine the user request but it can also launch macros that will contain the right answer for the users, this ensures that the right content is sent to the right person.

  • Higher productivity:

    Agents can search inside guides and find directly their answer or take a guide from scratch. As the agent progresses in the guides, actions can be automated in the support tool.

  • Tracking:

    Stonly includes a history of agent navigation for each guide and ticket, this allows to better understand why tickets have been escalated and also build report on agent usage.

  • Improvement of guides overtime:

    At any step, agents can report issues or leave comments in order to ask questions or suggest improvement to the content. Thanks to this, content is always up to date and managing the different use cases.

Need some advice on how to implement these guides for you agent? Feel free to reach out here.