Creating Support Operations That Scale with Business Growth

As your business grows, customer support operations need to scale to meet the demands of increased interaction volumes without sacrificing service quality. Your customers will demand faster response times and a more personal experience, while your support teams will need more efficient processes to keep up with the pace. Creating a support operation that scales involves the right technology, processes, data, and people.

What is a contact center?

A contact center is a function that manages customer interactions across multiple channels, such as social media, email, and voice. It can also refer to the software that enables teams to perform these interactions. Tools that fall under contact center solutions often capture and unify the context of conversations with customers, which empowers businesses to deliver a fully personalised and omnichannel experience.

Consumers increasingly want to communicate through whichever channels they prefer, from apps to messaging. Which channels customers choose to engage with businesses is unpredictable. Therefore, if a business only allows one or two customer support channels, it is missing out on an opportunity to connect with customers in the way they want to be contacted.

A dynamic and modern contact center allows businesses to meet customers wherever they are and utilise the human touch to engage with customers on their preferred channels and bring them value. Contact centers give teams the flexibility to connect with customers however they’d like to be contacted whilst providing the tools which maximise agent productivity. As interaction volumes increase, these features become vital to maintaining the standard of service without a corresponding increase in complexity.

How contact centers scale support operations for business growth

Contact centers allow businesses to manage increased customer interaction volumes, with a focus on supporting businesses to deliver the same consistent experience at higher volumes. AI-powered self-service can declutter simple queries, while intelligent routing ensures that complex queries reach the right agents. Having a unified view of customer information also allows support teams to better serve customers based on their unique needs.

Using a combination of automation and human resources allows businesses to achieve a higher level of efficiency without sacrificing the human touch. This provides support teams with more time to use their critical thinking skills to solve more complex issues.

How to build scalable support operations

Businesses need to implement a contact center with processes and technologies that do not create unnecessary complexity for their support team, even as the volume of interactions increases.

By standardising procedures and empowering agents to utilise self-service, businesses ensure that as they grow their product offerings or customer base, their support operations can continue serving customers without a proportional increase in complexity. Businesses can use knowledge bases to ensure that agents can get the information they need quickly and efficiently. Additionally, implementing self-service options can reduce the number of inquiries that agents receive. Intelligent routing can also ensure that customers are served efficiently by directing customers to the right agents based on their needs.

Companies should measure metrics such as first-time resolution, average handling time, wait time, abandonment rate, and customer satisfaction to ensure they understand how their resources are coping with the demands of their support operations. If any of these metrics worsen disproportionately, businesses need to consider whether there is a need to invest in more agents, automation, or improved support operation processes.

How to choose the right contact center software

Contact center software is one of the most essential pieces of technology for a company’s support operations, and so choosing the right option is vital to set the foundation for future growth in operations.

Native vs. integrated architecture

It is important to understand whether the system will be native or built on a series of other systems. Native systems can provide a single data model and administration experience, whereas integrated systems can lead to more complex administration and troubleshooting.

Ask vendors how many systems power their platform and what happens when businesses want to use a new channel or feature. Some solutions have a native architecture, while others could be multiple systems combined together. A more complex architecture can increase the time it takes to troubleshoot issues.

Total cost of ownership

The license fee represents only a small part of the overall cost of a contact center solution. The costs of implementation and ongoing maintenance can be high, depending on a variety of factors such as how integrated the new system needs to be with existing systems, how much administrative support is needed, and possible expenses if the system fails.

Ask vendors for a Total Cost of Ownership model instead of comparing solutions based on per-seat licensing.

Agentic AI capability

Bots and routing rules are good at resolving simple queries, but they are limited in their ability to handle more complex situations. Ask vendors about the AI capabilities of their solutions. Can the software manage multiple steps of an interaction, or will it just assist human agents?

Businesses should use their own data to test the capabilities of AI solutions rather than relying on use cases created by vendors.

Omnichannel capabilities and routing intelligence

The number of channels a contact center can support can vary, but it is more important to understand how the system maintains customer context across channels. If a customer talks to an agent via chat and then calls the contact center, the agent should be able to see the context of the conversation that is taking place on the chat.

Ask vendors to demonstrate a channel transition and confirm if the context is maintained for the customer and the agent.

Integration ecosystem and data connectivity

Contact center software should connect seamlessly to relevant tools such as CRMs, ticketing systems and knowledge bases. Businesses should assess each solution’s native integrations as well as the available options if they need to utilise third-party systems or custom coding to connect applications. Businesses should ask vendors how they will maintain connections to systems in the future, especially if the connected systems change their APIs.

Conclusion

A contact center’s role in building a support operation that scales involves automation, omnichannel engagement, smart routing, robust data, and standardised processes. With the right tools in place, businesses can empower their support teams to successfully manage higher volumes of interactions.