This article was originally published in Top-Tier Support, Front’s Head of Support Kenji Hayward’s LinkedIn newsletter for customer service leaders. For more frontline advice and actionable insights, subscribe today to get them delivered to your inbox every other week.
Every support leader chases this unicorn at some point in their career: the magic ratio. That is, the right number of support agents to customers that ensures exceptional service.
This magic ratio really comes to mind during annual planning, growing pains, new leadership, or budget reviews. AI has thrown a wrench in it all by deflecting more Tier 1 support, shifting human focus to more complex cases and responsibilities, and boosting agent productivity to new heights. It begs the question: does team size matter as much anymore?
Over a decade of leading support teams has taught me that true success is in the strategy, not team size. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when adding headcount makes total sense, such as when you’ve got a queue backlog or you’re scaling toward global support. But with the advancements in AI and technology, it’s impressive what smaller teams can do. And when your support strategy can marry the team’s talent, systems, and workstreams together to deliver exceptional service at scale, the result is, well, pure magic.
Over a decade of leading support teams has taught me that true success is in the strategy, not team size.
Why hiring more isn’t always the answer
Scaling is about much more than headcount. Hiring is lengthy and expensive, plus it can take a while for new agents to fully ramp up. That’s where empowering your existing team can go a long way. But where to start? Beginning with the customer experience is always a safe bet. What are your customers experiencing? Take a hard look at your operations. What’s preventing your team from doing their best work? How can your operations run more smoothly?
Let these three factors guide your decisions as you scale support:
Customer outcomes: Measure success through customer satisfaction and resolution quality. If your CSAT scores are low or it’s way too hard to resolve an issue, do a root cause analysis to understand what part of your customer experience needs more resources.
Employee development: Invest in team talent and career growth to create highly trained experts who can breeze through challenges. Former customer support rep, Lemuel Chan <<tag>>, was adept at triaging issues, identifying customer trends, and improving processes, so promoting him to Support Operations Analyst was a great move.
Operational efficiency: See where you can automate workflows and lean into tooling — like deploying macros for faster escalations or programming intelligent routing into your support chats.
An effective, smaller team can wield the power of a large one
When everyone is empowered to do their best work, the result is an all-star team that overcomes challenges and creates happy customers. Focusing on where you can drive the most improvements in your customer experience is a great guidepost for developing a high-impact team. Here are some tried-and-true ways I’ve learned over the years:
Curate a killer tech stack: Help your team streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and reduce burnout. Many support leaders overlook the importance of seamless collaboration within their teams or cross-functional partners. Tools that easily integrate internal communication with customer inquiries can be a huge game changer. (By the way, Front does this very well 😉)
Stay on top of training to level-set your expectations for high-quality service.
Upskill current team members: Play to their strengths, assign them projects they would excel at, and accentuate their value. And with AI taking on more Tier 1 support cases, you can now move agents into more specialized roles like conversation designers and support operations managers.
Invest in self-service support: When done right, self-service support has compounding ROI because more customers are getting their issues resolved without involving an agent.
Create open lines for cross-functional collaboration: Identify key contacts or teams you need to partner with for customer inquiries and alleviate any bottlenecks that slow down resolution.
Leverage AI for enhanced efficiency: Explore different areas in your workflow where you can use AI to reduce manual work, e.g. categorize incoming tickets or summarize lengthy conversations for faster handoffs. Keep a team-wide feedback loop to share explorations and lessons learned.
Tap into analytics to understand customer trends, synthesize their feedback, and drive data-backed decisions. This is where AI can help save time summarizing insights!
More tools for your support team
Craig Stoss shared this great article about team capacity planning — complete with calculations!
Sarah Caminiti has a great Epochal Growth podcast episode on The Future of Work: Leadership, AI, and Belonging with Luke Jamieson.
In case you were wondering, here are the top 5 ways Front empowers support agents to deliver exceptional service at scale.
Written by Kenji Hayward
Originally Published: 2 January 2025