Happy team, happy customers: a foolproof guide to building a strong customer service team

Chapter 1: The foundation

Building a strong customer service team is one of the most critical — and often overlooked — investments a business can make. Sure, sales teams are the drivers of new customers and revenue, but customer support teams are to credit for keeping said customers happy once the deal is closed. A truly top-notch customer support team won’t just retain customers — it will create advocates who market your business (for free) and drive new sales, paying for your investment in dividends. 

Despite the importance of a customer service function, many businesses find themselves struggling with inefficient and fragmented processes, and inconsistent service quality, especially as they scale. If this sounds familiar, stick around.

Whether you’re building a new team from scratch or looking to revamp your current function, we’ll walk you through everything we’ve learned over the past ten years as we established and grew our own award-winning support team. You’ll find actionable strategies for goal-setting, hiring, technology selection, and team development. Consider this your complete guide to building your new (or improved) customer service team. 

Let’s get started.

Chapter 2: Set clear expectations and goals around customer experience

Architects draft blueprints before construction begins. So before hiring can even start, you’ll need to spend time creating a clear vision of what you’re looking to accomplish by building a customer service team, starting with what customer service means for your business.

Define what excellence looks like for your business 

Support isn’t one size fits all. Define what exceptional customer experience (CX) looks like for your organization. Are you a travel company that needs to respond quickly to urgent booking questions? Maybe you work in financial services, where customers expect hyper-personalized customer support? Getting clear with your customer support goals ensures that your team understands how their work rolls up into your company’s mission. 

Put measurable goals in place

Once you’ve outlined what “great customer service” means to your business, it’s time to put measurable goals in place — metrics that will help you track progress and hold your team accountable along the journey. Think KPIs like response time, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores. While these will ebb and flow as your team and business evolve, tracking key support metrics ensures that your team is delivering quality service that will keep customers delighted. 

Choose your channels

While different industries naturally lean towards specific channels — healthcare may prioritize secure messaging, retail brands might emphasize chat and socials, and B2B often values email — the year is now 2025, and customers expect to be able to access support across multiple platforms. That’s where omnichannel customer service comes into play. And for good measure, let us say it one 👏 more 👏 time 👏:  customers expect to be able to access support across multiple platforms. Yes, that means email, live chat, and social media. This also means that your support team needs a unified system to track and manage customer conversations across all these platforms. Without proper backend integration, agents waste time switching between tools while customers experience disconnected service. So, from day one, plan for an omnichannel strategy that targets the channels where your customers actually spend their time. More on choosing the best omnichannel customer service tool for your team in a bit.

Chapter 3: Hire the right people

Now that you’ve got the blueprint, it’s time to lay the foundation. Great customer service starts with the right team members. But being a skilled customer service agent requires more than technical know-how — it requires genuine empathy.

Here’s our Head of Support, Kenji Hayward’s take on it: 

“Empathy shows up when they’re troubleshooting a technical problem and translating it back to the customer (internal or external) in relatable terms. Empathy grounds their assistance when a customer reaches out in Front Community. Empathy is the root of understanding the kinds of problems the customers are trying to solve and exploring various solutions on consult calls.”

Your customers want to be treated like humans, not tickets, so your support agents must be able to listen, understand customer concerns, and work with the customer to explore solutions. Be intentional when hiring, and prioritize candidates who can navigate both the technical aspects of support and the human elements of customer frustration, timeline pressures, and business priorities.

As your company scales, resist the temptation to simply add headcount:  a bigger team doesn’t always mean a better team.

Kenji also highlights that an effective, smaller team can wield the power of a larger one. When everyone is empowered to do their best work, the result is an all-star team that can overcome challenges and create happy customers. To develop this high-impact team, focus on areas where you can drive the most improvement. Here are some strategies that can help:

• Stay on top of training: Set clear expectations for high-quality service by continuously investing in your team’s development.

• Upskill current team members: When scoping project work or ticket management, enable teammates to lean into their specific strengths. With AI handling more routine support cases, agents can take on more specialized roles, such as conversation designers or support operations managers.

• Invest in self-service support: When done right, self-service support, like AI chatbot tooling and a robust knowledge base, can deliver compounding ROI by resolving customer issues without involving an agent.

• Create open lines for cross-functional collaboration: Identify key contacts or teams needed to resolve customer inquiries and eliminate bottlenecks that slow down resolution.

• Leverage AI for efficiency: Look for ways to reduce manual work, like categorizing incoming tickets or summarizing lengthy conversations for quicker handoffs. Keep a team-wide feedback loop to share insights and lessons learned.

• Tap into analytics: Use data to identify customer trends, synthesize feedback, and make informed decisions. AI can help by summarizing insights and saving valuable time.

• 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 across functional partners. Tools that integrate internal communication with customer inquiries can be a game changer (Front does this very well 😉).

Chapter 4: Define roles and responsibilities

A successful support function requires clear roles and responsibilities. Without well-defined duties, agents may end up duplicating efforts, handling customer requests they aren’t trained for, or leaving critical issues unresolved due to miscommunication. These missteps can only damage your bottom line but also erode customer trust. Conversely, expert resolutions will foster long-term loyalty.

Businesses should determine whether their support team will operate with a tiered support vs. a collaborative support model. In a tiered structure, agents are assigned to specific levels, with tier 1 agents handling basic inquiries, tier 2 agents managing more complex issues, and tier 3 handling highly technical inquiries. In a collaborative model, on the other hand, each agent has access to all support requests, and the team collaborates to resolve each case together.

Both models have their benefits, but also, why not use both? 🤷

At Front, we use a collaborative tiered model because it enables us to have the best of both worlds and keep the focus on customers. And as connoisseurs of customer service, we center everything around our customers while prioritizing efficiency. And you can too.

Chapter 5: Foster a collaborative culture

Customer service teams work best when they work together, so it’s important to foster a collaborative culture by providing ways for your team to be efficient, support one another, and build peer relationships all while helping your customers.  

Real-time collaboration

Sure, agents are responding as individuals, but customer service is a team sport. If agents don’t work together, they risk duplicate work, miscommunication, frustration, and ultimately, an inconsistent customer experience. That’s why your team must have a tool that supports real-time collaboration (again, more on choosing the best customer service platform shortly.) Some collaboration features that have proven essential for our team at Front:

• Conversation history allows agents to view the full history of a customer’s interactions, ensuring that everyone has the context they need to jump in on a conversation. 

• Comments make it easy for team members to work together on a customer request without the need for separate email chains or chats.

• Collision detection is especially helpful for teams using a collaborative approach. Agents can see when their teammate is actively replying to a message, so they don’t accidentally jump in and reply to the same customer twice. 

Team building

Building a successful customer support team isn’t just about the work — it’s about connection, trust, and — believe it or not — fun. Team-building activities can get a bad rap, but they’re essential to creating a strong, lasting team dynamic, particularly for support teams, which are often remote or distributed globally. This can look like taking a break from work for an hour to play games or simply blocking off time for the team to be together — in person or virtually — to have a working session. We recommend a good mix of both.

In fact, we do both regularly here at Front. We just hosted our first in-person offsite in Mexico with the entire company, giving our remote support team the chance to relax and connect while the rest of the company hopped in to tackle customer questions in the queue. 

At Front, we approach team building in two complementary ways:

Every month, our support team has “Mandatory Fun” events where we take a break from our usual work to have fun as a crew for 30-60 minutes. You may be asking, “How do you make that work while still helping your customers?” Great question. We break up events by region so we still have coverage in the queue while teammates participate. From Tetris and drawing games to emoji hackathons and AI-assisted survival games, these monthly gatherings have become something we genuinely look forward to.

Another way we like to foster team collaboration at Front is with our Queue Crush program — a regular working session designed to mimic the spontaneous teamwork that happens in an office, Twice a week, members from our support team get together and bring real cases they’re working on, ask for help, and share solutions. The result? Stronger connection, plenty of laughs,, and live ‘aha’ moments as we crack a tough case together.  

Chapter 6: Focus on training and development

Building a strong customer support program doesn’t start and end with hiring great people. Even the best support agents need training and development as the product and company evolve. Investment in team development will pay off in better performance, higher retention, and happier customers. And that starts right away with onboarding. 

Offer comprehensive onboarding

Set your team up for success and put in place a thorough onboarding program that equips them with the resources and support they need to answer customer requests with confidence. Here are a few tips to inspire your onboarding program:

• Build an internal knowledge base with up-to-date information about your company’s product or service offering, policies, and best practices for handling different types of customer inquiries so your new hires have a source of truth as they get ramped up.

• Pair new hires with tenured team members. It’s going to take some time for agents to feel confident in their new work, so connect them with someone who has been through the process themselves and can answer any questions, provide hands-on support, and help the new team member get acclimated to the team and company.

Develop consistency with a tone framework

The secret weapon of world-class support teams isn’t just what they say — it’s how they say it. A tone framework acts as your team’s communication blueprint, ensuring every interaction reflects your brand’s unique personality.

At Front, our tone guidelines inform both our team’s replies and our AI assistance features. By equipping our support team with guidelines that inform the language and voice they use in each interaction, teammates feel empowered to make decisions with confidence knowing they can reflect back on our tone pillars to guide their choice. Sometimes a conversation could benefit from an emoji to add warmth, or a technical question requires a more straightforward approach. Personalization matters, but so does consistency. A tone framework enables your team to accomplish both. 

Invest in ongoing training

The true differentiator between good and exceptional customer support isn’t just who you hire — it’s how you nurture their growth. As your business grows, your support team should too. Provide your team with continuous training, workshops, mentoring programs, 1-on-1 coaching, and professional development opportunities so they not only perform their best but feel their best. 

Chapter 7: Equip your team with the right tools

Handling customer requests across multiple platforms can quickly become overwhelming,  especially when 1) the team doesn’t have a centralized place to manage customer inquiries and 2) they don’t have the tools they need to collaborate on tackling those requests.

That’s where a customer service platform comes in. 

But not just any customer service platform. A complete customer service platform like Front. Front helps teams streamline workflows by consolidating emails, chats, and social media messages into a single interface, eliminating context-switching while ensuring that agents have all the information they need at their fingertips. We already mentioned the importance of choosing a tool with omnichannel capabilities, but it’s worth mentioning a few other features that’ll equip your team with everything they need to support each other, and your customers. Features like:

• Real-time collaboration: With collaboration features like message assignments, internal comments, and shared drafts, your agents can work together seamlessly while always knowing who owns what so no customer inquiry slips through the cracks.

• Workflow automation: Spend less time with manual work and automatically trigger workflows — think follow-ups, conversation tagging, routing, and more — so your team can clear their to-do lists of administrative tasks and focus on helping more customers.

• Flexible integrations: Connect essential tools that your team uses day-to-day into one platform. Whether a CRM, project management, or marketing automation tool, your team should be able to seamlessly integrate their favorite products so they have the information they need at all times.

• AI chatbots and agent assistance: AI is transforming how customer support teams work, enabling them to do more with less. New and improved AI chatbots can provide instant answers, 24/7. Use frameworks like AXIS to ensure AI is being implemented effectively to boost the customer experience. And with AI agent assistance, teams gain superpowers by leveraging capabilities that allow them to do things like summarize long threads, draft replies using context from previous messages, and auto tag conversations.

However, these features are just the start. That’s why we’ve put together a comprehensive guide on must-have help desk features to help guide your search. 

Chapter 8: Monitor performance and provide feedback

Remember the measurable goals we mentioned earlier in the article? Now it’s time to talk about how to make sure you’re reaching them. Monitoring customer service metrics serves two critical functions: it confirms your team is meeting current standards while also revealing opportunities to elevate the customer journey. The data you collect becomes your roadmap for strategic improvements, helping you identify exactly where and how to invest in your team’s development to ultimately improve the customer experience. 

There are a ton of metrics floating around in the customer support world: CSAT, resolution time, deflection rate….If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the options, we recommend keeping it simple to start with. Response time is a classic first metric to track. How quickly is your team interacting with new requests? Are they able to respond faster during different times of the day? And to make things even easier for you, here are a few tips on how to improve your team’s response times. 

Once the numbers are rolling in, you can spot patterns and pinpoint specific areas for improvement. Don’t let this valuable data sit unused in dashboards! Transform it into targeted coaching moments that drive real results. Schedule regular feedback sessions — with the team and individual agents — to share the data and implement strategies for closing the gap to hit goals. Team reviews help establish shared goals and celebrate collective wins, while one-on-one coaching creates a safe space to address personal development areas. Ground these conversations in concrete metrics rather than subjective impressions, so teammates know exactly how to make adjustments.

Chapter 9: Recognize and reward excellent customer service

It’s easy to always focus on where to improve, but don’t forget to celebrate the wins! Our Senior Support Specialist, Phoebe Killick, puts it like this:

“Working in Support is emotionally demanding work. It’s a common pitfall for support teams to get stuck heads-down in the queue, but taking the extra time to acknowledge excellence isn’t optional if you want to build a team who will go the extra mile. Praise is like professional caffeine. When I get a shoutout in our weekly spotlight for de-escalating that impossible ticket, I feel ready to take on ten more. Recognition replenishes what difficult tickets drain.”

At Front, we’ve developed a multi-layered recognition strategy that includes:

• Immediate appreciation through team chat shoutouts when agents receive glowing customer feedback. (automated through Front’s Zapier integration!)

• Team-wide spotlights in team emails and meetings that highlight standout performance and metric frontrunners

• Company-wide recognition for the support team’s impact on the wider business

• Performance-based bonuses when the team smashes our metrics goals

These recognition practices don’t just boost morale — they reinforce high standards and show the entire team what excellence looks like in action.

Chapter 10: Build and scale successful customer service teams with Front

Maybe you’re leaving this article with a few tweaks to make to your current team, or maybe you’re leaving with a long to-do list to begin building your first customer service team. Whatever the case may be, Front can help. 

Front’s AI-powered customer service platform makes it easy for teams not only to help customers but help one another. Front combines traditional customer support management features with forward-thinking automation and AI, so teams can be their most efficient and empathetic. With Front, your team is fully equipped with a customer service tool belt that enables them to work fast, work together, and create happier customers.