A support team leader is responsible for overseeing the operations and performance of a customer support team. They play a crucial role in ensuring that customers receive timely, accurate, and empathetic assistance, which contributes to customer satisfaction and loyalty. One of the core job functions is to ensure their team is operating as efficiently as possible to provide the best customer support. In times of need, they are the people who will step-in and help coordinate/bring clarity.
Pain Points
Workload management & efficiency
As a leader, it is imperative that your team is aptly staffed and enabled to handle the barrage of incoming requests. If you’re understaffed, you may introduce delays in assisting customers (try calling your internet provider, and you’ll see an example of this). One of the keys here is also making sure your staff can be as efficient and productive as possible. For example, how many mundane tasks/busy work does the team need to do? Are there adequate deflection abilities? Automations? The more efficient the team can be, the more productive it can be. Traditionally people focus more on adding more resources; however, making the process more efficient is equally as important.
Another key here is ensuring your team is enabled with the tools, knowledge, and “support” they need to excel in their roles. What tools are you using? Is it efficient? Do you have KBs? Do you have knowledge transfer session (KT) with teams as new features go out?
How to resolve them:
- Leverage intelligent deflection and AI offloads
- For example, don’t waste time making a human gather context, AI can now very accurately gather context and/or suggest articles.
- Leverage load in terms of routing
- Normally routing is statically done or done in a round-robin manner, however, that doesn’t work when cases may be differing in complexity.
- By using a system that can account for active case load and “bandwidth” you can more adequately spread the load.
- Automate as much as you can
- Traditionally updates and notifications are manual which places the burdon on the person working on the item.
- This is inefficient and doesn’t scale
- Instead, leverage a system that can proactively, and automatically, send notifications to the customer
KPIs to track:
- Agent Utilization Rate
- Ticket Backlog
- First Response Time
- Average Resolution Time
Performance measurement
How do you measure how productive your team is? Customer satisfaction? Are things improving or getting worse?
This is where setting appropriate KPIs and targets for the team and tracking progress is essential. This will help you determine how things are progressing and identify areas for improvement. For example, say your first response time increased by n% over the past week; what caused this? Too many requests coming in/understaffed? Process problems? Visibility concerns?
By tracking these KPIs you can ensure you have the objective information you need to help optimize the process.
NOTE: all KPIs are not created equally, ensure you’re focusing on the right things. (I have a section below covering some of the KPIs with example calculations.)
How to resolve them:
- Ensure data sanity/quality
- Metrics/KPIs are only as good as the data which is being used to calculate them.
- Gaps in data or invalid data will skew the results and also make them hard to trust.
- Ensure the data is valid and that any gaps are plugged.
- Buy, or build, a system that provides tracking
- Some systems may provide these things by default making life simple.
- However, as long as you can get the data you can track and calculate on your own.
- Automate
- Do NOT calculate these things manually
- Make sure there is automation to keep these numbers up to date and don’t rely on a human to calculate
- Manual/human-based calculations will always be out of date and error prone.
KPIs to track:
- First Response Time
- Average Resolution Time
- Customer Satisfaction Score
- Net Promoter Score
- Escalation Rate
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Technically this should be at the top of the list as this is all that matters for your customers: keeping them happy. However, it isn’t always that easy, you need to ensure support interactions are handled professionally; and customers receive prompt, accurate, and empathetic assistance. Why is this commonly a pain point? This commonly is the core item that support teams on measured on, and it is a measure of the whole system.
For example, if your staff isn’t enabled and can’t assist customers, that could impact CSAT. Likewise, if your tools don’t allow you to respond aptly or route things incorrectly, that could impact CSAT. Given that CSAT is an amalgamation of all of these factors, it can commonly be one of the primary pain points. However, this can also be a great indicator of how the system is operating.
How to resolve them:
- Provide good support
- This is a no-brainer, but is much more difficult than you think.
- Customers want to get to a resolution ASAP and brevity is key.
- How to provide good support?
- Have trained staff
- Use deflections to help provide self-support
- Provide proactive notifications
- Respond quick
- Don’t “leave them hanging”
- Automate tracking/surveys
- You need to be able to track the customer’s satisfaction after a resolution.
- Do this immediately after to ensure the responses are accurate.
- Failure to do this immediately will drop off responses and for those responses, they will be inaccurate as it may not be “top of mind”
KPIs to track:
- Customer Satisfaction Score
- Net Promoter Score
- First Contact Resolution Rate
Escalation management
No matter how trained your team is, they won’t be able to fix everything. In those cases (escalations), you must ensure things don’t get lost in the void. Part of this is ensuring you have visibility helping foster communication between internal teams. If you see an increase in escalations, that could point to a lack of enablement for the team.
KPIs to track:
- Escalation Rate
- Time to Escalation Resolution
Staff retention and development
As much as you must support your customers, it’s also imperative to attract, retain, and develop top talent. How can you help enable them? Are you helping them grow? If the staff gets burnt out or lacks development, it’s a poor situation for everyone. The staff may be unhappy, which may impact their service provided to customers. If that is hurt, that may impact your CSAT.
KPIs to track:
- Employee Retention Rate
- Employee Satisfaction Score
- Training Hours per Employee
Interdepartmental communication
Communication (or lack thereof) between departments/functions is a common frustration given that support is commonly at the vertex coordinating across external and internal resources. This is partly due to lack of visibility/access (e.g., different functions may use different tools which the other doesn’t have access to) and also the problems that come with this.
For example, say a customer has a problem, the sales rep wants to be updated, if they can’t resolve the issue they may escalate to engineering. Now support becomes the conduit of information between these various functions. Given older models where each function (sales, support, engineering) have their own system, this process commonly has to be solved through other channels.
KPIs to track: - Cross-functional Collaboration Score - Interdepartmental Issue Resolution Time
Budget and resource constraints
Budget is budget, and just like the business focuses on ROI (hopefully), the support team is a cost center that can be turned into a profit center (with some work). Now, focusing on the budget piece, any cost center will always be under budget scrutiny unless you can demonstrate tangible impact or value. Some support tools can be very costly and they are normally in addition to other tools. Keeping these seat costs down can have a significant impact on the BU’s P&L. One of the keys here is showing the value delivered to customers and/or the potential influence of deals (or even cross/upsell directly).
KPIs to track:
- Support Cost per Ticket
- Support Team Budget Utilization
KPI - Definitions
First Response Time (FRT)
- Definition
- The average time it takes for a support engineer to respond to a customer’s initial inquiry.
- Calculation
- (Sum of response times for all first responses) / (Total number of first responses)
SELECT AVG(TIMESTAMPDIFF(MINUTE, t.created_at, r.created_at)) AS FirstResponseTime
FROM tickets t
JOIN responses r ON t.id = r.ticket_id
WHERE r.is_first_response = 1
AND EXTRACT(@period FROM t.created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE);
-- NOTE: Replace @period with 'DAY', 'WEEK', 'MONTH', or 'QUARTER'.
Average Resolution Time (ART)
- Definition
- The average time it takes to resolve a customer issue from the moment it’s reported.
- Calculation
- (Sum of resolution times for all resolved tickets) / (Total number of resolved tickets)
SELECT AVG(TIMESTAMPDIFF(MINUTE, t.created_at, t.resolved_at)) AS AverageResolutionTime
FROM tickets t
WHERE t.status = 'resolved'
AND EXTRACT(@period FROM t.created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE);
-- NOTE: Replace @period with 'DAY', 'WEEK', 'MONTH', or 'QUARTER'.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Definition
- A metric that gauges customer satisfaction with the support provided, typically collected through surveys.
- Calculation
- (Number of satisfied responses) / (Total number of responses) * 100
SELECT (COUNT(cs.id) * 100) / (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customer_surveys WHERE EXTRACT(@period FROM created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE)) AS CustomerSatisfactionScore
FROM customer_surveys cs
WHERE cs.satisfaction = 'satisfied'
AND EXTRACT(@period FROM cs.created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE);
-- NOTE: Replace @period with 'DAY', 'WEEK', 'MONTH', or 'QUARTER'.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Definition
- A measure of customers’ likelihood to recommend the company’s product or service based on their support experience.
- Calculation
- (Percentage of Promoters - Percentage of Detractors) * 100
SELECT
((COUNT(CASE WHEN nps.score >= 9 THEN 1 END) * 100 / COUNT(nps.id)) -
(COUNT(CASE WHEN nps.score <= 6 THEN 1 END) * 100 / COUNT(nps.id))) AS NetPromoterScore
FROM net_promoter_surveys nps
WHERE EXTRACT(@period FROM nps.created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE);
-- NOTE: Replace @period with 'DAY', 'WEEK', 'MONTH', or 'QUARTER'.
Ticket Backlog
- Definition
- The number of unresolved support tickets at any given time, which can indicate workload and efficiency issues.
- Calculation
- (Total number of open tickets) - (Total number of tickets closed during a specific period)
SELECT (COUNT(*) - (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tickets WHERE status = 'closed' AND EXTRACT(@period FROM created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE))) AS TicketBacklog
FROM tickets
WHERE status != 'closed'
AND EXTRACT(@period FROM created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE);
-- NOTE: Replace @period with 'DAY', 'WEEK', 'MONTH', or 'QUARTER'.
Escalation Rate
- Definition
- The percentage of support tickets that require escalation to higher-level support or other departments.
- Calculation
- (Total number of escalated tickets) / (Total number of tickets) * 100
SELECT (COUNT(*) * 100) / (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tickets WHERE EXTRACT(@period FROM created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE)) AS EscalationRate
FROM tickets
WHERE is_escalated = 1
AND EXTRACT(@period FROM created_at) = EXTRACT(@period FROM CURRENT_DATE);
-- NOTE: Replace @period with 'DAY', 'WEEK', 'MONTH', or 'QUARTER'.
Agent Utilization Rate
- Definition
- The percentage of an engineer’s working hours spent on handling customer support tickets, which helps measure workload balance and resource allocation.
- Calculation
- (Total hours spent on support tasks) / (Total working hours) * 100
SELECT (SUM(TIMESTAMPDIFF(MINUTE, t.start_time, t.end_time)) * 100) / (COUNT(DISTINCT t.engineer_id) * 8 * 60) AS AgentUtilizationRate
FROM ticket_work_times