Building
a Customer
Service Team

B uilding a team of any sort is much like building a bridge: from the outside, it can look beautiful, but if there is one structural piece missing, even the prettiest bridge will fall to pieces under pressure. With support teams, it’s no different. Support people are hyper-empathetic and take on the feelings of each of the people that they talk to every day. Given that, they can be quite emotionally demanding, and difficult to manage in a large group.

Building a customer support team is like an elaborate game of Jenga, with all the skills and people building on top of each other. You need to have a number of different roles on your team and their personality types all need to fit together. There are also outside pieces beyond the team to consider. For example, if you’re planning to offer support outside of local business hours, you also need to ensure that you have coverage for the different time zones. Finally, there isn’t just a line up of qualified candidates waiting outside your door. You need to recruit, interview and hire this specialized team of support agent heros with the right skills, personality types and availability.

Luckily, we’re going to cover all that and more within the span of this book: how do you hire? What do the people who are the “right fit” look like? Once you’ve got people hired, how do you onboard and continue to measure performance as they grow within their position? Read on! We’ve got your back.