Support Driven Highlights: How to know when to hire another person for your support team?

Hey, Support Driven Community. 👋🏻

We’re starting to highlight some questions and answers you’ve all shared via Slack on our blog. We want to showcase your unique perspectives beyond just Slack.

If you’re not familiar with our Slack community, it’s full of 8,000+ members who care about customer support. We ask for advice, share our expertise, and have fun virtually connecting.

Let's get into this week's highlights.

How do you all measure capacity, in terms of recognizing when you need to hire another person for your support team?

"With a small team (two, then three people), we looked at volume and difficulty. And we figured out, on average how many tickets weekly our L1 agent could handle and how many our L2 agent could handle. (...) The bigger the team with much higher volume, it's been more complex, and we are actually looking at a tool that will give us a much better handle on some of this. In some ways it's looking at volume, but also average handling time, replies per ticket, complexity of types of tickets, what about if multiple people are out on a given week, how much back log are we comfortable carrying and what's our desired response times. In the end, we have a formula in spreadsheet that does some calculation on averages with volume, replies, handle time, people being out, and then spits out a number based on volume."

- Community member

"I use a 'support conversations per thousand paying customers' metric to show the amount of work being generated by the product. Then, I project forward using the growth metrics as well as the thousand-paying user metrics. Then I use daily assignment/workload counts to measure the headcount requirements to meet that forecast. From there, I use the worst week in the next 17 weeks to assess hiring needs, as it takes us 8-12 weeks to ramp someone up to doing appropriate volume/workload. The benefit of this method is that if you spend time and team-effort on impacting that per-thousand-paying-customers metric downwards (through docs, product feedback, proactive support measures, etc.). Then you can prove a declining cost of care (which I measure by number of agents per thousand paying customers), which results in a significantly lower effort for hiring requests in the future"

- Community member

"As a rapidly growing startup this is something I continuously keep a pulse on with my team! I've found the below works well, I like a mix of objective data to drive headcount (especially helpful if you need to build a case to leadership) and temperature checks with my team:

Weekly Temperature Checks: our weekly team meeting is called "Surviving & Thriving" where everyone on CS shares if they are indeed surviving or ideally thriving. If everyone is surviving for a while, it's a good sign that workloads are too high and I need to dig into the pipeline again I use First Response Time as a very telling gauge. If this is starting to drop, I know my team is getting overwhelmed by tickets I check daily how many tickets we're solving (cross reference this with one-touch so its not a false stat) and if our solves are not keeping up with ticket creation, again i need to hire. If your team can do 50 tickets each a day with 3 people but you're getting 250 tickets a day, you'll always have a dreaded backlog"

- Hayley-Chanel Johnson, Director of Customer Success @ BrokerBay

I'm wondering if any of you have any resources for creating tone & style guides, and/or best practices guides for a growing support team. Any and all resources are more than appreciated!"

"I definitely do!

https://www.helpscout.net/blog/writing-support-emails/ https://www.helpscout.net/blog/writing-well/ https://buffer.com/tone-guide http://styleguide.mailchimp.com/voice-and-tone/

- Brittany Ferguson, Senior Customer Support Manager at Brio Systems, Inc.

"I have this doc of links: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RkMaafL5y1fQ4RVF_MFTqVmbBCD9CpS1CCSTArXpPOM/edit?usp=sharing"

- Emily Kinzig, Member Support Specialist @ NerdWallet

"I’m a little late to the party, but my company just published this one, featuring awesome advice from Emily Kinzig! https://prowritingaid.com/art/2308/customer-service-style-guides.aspx"

- Micah McGuire, B2B Marketing @ ProWritingAid

"I wrote a thing on this once! https://www.saleshacker.com/how-many-customer-support-reps-do-you-need/"

- Michael Redbord, Head of Operations @ SaaSWorks

See you next week with another roundup of Q&A highlights! If you’re not already part of the Support Driven Slack community, join here.

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Updating First Response Times to See the Whole Picture

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Support Driven Highlights: Do you invite the customer to ask you or use the royal "we"?