Conceptualizing a Scalable Support Training Program
Support plays a pivotal role in providing the best experience to the customers of any company. Our Support team has always been at the forefront of solving every customer’s query in a prompt, accurate, and professional manner since the inception of our product. Enabling great customer satisfaction forms the core of any initiative that we undertake within Support.
Since customers can face issues in all nooks and corners of the product, it makes it very essential for us to keep our Support team upskilled, up-to-date with product knowledge, and confident with processes that they can follow in unprecedented situations. At the same time, a multifold increase in our customer base leads to a proportional rise in the count of Support tickets, thereby creating the need to widely and wisely scale up the team. To tend to these scenarios, our training program needs to be designed in an effective, comprehensive, and scalable manner.
In this article, we are going to talk about what makes a Support training program successful, drawn from the experience of designing our own program.
Key elements to designing a successful Support training program
Our first iteration of the Support training program revolved around the product and its features. We designed the program with a structured approach and included the various nuances of the product in the form of self-learning modules. Eventually, we realized that while having deep product knowledge is a prerequisite for Support, it forms just one part of the extensive knowledge and skillset required for success in this role. The training must also be able to help the team utilize and apply their knowledge in customer conversations. Hence, we dove deeper by performing the Support role ourselves for a few weeks, understanding the nuances of the role, and revisiting the training program to include the newly recognized elements.
Hence, we were able to develop a comprehensive training program, ensuring that all the new team members are able to acquire the skills needed to be successful in this role. The key elements of this program would include -
- Self-learning modules for Product and Support training
- Assessments and Support ticket simulations
- Tracking and feedback mechanism
- Mentorship from experts in the team
- Knowledge Base development
- Continuous training on the role
Self-learning modules for Product and Support training -
The first step in any onboarding program is to get the new team member familiarized with the company, the product, and the Support-related concepts. Hence, we kept the foundation of our training program intact. We initially talk about the industry that we operate in and we give an overview of our company and its products. We train on the basic technical concepts and the programming languages on which our product is based. Then, we move towards product-specific training where we provide a deep understanding of the various features of our product and how they affect the behavior of the pipeline in different scenarios. The product training is designed as a mix of pre-recorded videos and Bootcamp, making it interesting, learnable, and thorough.
This is followed up by Support-related training on understanding different categories of tickets and how to approach them. It includes training on the backend tools to engage with the customer and conducting the root cause analysis of issues, accessing and using our knowledge base to solve tickets, and training on effective communication.
Our program has been meticulously designed in a self-learning format to provide an extensive overview of how our product and Support tools work. Each training is associated with an assessment to gauge the understanding of the new joiner in that area. While these may seem obvious and a basic part of the onboarding process, it is very crucial to ensure that at the end of it, the team member is intimately familiar with all the required knowledge and context about the product and the Support role.
Assessments and Support Ticket Simulations -
Over the course of the training, it is essential to test the knowledge which has been picked up by the team members to understand the gaps and take steps to resolve them. We take various forms of assessments, such as presentations, quizzes, and assignments, to test a certain type of knowledge.
To take this a level further, we have introduced ticket simulations that replicate the application of the training knowledge in real scenarios and provide an experience of handling a customer ticket in training. Within this, we reproduce actual issues in a demo environment and require the trainees to conduct the root cause analysis of those issues using their product knowledge and accompanying resources like internal documentation, knowledge base, and external websites and provide the resolution on chat, just as they would do for a real customer. This is truly where one can understand whether the self-learning modules have been absorbed to a depth where they can be applied in different contexts.
Tracking and Feedback Mechanism -
Along with providing training and conducting assessments, it is equally important to continually monitor the progress of the trainees and provide constructive feedback for their improvement. In our team, we set up a streamlined tracking system along with a feedback mechanism that enables us to conduct the training of multiple new joiners with the available team bandwidth at once. Each trainee is provided with feedback on every stage of the training based on the parameters that we have internally determined. We conduct one-to-one sync-ups of the trainees with their mentors and other experts in the team who can help them resolve any doubts or roadblocks they face in the course of the training.
Having gone through the training and the assessment and improvement programs, the new joiner can be now onboarded into the Support role. However, we understand that the new joiners would still need confidence and assistance in handling live tickets and learning further about the product and Support processes on the ground. Hence, the next element becomes very essential to onboard new joiners fully into an independent Support role.
Mentorship from Experts in the Team -
To tackle new joiners’ roadblocks with live tickets and provide mentorship on Support and product knowledge on the ground, we have introduced a Buddy program once they are onboarded into the Support role after training. We want the new joiner to be confident and prepared to tackle any new scenarios that arise in the future independently or with minimal supervision from senior support. For this, we carefully analyze the high-performing members in our existing team with their Support and mentorship skills and the available bandwidth that they can invest in this activity and allocate them as buddies to these new joiners. Such a mentorship program can be essential for a new joiner to feel comfortable within the team, and to have one point of contact for any concerns or doubts to be comfortably communicated with.
Knowledge Base Development -
For any team, be it Support or Engineering, it is essential to maintain a Knowledge Base (KB) repository which could act as a central point of knowledge for the entire team. This enables all team members to have a single resource for any blockers they may have and provides a base for the new team members to use as well.
To create this repository within our Support team, we leverage the analysis of our Support Excellence team which serves as the main source of intelligence for different issues that our customers face. Each ticket is analyzed based on a variety of parameters and is cross-checked with the presence of existing documentation or KB article relevant to the ticket. Based on these analyses, we pick up relevant topics and develop the KB article on the same. This document is very detailed and would include the following components -
- A brief introduction to the causal of the issue
- Steps on identifying and attributing the issue to the relevant product area
- A two-fold solution to the issue — One through the product UI and the other through backend tools to triage and fix the issue
- Relevant screenshots and codes
- Older Conversations pertaining to the issue and how they were resolved by Support
Each KB article goes through a technical and a literature review both conducted within the team. The article is then published in the repository and is made accessible for the entire team to view. We have defined different categories of KBs as solutions to common user queries, guidance for handling common issues and errors, troubleshooting guides, and templatized answers.
When we started this activity, we created a KB repository achieving more than 90% of issue coverage of our product over a period of two months. This set of documents is now an essential part of the training program and serves as a very helpful resource for the entire team in their live role.
Continuous Training On the Role -
Learning is a continuous process, regardless of a person’s experience level, which is why the training of a new joiner does not end after onboarding him/her in the Support role. We believe that the Support team should be highly skilled with the product functionalities while staying up-to-date with the latest implementations made in the product, to provide a great customer experience by quickly and accurately understanding their issues.
To establish this, we have collaborated with our Engineering and Product teams to conduct biweekly training programs, namely Advanced Product Functionality Training, and New Product Release Training exclusively for the Support team. Every training session is recorded and maintained for the next set of new joiners to leverage this knowledge and is made accessible to other teams of the company as well.
These six key elements are the ones that we, during the entire process of setting up a Support training structure, have found to be the most important for any training process to be a true success and prepare the team for their new roles in the best way possible. Let us know how you set up your training process, and whether this article helped out in doing that!
