7 Steps to Scaling Your Customer Support Team for Rapid Growth
In under 12 months, TourRadar was able to rapidly scale up our Customer Sales & Support teams globally, to enhance our service even further for our 1.5M+ visitors per month.
We were breaking records and pushing through new milestones on a regular basis. We’ve been thrilled (and exhilarated) to have the opportunity to grow and face these new challenges daily.
Every day of the year, 24 hours a day, our world-class travel experts help travellers of all ages, from around the world, find and book their next life-changing experience online.
Like many startups that have experienced rapid growth, this transition did not come with a roadmap or clear path to success. It was, frankly, a battle. One that we blasted our way through, struggling, succeeding, and adapting along the way. On a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis.
In the depths of our challenges, as we researched and sought best practices, there were very little resources explaining how, exactly, a travel startup with exponential growth, fresh off a $50M investment round, balances the demands of the modern customer, the pull of topline business objectives, and how that all affects your teams culture.
As all startup wisdom says, when there’s a pain point to be solved and no existing paths — you build your own.
This is a rundown of how we did exactly that. What we are continuing to work on and the lessons we’ve learned from an absolutely insane 12-month growth period. A torchlight for any company looking down the barrel of hypergrowth, this can guide you toward the right solutions for your challenges.
#1 — Nail Your Hiring Process Across Regions and Teams
Hiring is the backbone of any successful team, and pouring time, money, and training into hires that leave a few short months later is not only inefficient but exhausting on your team and spirit.
To scale a team successfully, you need to sync regularly with your HR support team. Incorporate a consistent interview process with sense checks and be willing to say no to an individual for the greater good of the team.
We optimised our hiring process to reduce the amount of time from the first screening call to the final interview to four days maximum, enabling us to capitalize on interest from high-quality prospects.
Across our three customer support regions — Australia, Europe, and North America — we standardized our hiring strategy to ensure consistency in the hiring questions, practical pressure tests, and culture sync so that when a new team member joined, they were adding to the skill-set of our existing Customer Sales & Support teams, and that they were able to hit the ground running.
We also adapted to the local markets requirements — sourcing from travel schools in one region, targeting universities and retail workers in another and constantly working with our recruiters in a feedback loop to understand what an ideal applicant was, and why those we did not accept weren’t quite the right fit.
Co-ordinating regularly meant that we soon had a lean, fast-hiring process enabling us to onboard more agents rapidly to maximum efficiency, with a diverse but unified culture fit that added to our team.
#2 — Optimize Your Onboarding
Onboarding new hires was one of our biggest learning curves during our period of rapid scaling. It was an area that we did not recognize the impact of until it was negatively affecting our agents' efficiency and focus on a daily basis.
By updating our onboarding strategy, training, and ongoing monitoring, we were able to ensure that every agent was an effective one and that they were all fully independent in a much shorter time frame.
This meant that agents were more self-sufficient and empowered and that the existing senior agents were not constantly distracted by training, answering “quick questions,” and other repetitive tasks that occur when new starters are not given the support they need in the early days of their hiring.
Here are just a few things we updated to optimize our onboarding of agents:
- Watertight onboarding schedule, breaking down the agent’s first 4 days in office to specific blocks of time to ensure a mix of cultural immersion, skills training, and time shadowing existing agents and completing training units. This is executed consistently across all three offices for a unified baseline of knowledge and experience for all new starters.
- Proactively reaching out and introducing new hires prior to their start date via email, and to the existing team so expectations and excitement levels are high for when they join the team.
- Appointing specific mentors to new hires so that most of the training and incidental questions is diffused across multiple experienced agents regionally.
- Scheduled daily feedback loops with new agents at the start and end of the day so that they have multiple opportunities to ask questions or dive deeper into training topics. This is also a great way for new starters to build rapport with their Team Lead.
- Creation of a team-wide knowledge sharing channel with the sole purpose of answering repeat questions and surfacing consistent answers or areas of improvement for training topics. Our goal is to integrate this with automated solutions in the future for completely consistent knowledge sharing.
These efforts, along with the constant updating of our training units and knowledge base have been instrumental in making sure that by growing the team, we are not increasing the workload on our existing agents, trainers, and team leads. Rather, we are effectively guiding new hires through their onboarding.
This was a critical focus that once implemented, improved the rate at which an agent could become operationally effective from weeks to days.
#3 — Create a Model for Ongoing Training and Career Development
One of the biggest challenges for operational teams, particularly in customer sales and support, can be the risk of burnout and frustration of team members from being on the ‘hamster wheel’ of frontline support, answering repeat questions and dealing with customers on a daily basis.
It is extremely important to us at TourRadar to embody our company value of ‘encouraging personal development and learning’, particularly within a role that is so critical to our company’s success. With an average of +75 NPS score, our agents are the best in the business, so keeping them motivated and happy, moving forward in their careers, fuels their ability to better serve our customers.
To ensure they are able to grow their careers and experience within the customer support team, we implemented a T-model system (nicknamed the ‘Dojo’, as a hall or space for immersive learning) for agents to manage their own career progression, learning paths and development within the company and team.
The model allows for clear and unified expectations of how long, and how many executions of specific tasks it takes to become an expert in any one specific product area.
So, for example, if you want to progress to a Tier 2 level knowledge expert in the Cruise department, you first need to complete a required number of hours and tasks in Tier 1 regular customer support team to ‘unlock’ and progress through to the Cruise specialisation area. Once within the Cruise stream, there are three new tiers to master, over a period of up to two years, meaning agents will always have new challenges and skills to master.
Making these expectations explicit, and allowing agents to self select their expertise areas means agents at every experience level have a goal to push towards and can drive their careers forward in the areas that best suit their skills and motivation.
#4 — Know Your Data and Use It to Your Advantage
From a personal perspective, this was perhaps the biggest revelation and challenging aspect of our growth. As a natural people person, writer, and communicator, the data diving side of customer support was a weak spot that I worked hard to foster and improve over the last few years at TourRadar. Being a data-driven company means decisions and the data used to make those decisions can make or break your way forward operationally.
Learn the language of your product, tech, marketing, and leadership teams — data-driven decision making. Understanding the data and knowing what to ask for from a data report will empower you in all aspects of making operational decisions and product updates to improve things for your team, and drive superior performance.
In order to monitor the impact of our rapid growth, we created multiple levels of reporting, monitors, alerts, and data analysis to understand the difference that growing our team had upon results and our customers experience.
We saw our response times improve by more than 75%.
We saw our NPS score soar to over +70, putting us in ‘World Class’ territory.
We finally had visibility into which regions were experiencing more volume and at what times of the day, in order to make informed hiring decisions.
We could see which customer channels converted better than others and assign resources accordingly.
We were able to give our agents informed feedback and benchmarking.
Most importantly, we were able to identify the impact that our growing team had on the bottom line of the business and communicate that across to all teams, including our investors and board members. We could now tell the success story of TourRadar’s customer support team, confident in the knowledge we had acquired and the data we had to back it up.
Knowing your data makes all the difference — and it’s a language that will serve you well in any decision-making scenario!
#5 — Divide and Conquer
As a lean, mean startup in the early days, we hired and trained agents to be ‘all-rounders’ who could handle any enquiry, any call or question, whether it be sales or support related. We had agents who were ‘jacks of all trades’ and completely flexible to jump on the highest volume channel as and when necessary.
While we still train and imbue our agents with that philosophy, at some point, your team can no longer operate under an ‘all hands on deck’ strategy.
As we grew, it became necessary to update our team structure, allowing for the ‘flat’ organisational structure that TourRadar embraces, but diffusing the load upon single regional team leads to head up teams of 12–17 agents.
Our global team now has a fluid structure of 5 departments; Customer Sales, Customer Care, Cruise, Operator Support (B2B), and Customer Relations. Agents are often in more than one department and are always trained at a baseline in both Sales & Care. But for each department, we now have ‘People Leads’ to support the regional Team Leads in day-to-day operations.
Documenting this structure and making the various throughlines of reporting and expertise clear across the board meant that all team members had a better idea of who to go to with questions, training, and escalation of customer issues.
Though we continue to work collaboratively to hit team targets, and company revenue goals, this structure implementation provided clarity for agents within and outside of the customer support world to understand the interplay between agents areas of expertise and reporting lines.
#6 — Start Documenting Yesterday
Though we have achieved a lot over a period of rapid growth, there is still so much more to do. One of our major goals moving forward is improving our documentation — of internal processes, logic, and dependencies.
This is at a product and operational level. Having knowledge locked into 2–3 sources or people does not scale and will only cause headaches down the line.
As much as possible, work with your product teams and internally with experienced agents to document core workflows, processes, and interplay once you reach consistent levels of execution. This benefits the consistency of the customer's experience, the training of new hires and the entire team by having a single source of truth for how things work in customer support.
We’re blessed in our team to have some select agents that enjoy documentation and have incredible attention to detail to keep our processes on point — find those gems in your team and get started on documentation right away. Chip away piece by piece, and you will make progress!
It will make changing processes, tracking, and reporting infinitely more straightforward if you have done the homework already.
#7 — Keep the Culture Strong as You Scale
This point speaks more to people in leadership roles. The aspect of growth that is hardest to monitor, but the most obvious when it fails, is keeping the culture of your team.
There are a few different ways to encourage and monitor this, but if you take one lesson from this article, let it be this — your actions as a leader will always speak louder than your words.
Your team knows when someone is not carrying their weight, not embodying the company values, or stepping outside the bounds of behaviour and performance. They look to you to act upon this, and what you do (or do not do) will be watched closely.
They notice when you pledge to have regular 1-to-1’s and then don’t execute on them. They take your actions as indicators of your trustworthiness and commitment.
If you let poor behaviour slide or give people ‘one last chance’, the hard-working team members will see this, and no matter how many empty promises you make, your actions are the true barometer of commitment to the business goals and company values. They will lose faith when you don’t take action.
Even when its hard, act. Publicly, and as swiftly as possible to maintain the team and company culture.
Encouraging culture is possible, though not always measurable, but you will see its immediate effect. To encourage culture we aim to do the following;
- Let the personalities shine. You hired these agents for a reason, their unique style will likely be the reason a one-time customer becomes a customer for life.
- Repeat, repeat, repeat. Company values, minimum standards and core beliefs of the team are built only through repetition at every opportunity. Over-communicate them, so the team knows these in their bones and start to become advocates themselves.
- Give your team members enough ownership on projects and space to fail and learn from them.
- Always communicate the ‘wins’ for their ideas and suggestions, big or small. Especially if its taken a long time to get the product fixes down the pipeline.
- Work to engage your operations team beyond the ‘walls’ of your department. The more interaction with marketing, product and tech teams, the better agents and overall team members they will be.
Though this list won’t solve all of your scaling headaches, and we certainly can’t anticipate the unique hurdles you are sure to face, covering these basics will give you a solid platform from which to launch into hypergrowth.
Take a deep breath, use your team as a ballast, and enjoy the rollercoaster ride!
Carly Hulls’ exceptional work in the field has recently landed her a nomination as 2018’s Woman of the Year in Customer Service Stevie Awards.
