Do You Need a Customer Support Operations Team? (A Getting Started Guide)

What is a customer support operations team, and do you need one at your organization?

Your customer support team is the first point of contact many consumers have with your company. They help solve problems from missing shipments to software bugs and play a crucial role in delivering customer feedback to the rest of your organization. Support teams turn unhappy customers into repeat customers, but who supports them? That’s why many companies have turned to Customer Support Operations.

Customer support operations (also known as customer service operations) is a department or role that has grown in popularity over the last several years. While support agents focus on day-to-day customer interactions, support operations teams focus on implementing the right strategies, technology, and processes to lead to a successful customer experience for the agents.

Implementing customer support operations

Many organizations recognize the need for a customer support operations team as their business scales and support agents can’t keep up. Even if the agents are able to manage the volume of tickets, the accuracy and consistency of responses may decline without the right strategy in place.

“As our user base expanded, it became clear that a more structured approach was needed to manage customer queries effectively and maintain the high level of support our customers expect.”
Babu Jayaram, Head of Customer Success and Strategy at Qualaroo, on how he decided to build a support operations department.

“At Qualaroo, the decision to establish a customer support ops team was driven by our rapid growth and the increasing complexity of customer interactions. As our user base expanded, it became clear that a more structured approach was needed to manage customer queries effectively and maintain the high level of support our customers expect,” said Babu Jayaram, Head of Customer Success and Strategy at Qualaroo.

“Creating a dedicated team allowed us to optimize our support processes, ensuring consistency and scalability,” Jayaram said.

Tip #1
5 Questions to determine your need for customer support operations

Are customer inquiries becoming too overwhelming for frontline staff to handle efficiently?

Do customer inquiries require specialized knowledge or skills to address effectively?

Is there inconsistency in how customer inquiries are handled, leading to varying levels of service quality?

Do you know how the company’s customer support compares to competitors or how to improve competitiveness?

Can the current customer support setup scale with the company’s growth, or is it becoming strained?

Eve Bai, International User Operations Manager at StudyX.AI, an AI-driven education company, identified the key factors that her user operations team considers before adding to their tech stack.

“The first is integrability,” she explained. “We have to value the difficulty of the new technology being integrated into our existing systems and the associated costs.”

“Second, given our rapidly growing user base, we need to understand whether the new technology can scale with the growth. And finally, we need to predict how much the new tool can enhance the team’s operational efficiency and improve the overall user experience,” Bai explained.

Tip #2
Look for these three things before implementing new tech for your team

Integrability: If the tool doesn’t integrate across the internal and external systems your team uses (Chrome, desktop apps, mobile, support ticketing software, Slack, email, etc.), it won’t be widely adopted or provide the consistency you’re looking for.

Scalability: Can the platform grow with your team? Do have a clear understanding of how costs will increase with each added user? Are there usage limitations in your current pricing plan?

Measurability: Is there a way to track and measure how the tool is improving the accuracy and efficiency of your agents’ responses? Can you tie the tool back to customer experience?

If customers aren’t receiving responses fast enough

An early and immediate sign that you may need to establish a customer support operations team to improve your processes and technology is if your response time to customers begins to decline.

While seasonality or employee turnover can contribute to longer-than-usual response times, a support operations lead or team can solve ongoing issues by documenting new, clear policies for agents to follow.

Building SLAs

Your support agents and your customers should know your organization’s service level agreement (or SLA) for customer responses. An SLA is a simple agreement between you and your customer on when they can expect a response time after reaching out to you.

If your team doesn’t know how quickly they need to respond, it will be difficult for them to meet customer expectations.

Tip #3
How to define your customer response time SLA

Determine current average response time: Use your existing support ticketing software to understand your baseline for customer response times.

Review hiring and growth projections: Is your team planning to increase headcount? Are you rolling out a new product or service that will impact support tickets? Are sales projections higher than usual, leading to an increase in new customers?

Set baselines based on ticket priority: Some customer issues will be more critical than others. SLAs for top-tier tickets may need to be faster than those for minor issues. Use your average response times and projections to build these out.

Publish your SLAs: Make sure your support team and customers know the response time your organization plans to stick to.

Revisit SLAs often: Your team and the products and services you offer customers will change, as will environmental and seasonal factors. Revisiting these steps every few months is the best way to maintain customer trust and transparency.

Easy to access email response scripts

If your customer support agents need to type out full responses to every question or request, the efficiency of answering tickets is likely to slow down. This is where email scripts or response templates come into play.

While a customer support lead may be crafting these templates, they are only helpful if all of the agents can access them. Searching through documents that only some agents can access, manual copying and pasting, and finding and replacing [NAME] and [ISSUE] fields might not be the most efficient use of agents’ time.

One task of a customer support operations team is to help agents access these scripts and templates.

That’s where using macros or text expansions of pre-approved copy can help. The right text expansion tool will only require a few keystrokes for:

Paragraphs of approved responses to be expanded

Hyperlinking and rich text formatting

Personalization via form fills and drop-downs

Tip #4
Steal our 10 most-used templates for customer service responses

10 most popular customer service responses

We’ve pulled together templates for the 10 most popular customer service responses. These and dozens of other free templates are ready for you to use or add to your TextExpander Snippet library.

Free templates

If communication with customers isn’t consistent or accurate

What happens when your agents are speeding through ticket volume, but the answers don’t satisfy your customers? Your team may not know how they are supposed to answer customer requests.

Process documentation for managers

A lot of customer support operations leads will put together step-by-step instructions or a flow chart indicating how agents should answer customer requests. Sometimes, these are referred to as standard operating procedures (or SOPs).

Where process documentation and SOPs can be essential for maintaining consistency and accuracy from agent to agent, there is also a risk of having an unruly number of SOPs for agents to weed through. Excessive internal documentation can cause information overload for your agents, impacting productivity and accuracy of responses.

Outsourcing support from overseas

Overseas talent often supplements a strong customer support team. Hiring support talent abroad can not only be cheaper but also allows companies to offer 24/7 support without requiring local agents to work strenuous overnight shifts.

With a growing international team, however, comes a lack of consistency in responses. Kyle Wilson, founder and CEO of staffing agency Thrivemodal, has seen this firsthand. In the last decade, his agency has built out companies and teams in the Philippines, many with more than 500 customer service representatives.

His advice for ​​customer support operations leads managing international talent: “Keep things simple initially. It’s all about finding that sweet spot between tech and processes. You want processes in place to keep everything running smoothly, but you also need to be agile enough to adopt new technologies that can give you an edge.”

Working with an international support team that needs help with common phrasing or responses? We’ve created a few templates just for you! Copy and paste them into your knowledge base, or add them to your TextExpander account.

Tip #5
Template libraries for international support teams

Send thanks to a customer with 10 Customer Appreciation Email Templates.

Get more feedback with 5 Customer Feedback & Satisfaction Survey Email Templates.

Sometimes, customers want refunds. Respond with 20 Refund Request Email Templates.

Request more reviews with 5 Customer Review Request Email Templates.

Respond to unhappy customers with 10 Angry Customer Email Responses.

Resolve negative reviews by responding with 20 Negative Review Response Examples.

Managing tech stack and integrations

Your team will never be able to work in only one tool. Sure, you may have an all-in-one support desk tool like Zendesk, but that is not the only place where your agents will write and communicate. Internal conversations are bound to spill over into Slack, company email, or documentation in project management systems like Jira.

The long and short of it is that any new technology that you bring on must integrate with every tool you use.

“When considering new technology, our focus is on three primary factors: customer impact, team efficiency, and long-term scalability,” explained Jayaram.

“Only after we’ve established clear, efficient workflows we consider new technology. We assess whether the technology will genuinely enhance our processes or add unnecessary complexity. The key is ensuring that any tech we bring on board integrates seamlessly with existing systems and supports our overarching goal of improving the customer experience,” Jayaram said.

It’s a support operations manager’s job to ensure that any new technology can integrate and grow with a support team.

Tip #6
An integration checklist for software that will grow with your team

Do our existing processes work well with this technology?

What tools does this technology integrate with? What is excluded from this list?

Is it simple for our support team to use? What is the learning curve?

Guide to TextExpander integrations

If customer feedback isn’t making it to the rest of the organization

Strong customer feedback management (CFM) processes begin with customer support teams. Your agents are ripe with new ideas from customers and a list of problems your organization didn’t know it had. It’s the job of a support operations lead to get that feedback into the right hands.

Tips for more productive data entry

How an organization chooses to disseminate feedback throughout the company depends a lot on its communication culture.

Are you a remote organization that heavily relies on Slack or messaging communication? Are you a small team that meets in person every morning? Knowing your typical communication pathways is the first step.

Whether your company chooses to document this feedback in Google Docs, Jira, or your CSM of choice, it’s likely that your agents will be faced with a lot of arduous data entry to pass this information along. To help, we’ve pulled together a list of the top data entry automation tools to speed things along for your agents: How to automate data entry.

Building a customer feedback management strategy

“We’ve built a feedback loop at Qualaroo that ensures insights from customer support reach every relevant department,” explained Jayaram.

“We use regular cross-functional meetings and collaboration tools to track and document feedback. We’ve also established a formal escalation process for urgent customer issues. The goal is to foster a culture where customer feedback is seen as invaluable to every team’s strategy.”

Jayaram explained that in addition to tracking common customer satisfaction metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge how well Qualaroo is addressing customer pain points, the company also looks at internal metrics.

“We monitor feedback response time as well as the implementation rate of customer suggestions,” he said. By assigning ownership of feedback to certain teams, Qualaroo is able to build transparency with customers and keep them informed about how their feedback is being implemented.

“Don’t underestimate the power of closing the feedback loop. When customers see that their input has been acknowledged and implemented, it reinforces their sense of partnership with your brand,” Jayaram said.

Tip #7
How to build a strong customer feedback loop

Host recurring cross-functional meetings where feedback from customer support is shared with product, engineering, marketing, and sales.

Use your collaboration and project management tools to document customer feedback and assign internal ownership.

Make feedback visible across the organization, even to those not involved in implementing it.

Establish an escalation process for urgent customer issues in Slack, email, Jira, or wherever your teams go for instant communication.

Choose your metrics: Not just CSAT and NPS, but feedback response time or rate of customer feedback implemented.

Keep customers informed about the status of their feedback and how it is influencing the future of your products or services.

Conclusion

Only you and your team can decide when it’s time to implement a customer support operations function. When it is, know that TextExpander is here to help you and your team ditch copying and pasting from templates.

Teams using TextExpander have access to an unlimited library of personalized Snippets that they can access with only a few keystrokes. TextExpander is a support teams’ knowledge base and typing productivity tool that has enabled agents to save 1.7 million hours each year.

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