Triage support to specialized reps

1. The constraint and what graduates it

Customer service is how you get customers to refer, retain, review and resell.

Item	At this stage
The constraint	Support for varied new offerings is breaking because of the volume: the whole department is giving way, swamped by the number of new customers and by how many different types of customer there are
To graduate	Triage support to specialized customer service reps

This is to improve efficiency and shorten training. Notice how closely it follows what happens in sales at the same size.

2. Train each rep for the products they serve

As in sales, the aim is shorter training for new support reps, since they no longer have to learn everything. Say you have product one, product two and product three. A rep does not need to know how to speak to enterprise-level clients if the only customers they speak to bought a $5,000-level product. So give reps different training, specific to the products they service.

3. Route each customer to a rep who can serve them

Triaging support means having a system that routes each specific type of customer to the specific type of rep able to serve that customer. In practice that looks like:

• tagging in the CRM;
• customer segmentation;
• routing people on the phone and by email.

4. Give reps a path up

Once there are different levels of service, with customers at each level and reps serving them, you can offer a career path to the reps who serve the higher-level customers. A rep who starts off serving the lower-level customers can be told something like this: if you do really well, maybe we put you on product two, and you make more a year; do really well there, and we put you on enterprise, where you can almost double what you made when you came in on day one. The size of that first raise is under what this page does not decide.

Almost a retention system. With all the new products, as you tier them and triage the support, you almost create a retention system for your staff along the way: one where support reps get to ascend. That extends the lifetime value of your talent as well as the lifetime value of your customers.

5. Faster answers, no runaround

You also get to shorten response times, since people get routed to the support reps trained on that specific product. A lot of times, at this point, support is slow because there is no efficiency: people have not been trained, and customers are not being routed to the right place.

Picture calling because a delivery never reached your door. The first person asks what the problem is, hears it, and says that is actually a different department, so hold on. The next person asks what the problem is; you explain the missing package all over again, and hear that it is not their department either and you will have to be rerouted. By the time you reach someone who can actually fix it, you have been on the phone for 20 minutes. Nobody wants that, and it is why triaging support matters at this point.

6. Standardize the notes

The last piece: make the notes in the system standardized, so that different reps can hand a customer off seamlessly. For example, someone in your first-level product wants to buy another product, or is passed to a different product in a cross-sell. With notes in the CRM, the next person can look up what has already happened: nobody asks the customer the same question twice, and the customer does not have to repeat themselves.

That repeating is called the biggest thing that happens in big companies like this one. Without the notes on each customer kept in one central place, the customer tells the story over and over and over again.

7. Route by rule and by channel

On the technology side, think about every way a customer can communicate with you. At this point you probably have many: they reach out by email, sometimes by direct message on social media, sometimes by phone. Each of those ways has its own customers who use it. Most of this is just technology integration, routing by rules and by channel of communication.

8. A support team for each division

The theme of this whole stage is that you have almost product divisions. Under them sit, for example, an electronics division with its own marketing, sales and customer service; a home goods division with its own; and a snacks division with its own. At this point you might have customer service segmented by division, a team for each, with customers triaged to them by the technology. Structurally, each division has people who are just driving revenue, which is why the divisions are almost like little mini companies starting to exist inside the larger one.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• The raise for the first step up. It is given as "$155,000 more a year", for a rep moved to product two. If enterprise pays more than product two, almost doubling day-one pay there would need day-one pay of at least $155,000. Not established on this page.
• Which tools do the routing. Only the CRM is named. Not established on this page.

10. The checklist

Step	What to do
Levels	Split support by product level (the examples given: product one, two and three, and enterprise-level clients)
Training	Train each rep for the products they service, not for everything
Routing	Route each type of customer to a rep able to serve them: tags in the CRM, customer segments, phone and email routing
A path up	You can give reps a path up the product levels, from the lower-level customers toward enterprise, with more pay
Notes	Standardize the notes in the CRM so a hand-off does not make the customer repeat themselves
Rules and channels	Integrate the technology to route by rules and by channel of communication
Divisions	Where the business runs as divisions, you might give each division its own support team

11. Where this sits

• The standards a support contact is held to, resolving the problem the first time among them, are on SOP 144.
• Tagging customers so the team knows which product path each one is on: SOP 169 — Blend the customer journeys across products, section 5.
• Sending the best leads to the best closers, the sales side of routing: SOP 84, section 2.
• How raises are set across the business: SOP 134 — Set pay increases.
• What a rep may decide alone to put a problem right: SOP 161.
• The path on this page moves reps up; moving customers up to the next product is SOP 162.

12. What this page does not cover

Hiring support reps and response-time targets are not covered on this page.