You are a growing business, but you have learned from other companies in the past to grow too quickly, and you will lose touch with your client base too slowly, and you will miss opportunities to gain new customers. The secret is to scale up your customer service. As you grow, so too does your dedicated team of IT and CSM solutions. Easier said than done; it’s a juggling act you have new customers that you have to court, old customers who have grown accustomed to a certain level of service and limited resources to achieve it all. How do you scale your customer service so as you grow, you still deliver that fantastic customer service you did when you were leaner?

How to Scale Customer Service

As with a lot of your decisions, the question is who, not how. Your employees are some of your best resources. How do you put these resources to use? Who do you need to hire? Who do you need to train?

• Network growth: As your business grows, the first thing you want to scale up is your IT department. Automating as much of the CSM workflows as you can frees up valuable resources to be used elsewhere. Every query that can be answered with a click of a mouse is time and money saved.
• Software choice: You want to choose efficient but easy to use software, or it’s useless to you. Features to look for include: a powerful search function that allows you to quickly sort emails, employee roles, and items needing immediate attention, procedures that are easy to find and give clear guidance, and quantifiers that monitor your employees’ progress.
• Procedures and policies: The better your procedures are, the less time new staff members will spend seeking a manager to assist. Not that questions will never come up, but you will learn to anticipate the common problems and develop a procedure to deal with them as you grow.

As your business grows, your customer service management should scale seamlessly. Your new customers should feel impressed, your older customers should feel valued, and your organization should run smoothly with no growing pains.