To quickly scale your customer service organization, you need to continuously rethink how to best provide support, what kind of people and skills you need, and how you’re going to organize it all.
That’s what this guide is all about. It’s the lessons we’ve learned at Zendesk over many years of rapid growth and—as a result—how we structure our customer service organization around specific teams, tiers, and roles.
We define success as a combination of people, process, and technology —where the people part always comes first. One of our most important initiatives over the last several years has been our focus on building that people-first approach to customer service.
Key to that is providing well-defined roles and performance expectations, which gives everyone on the team an understanding of what they should be achieving and their career path options and goals to work toward.
This guide represents the work of many present and former Zendesk support team leaders who managed the support organization to keep pace with the company’s growth and to continuously provide a great custome support experience.
What you’ll find here is a framework of the core elements of a customer service organization that you can use to build out your own organization
We distilled our qualitative and quantitative research into the four main business objectives that every retail brand reaches for. And we lift the lid on the tactics needed to reach those objectives plus the metrics you need to measure progress at specific steps in the journey
In addition to grouping the objectives, the framework o ers retailers a more nuanced view of the customer journey and a roadmap to increase transactions and retention
The model breaks each objective down into layers and outlines the actions and experiences retailers must enable or enhance to influence behavior, remove friction, and drive positive outcomes for all stakeholders.
It narrows down what retailers must do to motivate customers to move through the stages and — ultimately — increase customer lifetime value
Above all, the Fit for the Future Framework opens our eyes to the model and the mindset retailers must embrace to increase the kind of meaningful engagement that leads to increased transactions and customer loyalty
It’s important to understand that the framework is also a continuum, ranging from low-value to high-value actions. Customers may traverse this spectrum rapidly within the space of a few sessions/interactions or remain stubbornly stuck in a low-engaged state for days, or months. Understanding the tactics needed to remove friction and nudge customers to progress will separate the retail leaders from those left behind
4 Strategic Business Objectives:
• Increase new user retention
• Increase customer engagement
• Increase order transactions
• Reduce customer churn
