MBA2504 Q&A Wednesday: How many customer support agents do I need?

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, practical business lessons delivered on a silver platter. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today is Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, if you've got a challenge you want to overcome, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. Today's question comes from Terry and Terry asks, How many customer support agents do I need? I've been building my online community for years and I've been doing customer support myself, but the company's growing.

0:44we're getting a lot of customers. And I'm thinking about hiring a customer service agent or two, maybe even more. Not really sure how many I actually need so that I don't have to touch customer service emails or chats. Great question, Terry. Absolutely can help you with this. We ran one of the best customer support teams in the business when we ran Webinar Ninja, my software company of 10 years from 2014 to 2024. And we were known for our excellent customer support. And we built an amazing customer support team with the help of my co-founder, Nicole, who was really the leader when it came to making sure support was our hallmark.

1:21And like you, Nicole and I answered every single customer support ticket, chat, email for years before we started to build out a team. At our height, I believe we had eight or nine agents plus a manager to handle all the volume that we were getting. So in today's episode, what I want to do for you, Terry and everybody who's listening is to give you a plan of action. I want to give you some factors to consider when it comes to how many people you need to hire initially for your support team and then how to think about it as you're growing. This is very important because one, you want to make sure that your quality doesn't suffer, that your support is excellent.

2:01And in fact, you want to see it improve with hiring a team because your customer support is an extension of your brand. It's what your customers are going to remember you by. But also, you don't want to overhire because the worst thing you could do for an employee is to give them too much time on their hands where they're twirling their thumbs and it actually leads to poor performance. Don't worry, I got you covered. I'm going to give you a game plan. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of the best things about doing your customer support yourself for years or a period of time is that you know the ins and outs of your customer support department because you are the customer support department in the beginning, right?

2:36You're serving all your customers yourself. So you know all the common queries, you know your customers themselves and what troubles they are having, what are some reoccurring questions they're having. You have some assistance in place in order to answer these emails and chats. This is incredibly important because as you're hiring now, you know what to look for. You know exactly what it takes to do that job and you know how to evaluate really good customer support agents. But before we talk about what to consider when hiring your first, second, third, your whole team, I want to applaud you for really thinking about this and prioritizing customer support.

3:10Customer support is something that really can differentiate you and help you become a leader in your market. Like I said, it's an extension of your branding, it's an extension of your marketing. So let's jump into the factors you need to consider when hiring your first, second, third agent, your entire team. Number one, The volume of customer inquiries. How many inquiries, whether they're chat, email, phone, WhatsApp messages, Facebook messages, text messages, or whatever. How many customer inquiries are you getting every single day? You should have this number on hand. You should know how many inquiries you're getting.

3:48Before Nicole and I built out a customer support team, we were getting about 200 customer support inquiries a day. Both of us were doing 100 inquiries a day. And this was a combination of email and chat. And we were using a tool at the time it was Zendesk. We moved on to Intercom, but we had a customer support tool to really track how many actual emails and responses we had each day. And this allowed us to know what our baseline was. Now, this is a lot of customer support. We were growing fast. We had a lot of customers coming in. We had a free trial. So we got a lot of people coming in free. So you might be thinking, okay, sounds good.

4:26Does that mean that I should just hire two agents in this scenario to cover the work that Nicole and I are doing? The answer is, I wish. No, because there's a couple of things you need to consider. Number one, let's say you're handling 50 inquiries a day and that's what your volume is, but you are doing other things, right? You're doing other things in your business. You are busy building out your business and you're doing customer support. This person that's going to handle these inquiries, this is all they're doing. They're just focusing on customer support. So they should be able to do more, right?

5:02But on the flip side, just bear with me here. On the flip side, you're going to answer these inquiries a lot faster than anybody else because you know your product. You know the ins and outs of your business more than anybody else. You don't need to look up the answer. You know the answer, okay? Because you made the answer. You made every aspect of your business. So it's going to be a lot easier for you to respond. Then you have the motivation, of course, that this is your business. So you're going to be motivated to answer inquiries faster, more efficiently, things like that. On top of that, you're not only doing customer support.

5:37You're actually managing customer support while you're doing the actual support tickets, the emails and the chats. You're managing the process. You're doing quality control. You may not be noticing it, but if you outsource or you hire somebody to do the support, you're still going to have to manage the process. You still have to manage the people that are running the day-to-day, the agents themselves. So if you want to be completely outside of customer support and do no management, then you're going to have to hire a manager as well. So a couple of things to consider. Know your baseline of inquiries, how much you're doing.

6:10And usually I like to kick it back 20%. So even though you're busy and you're doing all these other things in your business, not just customer support, and all this person is going to focus on is this 100%, they're not going to be as knowledgeable or as quick to respond as you will. Yes, they will ramp up eventually and probably be better than you, but at the start, just keep this in mind. Factor number two you need to consider is response time goals. What's your desired response time? Is it important for your customers to get a quick response? Is it totally fine for them to get a response in a day or two?

6:44Do you have different goals for responses to people that are customers and there's different response time to different levels of customers? Maybe you have a different response time goal for people that are not customers yet, like leads. You have to define how quickly do you need to get back to these customers. For us at Webinar Ninja, our average response time was under five minutes, okay? Because we really thought it was important to give an answer, get back to our customers as fast as possible, whether they're a lead, whether they're a high paying customer, a customer that just signed up yesterday.

7:16We wanted to make sure that when somebody reached out to us, email, chat, they got an answer under five minutes. They heard back, first response time was under five minutes. And we would often hit two minutes, three minutes, because we felt like this makes a huge difference and makes a great impression. So you need to calculate how many inquiries each agent can handle with that time frame in mind. Because you may want more agents handling less tickets if you want a very fast response time. If your response time is a little bit more conservative and not as ambitious as we were, then you could probably do with less agents.

7:52Factor number three, the complexity of your inquiries. How complex are your customer service inquiries? The questions that the customers ask. Are they troubleshooting some complex complex issues with their product, their service, whatever they bought from you. For example, Apple, their customer support and their complexity of inquiries is going to vary. There's going to be chats, there's going to be phone calls on Apple. I've been a part of those because I'm an Apple customer that are going to be an hour or two hours, three hours long, just one customer, one inquiry. But maybe your inquiries don't take that long.

8:29Maybe the average inquiry is not that complex. They're quite simple. Maybe each inquiry from start to finish, from hello to is there anything else I can help you with, is 10 minutes or five minutes. That's going to change how many agents that you need. Because at the end of the day, if they're working an eight-hour shift, and let's say your average inquiry is complex to the point it takes an hour per customer, they can only do eight inquiries a day at best with no breaks, regardless of your average response time goals, regardless of how many tickets are actually getting in the inbox. So this is actually something you really need to look into right now, how complex are your inquiries?

9:08And on average, when there's no goal, how long does it take to solve an issue, to respond to a customer's inquiry? Okay, factor number four, availability and coverage. You need to decide how much coverage, how much availability do you want to offer your customers? Are you going to offer 24-7 support like we did at Webinar Ninja? This changes things completely because if you want to have customer support around 24-7, you're going to need somebody, one person at least, on shift at all times. And in our case, we tried to have two people on shift at all times because they can help each other out if they're trying to problem solve something.

9:51Plus, we had a manager on shift at all times. Now, some shifts are going to be busier than others. Some agents are going to handle a lot more tickets than others. And that was our case because, you know, depending on the shift, depending on the volume of the tickets at certain times, some agents would have a very easy shift and some agents didn't. And that's why we did a rotation of shifts. Every 12 weeks, we would change up our rotation. So if you were on a certain shift after 12 weeks, you would move on to another shift. That way you get exposure to all our customers around the world and it evens out the workload.

10:27So if you want to have 24-7 support, you got to think about that and how you're going to cover all those time zones. Maybe you're not going to offer 24-7 support. Maybe you only need nine to five or nine to nine. Maybe you want to cover just half the world. Maybe your audience is not global, so you don't need 24-7. So this is something you need to think about and plan and be strategic when it comes to hiring your team. Now, to recap, what are the four factors you need to consider when you're hiring your team for customer support? Number one, the volume of customer inquiries. Number two, your response time goals.

11:01Number three, the complexity of your inquiries. And number four, the availability and coverage you want to offer your customers. So I want to give you some practical steps to determine the number of agents you're looking for, things that you can do right now to get ready and to start hiring. Number one, get your numbers right. Figure out what your inquiry volume is. Track the number of inquiries you're receiving daily across all your channels, email, chat, phone, social media, whatever it might be. And a lot of these modern softwares like Intercom and Zendesk, they aggregate all that stuff for you in one platform.

11:33Number two, set a response time goal. What is your response time goal? How quickly do you want your customer support team to answer to inquiries? What is kind of the bar you must hit? that would be great for your customers. Remember, it depends on your market, depends on who your audience is. We were in webinar software. Things are critical. Things are happening live. So response time was very important. And that's why we had it under five minutes. But if your product is not that critical, let's say you have an e-commerce store and you're selling t-shirts, no one's going to die if they don't get a response within five minutes about their refund on their t-shirt or an inquiry about which size is best for them.

12:12Maybe a two-hour response time is fine. Maybe a five-hour response time is fine. You know your market, you know best. Number three, assess your inquiry complexity. How complex are your actual inquiries? Determine how many inquiries each agent can handle based on their complexity. And number four, calculate agent requirements. Use the data from steps one through three and calculate the number of agents you need. For example, if you receive 100 inquiries a day and you want a response time within an hour and each agent can handle 20 inquiries a day, you're going to need five agents. And number five, plan for coverage.

12:47Ensure you have enough agents to cover the support hours you want to offer, whether that's 24-7, whether that's 9-9, whether it's 9-5, whatever it might be for you. So just a quick recap example. Let's say you receive 150 inquiries a day, you want a response time of two hours, and each agent can handle 15 inquiries a day, you're going to need 10 agents. That's 150 inquiries divided by 15 inquiries per agent. That's 10 agents. If you operate 12 hours a day, nine to nine, you might want to think about spreading these agents across different shifts to ensure full coverage. Now, this is just customer service work.

13:22This is not managing the customer support team. This is not customer success. This This is not onboarding, okay? This is just answering customer support inquiries. To wrap up, determining the right number of customer support agents for your business involves understanding these factors I mentioned today. Because at the end of the day, you wanna make sure your support team is not overworked, but also not underworked. I feel like the sweet spot is 80 % capacity, that they're working at 80 % of what they actually can pull off. That way they don't burn out, That way they feel like they're getting good job satisfaction and they're not stressing out about every single ticket because things are so tight.

14:04But anything under 80%, 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, you're being inefficient. You're really overpaying. And I've gone through that where I had agents that were not doing enough and the quality of our support suffered a bit and I had to make a quick change. Terry, I hope this helps you figure out your optimal number of customer support agents for your business. If you're listening right now and you got a question, you have something you're struggling with, something that maybe you just can't figure out, hit me up over at omar at 100mba.net. Just email me and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday.

14:38If you like this episode, if you enjoy the show, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. We're on all the apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, you name it, we're on them all. By subscribing to the show, you support the show in a big way. You have no idea how much it impacts us and allows us to reach new audiences. So thanks in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Over time, your customer support team is going to get more and more efficient. They're going to be better at answering questions. They're going to start creating customer support articles based on common questions.

15:09And those are going to be answered automatically through self-service that customers will go through. Your product is going to get better. Your website's going to get better. The experience of buying is going to get better. So therefore, customers are not asking so many questions. And the job of the leadership in your business is to make the job of customer support better, easier, more efficient. I mentioned this in a previous episode. One of the things that we did was in our management meetings is we looked at the top questions or issues that customers would repeat over and over again. And we would prioritize just removing that issue from existing again, just fixing the problem from the product.

15:48If a customer kept on asking like, hey, how do I find of that billing information. Maybe it's not intuitive. Maybe it's not clear. Maybe it's too hidden. We need to make it clear inside of the app. That way, our customer service agents don't get that question asked ever again, or not as often. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

16:24Thank you.