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Get startedWhen it comes to running a successful business, growth is a fantastic sign. It shows you’re delivering a high standard of service and a product that people genuinely want.
But scaling your business can be daunting. When everything is going so well, the last thing you want to do is introduce a change that might disrupt the quality you're known for. The key to growing without compromise is to scale your customer support team right alongside your business. This ensures that no matter how much your customer base expands or your offerings diversify, you continue to provide excellent customer service. To understand how to scale without leaving quality behind, let’s explore why scaling customer support is so important.
TL;DR
Scaling your support team is key to maintaining that quality as your business grows.
67% of customers will switch brands after one poor experience. Growth should never come at the cost of exceptional service.
Expanding your customer support means aligning team size, tools, and processes with your growing customer base and product offerings.
Businesses that invest in scalable support models see an increase in customer retention. Prioritise tools and training to create a seamless experience for every customer.
Proper scaling ensures businesses can handle growth without sacrificing satisfaction, leading to long-term loyalty and sustainable success.
The importance of scaling customer support
Excellent customer support is a fundamental reason behind most businesses’ success. While other factors are certainly involved, a strong support system creates memorable experiences that build lasting brand loyalty. As your business grows, these support functions can get stretched thin, leaving your team struggling to keep up and unable to deliver the personalised service your customers expect.
This isn't just bad for your customers; it also impacts your team's morale and performance. When thinking about how to scale customer support, it’s helpful to consider the ways your business is growing.
More markets and more time zones
Expanding into new territories can be exciting, but your customer support team will have to contend with different time zones and additional local market knowledge. This can call for faster onboarding and connecting a dispersed global team.
More products require more conversations
As a business grows, its products and services often expand. Each new offering introduces fresh use cases and customer questions, increasing the demand for knowledgeable support. This requires your team to develop more expertise and your processes to scale efficiently to handle the increased volume of enquiries while maintaining high-quality service.
More support; more channels
The ways customers prefer to communicate are always evolving. While voice remains a crucial channel for making a personal connection, meeting modern expectations often means offering support across multiple platforms. As teams juggle voice, chat, email, and social media, they need connected systems to manage higher volumes and deliver a consistent, high-quality experience on every channel.
Defining quality in customer support
Maintaining quality while you scale customer support starts with defining what "excellent support" actually means for your business. Once you have a clear definition, you can track your performance using key metrics to ensure you stay on course.
Let’s look at some of the most important metrics to track.
Survey scores
Whether you use CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) or NPS (Net Promoter Score), these measurements give you a clear sense of how happy your customers are. Crucially, they also indicate how likely customers are to recommend your business to others, which is a powerful asset for a growing company.
First response time (FRT)
This is the average time it takes for your customer support team to respond to an enquiry. As your business scales and enquiry volume increases, it's vital to maintain quick response times to show customers you value their time.
First-contact resolution rate (FCR)
This metric tracks the percentage of customer queries that are resolved during the very first interaction. As your business grows, this number can be challenging to maintain, but keeping it high is essential for retaining your customer base and your reputation for efficiency.
Average resolution time (ART)
This is a useful metric to gauge how long it takes for a support ticket to be fully resolved. This will likely vary depending on your industry, but it's important to have a target figure in mind that your team can consistently strive to hit.
Internal Quality Score (IQS)
This measurement shows how well your customer support team is performing against the quality standards you've defined internally. This is often the metric that requires the most investment and is highly dependent on your specific business goals.
When deciding how to scale customer support, you must define your own benchmarks. However, looking at the context of other businesses can be a great way to understand the competitive landscape and set ambitious goals.
How to maintain quality while scaling your customer support team
Your business is unique, so scaling your support team effectively is rarely as simple as just hiring more people. There are several strategic ways to grow your support capabilities without sacrificing the quality of the customer experience.
Here are five key strategies to consider:
Build an omnichannel strategy
Choose a voice solution that integrates with your existing tech stack
Automate as many processes as possible
Refine the onboarding process
Invest in proactive and AI-powered support
With this in mind, let’s look at how you can scale customer support by diversifying your offerings without compromising the experience.
1. Build an omnichannel strategy
Customers appreciate having multiple ways to contact you. Their preferred channel can change based on the situation, but the quality of your service needs to remain consistent everywhere. Integrations between your systems (like phone, chat, email, and social media) are essential for managing all interactions in one place. This unified view improves efficiency and ensures you maintain high service quality across all touchpoints.
Common channels include:
Voice
SMS
Chat
Email
Social media
Building an omnichannel strategy helps you interact with a broader pool of customers and caters to those who have a multi-factor request.
Bear in mind that your omnichannel strategy needs to be streamlined so your customers don’t feel they are getting a fragmented and inconsistent service. When done right, an omnichannel strategy also saves your team time by funneling requests to the most appropriate channel, ensuring you only dedicate agent time to the enquiries that truly require it.
For example, Aircall’s integration with Salesforce includes a dedicated omnichannel feature that saves time and helps maintain quality support.
2. Choose a voice solution that integrates with your existing customer support tech stack
For many customers, a great phone call is the pinnacle of personal and empathetic service. However, as support volumes grow, delivering that personal touch on every call can become difficult. Integrating your phone system with your help desk and CRM platforms is a powerful solution. These CRM integrations give agents instant access to customer data and open tickets, helping them personalise calls and maintain efficiency.
When a customer calls, your team will have all the information they need at their fingertips, automatically updated. This allows for a more informed and seamless conversation. As Genuine Legal discovered, this integration can transform customer interactions.
“When they call, we can greet them by name. We can see from their Hubspot profile when they call, how many times, everything… We have better customer service.”
Tools like Aircall integrate seamlessly with platforms such as Freshdesk, HubSpot, and Zendesk, ensuring your voice solution works in harmony with the tools your team already uses.
Learn how Aircall helps teams scale customer support effortlessly through 200+ powerful integrations. Try Aircall today.
3. Automate as many processes as possible
When you're figuring out how to scale customer support without compromising quality, it's essential to treat your support team's time as a precious resource. Automating tasks like call logging, ticket creation, call routing, and post-call updates frees agents from manual administrative work and ensures data remains consistent across all your tools.
Automation works best when your systems are connected, allowing customer details, tickets, and call notes to update automatically between platforms. This eliminates the need for agents to spend hours searching for customer data or performing manual data entry, allowing them to focus on what they do best—helping customers. For Holidu and Bookiply, using Aircall’s Zendesk integration was a game-changer for reducing manual work.
“The Aircall Zendesk integration has allowed us to kill manual work and save time, since all key information is automatically entered into Zendesk for ticket creation, and we can easily keep track.” - Darius Abde-Yazdani, Managing Director at Bookiply
By building the right tech stack, you can bring more automation into your processes, keeping your team productive, motivated, and dedicated to delivering quality.
4. Refine the onboarding process
Onboarding can be a time-consuming process for new team members and the colleagues training them. In fact, a Klaus Customer Service Report found that 28% of businesses say onboarding and training get in the way of scaling.
Onboarding software can ease this process with features that support development and in-the-moment learning. Aircall, for instance, offers call recording, call whispering, and other features that help new reps get up to speed quickly. To give this more direction, however, a robust quality assurance program is needed.
Having this in place will ensure your business remains on course to meet its standard of customer experience and satisfaction. When it comes to onboarding, it will also ensure your team is working from the very latest insights. In fact, the Klaus report found that 89% of businesses agree that quality assurance reviews help customer service teams onboard new agents.
While only 13% of companies with fewer than 50 employees cite onboarding as a challenge, this figure jumps to 43% for companies with 500 to 5,000 employees. Depending on the size of your business, it’s worth considering whether you need small-scale initiatives like a buddy system or a more structured training program with a dedicated team.
5. Invest in proactive and AI-powered support
Investing in proactive and AI-powered support can help your team scale by reducing ticket volume and improving response times. By combining automation, self-service, and AI, you can ensure consistent quality even as customer demand increases. This approach anticipates customer needs and provides solutions before issues escalate, creating a smoother experience for everyone.
Chatbots and contextual help
Chatbots and contextual help widgets are fantastic tools for anticipating customer needs before they turn into support tickets. They can handle routine queries automatically, guide users through common issues with pop-ups and walkthroughs, and free up your agents to focus on more complex, higher-value interactions. This proactive approach minimises frustration and provides instant guidance right where customers need it.
Knowledge bases and self-service
A well-organised knowledge base empowers customers to find answers on their own. By providing detailed articles, tutorials, and FAQs, you enable self-service that reduces the number of repetitive enquiries your team has to handle. This not only shortens resolution times but also allows you to scale your support capabilities without adding more headcount, giving customers the quick answers they want.
AI-powered voice tools
AI is also transforming proactive support on voice channels. AI-powered tools like Aircall’s AI Voice Agent can automate routine calls by answering frequently asked questions, routing callers to the right department, and summarising interactions for your team. This frees up your agents to handle more complex issues that require a human touch. As The Grout Guy found, this technology is about enabling teams to do more.
"We’re not trying to replace people—we’re trying to enable our team to do more with less, letting AI handle routine issues and freeing capacity to handle the trickier stuff."
- Anthony Messina, Salesforce Platform Manager, The Grout Guy
Scale your customer support with Aircall
Scaling your business is an exciting journey, and growing your customer support shouldn't mean sacrificing the quality that got you here. With the right strategies and tools, you can expand your operations while continuing to deliver exceptional service. Aircall is designed to help you do just that.
By automating key tasks like call logging, ticket creation, and post-call updates across your CRMs and help desks, Aircall helps your team save time and maintain impeccable service quality. With powerful AI-driven capabilities and over 100 integrations, Aircall provides the foundation you need to scale customer support intelligently and efficiently.
See how Aircall helps you automate routine call tasks and connect all your favorite tools through 200+ powerful integrations. Start your free trial today.
Frequently asked questions
How do I scale my customer support?
Scaling customer support effectively involves a multi-faceted approach. Start by building an omnichannel strategy to offer consistent service across various channels like voice, chat, and email. Next, choose a voice solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack, such as your CRM and help desk, to give agents a unified view of the customer. Automate repetitive processes like call logging and ticket creation to free up your team for more complex issues. Refine your onboarding process with quality assurance and training programs to get new hires up to speed quickly. Finally, invest in proactive and AI-powered support, including chatbots and self-service knowledge bases, to reduce ticket volume and empower customers.
What are the KPIs for customer support?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer support help you measure and maintain quality. Important KPIs include survey scores like CSAT and NPS to gauge customer happiness, First Response Time (FRT) to track responsiveness, and First-Contact Resolution (FCR) to measure efficiency. Average Resolution Time (ART) helps you understand how long it takes to solve issues, while Internal Quality Score (IQS) allows you to assess performance against your own standards.
How can automation help scale customer support?
Automation is crucial for scaling customer support because it handles repetitive, time-consuming tasks, allowing your agents to focus on high-value interactions. It can automate call logging, create tickets in your help desk, route calls to the right agent, and send post-call updates. By connecting your systems, automation ensures data is consistent and accessible, which improves efficiency, reduces manual errors, and helps your team manage a growing volume of enquiries without sacrificing service quality.
Published on August 14, 2022.
