The Zen of Scaling a Support Team

There’s a delicate balance when it comes to scaling any professional team: hire too many too soon and resources go underutilized, but leave it too late and you risk overburdening your existing team members. Customer support teams in particular can become overloaded and burned out if the company is growing faster than the team has capacity to handle. There’s a big expectation on support teams to continue providing reliable service to customers at all times, and to never let the cracks show. For a customer, it doesn’t matter how many open tickets a support agent has on their plate as long as their agent is dealing with their issue right now. For support agents, pressure comes from both sides – they’re held accountable for their efficiency from both the company and the customer. When the number of incoming inquiries is too much to handle, the only way to reduce the pressure is to get more hands on deck to deal with the volume.

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