Customer Experience (CX) | 10 MIN Read

4 Steps To Take When Faced With Unexpected Customer Growth

By @SamFalletta

There are many reasons a business sees growth during a time when they are unprepared to handle all of the customer interactions necessary to fully capitalize on the opportunity.  Sometimes it is a seasonal spike, other times it is an external factor, or it can even be because internal staff that was once stable has shifted to focus on other priorities.

In today’s radically changed global environment, we are hearing from a lot of businesses that are being challenged to support a growing customer base. Tele-health, meal delivery, home fitness, and financial industries are seeing explosive growth as the world moves remote, social distances, and toils with the realities of the coronavirus pandemic. These businesses are not only seeing an unexpected surge in customers, but in inquiries as well, challenging them to scale quickly in order to meet their customer experience goals.

While these problems are welcomed compared to the alternative that so many other businesses are facing during this time, they are not any less challenging to overcome.

Having spent the last 20 years helping hyper-growth companies accommodate a massive surge in customer demand, here are four places you can focus today to get you on the right track to support your growing customer needs:

1.) Quantify

Determine the source of all customer contacts

The initial key is to understand precisely where your customer contacts are coming from so you can strategically create a plan to address them. You can start to quantify these inquiries by answering the following questions:

• Which channels are you receiving the most contacts?  Are customers making inbound calls, social media inquiries, chat requests, texts, or emails?  Each channel has a different expected response time from the customer so understanding where the needs are can help you staff accordingly.

• What time of day is seeing the most volume? Are you aligning your staff schedules with your volume spikes?

• What’s the purpose of the inquiry? Are new customers attempting to order from you?  Did they have a technical issue?  Need additional product knowledge?  Want to understand the difference and benefit between two tiers of your service?

It is critical to understand the reason each customer is reaching out in order to help build content to support your growth.  This is often done through simple call dispositions and aggregated reporting. Many times during growth surges it will make sense to add additional call dispositions to better track and report which can typically be done quickly and easily. We have worked with some companies that have wanted to track inquires related to coronavirus, for example. Creating new daily trending reports will help as well.

Quantification of all customer touch points starts easy and gets complex very quickly.  Don’t be overwhelmed with the detail, as much as be sure you produce something to help get you started.

2.) Prioritize

align Your staff to high impact engagements

Once you understand the source of all your contacts you need to prioritize the value of each.  Ideally, you’d be able to handle all engagements efficiently and effectively to meet your customer experience goals but that is rarely the case during a hyper-growth phase of business.  In this step, assign value to each of the contact types and determine the highest priority for your team.

The order of prioritization may look like:

1. Customer support requests from highest value customers

   (This assumes you’ve identified your highest value customers previously.  If not, start here.)

2. New customer purchase requests

3. Urgent support requests from middle-tier customers

4. All other

Once prioritized, you can adjust your interactive voice response (IVR) prompts to recognize the phone number from your highest value customers or create a unique phone number for new sales inquiries. At this stage the goal is to create distinct workflows for all value streams so you can service them independently.

It will also be necessary to prioritize how customers get in touch with you. If you have more emails than you can handle it may make sense to pause chat and utilize those resources to more quickly answer email. We have found that customers expect an email reply within 24 hours in order to reduce the likeliness that they will follow up with a call to get the answers they need.

During times of surging growth, it may seem like you can’t possibly handle all available requests, so it’s challenging to make decisions because each alternative creates a gap in the previous place. 

That’s okay. 

By laying out a plan to focus on the high-value interactions you create clarity on how you will need to backfill.

3.) Deflect

Build out FAQ content And Update Frequently

As you gather customer interaction data you will be able to notice trends and build content to reduce the need for your customers to reach out for personalized service. A study conducted by Dimension Data found that 73% of customers prefer to use a company’s website to solve their problems instead of reaching out through other channels of support so it’s important to build this content out very robustly.

Do you have a knowledge base of FAQs on your website?  If so, keep updating it frequently based on the volume of calls you are getting for specific requests. Add links to this knowledge base prominently on your website and in your IVR prompts. It’s best to update these on a weekly basis (at the very least) based on previous weeks’ volume.

We have found that sources of content can come from all parts of the organization. For example some of our best FAQs have been written by our team that handles the day to day phone calls – they are the front lines after all.  Other functions such as your customer management group, marketing, and IT team often have great ideas for FAQs as well.

4.) Focus

Focus Internal staff on highest priorities and backfill with temporary or outsourced personnel

Ensure that any internally trained staff is committed to your highest pay-off activities.  Once you have measured and implemented inquiry deflection content techniques, you may still realize you are receiving more volume than you can handle.

If this is the case, evaluate the option to bring on temporary staff or contact an outsourced customer experience partner.  The key to this implementation is to have them focus on the narrowly defined problems or calls that you are unable to handle internally.

You will not necessarily need to train this staff on 100% of your product or service as they are essentially triaging the contact and attempting to resolve quickly or escalate to your internal resources.

Use the Pareto Principle here.  For example, to fully train an internal employee to handle 100% of the service requests they may encounter, it may take 4-6 weeks.  By focusing on the 80% of the scenarios that can handled in 20% of the training you will be able to add growth much faster than in a normal scenario.

As the partner develops their experience, they may be able to transition into a role where they handle higher value contacts but fight the urge to train them on 100% of all customer scenarios at first as your goal is to have them be productive and helpful as quickly as possible, not to handle 100% of every interaction.

Sometimes these volume spikes last for days or weeks, while other times they are the start of long-term sustainable growth.  In either scenario, be sure you weigh the opportunity cost of not having been ready to capture the influx of business, not just the expense of assisting customers. 

Concluding Thoughts

There are times where the customer demand is so high it is easy to freeze and do nothing and we are seeing many companies do that today.  Missing these opportunities are significantly more costly to your business than moving forward aggressively with a strategy to increase your capacity in order to meet customer experience needs. 

The scenarios for each organization are very different but I’m hopeful the CX solutions presented above can help your business scale quickly and effectively during this unique time in history.