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At Udemy, we are currently supporting about 250,000 Monthly Active Users with a 6 person team. About 1% of users write in (2500 tix a month). How do you measure when you need a new team member?
I think this is one of those that’s a judgement call that each company has to make. At 2500 tickets a month, that’s about 83 a day. If each of your six people are working tickets, that’s an average of 14/person/day. From the numbers standpoint, it feels like you’re okay. That said, that’s pulling just from those numbers. If only have your team is working on tickets, it changes things.
At the end of the day, are you feeling overwhelmed by tickets? Like it’s just a never-ending flood you can never get ahead of? If so, it’s probably a good time to add a new team member. Or if you’re holding your own with tickets but never have time to work on surprise gifts/emails to customers, updating your help docs, etc., then it’s probably time to add a new team member.
Are you feeling pressure from the support load to add a new person to the team?
We’ve added support team members reactively based on the feeling of being overwhelmed, but that approach taxes our existing team, because only when they are being overtaxed do we begin trying to hire someone new, which can mean 2 more weeks of hiking ticket mountain.
I’m trying to take a more proactive, predictive approach to adding new staff, so not only do we have people in place when we need them, but we can forecast our personnel needs.
How many tickets a day do your team members average?
Proactive definitely helps if you can get a good feel for where your tickets will be at a few months out.
For us, we’ve got a team of 10 handling about 10,000 cases a month. We’re scattered throughout time zones so some of us see less tickets than others. On average, I handle between 60-80 tickets a day.
This is definitely something we’re working on right now as we’re digging into how we’ll continue to scale. I wanted to find some data to back up my “gut” feeling that we needed a few more people, and everything in our company comes back to a data driven approach. I’ve found the ZenDesk Benchmark Report was pretty helpful in comparing my team to industry averages and looking at support across industries.
Tickets per day is going to super personal to the type of company you work at, which is where the benchmark report comes in handy. In retail it’s going to be higher because we get order-related queries, rather than traditional tech support requests. Other industries may be lower because they take more time to solve out, escalate, etc.
Not sure what you use to track your analytics but GoodData has given me pretty good insight into KPIs and how we’re performing on those, so we can use that combined with predicted order volume to make a case for when we’ll need to scale.
Hey Alex,
As far as what the right number for you is - I couldn’t say as it depends on the average time you type of support tickets take. So that would be a gut check for you. However we’ve had issues with figuring out the same thing in the past so hopefully our bumps and bruises can help you plan
Currently we have a pretty large support team (24 people in our department, 17 of which are purely front line support). In previous years we would just ‘feel it out’ as you mentioned and recruit when we felt swamped. Definitely not a good spot to be in and it’s no fun for your team to get to that point. Thankfully we have tons of data that we were able to make use of… and it sounds like you guys have the same!
We looked at historical data to see what our average daily load was per-person. Then we looked at what the load was when we were feeling swamped. From there we split the difference and used that as our guideline for hiring. We don’t want to wait until that swamped period to hire, but we also don’t want to over-hire.. which is why we aim a bit higher than average.
We can easily tell how many cases we get on average/per customer - so from there it’s just a matter of working with marketing. Set a benchmark of ‘for every XX new customers, hire 1 body’. Then just work with your finance and marketing team to plot your growth and churn and see when you’ll hit that many new customers.
Now aside from number crunching an even BIGGER lesson that we’ve been learning lately - is more so ensuring that we are being as efficient as possible. You might have some opportunities to help your team be more productive simply by changing processes or giving them better or more tools.
A silly but great example is our ticketing system. The system we use for tracking all our emails was a bit slow. We updated to a new version of the software and stuck it on a new server. Suddenly we were saving 20-30seconds on each case just in page load times. Might not sound like much, but 30seconds times 10,000 cases a month is over 80 man hours! So take a look at things like that, or maybe tools that would add or combine functionality for your team. It might have a substantial impact
Cheers,
Phil
Great advice Phil, thank you!
Regarding your “bigger” learning regarding efficiency. One thing we’ve been trying to do is group like tickets together, allowing agents to fly through a specific ticket type. Are you doing anything like that? One challenge we’ve had is how best to separate tickets as the come in to their appropriate buckets. We’ve tried rules that identify keywords, custom fields users complete when logging a ticket, and manual sorting. None seem to work that well. Any approach you’ve found especially effective?
Hey Alex,
With our current set up we don’t have a good/reliable way of filtering like that. So it’s not something that we currently make use of. Can’t help on that one - sorry
So on your team, every agent answers every type of ticket?
We’ve found having specialties has the benefit of agents owning the intricacies of a certain type of ticket, and helps with training. Certainly a booster of efficiency
Since all of our front line staff do both phones and emails. Unlike email, we don’t know what issue the customer has until we are talking with them. So for that reason, we don’t bother having any particular person handle specific types of cases. Because of the constant variety, we find it keeps people sharper for when they are on the phones.
That’s not to say that we don’t have some people who dig deeper into certain areas. We do, and those people will put extra effort into making sure they are an expert on say a particular integration or add-on. However, they use that to teach the team - or be a go to, in the event another team member couldn’t answer the question.
If we ever dedicated team members strictly to emails - we would likely look at having a system a little more like you mentioned.Hey Alex,
At Craftsy (also focused on online education to the public) we currently have over 3.7 million members (customers) and a team of 14 on tickets and phones and 1 on social media. Currently, we take 10,000 - 12,000 tickets a month and manage 22 active FB pages with 7 million fans. We’ve scaled quickly from 1 - 17 in just shy of 3 years and have done so at times, painfully understaffed. Just like Molly @ True&Co, we’re a very data drive company, so developing key reports, prediction models, and working closely with our product team has helped us define how to grow. For us, growth has both been a factor of growing the headcount of our team, but also reducing our ticket volume per active member. We work extremely closely with our product team to drive innovative new enhancements and features to improve our teams internal tools as well as improve customer facing features that account for our biggest buckets of support volume. This helps us prevent problems instead of just throwing more support at solving problems and thus curb the need to hire, to some extent.
Our goal is to be hired with “1+” capacity which allows individuals on the team to work on meaningful, career building projects outside of tickets/phones/social media. When we feel this wiggle room start to disappear, we fire up that open rec and begin the search for another team mate (or 2, or 3 depending on our predicted growth). We’ve also worked closely with our analytics team to help develop a predictive model for support volume as it relates to our larger business goals based on the past few years worth of ticket data (gathered and pulled from Gooddata). To be honest, in the first few years prediction was nearly impossible, especially at our growth rate. Now that we’ve got some data to work with, it’s getting a bit “easier.” Of course this is always an ever growing process and we’re no experts - even when it comes to our own growth.
I’d love to hear more about how you’ve organized your team into specialities, especially as it relates to your business model and types of inquires you’re getting. This is something we’re just dipping our toes into now and an idea I’m really excited about. I’m happy to chat with you in more detail if you’d like! Sounds like there is a lot we can learn from each other.
Jenn
Wow! I envy you all. Does anyone here work in the CPG world? I currently work as the primary consumer response advocate for method (the soap company) and Ecover. At the moment, we are a 1.25 person team. My job is 25% of our PR advocate’s job and done on a ‘when time is available’ basis. I am responsible for all phone calls, emails and some FB posts. At the moment my desk consists of two phones: one for method and one that doubles as the ecover phone + my personal line.
My question is: how do you convince your company to scale the support team? My .25 team member will be going full-time PR in July and we did convince the company to hire a part-time temp for 15 hours a week.
At the moment, I answer over 1000 cases a month, usually around 50 emails + 10-20 phone calls a day. I also provide quarterly reports to our product teams. I will be attending my first Userconf this fall in SF to learn more from all of you. I’m also hoping to shadow some companies in the Bay Area to get an idea of what their team looks like in order to convince my company to give me some help.
Any advice on anything (really!) is greatly welcomed and appreciated.
Hey Angela,
That’s pretty rough. I think there are several tacks you can take to convince your organization to scale up support.
- Support is Sales: It is always difficult to connect with customers and convince them to spend money, especially when you as an organization are explicitly trying to sell them something. However , you have 1000 customers a month contacting YOU asking how they can work with your company better. Scaling up support means improving the sales cycle for those customers (caveat, you may get a sales goal)
- Support is Marketing: The fastest way to get people talking about your company on social media, good or bad, is through their experience with support. It is also a way that people often judge when picking between companies, so having a top quality support infrastructure that provides timely and personalized responses that make people say “WOW” will often make other people say “maybe that company DOES care about me”.
- Support is R&D. This might be a good tack for CPG, if your organization is one that looks to improve consumer experience and understanding of the product. When a support team is not overloaded just trying to respond to tickets, it can begin to look at ticket patterns and expose what the biggest needs are for improving the core offering of an organization. For example, if you had the capacity to analyze tickets, may discover that 20% of people write in asking if the soap contains animal fat, which could inform how to improve the labelling of your soap!
- Quality Support is Mission Critical Across all these points is an underlying recognition that taking care of customers is important to your business. If your company has a mission statement, or otherwise explicitly says they care about customers, leverage that point with the importance of prompt, personal, helpful responses.
At the end of the day, regardless of the overarching argument you make, be sure to leverage data to prove your case. What is the average response time? What is your backlog? What is your CSAT? What KPIs does your management care about, where is that number at now in relation to support, and how could that number be improved with new people.
Hope this helps
Thanks for the awesome insight, Alex. I’ve been trying to persuade the team to increase the team. While they do see the importance of it, I don’t think they understand how draining answering that many consumers can be. When looking at the numbers, they go…”Not bad! Can you starting do XYZ now?”
Appreciate it!
Ahhhh… Then data data data Angela.
Work out this formula:
Each response take <i>T</i> time on average, there are A tix plus B re-opened tix per day. (A+B)*T=Total hours to respond to tickets per day. This is your ammo to overcome scope creep (i.e. you can do it all!)
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