MBA2250 Q&A Wednesday: How many support messages is too many for one team member? - The $100 MBA Show

Summary

The $100 MBA Show: MBA2250 Q&A Wednesday – How Many Support Messages Is Too Many for One Team Member?

Introduction

In episode MBA2250 of The $100 MBA Show, host Omar Zenhom tackles a common challenge faced by many entrepreneurs: determining the optimal number of support messages a single team member can handle effectively. Released on February 22, 2023, this episode provides actionable insights grounded in Omar's extensive 20+ years of entrepreneurship experience, particularly focusing on customer support efficiency and team management.

Listener's Question: Balancing Support Message Load

At the heart of this episode is a question from Candace:

“I am looking to hire another customer service agent. Currently, I have one team member that handles support messages, but I'm not sure if we need to hire a second one because we have too many messages, or the support agent is not being productive enough, or maybe they need to be replaced. I have no way to gauge because when I ask my other friends in business, they have different types of businesses and different support requests. Would love your help on this question.”
– Candace (00:40)

Omar's Framework for Assessing Support Load

Omar begins by acknowledging the universality of the issue, emphasizing that every business with customer interactions must evaluate its support capacity. He outlines a two-pronged approach to determine whether to hire additional support staff or optimize current operations:

Quantitative Assessment: Number of Messages Per Day

Omar underscores the importance of understanding how many support messages one person can handle daily. He suggests conducting an experiment to measure this accurately.

“The easy way to find out is to take three days out of your schedule and be a customer service agent 24/7... in my experiment, I did about 100 to 110 tickets a day on average.”
– Omar Zenhom (03:15)

By personally managing support for a set period, Omar was able to establish that an average of 100-110 messages per day is manageable, providing a benchmark for hiring decisions.
Qualitative Assessment: Average Response Time

Beyond sheer volume, Omar emphasizes the need to set and adhere to average response times, recommending a maximum of 24 hours for replies to maintain customer satisfaction.

“I think beyond that, two days, that's just too much. If you want to have excellent customer service, that should be the bare minimum.”
– Omar Zenhom (02:00)

For his own company, Webinar Ninja, Omar targets an average response time of five minutes, highlighting the importance of swift communication in enhancing customer experience.

Determining the Threshold: Calculation and Comparison

To provide a clear method for Candace and others in similar situations, Omar outlines a straightforward calculation:

Conduct the Support Experiment: Handle support duties for three peak days to gauge the average number of messages handled personally.
Establish a Benchmark: Divide your personal average by two to set a manageable target for each support team member.

“If your average is a hundred, your new hire should handle 50 a day.”
– Omar Zenhom (05:45)

This method accounts for differences in efficiency, knowledge, and communication skills between the business owner and new team members.

Assessing Team Member Performance

Omar advises evaluating current team members against the established benchmarks:

Above Benchmark: If a team member consistently handles more than the target, consider whether they need additional support or should be recognized for their efficiency.
Below Benchmark: Identify if underperformance stems from a lack of training or insufficient tools. Omar recommends practical solutions such as:

“Maybe you can give them some helpful tips, techniques, show them how to use text expander, use canned responses...”
– Omar Zenhom (07:30)

Implementing these strategies can enhance productivity without immediately resorting to additional hires.

When Training Isn’t Enough: Making Tough Decisions

Despite best efforts, sometimes team members may not meet performance standards even after training. Omar discusses:

“Sometimes, you just are not a good fit for each other... About 50% of the time training helps and they get better... The other half, you have to say goodbye.”
– Omar Zenhom (09:20)

He emphasizes that maintaining service quality is paramount, and making difficult staffing decisions is part of responsible business ownership.

Conclusion: Building a Strong Support Team

Omar wraps up the episode by reinforcing the importance of balancing team workload to ensure customer satisfaction and efficient business operations. He underscores that:

“You are only as strong as the team you build... The best entrepreneurs know how to recruit the best team members and know how to say goodbye to the ones that don't work out.”
– Omar Zenhom (10:10)

Key Takeaways

Conduct Personal Experiments: Understand your support capacity by handling support duties yourself for a limited period.
Set Clear Benchmarks: Use your personal performance data to set realistic targets for your team members.
Enhance Efficiency Through Training: Provide your team with tools and training to maximize their productivity.
Make Informed Staffing Decisions: Balance between hiring new team members and optimizing current staff performance to maintain customer satisfaction.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

On Response Time Standards:

“I think beyond that, two days, that's just too much... excellent customer service, that should be the bare minimum.”
– Omar Zenhom (02:00)
On Personal Experimentation:

“Take three days out of your schedule and be a customer service agent 24/7... I did about 100 to 110 tickets a day on average.”
– Omar Zenhom (03:15)
On Team Member Evaluation:

“If you have to hire, hire and lighten the load a little bit on people... grow into it as you get more customers.”
– Omar Zenhom (07:45)
On Tough Staffing Decisions:

“About 50% of the time training helps and they get better... The other half, you have to say goodbye.”
– Omar Zenhom (09:20)

Final Thoughts

This episode of The $100 MBA Show provides a practical framework for entrepreneurs grappling with customer support management. By combining quantitative analysis with qualitative standards, Omar Zenhom equips listeners with the tools to make informed decisions that balance team workload and maintain high customer service standards.

For more insights and actionable business lessons, visit 100mba.net.

Transcript

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Omar Zenhom (0:40)

Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Power to the people, the business people that is every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co founder back in 2014 and and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Candace and Candace asks, hey Omar, I am looking to hire another customer service agent. Currently I have one team member that does support messages but I'm not sure if we need to hire a second one because because we have too many messages or the support agent is not being productive enough or maybe just not good enough and I need to replace them. I have no way to gauge because when I ask my other friends in business they have different types of businesses and different support requests so I can't really compare. Would love your help on this question. Thanks so much for everything you do with the podcast, Candice. Thanks Candice for the great question and I got your back. I'm going to show you exactly how you can know how many messages is too many messages when it comes to support requests. So you can be able to know should you hire, should you replace your current team member. Or maybe they need some training, but you should have some sort of barometer, some sort of minimal number of messages. Of course these are averages because some messages are going to take longer than others. But in today's episode I'm going to give you a really good way to find out how many is too many. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So in today's Q and A Wednesday, Candace asks how many is too many support messages for my support team member. And I love this question because I know that everybody at some point is going to have to deal with this situation in their business. Because every business has some customer support, customer success, customer service element, whether it's chat, email, phone, there is going to be that element in your business. And you kind of need to know how many messages are you getting, how many people you need to man those messages so that you could be efficient. There are two things you need to look at when it comes to your customer support team and standards to make this decision to know how many messages is too many for one person. The first one is obvious. How many messages, how many customer support questions or queries or tickets or whatever you want to call it? How many of those can one person handle in one day? That's pretty basic. But if you want to take this beyond that, you got to ask yourself what is the average response time you want to hold as the standard in your business? So for example, some companies have a policy that they want to return all messages within 24 hours. That means if a support email comes in, it needs to be replied to, it needs to be responded to before the 24 hour mark. Before 24 hours elapses. Of course you need to consider holidays and weekends, but you got to kind of establish what your policy is. And I would say no later than 24 hours. I think that really beyond that, two days, that's just too much. That's just too long for you to get a response. Especially if it's a sales query. Maybe a customer is asking for urgent help. Beyond 24 hours is kind of too long in my book. If you want to have excellent customer service, that should be the bare minimum. So for example, in my company, my software company, Webinar Ninja, our target for our first average response time is five minutes. We want to make sure people get a response quickly so that customer service is part of what they're buying. How many of you love a good company with great customer service like Disney or your favorite local restaurant? We just love being treated well and promptly. But if you're in candice situation, you're probably just in that 24 hour mark and you just want to make sure you're not overwhelming this agent in terms of how many support tickets they're able to finish in one day. And if there's too many tickets, meaning there's tickets they haven't responded within a day at the end of their day, meaning they have so many tickets they can't keep up with the 24 hour response time. How do you know how many is Too many? Is 40? Too many is 50 Too many? Well, this is an easy way to find out and I highly recommend everybody does this. Take three days out of your schedule and be a customer service agent 24, 7. Okay? You want to do it during the peak times, like during the week. So it's a real indication of what real volume is like. And ideally you can just maybe relieve your current agent while they're on holiday or something like that. Now, I know that you got a lot to do and ideally you probably did this before you even hired them. So if you didn't, then you're going to have to play catch up. And why do I say three days? Well, you need to have some sort of aggregated average. One day could be a little bit busier than the other. And you want to make sure that you're being fair. For example, my co founder and partner Nicole and myself, we did all of customer service for Webinar Ninja before we hired anybody. And then even when we hired people and had two agents, there were moments where we were so busy. I had to be a full time agent for a few days. So I basically answered so many customer service tickets and questions and emails and chats for maybe eight, nine hours straight for a few days in a row. And I got a good understanding of what this job entails, so it was easy for me to hire new people and know what to expect. Now, in my experiment at that time, when I jumped in, when we had agents, there were days where I did 200 customer service tickets. Okay, Every single day. That's a lot. Some days I did 180, some days I did 150. But I say on average I was able to do about 100 to 110 tickets a day. And when I say ticks, I mean messages or chats or emails, some sort of correspondence with a customer or potential customer. Now you have to factor in a few things. Number one, you probably know the product better than anybody else. You don't have to look anything up. You have all the information in your head. Okay, at least I can speak for myself. That's what I was dealing with. I never had to look up a help article. I never had to check the app itself. Maybe on a rare occasion it's a kind of hidden feature or something that's not used that frequently. I would have to kind of double check, but I probably did that. Maybe I would say once a day, not with every conversation. And even once a day was a lot. But the point here is that I have a lot of information and I know how to answer these questions very easily and fast. The other thing is that I'm a native English speaker, actually. I write a lot, I type a lot, so I can be economical with my language. I know how to write quickly. I'm not working in my non native tongue. That speeds things up a little bit for me as well. Also, it's my business. Of course I'm going to work hard. Of course I'm going to hustle. Of course it really matters to me to give great customer support because these people are paying all the bills for the business, the customers. I'm going to have a little bit more oomph. It's not that I don't expect that from my team members, it's just that I know that I'm probably going to push harder than most people. I'm just going to hold myself to that higher standard as the business owner and so should you. So I would say that after doing this experiment, I would take your numbers and divide them by two. Okay, cut them in half because that really is a reasonable number, comfortable number for one person to handle. You're going to double the average person's number because of your knowledge, because of your skills, because of your motivation, even if they're a native speaker. You're probably a better communicator because you've been doing this for a while and talk about your business and your product all the time. So this is why this experiment is so helpful. Because you can do an average over the three days. How many support tickets am I doing every day? Let's say it's a hundred. That means the average person that I hire should do 50 a day. So take a look at your team member. Are they hitting those milestones? Are they hitting half of what you would do? If they are awesome. Maybe they need some help. Maybe they need to hire. If your company is growing, it's better to hire and lighten the load a little bit on people. Even if it's not like a pure 5050 split to agents, they'll grow into it as you get more customers and more leads. But if they're not hitting your numbers, if they're not hitting half of what you do, then it probably means one of two things. One, they need training. Maybe you should co work with them one day and find out what's taking them so long. Maybe you can give them some helpful tips, techniques, show them how to use text expander, show them how to use canned responses or saved responses that you can edit and modify. Show them how they can just respond really quickly to a chat without having to write paragraphs of information as their first response. Show them how to handle several conversations at once. Maybe they just need some training, some tips, some tools, and maybe just a few days with you. They can really benefit from these strategies and your practices. That's worth a shot. Helping them get better. Train with them so that they can then teach somebody else when you hire your next hire. But what if that doesn't work either? What if you train them, you help them and they still don't cut the mustard.