5 Signs Your Small Business is Ready for a Support Software Upgrade
As your small business grows, so does the need for more efficient and scalable customer support tools. Recognizing when it's time to upgrade your support solutions can help streamline processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve overall efficiency—ultimately driving better results for your business.
Sign #1: Outgrowing Current Tools
Congratulations - your business is growing! If you’re running into more problems with your support processes than in the past, it’s likely a sign that your current tools are insufficient for handling your new volume or complexity of customer inquiries and data.
These inefficiencies can be hard to pinpoint at first, but here are some warning signs to look out for:
Support agents’ time spend significant time hunting down information
Tickets or SLAs getting missed by agents due to high volume
Too many steps for your support agents to resolve a case
Support agents providing incorrect information to customers
Volume too high for your current team to handle
Need for additional support infrastructure features
Let’s play out a scenario where a small business realized they had outgrown their current tools so you can see these inefficiencies in action. A good example would be a business growing beyond a “lower level” plan on a tool like Zendesk:
Imagine a company on the Zendesk Suite Team plan, which is one of the lower level plans available. It worked well for them in the startup phase, but the company is growing and has more complex support needs than their current plan can support. Eventually, they may find that they want to add the below functionalities to their support stack to improve efficiency and quality:
Create multiple different ticket submission types and forms
Add view-only accounts (“Light Agents”)
Implement new service-level agreement (SLA) rules
List business hour schedules
Use additional AI tools to help with routing or agent efficiency
Meet additional regulatory requirements like HIPAA or GDPR
Sign #2: Rising Volume of Customer Inquiries
As the number of customers a business acquires increases, the need for additional support efficiency tools needs to increase as well. It’s the price of success, however, your customer experience should not be impacted by the addition of more customers.
When support volume increases, here are a a few things we’d recommend you try out:
Make use of routing tools, like Zendesk’s AI routing, which decreases the amount of time for tickets to get to the right person, and can help perform ticket load-balancing automatically.
Utilize Help Center articles and AI agents for deflection with tools like Gorgias that come with out-of-the-box help center software and generative AI which can help “deflect” support tickets away from your team. Your customers get a faster solution to their problems when they have a self-service option, and your support agents can spend their time working on more difficult problems.
At scale, even a 1-2% reduction in case volume from deflection can save significant costs
Customers prefer to resolve their own issues anyway - Hubspot reports that 77% of customers view brands more favorably if they have good self-service options
Reduce resolution time by any means necessary with AI tools, like Zendesk’s new agent copilot, to help support agents find resources faster
AI-powered tools aren’t just for your customers or end-users, they can be useful for your agents, too. Zendesk’s copilot and AI packages can do quite a lot - from helping agents write, automatically searching your help center database and summarizing answers for your agents, to automatically suggesting macros and new help center articles. Generative AI is a powerful tool for increasing agent efficiency, and should be used in nearly all high-volume environments. It will decrease the amount of time agents spend on tickets, your overall ticket resolution speed, and will increase your customer satisfaction, to boot.
Sign #3: Poor Customer Satisfaction / Feedback
Maybe your volume and complexity are relatively stable, but if your company’s support responses are slow or unpersonalized, then that’s also a clear sign that it’s time to upgrade.
Poor customer service satisfaction often happens early on in a business’ life cycle when they are still trying to use email or another low cost communication method as its main support mechanism. Many times, this is less about the software itself and more about a company’s lack of CX subject matter expertise, inability to afford a higher tier plan, or simply not having the time or resources to dedicate to properly implementing the correct tool(s).
Business owners are typically not as familiar with support operations as they may be in other areas, so the gravity of creating a functional support stack can often be overlooked. If you’re not able to hire someone to specifically handle this, designating someone on your support or IT teams who can focus on optimizing your processes and software is a great career opportunity for an existing team member and a good way to improve your CX at the same time. If you’re interested in getting some expert opinions on your support process, take a look at our post on implementation consultants here.
Sign #4: Lack of Reporting & Analytics
You might be in a pivotal time for your business—perhaps you’re gearing up for a funding round, just hired a new executive or looking to make some critical internal investments—and you’re under the gun to provide accurately detailed CX analytics like never before. Upgraded support tools can help with that!
When you’re looking to upgrade or onboard a new software into your support stack, ensuring they have custom, easy-to-use reporting and dashboarding tools is essential.
A good example is a tool like Zendesk Explore, which is automatically integrated with your Zendesk environment. It allows you to create custom reports using almost every possible data point in Zendesk you can think of. Other tools such as FreshDesk often come with their own reporting capabilities as well. For more robust options, you can consider using a database tool like Snowflake and connect your various tools with a connector, like FiveTran.
Sign #5: Scalability Challenges
A very common problem with companies transitioning from the startup phase to a more mature phase is that business performance actually begins to outgrow its current systems. Not the worst problem to have, but it’s critical for your systems to mature with your business.
You might be tired of hearing this by now, but my #1 scalability feature I recommend for small businesses moving to more advanced support systems is artificial intelligence (AI). There are some truly sophisticated AI features that can make significant efficiency improvements in your support process with very little upfront work needed, such as:
AI copilots that help human agents find resources more quickly
AI agents that help customers find answers to their own questions
AI routing rules that ensure tickets are routed to agents efficiently, and they get to the right agent the first time
AI recommendations for new automated responses or help center articles
Other than AI, the other scalability features I’d recommend you look into really depend on your business’ use case. A few to consider in general are:
Have as many communications channels as possible, like email, phone, live chat, social media, etc. Customers have a high expectation for available support channels nowadays
Utilize process enhancement tools to minimize time to resolution, especially cross-team integration tools or apps
Use data to drive decisions. You can’t effectively scale without knowing where your pain points are, so invest in reporting tools to guide the way
Conclusion
Upgrading your customer support tools is essential to maintaining high-quality service as your business scales. By implementing the right SaaS solutions, you can streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and position your business for long-term success.
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