Managing your first customer support hire

Handing support to someone else is the first time your store's voice stops being yours. Most merchants do it badly, not because they pick the wrong person, but because everything the job needs is in their head and none of it is written down.

This is about the handover, and about what to check afterwards without reading every reply they send.

Before their first day

Four things, and the first two are where people cut corners.

Your twenty most common answers

Not a policy document. The actual text you send, copied out of your sent folder, for the twenty questions that make up most of your volume. This is a two-hour job and it is the single highest-return thing you will do in the handover, because it teaches tone and content at the same time.

A new person given a policy writes correct, stiff replies that do not sound like your store. A new person given twenty real examples sounds like you within a week.

Their refund authority, as a number

Decide the limit before they start and say it out loud: below this amount, refund or replace without asking. Above it, come to me.

Set it higher than feels comfortable. If someone has to check with you over a $30 replacement, you have not delegated support — you have added a queue to it, and the customer waits through both.

What they are allowed to say

The uncomfortable cases: an item is out of stock indefinitely, a supplier has let you down, a shipment is stuck in customs. New people default to vagueness because nobody told them what they may admit. Vagueness is what makes customers angry. Tell them what they can say plainly.

Where to escalate, and how fast

One rule beats a decision tree: anything you cannot resolve today, tell me today. Not at the end of the week, and not once it has become a problem.

Inbox zero is the wrong target

The instinct is to ask for an empty inbox. Do not. An empty inbox means every ticket has been closed, and the fastest way to close a ticket is to close one that is not resolved. Ask for zero and you will get it, along with customers who were marked handled and never heard back.

Two better targets, both of which are checkable at a glance:

• Every ticket has a state. Open, waiting on the customer, or resolved. Nothing sitting in an undefined middle.
• Nothing waits past your threshold. Pick a number — most small stores can hold to 24 hours — and treat anything older as the exception that needs a reason.

What to check, and how often

You do not need to read their replies. You need four numbers, and they take about five minutes a week.

Two people, one inbox

The moment a second person answers, a specific failure appears: both of you reply to the same customer, saying slightly different things. It is worse than a slow reply, because it tells the customer nobody is in charge.

Coordination by conversation works for about a fortnight. After that you need the tool to show who has a ticket, and you need every reply attributed so that six months later you can see who said what to whom.

This is also why a shared Gmail account stops working sooner than people expect. It shows you a message and tells you nothing about whether a human has it.

The weekly review that is worth doing

Fifteen minutes, once a week, and only two questions.

What did you have to ask me about? Every escalation is either a gap in what they were given or a limit set too low. Both are yours to fix, and fixing them is the whole job of managing support.

What did you answer more than three times? That is a help centre article, or a change to your product page. Support volume is a signal about the store, not just work to get through — the same question arriving weekly usually means something upstream is unclear.

What good looks like after a month

• They handle everything below the authority limit without asking
• Nothing waits past your threshold without a reason you know about
• You have stopped reading replies because the ones you spot-check are fine
• The list of common answers has grown, because they added to it
• You find out about problems from them, not from a review

If you are still reading every reply after a month, the problem is usually the handover rather than the person. Go back to the twenty answers and the authority limit.

Related

What running support out of Gmail actually costs you works out the number that usually justifies the hire in the first place. What to say when an order is late is a reasonable first entry in the list of twenty answers, since it is the conversation your new hire will have most often.

What good customer service is actually worth explains why the refund authority limit should be set higher than feels comfortable.