Is Your Support Team Meeting These 5 Challenges? It may be a workload management issue

Support teams are in more demand than ever. As expectations rise and resources shrink, it's easy for support teams to feel top-heavy and sometimes unmanageable.

For support managers who balance day-to-day support tasks, long-term strategic planning, and team development, it can be difficult to allocate workload management the time and the attention it deserves. However, spending time managing the nature and distribution of your team's workload can help you maximize strengths, minimize inefficiencies, and improve team morale. We've introduced a host of new workload management features to help you achieve this, but first, let's dive deeper into the benefits of effective workload management for your team.

What is Workload Management?

What do we mean by workload management? The term covers the planning, strategizing, automating, and organizing necessary to run a healthy and effective support team. It's a largely invisible, behind-the-scenes job that tends to take up a lot of support managers' time — and yet it's absolutely essential to delivering a great customer experience.

Why is workload management important?

When working in a small support team, workload management can take an informal form. Need someone to take over some of your conversations while you tackle a more complex query? Just message your teammates to find out who has the ability.

However, as your team and business evolves, so does the need for a more structured approach to workload management. Here's why:

Rising customer expectations: In 2022, 83% of customer support teams saw an increase in customer expectations for support. Customers want fast, personalized and high-quality customer service, and customer service teams need to ensure they can meet the challenge. This means maximizing the efficiency of team processes. Team Morale: Burnout is a growing risk among support reps. In fact, more than half of support managers say their team members have felt burnt out in the past few months. Workload management is only part of the puzzle, but can go a long way in ensuring your team members don't take on more than they can handle by giving you more visibility into their workloads. work. Team planning: Knowing exactly how much each of your team members can handle—and your team's overall productivity level—is critical to team planning. Do you need to increase your workforce? Can you find ways to work smarter with automation? Will you be ready for increased inbound volume after an announcement or feature launch? These are questions you need to answer to give your customers the experience they expect. Team training: It's important to make it easy to onboard new team members and avoid overwhelming them from the start. Without a robust workload management system, it can be nearly impossible to control the volume and complexity of new hire customer conversations, resulting in an overwhelming experience for them and a disappointing experience for your customers. . Workload Management Principles

Effective workload management should adapt to your team's workflows, and be robust and reliable without introducing process for process. We believe that any workload management system should be:

Very flexible: No two support teams are the same. Teammates should be able to control and adjust various system settings based on their team's goals and workflows. Easy to configure and modify: Teammates should review and revise their configuration and resource allocation as they scale their team and react to unforeseen developments. Barriers to installation and modification become barriers to efficiency. Predictable: Shift managers should be able to easily understand how their queues and conversations are sorted by their workload management system. This helps build confidence in the setup and reduces the urge to manually prioritize and shift conversations between teammates. Workload management issues facing customer service teams - and how we solve them

Based on these principles, we've introduced a series of workload management features to our customer service platform to make life much easier for managers and their teams. Regardless of industry, customer support teams face many of the same issues. Not everything can be solved by the workload man...