Hey hey, howdy! 🤠

Happy Monday from Canada 🇨🇦 This week’s email focus is going to be ALL about CX Team Workload and Management. Are you overworking your support reps or perhaps could they be empowered to do more? Before we hop into, here’s my life update:

I took Thursday and Friday off work and took a quick, nature-focused vacation. We’ve got to “touch grass” 🏞️ every once in a while, ya know? [if you can’t, this sometimes you can catch this Lawn Stream, which live streams grass growing, could be an alternative]

The Capilano Suspension Bridge Park and the Butchart Gardens were the highlight of my trip to Vancouver and Victoria. They were both breathtakingly beautiful and a great way to disconnect and reset. Enjoy some pics:

Enough about me, let’s get into it. If you know someone who’d be interested in learning more about Digital Experience (DX), I’d LOVE it if you forwarded this to them.

🌟 CX Team Workload 🌟 

The top questions I get as a CX leader seem to be revolved around workload. This is an insanely complex topic although it may seem more simple.

“How many tickets should my reps be closing a day?”

“Am I overworking my team?”

“My CX team seems stressed, what can I do to help?”

Before answering those questions above, I always have some follow up questions (and honestly, it’s still hard for me to answer unless I do a deep, deep dive):

- Is your team doing other essential tasks outside of answering emails/tickets?
- How confident are you in your teams’ efficiency and organization?
- What kinds of automations do you have set up to help with workload?
- What’s the breakdown in your ticket type?
- What’s the breakdown in your channel types (email, chat, phone, etc)?
- How happy are you with the service your team is providing?
- Do you feel that each customer is getting the TLC that they deserve?
- Is your support / CX team focused on any revenue drivers?
- How many hours a week is your team involved in meetings?

If your team is buttoned up with efficiencies and they’re ONLY answering tickets (not doing any intense logging or diving into issues), they could certainly “do more tickets.” However, in the ticket world, less can mean more.

If your team has responsibility in relaying the voice of the customer, fixing issues and finding patterns in reoccurring tickets (which in my opinion, they totally should for various reasons), I’d suggest taking the approach of pushing ticket volume, and throwing it out the window.

📈 Since all businesses are different, I’d suggest doing the following to determine whether or not your team is answering enough tickets or if they’re overworked:

1. Master the efficiencies and processes - every single touch point and process should lead to the least amount of tickets and ticket touches. This means, collected as much info as you can from the customer before the ticket even gets to you. This means fixing issues that could happen again. This means having an updated, easy to use Help Center/FAQ page so that customers can find answers immediately. If you’re unsure about your efficiencies, my team will give you a free audit to help out!

2. Determine how much time your team is spending outside of answering tickets - oftentimes, there are other responsibilities given to the individuals answering tickets. I’m ALL for this. It’s empowering, it shows that these employees are key parts of the business and it helps them grow. Ask your team to time themselves doing these tasks (uninterrupted), it’ll help with the assessment.

3. Develop a solid CX reporting procedure - typically this will include things like CSAT (customer satisfaction score), first response time, number of tickets replied to, etc. This could get pretty granular and I like to make company specific KPI’s depending on the products sold. I could create a whole newsletter about reporting - let me know if you’d like that 🙂 From the insights of the KPI’s - continuously revisit #1 ^ and start to look into if you should off board some of these ticket types to another person or team OR develop one of your agents to master these.

Once you master the above, use this formula to determine workload:

• # of Tickets Replied to / workdays* = Actual Tickets per workday

• Tickets per workday / number of agents

Here’s a hypothetical example:
2 Month look-back: *using June & July*

7000 / 40 = 175 = tickets replied to / working day
175 / 5 = 35 tickets per agent per day

Generally, I see teams comfortable from around 29 - 100 tickets per day dependent on the types of tickets, quality of support along with the tasks required outside of answering support emails/tickets.

🍬 Finding your CX Ticket Sweet Spot 🍬 

The best procedure to follow to find your ticket sweet spot is to track your tickets/agent/day and ask the CX team weekly how their workload felt that week. You’ll start to see a correlation in that number and the stress of your team. Keeping your team stress levels low is an important part of employee retention. Don’t forget, it’s not easy dealing with customers all day (especially the angry ones).

I personally like to keep my teams at the lower threshold and give revenue and brand driving activities to do when the tickets are lower. This allows us to be able to handle the higher ticket weeks without having to hire temporary help for sales, new product drops, PR pushes, etc. It’s also a great idea to have at least a couple other members of the company understand the Helpdesk and know how to help customers so that they can jump in on these busy days.

I’m a big fan of training non-support members support. Everyone learns a great amount and goes back to their team remembering who we’re serving, our customers. Not to mention, it builds respect for our CX team when others realize it’s a complex unit of the business and not a low-level, bottom of the barrel function.

The lower ticket / agent / day numbers are usually the teams who are logging manufacturing issues, involved in meetings in order to receive proper communication, aiding in being that voice of the customer in operations meetings, digging into and solving website issues, etc.

*I started going into a rabbit hole about how to structure the team to manage all of the above but the newsie was getting SUPER long so I’ll save “CX Team Structure” for next week, if you have any questions about that specifically, let me know and I’ll cover it next week

All in all, the number of tickets expected out of your agents is a complex question and should be evaluated taking in all the details. I feel it can sometimes be a bit toxic to compare our CX team to others for this reason. Most important is the happiness of your team and your customers. Get efficient and then find your CX sweet spot.

🥩 Chomps News! 🥩 

Chomps is having a Buy More, Save More sale! If you’re looking to try Chomps (or stock up), now’s the time. You can get up to 25% off one-time purchases and up to nearly 35% off subscription orders (honestly, that’s a craaaazy deal, we rarely do sales over 20%). Tag me in your Chomps photos, I love seeing them.

P.S. I run SMS at Chomps and it’s been such a fun channel for me to learn. I do some fun campaigns outside of sale communication and company updates. I’d love feedback from my marketing friends or to swap ideas on what’s been working for your SMS growth and conversions. Sign up for Chomps’ SMS here.

🔈️ Announcement! 🔈️ 

I became a Gorgias Ambassador! I am really quite pumped about this. I actually first heard of Gorgias in 2019 from a silly instagram ad that said something like “Do you work in support and have 1 million tabs open? Gorgias can help streamline your work and reduce your tabs, in turn, speeding up response times.”

This was a miracle to me, I was working off a Helpdesk that didn’t have any integrations and my team and I were constantly wasting time (and probably making mistakes) having a bunch of Shopify tabs open and trying to keep track of who’s who.

Fast forward to onboarding them in 2020 for many different businesses and seeing the tech evolve and grow - I’m still in love with it. Going to the DTCx events hosted by Gorgias taught me lessons that I would have taken me much longer to learn without meetings the outstanding leaders at the events. Just recently, we had the honor of doing a live Oopsie Podcast with Jason Panzer, President of Hexclad at the the DTCx event in LA (episode dropping next week!).

Gorgias’ ability to adapt and their willingness to listen to customer feedback has really transformed my CX teams and it’s an honor to be an ambassador. If you’re interested in trying the tech, you can get a free trial here. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any questions as well! As always, Chomps work comes first (my full-time job) but I’m happy to hop on calls outside of my work hours to answer any Q’s about Gorgias.

Upcoming Events 📅

San Diego Event/Dinner - (NEXT WEEK - details will be texted to you)
Calling all San Diego locals in ecommerce 🗣️ Gorgias and I are hosting a get-together in August. If you wanna come, sign up here. If you’re not from SD but have ecomm friends there, fwd this to them!

Commerce Roundtable - San Diego, September 18th & 19th
This event is going to be INSANE. I’d encourage you to check out the guests on the site and make a trip out to sunny California to hang with us all. We’re going to be doing a live Oopsie Podcast ft. Dylan Barbour where he’s going to spill his biggest mistake in business and what he learned from it.

You can grab a discounted brand ticket with code OOPSIE at checkout!

Latest Oopsie Podcast 🙊

This week’s Oopsie Podcast featured Amanda Dames from Peacock and it was recorded LIVE at SubSummit - our first recording with a live audience.

Listen here!

Thanks for reading, please feel free to reply and say hi and give any and all feedback :)

xoxo,
Zoe

Join our CX discord here.