Olga Rotanenko, BizDev Director
28 april 2022

Sourcing and recruiting the candidates you need can be difficult enough. However, even when you find the people you need, you still need to figure out a Customer Care organizational structure that best fits your needs. Since figuring out such a structure can be quite challenging if you have never had to do something like this before. The tips that we will provide below will also be useful even if you currently have a team but would like to achieve better results by reorganizing the team structure. Therefore, without further ado, let’s get started. 

Assigning Roles and Responsibilities

Everyone on your team will be responsible for performing various tasks, and it is very important that everybody on your team knows their duties and responsibilities. In addition to this, these responsibilities must match the skillset of each team member. The roles and responsibilities listed below are common in most Customer Care team structures: 

• Executives – These are the people who are responsible for assembling your team. This starts with the Human Resource Director who implements all of the processes for ensuring that the service provide can source and recruit the needed number of candidates. They will also be responsible for assembling a recruiting team to implement all of these processes. 

• Managers – Ordinarily, a manager is the one who appoints his team leader. He may make a selection from different, well-deserving individuals who are then tasked with leading the execution of specific projects. A team leader’s duties broadly include giving instructions, providing direction, and guiding a team to meet the set targets. 

• Team Lead – A team lead, or team leader is a professional who guides and encourages a group of people. They inspire, motivate and provide suggestions to help their team members reach certain goals at work.

• Trainer – The trainer will be responsible for making sure that your all of the agents on your team have the technical and soft skills needed to perform their job efficiently. This is a crucial role because if your agents have the needed skillset from the outset, they will be able to hit the ground running.
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• Quality Assurance Manager – After the implementation stage has been completed, the quality assurance manager will analyze the performance of the agents and identify areas of improvement. For example, they could listen to a recorded conversation between the customer and the agent and then provide feedback on what went well and provide some guidance and training on ways to improve. 

• Agents – These are the people who interact with customers to handle complaints, process orders, provide information, and many other tasks that involve directly dealing with the customers. 

Now that we know about the various positions that make the team and the roles and responsibilities, let’s move on to figuring out the structure that best fits you. 

What Factors Will Affect Your Customer Care Team Structure? 

There are various factors that will influence the structure of your remote team. For example, think about the service you are in. If you sell complex SaaS software, you may need to have several support levels. Addiction factors to think about include: 

• Deployment – What software do you use to track your support activities? Are you capable of providing omnichannel support? There’s no denying that technological innovations can improve customer service and the customer experience, often in stunning and unparalleled ways. 
• Business size – Consumers expect higher communion from small compared to large companies, and consequently, small relative to large companies garner lower evaluations when they exhibit low communion behaviors. These high communication expectations are driven by the relatively lower marketplace power of small companies. 
• Industry type – you probably already noticed that the quality of customer service varies greatly by industry. These days, it is essential to quickly problem-solve issues and respond to customers who are not happy with the product or service you are providing them. 
• Scope of service – The scope of customer service activities can vary greatly from company to company. It can include activities such as handling customer complaints and providing appropriate solutions and alternatives within the time limits. 
• Geography – A geographical organizational structure organizes people within an organization by geographic location. Basically, each division acts as if it is its own company, combining different types of personnel for various business functions 

Tips on How to Best Manage Your Outsourced Customer Care Team 

One of the most important things you can do is develop well-defined team roles. When teams have clear functions and responsibilities, they are aware of expectations and become more efficient. They will also feel more comfortable and better disposed to get all of their tasks done. However, you need to know which people are right for that job and encourage them to grow into these roles. 

Then you need to determine your approach, i.e., flat or hierarchical. Flat, sometimes known as organic structures, take a more horizontal approach to management, meaning that there are no differences in the responsibilities between the CEO and a regular agent. Everybody is encouraged to offer feedback, and honest and open culture is encouraged. A hierarchical approach is different in that there is a distinct structure between each position, but all departments work to complement each other’s strengths. The positions within the hierarchy will determine employment opportunities and the overall time and effort that will be required to fill all of the positions. 

Now it’s time to understand the people you will need to implement the structure that you have chosen. This includes understanding the positions you need to fill but also how many agents you will need to meet demand. Think about both the soft and hard skills each candidate will need to have. While the outsourcing provider will be responsible for training, you control the criteria by which candidates are picked. 

Think about how you will define the success of your team and how things are moving along. Just as a writer needs a proofreader and software developers to need code reviews, customer service teams need quality assurance (QA). It’s a means of onboarding, training, and coaching agents by reviewing their interactions with customers. The goal of support QA is to improve and maintain excellent support quality. Support QA (sometimes called customer service quality control) has become a standard practice for ambitious businesses. Though simple in nature, it is an integral part of being customer-centric. Benefits include customer loyalty, improved retention, and a boost in growth.

Finally, you should strongly consider adopting an omnichannel support model. Omnichannel customer service is assistance and advice for customers across a seamless and integrated network of devices and touchpoints. Businesses with robust omnichannel customer service can maintain consistently great experiences for their customers regardless of the communication channel.

Set up the Best Outsourced Customer Care Team with Pexly

A customer service organizational chart is a framework of roles, teams, and tiers that help build a people-first approach to customer service. The key to that is providing well-defined roles, which is important because it gives each team member an understanding of how they fit into the structure of the team and their input in achieving the needed objectives. 

While there are many factors to take into consideration when figuring out the best structure for your team, a trusted service provider, like Pexly, can figure all of this out for you and shoulder the lion’s share of the work in setting up your team. We have more than eight years of experience in actualizing projects of various sizes and complexities, and we are confident that we can find the right solution that best fits your needs. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.