Hi everyone!
This group has been a little quiet, so I figured I’d liven things up with a potentially controversial topic in a group of Support leaders 😄
One of our customers told me a really interesting story last week. They started up their Customer Success team as a group of humans who provided both support and success activities for customers. Unsurprisingly, the team ended up firefighting a backlog of support queries from customers and they were looking into hiring some Support specific staff to allow their Success team focus on more consultative and proactive engagements. However, they implemented Fin AI Agent who now takes care of a huge bulk of support-type queries, meaning they could rethink the hiring strategy around a brand new team and extra headcount.
This is the opposite of how I’ve seen Support and Success teams get going in the past. In my experience, a Support team is set up first, then scales in terms of human headcount as the business grows. Success teams are built later, when Support and Sales are too busy to help customers more proactively.
This customer’s story really showcases the power of AI today in being able to build a team or true CX humans from the start and automate the classic “Customer Service” interactions, leading to NO hiring for a specific Support team (for now at least).
My question to all of you: If you could start over, would you do this? If not, what would you do differently?
I know the hiring and scaling of human Support teammates (or the opposite!) in the world of AI is a spicy topic so I’m looking forward to some interesting debate on this topic 😅
Ruth
