This is the second post in a series called “It Takes a Team” where I will be covering the essential skills for building a high-performing Customer Experience (CX) team.
In the previous episode of this series, I discussed creating an inbound forecasting model, identifying ways to reduce support volume, and aligning with the company on hiring locations.
This episode builds on that one by diving into the roles to consider as you scale your team. I’ll walk you through the specific positions and skills I wish someone had told me about 10 years ago that would’ve saved me so much time!
At the end, I’ll share the most critical first steps to take when you’re building a team, whether you’re an early-stage startup or a rapid-growth company.
Expanding customer support roles
I’ll start with a story from my time at Frame.io. As the customer base doubled every six months, I had to quickly scale the support team to keep up while making smart, intentional choices with limited resources.
First, we needed 24/7 support because the Sales team was closing large enterprise deals. I needed to figure out when and where I needed more team members and the current support team was already over their capacity in customer conversations.
Second, our budget was limited. We did not have the budget to hire many different roles, so I had to get creative.
Third, I needed help with operational roles, managing analytics, the knowledge base, convo quality assurance, internal processes, bug tickets, voice of the customer, and the list goes on. I was handling all of these roles while managing the team that was in the queue.
Scaling to 24/7 support on a budget
We hit a major challenge: we needed to support customers 24/7, but hiring overnight shifts in-house wasn’t feasible.
The current Customer Support team was already in 3 cities: Dublin, New York City, and Los Angeles.
To meet our SLA requirements, I partnered with a business process outsourcing company (BPO) in the Philippines. With just five team members handling tier 1 inquiries (like informational responses and simpler actions) we achieved 24/7 coverage without adding overnight shifts in any time zone.
We developed 24/7 support without creating overnight shifts.
The results were transformative. The in-house team could focus on higher-level issues and customer satisfaction improved significantly. It also gave us the breathing room to start scaling our processes and tools.
Delegating operations to the customer support specialists
The assistance from the BPO alleviated the rest of the team to spend 20% of their time in operations. Each support specialist’s role changed from solely reactive responses to include operational ownership.
I no longer:
- wrote every article in the knowledge base.
- trained new hires through their 90-day onboarding.
- hosted the webinars or created tutorial videos.
- pulled weekly metrics to analyze the data.
- conducted QA on our agents’ responses to customers.
- directly managed every person in Customer Support.
Delegating operational ownership not only builds team members’ skill sets but also fosters a stronger, more cohesive team culture
CX leaders in early startups that developed every process might have trouble delegating “their baby”. If someone spent 6 months crafting a process, understand that it can be difficult to pass ownership to someone else. But, it’s the only way to scale operations.
I’m speaking to you, early-stage CX leader! What can you delegate to your team members that you’re tightly holding onto?
You have to delegate the work if you want to grow
At Frame.io, I deeply understood the Video Post Production workflow from the CEO. He coached me on his method of delivering the product’s value while matching it with the customer’s workflow. His storytelling ability is incredible, and I felt since I was coached by him, it would be difficult to delegate webinars to someone else, but I knew it was time.
I’ll say this out loud, I went overboard on micromanaging the handoff. I wrote a script that I wanted him to follow 100%. I wrote comments on the side of how long pauses should be during specific “ah ha” moments, allowing the information to sink in before moving onto the next feature, and the person taking over webinars was sweating bullets during his first screening with me. Literally, sweating through his shirt. I didn’t make it easy for him and made him incredibly nervous to present how he would host webinars.
Today, he’s in front of the camera every day, hosting webinars and creating impactful content, surpassing everything I showed him. Now, I have plenty to learn from him.
It’s important that you empower your team to own processes without micromanaging them. They may end up doing a better job than you.
A diverse skill set within your team enables seamless delegation of operational ownership across the customer experience.
Roles and skills to run an efficient support organization
Now we’re in the segment of the podcast that I wish someone had shared with me about 10 years ago: The roles and skills to run an efficient and high-performing Customer Experience organization.
When hiring Support Specialists, think beyond answering tickets. The real value comes from their ability to take ownership of operational tasks that improve the customer experience.
If you’re an early-stage company, this is your cheat sheet to set yourself up for success. If you’re a rapid-growth company, start looking for these 8 skills and qualities on your current team. You may have untapped skills on your team that you can start to coach and mentor. I’ll start with the 2 skill sets in your CX Leadership.
CX Leadership Roles and Skills
I’m sharing 2 separate CX Leadership Roles that will likely all be the same person at the startup level. I’m defining these roles for consideration when the organization grows to a point that it’s time to expand the team.
(Watch the video on Youtube or Spotify for more details)
Head of Customer Experience (CX)
- evaluates customer interactions
- develops X-dept processes
- develops scalable strategy
- are the customer storyteller
- creates the company tone/voice
Skills:
- people-first approach
- customer-centric mindset
- build a long-term strategy
- excellent grammar & writing
- relational
- have an executive presence
Head of Customer Support (CS)
- focused on support operations
- developing & driving KPIs
- expanding metrics / data points
- creating internal processes
- developing prediction/forecast models
Skills:
- tactical
- outcome-driven
- data-driven
- analytical
- organized
- detail-oriented
CX Operational Roles and Skills
Early-stage startups generally wear all of the hats. If you’re in CX leadership and handling the following roles, consider how you could delegate these tasks to other folks on your team.
“We don’t have enough bandwidth to cover the queue as it is. How can I move someone to operations from the queue for a couple of hours per day?”I covered this challenge in the last episode, where I shared strategies for reducing your overall support volume. If you haven’t listened yet, go check it out after this episode.
Today, I’ll share 5 operational roles that can be done a couple of hours per day (or per week) to make an incredible impact on your team. This can also develop into a perfect career trajectory for someone to operate full time as the company grows.
Knowledge Specialist
Maintaining your internal and external knowledge is a big job. Likely, this would require multiple people until this role can be hired as a full time position.
- ensure public KB is complete
- x-collab with Prod/Eng
- update/create new documents
- develops/maintains function tracker
- partner with Prod/Mkt on tone & voice
Skills:
- high attention to detail
- simplify complex statements
- clarify internal jargon
- excellent communication/writing skills
AI Architect
An AI Architect, some companies may call this a Prompt Engineer, focuses on the development of the AI agent, AI assistant, and AI analytics.
- create solutions for customers,
employees, and metrics - develop/train AI chatbot or assistant
- a/b test with small segment of users
- measure results
- rinse and repeat ⤴
- train bots on unresolved responses
- collab with KS to write responses
Skills:
- loves to solve impossible problems
- analytical
- highly results-driven
- love learning
Customer Experience Enablement
As your team grows and the Product team continuously launches new features, you need someone to handle CX Enablement. The Head of CX will onboard each of the newest members, while this is something that can be delegated. When our team expanded to the Philippines and later to India, training was constant and no longer manageable by me, nor by my Managers.
- creates onboarding courses: industry | product | customer
- develop course segments: week 1 | 30 days | 60 days
- collab with Product on content
Skills:
- loves to teach
- incredible attention to detail
- enjoy coaching all levels
- revise documented processes
Customer Experience Analyst
Someone has to make sense of the data! A Customer Experience Analyst uncovers the story with numbers. There’s more to Customer Support than CSAT, first response time, and NPS. Oftentimes, the company will have a Data team, which can act as the CX Analyst, while someone in the CX department will need to know what to ask for.
- maintains the data structure
- finds gaps in the data structure: customer health, agent assistance, AI resolutions, product indicators
- develop strategic metrics
- convert data to visualizations
Skills:
- thrive in a spreadsheet
- love writing formulas to solve problems
- enjoy storytelling with data
CX Squad Leader
To explain a Squad Leader, I’ll share another story. There were 4 Product teams at Frame.io which meant if we created one Voice of the Customer, it was only 25% useful for each Product Manager. I was meeting monthly with all Product Managers and there was so much information that we never got to it all.
We assigned CX Squad Leaders to meet with the key stakeholders that made decisions on each of the Product teams. This included Product, Marketing, and Engineering. The CX liaisons created Squads around specific Product teams and had a very productive agenda.
An example would be the iOS Squad. A liaison from CS would gather data and direct customer feedback around iOS bugs, iOS feature requests, confusions, and issues. Members from Product, Design, and Engineering heard the Voice of the Customer every month.
Here’s what a CX Squad Leader would do:turn product-specific data into insights
- create the Voice of the Customer for that specific product
- schedule VOC meetings
- gather & communicate feedback
- document features, X-collab with
Knowledge Specialists & Head of CS
Skills:
- outcome-seeker
- seasoned communicator
- inquisitive
- product expert
Quality Assurance Leader
A Quality Assurance (QA) Leader ensures the accuracy and quality of responses to customers while maintaining the tone and empathy used with customers. When the CSAT average rating starts to slip for an employee, a QA Leader coaches best practices.
- ensure accuracy/quality of responses
- coach response best practices
- develop/maintain grading scale
- maintain internal QA documentation
- review conversations & provide feedback
- communicate feedback with Managers
Skills:
- excel in communication skills
- can provide productive feedback
- coaching team lead, senior, or Manager
Early-stage companies to hire first employees
For the early-stage companies, you might not know how to hire the first person in Customer Support. Based on my experience, you need a tactical and empathetic person that proves they can manage their time efficiently and not get overwhelmed while managing many different tasks at the same time. This will be your Head of Customer Support, that builds your processes to address your customers.
Then you need queue busters, while the second hire should have a focus on being a Knowledge Specialist, ready to document and manage the internal and external knowledge hub during their operations time. Third, should be an AI Architect to work alongside the Knowledge Specialist in developing all the AI tools and solving the informational questions. With these 3 hires, your CX organization is positioned for high-performance and low overhead.
Rapid-growth companies to pivot processes
For rapid-growth companies, I’m sure this is a lot to digest. So let’s break down where you should start.
- Conduct a gap analysis. Evaluate where your team is struggling. Are they overwhelmed by ticket volume? Are customers frustrated by slow response times?
- List your top five biggest ROI opportunities. For example, if your team spends a lot of time answering simple, repetitive questions, an AI chatbot could be a high-impact investment.
- Prioritize hiring or optimizing for these roles. Even one strategic hire can make a huge difference in your team’s efficiency and customer satisfaction
Wrap Up
Building a global CX team doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small, focus on the highest-impact roles, and leverage tools like AI to support your team. As you grow, these foundational hires and systems will scale with you.
Curious how to apply these ideas to your own team? Let’s brainstorm together.
Book a free 30-minute meeting with me and leave with actionable next steps tailored to your startup.
