Airbnb has had massive success by being extremely customer-focused. Despite naysayers, they’ve successfully built a huge business around a community marketplace for people to rent out their homes. People love it, and the company is always trying to figure out how to better help these customers. Last July, Airbnb made a huge decision: to start providing 24/7 support on both email and phone. As soon as possible.

“It was an exciting, global challenge,” says Jessica Semaan, Customer Service Strategy & Planning at Airbnb. “There were a lot of very long nights until we got things organized.”

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 6.

When your company is small, it’s easy to improvise to delight your customers. You know most of them. You remember them. And you know each member of your customer service team well (and could probably hit them with a paper airplane from where you’re sitting). Joe from Company X wants a discount? Sure. Fred from Company Y is going to be in town? Have him come by for a beer!

But once your company gets large, this is a much bigger challenge. You don’t necessarily know the Freds and Joes. You don’t even know all your customer service agents, and they may know you as a boss, not as a person. You’ve put customer service training & guidelines in place to ensure quality. But how do you ensure that you’re creating customer delight?

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 6.

More than a year ago we wrote about how we feel that customer-powered support doesn’t work. We were a little overzealous with our title; even in that post, we mention that customer-powered support can be useful for some organizations.

When you reach a certain customer base size, scaling a regular support organization can become difficult to impossible. This is especially true with free services which have many casual users (Google, Facebook, etc). If you’re on the road to becoming one of these organizations, it’s time to examine how you can provide better customer service by getting your customers involved.

How do customer-powered support communities work?

In addition to traditional support features such as knowledge bases and ticketing software, you have one or more forums where your most passionate and helpful customers can help other customers.

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 6.

We’ve discussed training your first customer service representative. But soon your team will grow, you’ll start to have account managers (salespeople) interact with your customers, and you'll stop being personally involved in training. How do you ensure that everyone is getting quality training, even as your team grows out of your personal grasp?

I spoke to Maya Grinberg and Hannah Meiton from Wildfire Interactive, makers of a variety of ...

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline.

Whew, you’ve finally made it to the final stage of our timeline. You’re a huge enterprise company with many customers and staggering amounts of revenue. So, you’re done, right? Of course not.

As you move into Stage 6, the infrastructure we put in place previously is going to help you immensely. But you also have a lot less control over individual interactions. You’ve got a huge team and a huge customer base who are doing so many things that you can’t hope to read them all in the day. It’s time to ensure that you are building a culture that will turn this into positive results, not a mess of bad, inconsistent support.

Some things you’ll want to think about in this phase:

1. A customer-powered support community. Although we feel this doesn’t work for 99% of companies, you’re now at the size where you may need to guide your community to help each other in order to keep up with the size of you’re customer base.
2. Ensure that you’re building an internal culture of quality support, because you can no longer control it all.
3. Investigate pre-written scenarios for new hires, to give them the right approach - both specific to that scenario and in general - to helping customers.
4. Do not let you standards slip. Yes, there’s a lot going on...but if you can’t answer customers at the same rate you did in Stages 1-5, they’re going to be disappointed and start looking elsewhere.

Stick with us as we take the dive into the final stage of our timeline!

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 5.

We’ve all had this experience. You call the support number for a big corporation...maybe a bank, a cable company, or a phone company. You wade through some robo-menus, and then finally speak to a human. And they totally fail to help. They suggest obvious solutions, seem to actually be less technically competent than you, and spend a lot of time “checking your records” and looking things up.

These people aren’t trying to be irritating. They ...

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 5.

So, you’ve hired your first full-time customer service rep. You found the right candidate. Now how do you turn them into a lean, friendly, ticket-answering machine?

1. Orientation

A huge part of doing customer service is context. Make sure you’re prepared; Jess Tellford from Zibbet says that they “take note of all the common tasks [the new hire will] be required to perform and document everything.”

Don’t expect to get through it in one ...

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This is part of our ongoing series on scaling customer service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage Five.

You’re back from the holidays. You got a break (which, after all, is good for productivity). You ate delicious, home-made food. Maybe you got presents.

And now you have to start answering customer service messages again. Hoo boy.

Having a hard time getting back into the groove? Here’s 5 things to inspire you to answer those customer issues:

You’re gonna make more money

Customer service rep salaries were up by 6.8% in 2010 - despite ...

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This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline.

Here we are at Stage 5 of the Customer Service Scaling Timeline. You’re no longer a plucky startup. You’re becoming a company, with all the good and bad that entails. Your team is growing, which means you can do more - but also means that you have less direct control over quality.

Stage 5 is all about putting processes in place that ensure quality and avoid becoming the traditional call center, where nobody can help you and everything takes forever. Here are some of the parts of scaling gracefully into Stage 5:

• Scale tools before team. Video. Webinars. Classes. How can you proactively educate more people rather than letting them run into issues and have to wait for a response form the support team?
• Consider reintroducing live chat. Now that your team is significantly larger, you can have someone dedicated to it, which is what it requires. Your customers will love the instant response.
• Implement a CRM. As your company grows, it’s harder to yell across the room to find out about a customer. A CRM will allow you to keep continuity across different service channels and employees...even if they don’t know each other.
• Training is all-important. You can’t watch every staff member, and you shouldn’t have to. Make sure you have significant training to not just give them the tools but also the cultural education to maintain your level of quality.

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