How to Plan Customer Support Needs for Product Launches
You’re ready to introduce your new product to the world. You’ve named it, done your market research, and have your release plan in place. You’ll need a customer support team ready for launch, but how much support will you need? Which support channels (phone, email, chat, social) will you staff? Will you offer around-the-clock support? What times of day will you need the most agents working? And most importantly, how can you possibly determine all of this before your product hits the market?
It’s a question we’ve helped answer for many clients, from large global brands to small start-ups. We’ve become adept at helping clients launch their products, because we take the time to work closely with each one, analyzing forecast numbers and translating them into an informed plan. As you prep your product for launch, ModSquad is there at your side, ready for action.
Whether you’re gearing up to face the Shark Tank investors, crafting a compelling story for Kickstarter, or bringing your product to market on your own, it’s a challenge to juggle all the moving parts. Have you considered the operational impact this product release will have on your organization? If you don’t correctly forecast how the launch will affect your day-to-day operations, you could face a situation in which you’re unable to answer customers for days or even weeks. In such cases, enthusiastic customers can quickly turn into disgruntled, vocal haters. Don’t let that happen. We’re here to make sure you’re fully prepped.
Leave the Calculations and Analysis to Us
Our decade of experience has taken us around the block a few times. We’ve seen how product launches play out and have been very successful helping clients predict their support needs. We look at things like estimates for products shipped and future revenue forecasts, translating those numbers into likely customer support requests and developing models to anticipate needs in multiple scenarios.
Your team has likely created a revenue forecast for your product or app. After all, you need to plan how many products to have in the warehouse, or how much traffic your servers will need to handle. We review these numbers, in a way no traditional outsourcing firm does, and help clients anticipate the operational impact and the expected customer support and social media needs. Dealing with customer requests doesn’t have to be your specialty; that’s where we shine.
From there, we build a support team to fit those projections. Included are the “unknown unknowns,” those things that we’re not even aware we’re not aware of, things that can throw a monkey wrench into your plans. No matter how well you forecast, changing conditions can trigger a million hits to your website overnight. We offer on-demand scalability to boost your efficiency. In addition to our endlessly flexible scheduling, our Mods are cross-trained, can cover multiple channels, and are proficient at implementing the tools you need to ensure scalability. We make sure all your bases are covered.
Flexibility Goes Both Ways
How do you maintain an effective process? Iterate, iterate, iterate. Just this past holiday season, we had the opportunity to help a client run a beta test of their product launch, and the response from customers was overwhelming. This reinforced the notion that until you ship enough products or see enough downloads of your app, you just won’t have a truly viable data set to understand all possible outcomes. That’s why we’re working closely with our clients to create better loopbacks and hold more informed discussions with their product teams. What we learn from these launches, we’ll incorporate into plans for future scalability.
All of this comes together in a support package that can’t be matched by anyone in the industry. Unparalleled flexibility; unique analysis of historical data to inform support plans; open communication with a team that’s just as invested in your success as you are. That’s ModSquad in a nutshell; that’s how we roll.