Your New Support Team Should Have Questions for You

The exceptions your business runs on are the answers nobody wrote down, and a new support team gets them in one of two ways. It gets them from you before it goes live, or from your customers after it, one wrong answer at a time. The questions a new team brings you in its first week are the best early sign that its onboarding is working.

That holds for a new provider, a few new agents, or a new lead replacing the person who ran support. If you’re bringing on seasonal agents this month, it holds for them too.

An onboarding that barely touches your calendar feels like a provider that has things handled. In our view, a quiet first week is the warning sign, and the remedy is hours of your answers before the start date.

What a New Team Can Learn from Your Documents

A capable team learns what’s written down quickly. These documents answer the common questions:

• Your help center
• Your policy pages
• Your saved replies
• Your product pages

A good agent picks all of them up fast.

The answers that cost you when they’re wrong are usually the ones nobody wrote down. They include:

• Which product runs small
• Which commercial account has its own freight terms
• When the return window bends, and for whom

Those answers live in your head and in your lead’s. If you’ve ever lost a support lead, you’ve seen what leaves with the person, and a new team arrives without any of it.

A business that sells to other companies tends to carry more of them, because large accounts collect their own arrangements over the years. Those arrangements look like this:

• One buyer has longer payment terms than the rest.
• Another buyer has a standing discount that nobody ever put in the system.

Your written policy tells a new agent what the rule is. It rarely says when you break the rule, because you’ve never had to explain that to someone who wasn’t already there.

Your Customers Will Teach a New Team the Rest

A new team that hasn’t heard your exceptions from you will meet them in the queue. Each one turns up as a customer who got the standard answer when your business would have given a different one. The customer pays for that lesson first, and you hear about it later.

Picture a business that sells work boots online, to individuals and to companies outfitting their crews. One model runs narrow. For years the owner has told anyone who asks to order a half size up, and has swapped the pair for free if it still didn’t fit.

The owner never wrote that advice down, and the size chart on the product page doesn’t mention it. In the new team’s second week, a site manager orders that model for a whole crew and asks about sizing. The agent answers from the size chart.

Most of the crew’s order comes back. The owner finds out from the returns, because nothing in the ticket looked wrong to anyone in support.

The return shipping is the smaller cost. The site manager now has a crew waiting on boots that fit, and a supplier whose sizing advice they can’t rely on, just as they were deciding where to place the next order.

Your version might be one of these:

• A commercial account’s freight terms
• A warranty claim you always honor for a repeat buyer

Each one is a ticket a new team will answer from the written policy until somebody tells them otherwise.

The Onboarding That Needs Nothing from You

An onboarding that needs nothing from you has put its questions off until your customers ask them. Your help center and old tickets answer the common questions, so a new team can go live without you. The rest arrives later as one of these:

• Returns
• Refunds
• Accounts that expected a different answer

A team that has read your past tickets closely will have found the places where your answers and your written policy disagree, and it will want to know why.

In your history, those places include:

• A pair swapped for free on a product that runs small
• A freight charge dropped for one commercial account

Each is a question the new team should bring to you, since the ticket shows what you did and only you know why.

A team with no questions for you in its first week hasn’t found those places yet.

The same reading applies to a new in-house lead. Someone who starts on Monday and never asks you anything is learning your business from the tickets that go wrong.

You Answer, and the Team Writes It Down

Writing the training material is the provider’s job, and so is turning what you know into something a team can work from. A good onboarding asks you questions and writes up your answers as the replies and help articles the team uses.

Your part is to answer. That means hours of your time across the first two weeks, split between two things:

• A few calls
• A running list of questions the team keeps for you

The split works the same way with an in-house lead. You hold the exceptions, and the lead’s job is to get them out of you and into the material the team works from. If you find yourself writing that material, the job has landed back on your desk.

What a Working Onboarding Brings You

A working onboarding does three things:

• It reads your past tickets and comes back with questions only your business would raise.
• It drafts replies to your hardest tickets and asks you to correct them before a customer sees them.
• It books time with you and with whoever else knows the exceptions.

You can ask for all three before the team goes live, and each one tells you something.

Their open questions. Ask for the questions the team still has for you, kept as a running list. Read the list this way:

• In week one it should be long and specific to your business, with questions about particular products, accounts, and past tickets.
• A short or generic list means nobody has read your past tickets yet.

Two questions show the difference:

• Generic: “What’s your return policy?” Your help center already answers it.
• Specific: “Why did you take back this opened case in March when the policy says unopened only?” Only someone reading your tickets would ask it.

Hard-ticket drafts. Ask to see how the team would answer the tickets that cost you most when they go wrong, before any of those replies go out. Your hardest tickets are the ones where the written answer and your real answer differ, such as:

• A sizing question on a product that runs small
• A freight dispute on a commercial order

Check whether each draft carries your real exception or just restates the help center. Every correction you make there is one your customers won’t have to make.

Time booked with you. Ask what’s on the calendar with you and your lead in the first two weeks. A plan with none of your time in it assumes your documents hold everything.

The time should include whoever handles the exceptions day to day. That might be:

• The person who approves returns
• The account manager who knows each commercial customer’s terms

After go-live, the questions should get fewer and keep coming. New ones should reach you as decisions to make, such as an account asking for terms you’ve never offered, rather than as complaints someone has to clean up. A weekly report is a good place for them to arrive.

How HelpFlow Onboards a New Team

Other agencies supply agents. We supply the customer service operation and manage it, which includes recruiting your team and training it on your business. We’ve run customer service for furniture, building-products, industrial, and manufacturing companies that sell to other businesses.

Onboarding takes 10–14 days from kickoff, and full ramp is 30 days. Our onboarding includes two steps:

• We read your past tickets before go-live.
• We book time with you or your lead during those 10–14 days.

Before Your New Team Starts

Before the new team’s first day, ask it for three things:

• Its open questions
• Drafts of its replies to your hardest tickets
• The time it has booked with you and your lead

Then do two things yourself:

• Block that time on your own calendar.
• Give the team the names of everyone else in your business who knows the exceptions.

Read a long list of specific questions as the sign that your new team is learning your business from you. Read a quiet first week as a warning.