Blog Build a successful Support team and opti...

Build a successful Support team and optimize company success

Tiahn Wetzler, Director, Content & Insights, Adjust, Jul 09, 2020.

As the first point of contact for customers, support and client services are a key staple in almost all business models and are crucial for Adjust.

Customers trust customer support agents to prioritize and accurately respond to their requests.

Created just over three years ago, the Adjust customer support team operates in 17 languages and is divided into two core teams. Part of the development of our support strategy was the conception of the Adjust Mobile Academies, where we’ve been able to reach more customers than ever before - empowering and educating them on how to get the best out of our product.

How to build a great support strategy

1. Defining responsibilities

Defining the role of Adjust Support, its scope, and its responsibilities are the first steps in developing an overall strategy. Should the focus, for example, be client retention, revenue, education, or troubleshooting?

Defining the role of support helps prevent the team from being stretched across too many tasks, allows for the hiring of the exact expertise required, and helps to better focus that expertise.

Traditionally, Support or Client services are set up so that each customer is assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM), who becomes their sole point of contact. The CSM then redirects any inquiries internally before getting back to the customer. This approach works well for certain businesses, but in the case of Adjust, it required adaptation to more specifically meet the needs of the business and customers.

“The customer support and tech support is far above other partners that I’ve worked with,” said Mark Powlen, Head of Growth at Tally.

As a solution, two core teams were created with the function of building and maintaining customer relationships:

Technical account managers, who provide customers with product education, as well as troubleshooting and technical advice.
Client partners, who are responsible for overall customer satisfaction.

This two-pronged approach allows for optimized efficiency: instead of writing to a CSM, Adjust customers ask their dedicated Technical Account Manager, effectively a Support Engineer, any product related questions. Providing as much expertise with as little turnaround as possible has proven far more effective than gatekeeping it via a CSM.

“Working with Adjust was a milestone that allowed us to further improve, not only in tracking, but also in efficiency, and visibility. This is not possible without the account management and support we get from their side,” explained Faisal Hammad, former Global Marketing Manager at FoodPanda.

2. Scaling

There are two key areas of Support needed to grow a skilled team.

Education

The Adjust product is constantly evolving, and the team should be aware of every change to assure that knowledge is up to date. A training and onboarding program was established to help us scale, with the first iteration aimed only at new hires. The program contains more than 40 courses and has since expanded into a 3 week live onboarding for new hires, as well as a continuous learning tool for all team members, updated regularly with courses and tests. The net gain has been significant, with ramp-up time for new team members decreased from twelve to three months.
Expansion

As every Support team member is in direct contact with customers and partners, they know how the company’s products are leveraged. Internally, the team represents the customer point-of-view. This knowledge is crucial to the functions that are traditionally far removed from the customer experience. A few initiatives have been implemented to ensure that this knowledge is shared adequately. The first is the weeks-long hands-on training given to all teams, providing insights on the whole company. The second is the encouragement of job transfers within Adjust. Support is the one team that touches almost all aspects of the products, and we encourage this knowledge to remain and permeate through Adjust, with team members having moved into Product, Sales, L&D, Engineering, and more.

3. Analytics and tools

Not every customer wants the same service. Some prefer a quick acknowledgment that an issue is being investigated, while others prefer to wait and receive a complete answer that covers everything. With our helpdesk and analytics tools, Adjust has built a custom process per customer to match their choice. When a request comes into the Adjust Support system it’s assigned a specific priority and a countdown. Automated checks have also been implemented to ensure a new set of eyes is brought in when the number of touches is comparably high, or if the countdown is running low.
New requests are also assigned a type, eg. discrepancy issues, feature requests, and cohort questions. The data is then aggregated into an internal dashboard where global service quality, average response time, types, and numbers of requests can be analyzed.

4. Adjust Mobile Academies

With more than 135,000 apps and 5,000 clients globally, it’s impossible to meet with every client individually on a regular, quarterly basis. In the same sense, dedicating resources to every customer results in an oversized support team.

Realizing we needed an effective and customer-centric solution, we were inspired to develop and launch the Adjust Mobile Academy

The concept is simple: every quarter we organize three Academies per region and invite our customers to attend workshops focused on specific mobile marketing topics. We analyze all support cases received in the relevant quarter and center the theme around the five most common issues per region.

For Adjust, building the great support team we have today was about finding the perfect balance. We take pride in rigorously training the team and giving them the right incentives to progress and grow. We also place significant emphasis on understanding the unique and varied needs of our customers and clients and empowering them to get the most out of our products. The better equipped our customers are to use Adjust to the fullest, the happier they are, and the happier our customers are, the happier the team is.