How to set up support tiers

If your company is growing, your organizational structure is probably getting more complicated. You may be expanding your customer service team and wondering whether you’re doing it right. At Zendesk, we’ve wrestled with this issue during our own cycles of rapid growth. We examined what would be best for our customers, agents, and our business needs. Ultimately, we decided on a tiered help desk structure that could flex with our growing business.

Today, our Global Customer Advocacy Team comprises over 250 people in eight different locations around the world. Rather than just increase staffing to one vast pool of agents, we purposefully structured this team into customer support tiers.

Why? Experience has taught us that to be truly customer-driven, we need to structure our team around specific skills, competencies, and levels of experience. Our three tiers (tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3) correspond to the complexity of technical problems our customers face.

Why should you move to a support tier system?

There are two key advantages to the support tier system: scalability and higher employee retention.

As your business grows, so will your customer base. Naturally, you’ll see an increase in the volume of incoming support tickets. And if growth includes new products and features, the complexity of those customer inquiries is also likely to increase.

Support tiers offer a strategic approach to managing those challenges. Each support tier is focused on solving a specific range of issues and complexities. For every type of incoming ticket, there’s a specialized agent qualified to resolve it. This tiered system makes it possible for support teams to scale with the business’ growth.

There are customer support alternatives to the tiered model. For instance, in “swarming,” one employee handles a support ticket until it is resolved. If this employee needs help, they enlist their colleagues to “swarm” on it until they arrive at a solution. The downside of this system is that it can create inefficiency when less-qualified agents have to ask for help, and the lack of a clear hierarchy can create frustration for customers and IT teams alike.

[Related read: 9 ticketing system tips for outstanding customer service]

Agent satisfaction on the job is just as important as scalability. If you want to retain customer support agents, you need to ensure that the job they’ve been hired to do is one they can do well. That means finding ways to streamline the ticket process, matching agents with issues they can quickly resolve, and making sure they’re not overloaded.

Tiers give agents flexibility and opportunities for advancement, which can help with agent satisfaction and retention. Without a ladder to climb, agents aren’t motivated to do their best work and are more likely to quit. In the end, this hurts your bottom line—you’ll constantly be hiring and training new agents to offset high rates of churn.

There’s no reason to settle for this when you can devise an organizational structure that supports advancement while also serving the customer better.