4 ways to improve support team efficiency

Your support team plays a key role in keeping customers happy. When your team provides smooth and efficient support, customers get more value out of your products. In turn, that makes accounts more likely to trust your company and renew their contracts.

So let’s explore some ways to improve your support team’s efficiency. We’ll explain how you can create a supportive environment, improve your workflows, track important data, and use certain tools to boost your team’s productivity.

1. Build a great support team

Efficient teams are built on a strong foundation of clarity and guidance. Here are some ways you can set that foundation:

• Understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Start with a review of your team’s work and results. Check your customer support metrics to see what’s going well and what needs improvement. For example, a high first contact resolution score could tell you that your team fixes simple issues fast, while a large ticket backlog shows they struggle to work together quickly on more complex requests.
• Define clear roles and responsibilities. All team members should understand customer goals and the role they play in driving customer success. Create clear playbooks for common interactions, and show who’s responsible for each stage and task.
• Nurture communication skills. Train your team to communicate well — they should use active listening and repeat key information to make sure they understand what customers want. This skill helps your team work more efficiently and offers customers a better experience.
• Manage time carefully. Strong time management leads to a more efficient and productive team. Give your team access to time-tracking or planning tools, and teach them how to prioritize tickets and make the best use of their workdays. 
• Reward success. Motivate your team with rewards for impressive work. For example, you could give small bonuses to team members who exceed targets on metrics like time to resolution and customer satisfaction.

2. Streamline workflows

Next, you can improve team productivity with smoother workflows.

Find bottlenecks

To see where your team is getting stuck in different workflows, review how tickets progress through support — from the first customer message all the way through to resolution — and look at the stages that take up the most time. Some bottlenecks have global effects and lead to high average resolution times, which makes them easier to spot.

Other bottlenecks are more subtle, holding back certain kinds of tickets or tasks. Look for repeat situations where tickets are routed to the wrong place or bounce around between teams. Also watch out for tickets that are escalated when they shouldn’t be, or vice versa. And track customer feedback — frequent complaints and requests for updates are common signs of bottlenecks. 

Simplify processes

When you find a bottleneck, look for ways to simplify and speed up the process. For example, if you have slow first response times, you could add more headcount to deal with growing ticket volumes. Or you could use automation to route tickets more efficiently, and AI agents to answer simple customer questions and free up your team’s time.

Keep improving

Support tickets are like traffic — when you remove a bottleneck in one place, traffic can flow more smoothly there but lead to gridlock elsewhere. So do regular reviews to find new blockages and streamline your workflows further. 

Great support teams are encouraged to always improve. So outside of full reviews, ask everyone to look out for inefficiencies and flag them to their managers. This feedback keeps your support team running at max efficiency and aligns them with company goals.

3. Leverage support tools to increase efficiency

The right tech stack will help your customer support team run much more efficiently. Look for solutions that include:

• Ticket management. Your team likely spends most of their time dealing with support tickets, so a platform that makes ticket management intuitive will save time and boost productivity. Choose a B2B customer support platform that includes robust ticket management features and gives your team full visibility into customer context.
• Automation and AI. Use automatic ticket routing to avoid delays, and let AI assistants help with repetitive tasks like searching your knowledge base, drafting responses, and summarizing issues. When you automate these tasks, you free up your team to solve complex issues and offer customers proactive help.
• Self-service options. A helpful knowledge base or AI agent lets customers find answers on their own, which lowers ticket volume so you can help more people faster. For example, Pylon’s AI Agents interact with customers using your brand’s tone and personality, resolve issues using a structured list of actions, and escalate requests to the right team members when needed.
• Omnichannel support. Today’s B2B support teams communicate with customers in a lot of different ways, from Slack messages to chat widgets. Context switching between all those platforms to handle support interactions can be difficult and waste time, so choose a platform that offers omnichannel support.

4. Measure your progress

Finally, here’s how to improve team performance in the long term — you’ll need to measure efficiency so you can keep making support better.

Track important data points

Start by tracking key performance indicators like:

• First response time: How long it takes for customers to get initial replies after they submit tickets
• First contact resolution: How many issues are resolved in a single interaction
• Escalation rate: How many tickets are sent to a team leader for resolution
• Time to resolution: The total time from ticket open to resolution
• Ticket backlog: The number of unresolved tickets
• Customer effort score: How easy or difficult it is for customers to resolve issues
• Customer satisfaction: How happy customers are with your support

Compare your results against industry benchmarks, as well as your service-level agreements with customers. Also, look at how scores change over time and what impact your productivity updates have. Try to spot trends that help you maintain efficiency increases and make more improvements.

Make changes based on data

Use insights from data and customer feedback to push efficiency even higher. For example, if you find that first response time and first contact resolution are high, but customer satisfaction is low, that could mean your team prioritizes speed over complete and useful answers. You can fix this by training your team to fully resolve customer requests before they close tickets.

On the other hand, if you see the escalation rate climbing, you could need to train your support team to handle more issues independently. Let the data guide you as you refine workflows to keep productivity as high as possible.

Boost your customer service efficiency with Pylon

You now know how to improve your customer service: Set up the right work environment, streamline workflows, measure performance, and make changes based on data. But the most important step is to use a B2B support platform with automation and AI agents that help your team work faster, so they can offer high-quality customer support in less time.

Pylon is the modern B2B support platform that offers true omnichannel support across Slack, Teams, email, chat, ticket forms, and more. Our AI Agents and Assistants automate busywork and reduce response times. Plus, with Account Intelligence that unifies scattered customer signals to calculate health scores and identify churn risk, we're built for customer success at scale.

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FAQ

How do you maximize team productivity? 

Use integrated ticketing tools, set clear SLA targets, and automate repetitive tasks. Empowering your team with a robust knowledge base allows them to resolve customer issues faster and more accurately.

What affects team productivity? 

Factors include ticket volume spikes, tool latency, and team burnout. Unclear escalation paths and fragmented customer data often lead to slower response times and decreased efficiency.

What makes a team effective and productive? 

Success relies on high emotional intelligence, streamlined workflows, and shared metrics like CSAT. Trusting your team to solve problems without micromanagement fosters a faster, more agile team.

Why is team productivity important? 

Efficient support directly boosts customer retention and brand loyalty. High productivity ensures lower wait times, allowing the company to scale without compromising the quality of service.