Darren Huston

Read How to Scale Your Customer Service Team

Scaling a customer service group isn't smooth, let alone for fast-growing startups. For brands such as Birchbox and Warby Parker, which were born to compete on the basis of service, the challenge is even greater. These agencies must ensure they have the right resources in place to consistently meet the sky-high expectations they've set while serving a rapidly expanding customer base.

Things To Consider:

1. Will you use in-house agents and/or outsourced teams?

Keeping in-house service team will require significant, ongoing investment in hiring, customer service coaching and training, and infrastructure—both physical work space and technology stack. But you maintain complete control, which means you can hire folks who are suitable for your brand culture and monitor them closely.

"[W]e don't treat customer service as a cost center . . . and we don't outsource customer service to save money. We apply the same rigorous hiring standards in that department as in any other function. We strongly believe that our service centers are a critical part of the customer experience and that if something goes wrong and we're able to fix it, we'll have that customer for life. And our data confirms that."

– Darren Huston

2. How many agents will you need?

This is one of the biggest questions startup brands grapple with. If your team size is off by even a few agents, you'll either waste precious resources or degrade service quality. We wrote recently about the , which you can use to calculate the ideal number of agents—provided you have the right inputs.

3. What will your agent-to-manager ratio be?

We've seen agent-to-manager ratios run the gamut, from 1:5 to 1:20. Your ideal ratio will depend on how much your managers are tasked with on a daily basis.

4. How will you hire for peak volume seasons?

Hiring for your brand's peak seasons (holidays, back to school, etc.) may involve seasonal brand hires or temporary outsourcing. Regardless, timing is everything. If you're preparing for the Christmas shopping season, for example, starting the hiring process in mid-September won't leave you enough runway to get your fledgling agents off the ground.

5. What kinds of technologies will you adopt?

Agent empowerment, operational efficiency, and an all depend on the customer service stack you have in place. High-functioning contact centers rely on technology to manage call queues, route calls effectively, and manage live chat and email.