How to Hire and Onboard Your E-Commerce Company’s First Customer Service Manager
Customer service is one of the most important aspects of any e-commerce business. Customer service is the face of the company, the manifestation of your brand, and often the deciding factor for customers when choosing between competitive products or solutions. It's incredibly important to leverage the skills of a customer service manager who can handle customer inquiries and complaints, as well as train and manage a team of customer service representatives as your business grows and scales.
If you're looking to hire and onboard your company's first customer service manager, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Do your research
Before you start your search for a customer service manager, it's important to do your research and understand exactly what the role entails. What responsibilities will the customer service manager have? What skills and experience will they need? Once you have a good understanding of the role, you can start writing a job description that will attract qualified candidates.
After nearly three decades of experience in e-commerce sales, fulfillment, and customer service, here are a few commonalities we see across the most successful customer service managers.
A good customer service manager should possess:
Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.
Ability to handle customer inquiries and complaints effectively. Remember, your new customer service manager will always need to field inquiries directly, especially in the course of dealing with customer service escalations.
Demonstrated experience training, mentoring, and managing a team of customer service representatives.
Basic understanding of business financial management including budgeting, forecasting, labor planning, procurement, and possibly P&L management.
Thorough understanding of customer service performance metrics and the "levers" that can be pulled within an organization to improve performance.
Deep understanding of customer service technologies, including but not limited to: A) Help desk tools such as Freshdesk, Intercom, Kustomer, Zendesk, etc., B) Quality assurance (QA) tools like Playvox, C) E-commerce integrations and plugins for order status and shipment tracking status visibility, D) Learning Management System (LMS) and agent coaching platforms to continuously improve agent performance.
Organized and detail-oriented. Managing a customer service team is a highly demanding role. These demands include meeting the challenge of new business requirements such as new product launches and changing policies, meeting SLAs and real-time customer demands, to simply working through the ins and outs of managing agents who have their own personal challenges and career ambitions.
Possess a solid understanding of the e-commerce industry and a proven desire (and ability) to stay relevant with changing customer service technologies and best practices.
Find the right fit
Both objective and subjective measurements come into play when identifying candidates who may be the best "fit".
Objectively, it can be important to narrow candidates based on a few specific categories:
Product category experience is likely obvious. Does the candidate have experience in your market, industry, or another analogous scenario?
Specific sales channel experience is often overlooked. For example, hiring a support manager with e-commerce experience when most of your sales are conducted through indirect sales channels like major retailers, or vice versa, can lead to lots of friction. Offline post-sale technical support is an entirely different animal than pre and post sale e-commerce support.
Experience with companies of your size and scope is also very helpful. For example, there are wonderful customer support managers out there who have successfully scaled startups from one or two agents to dozens of agents. Others may have experience managing onshore and offshore contact centers with hundreds or thousands of agents, albeit often in a much more bureaucratic corporate culture.
Other objectively evaluated skills may include experience managing inhouse versus outsourced teams, as well as onshore versus offshore based agents.
Subjectively, It's important to find a customer service manager who is not only qualified for the job on paper, but is also a good fit for your company culture. Again, customer service is the face of your organization and this hire should reflect the brand and ideal customer experience you are hoping to create.
The customer service function, and your customer service team's culture and performance, better be aligned with your values and culture. As a result, the definition of "the right fit" is not one size fits all. For example, if your company sells fun educational children's toys, your customer service manager's style, tone, and interpersonal skills should likely be very different than if you sell medical devices for pain management.
That said, universally, your customers and internal colleagues are deserving of a customer service manager possessing empathy, a positive attitude, strong motivation to advocate for customers and the brand, and alignment with your overall company mission and goals. And, at the risk of re-stating the obvious, the customer service manager should also be able to work well under pressure and keep a cool head in difficult situations. Plenty of these situations are inevitable.
Successfully onboard your new Customer Service Manager
Once you've found and hired the perfect customer service manager, it is important to onboard effectively and hit the ground running from day one. This means providing a thorough overview of your company, your products, and your target market. The customer service manager should also be trained on any relevant software or systems, other than those systems the new customer service manager is tasked with selecting.
Other key considerations during onboarding include:
Be sure to have an open and candid conversation about how you expect the customer service team to handle difficult customer situations. Exception handling and escalation strategies should be rooted in the uniqueness of your business model and the desired customer experience you are hoping to create. In other words, ensure you have alignment around the concept of "This is how we treat customers when things go wrong".
Gain alignment on objective metrics that will help you evaluate the customer service manager's performance. This can be tricky, as customer service is a complex and highly variable function. Do not let arbitrary metrics rule the day. Focus on designing metrics that achieve the aforementioned customer experience outcomes you want your team to achieve. Some common goals or metrics include A) Reducing customer complaints, B) Reducing the number of escalated support tickets, C) Improving customer inquiry response times to, D) Maximizing first contact resolution rates, and E) Improving overall customer satisfaction ratings and on/or NPS results.
Agree to a timeline for implementation of the above items and when certain milestones should likely be achieved if all is going to plan. In other words, as you fast forward 30, 60, 90, 180, 365 days and beyond, it should be objectively obvious to both you and your customer service manager if "things are going well" or not.
Parting thoughts
Creating a great customer experience is not always easy, but it is always worth it. Hiring and onboarding a customer service manager is an important step for any e-commerce business. By taking the time to find the right candidate, giving them your thorough attention, and committing yourself to their success, you are one huge step closer to enabling your ideal customer experience and building a terrific brand.
Rush Order is experienced in leading CX teams for startups and helping founders identify that first key CX hire. Please contact Rush Order to discuss how we can guide your customer service hiring and team-building strategy.
