B2B (business-to-business) support teams play an extremely important role in any B2B organisation. The surfers ( 🏄 that’s what we call customer service team members) in these teams work hard to ensure that clients can trust their service providers and get optimal use from their product. Given the importance of getting customer support right in a B2B company, getting a planning tool in place is essential. 

Complex relationships with customers 

Customers of B2B companies tend to have high average contract values, significantly higher than that of a consumer-facing business. The success of a B2B company is also dependent on recurring revenue. This means supporting customers well can be make or break for your company. 

The biggest complexity that B2B businesses face is the wide array of queries a customer can get in touch about. There could be something as simple as a password reset, or something as complex as a bug that prohibits the customer from being able to use the product. This means it’s really important to set your target response times (also known as service level  agreements) upfront and balance the objectives of responding as quickly as possible, but also maintaining a target that is achievable given your headcount and capacity. 

And of course, teams are not static. Schedules and surfers’ available times are always changing. You need to know that experienced surfers who live and breathe your product are always available to step in. The newer surfers might still be learning the ropes. You may also need tech support available at certain times. All this requires a flexible scheduling system.

Intelligent team planning software will guarantee that you have the right surfers working at the right time. Always. 

Surfboard is built with B2B support in mind

We’re a B2B company ourselves so we know how important it is to get support right and respond quickly to your customers. 

Surfboard is built to make complex relationships manageable through simple, smart and fair customer service planning. 

We know how long it takes to train your customer support team, making sure you have the right people well equipped to answer all the questions your customers might have. We strongly believe that making your surfers happy and satisfied with their jobs will result in a superior customer experience. Providing balanced schedules and diversity in support roles is foundational for scaling successfully. 

Intuitive and effective

Surfboard plugs right into your customer service platforms. It interacts with whatever medium you prefer – whether it’s social media, text, email, chat or phone calls. That means that our software can understand your precise needs. No matter how niche your requirements are, surfers can get actionable and effective schedule plans.

Functions like Activities cater for the different skills and types of work your team members can do. If you prefer your team to be performing specific tasks at specific times, you can let us know. We’ll take that into account when we smartly generate your surfers’ shift plans. (Don’t worry though, the plans are 100% customisable).

Remember we said that surfers need to understand their clients’ companies super well? Surfboard makes that achievable without compromising on quality customer service. With tools like 20% time you can schedule time for surfers to learn more about their clients or spend time on projects. 

There are levels to this

We understand that different clients might have different priority levels. Enterprise clients, for example, might consistently be high priority on your customer service list. This is why you can set different priority levels for different types of work. 

Surfboard’s tools have intuitive ways of setting target response times for all kinds of tickets. We take your historical data into consideration when planning anything, so we can understand where your priorities lie. 

The best part is that everything is totally tweakable. You can change absolutely any recommendation we give you with just a few clicks.

Let your B2B support team make strides

If you’re managing a B2B customer support team, we think you’ll love Surfboard.

Got any questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to nora@teamsurfboard.com