Needless to say, customer support is a vital organ for business success, directly affecting customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. In fact, a study notes that in 2024, poor customer experiences cost organizations worldwide an estimated $3.7 trillion, marking a 19% increase from the previous year.
Customers often switch companies if they don't receive good customer service, regardless of product satisfaction. Conversely, they are often willing to go out of their way to do business with a company that offers better service.
Support agents are at the forefront of delivering these sensitive experiences, making their role crucial in fostering customer relationships and driving business growth.
In this article, we’ll explain who they are, what they do, the essential skills needed to become one, and some steps to build your support team with the best support agents.
Who are support agents (and who are they not)?
A support agent is a trained representative of your company primarily tasked with resolving customers' complaints, answering inquiries, and providing usage guidance on your company’s products and services.
Beyond handling tickets, they also provide emotional support by ensuring customers feel heard, valued, and reassured throughout the interaction. This, in turn, strengthens customer trust and loyalty.
Support agents play a vital role in enhancing customer satisfaction—which indirectly drives ROI through repeat purchases—but they are not sales representatives or marketers. Marketers and sales reps acquire customers and sell.
On the other hand, support agents retain these customers and boost repeat purchases through efficient assistance.
4 primary responsibilities of a support agent
A support agent's primary responsibilities include serving as the first point of contact, handling queries, providing proactive support, and gathering essential feedback.
1. Serving as a brand's first-line contact
When things go wrong, customers become frustrated and demand to speak with anyone—even the CEO. Your support agents step in to act as the first line of defense, de-escalate situations, and provide solutions professionally.
They also represent your brand through every empathic response, ensuring customers leave with a positive experience and a lasting impression of excellent service.
2. Handling customer inquiries
Customer support agents handle all customer inquiries. Depending on the technicality of the query, they might sometimes involve a specialist or higher executive.
For instance, if a customer has a dispute over billing that involves policy exceptions, your agent might need to coordinate with or escalate to a higher executive for approval.
3. Providing proactive support
Support agents detect customer needs ahead of time and promptly contact them even before they log a complaint. This helps reduce inbound tickets and boosts customer satisfaction.
As an omnichannel customer support platform, Plivo CX’s proactive service enables your support team to provide a more refined and automated proactive support.
4. Gathering feedback to optimize product offerings and marketing
Your support agents are the most valuable source of feedback since they interact with customers daily. They can help you gather recurring concerns, pain points, and suggestions that drive meaningful product improvements.
Plivo CX’s metrics tool automates this feedback collection process and ensures your agents focus on core tasks instead.
Essential soft skills of a good support agent
Being a support agent involves not only resolving queries but also understanding and communicating with customers on a personal level. This is why certain soft skills, beyond technical competency, are essential when recruiting one.
Active listening and empathy
Active listening involves paying close attention to every word and emotion communicated rather than focusing solely on the problem.
Unsurprisingly, active listeners excel at expressing empathy since they’re more likely to understand how customers feel better. This deeper connection allows them to communicate effectively, provide reassurance, and de-escalate tense situations.
Good communication skills
A good support agent must convey their points concisely while considering the appropriate tone.
They know when to avoid passive-aggressive words such as “actually, ought to,” colloquialisms, and slang to maintain clarity.
Adaptability
Different customers present with different complaints, personalities, and communication styles. Some are patient and easy to communicate with, whereas some are aggressive and impatient.
So, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work, and that’s why an ideal support agent must be able to adapt to each high and low while maintaining efficient support delivery.
Problem-solving skills
Customer support playbooks are valuable, but not every customer complaint will fit neatly into predefined solutions. Situations like this require your support agent to think outside the box while staying within your company’s guardrails.
A good support agent must be able to devise quick solutions to new problems and escalate as soon as possible when necessary.
6 steps to hire the right support agent and build a functional support team
Your support team can either make or mar your business. Hiring the right agent and building a functional team is, therefore, essential. Let’s see how to do that.
1. Define your staffing needs and ideal agent
You can figure out how many support agents to hire based on your historical ticket volume, scale of business expansion, and anticipated growth in the next quarters. This ensures you don’t over-hire and bloat your expenses or under-hire and cripple your support delivery.
Plivo CX’s reporting and metrics tool provides a comprehensive ticket summary, which helps you determine your historical ticket volume.
Simultaneously, you need to define who your ideal agent is—that is, the skills they should preferably possess, availability, technical proficiency, lingual capacities, and experience. You can diversify your recruitment process if you’re catering to multilingual audiences.
Once you’ve identified your staffing needs and ideal candidate profile, you can post your job listing on your company’s career page and on popular job boards like LinkedIn to attract qualified applicants.
2. Prioritize agents with empathy and problem-solving skills
You need a team of agents who can dialogue with different kinds of customers, resonate with them emotionally, and make them feel heard while providing adequate support. That’s why you should prioritize agents with empathy.
Also, look for agents with strong problem-solving skills—someone who can think quickly on their feet and provide solutions to out-of-the-script problems.
Tools like TestGorilla and Testify help you assess your applicant’s skills and ability to address different scenarios. For a more tailored assessment, present candidates with real scenarios or past customer complaints from your database and ask them to resolve the issue.
3. Test for relevant technical competency
Technical competency is your support agent’s ability to resolve customers’ technical queries. This could include troubleshooting software issues and providing answers to product-specific technical queries.
Usually, your agents don’t need to be tech geeks or specialists for L1 tickets. An entry-level customer support agent with the necessary soft skills can do a great job here.
However, it’s a different ball game for agents managing L2 and L3 tickets. They should have the necessary expertise to manage complex and product-related technical issues like specialists.
This primarily hinges on their hard skills portfolio, which you need to consider when hiring. Provide real-world scenarios to assess these skills and ensure they genuinely have what it takes to be your ideal agents.
4. Provide comprehensive agent training
From the onboarding stage, you need to identify the gaps in your hires’ competencies and design individualized or group training to boost their efficiency. Training can include soft skills, lingual capacity, and upskilling hard skills for more proficiency.
Agent training is not a one-time process. Plivo CX’s coaching tools help your agents leverage past interactions with customers to continuously refine their delivery—how to respond or handle similar situations when they arise again.
5. Equip your support agents with AI-powered tools
Gartner notes that more than 80% are either using or planning to integrate AI-powered chatbots in 2025. Advanced chatbots are essential because they can handle the majority of L1 tickets, thus freeing up your agents to do other complex tasks.
An example is Plivo CX’s openAI-powered AI chatbot, which can leverage your database in real time to make decisions, autonomously handle refund requests, modify orders, and make personalized recommendations.
Your team also needs an omnichannel platform that centralizes all communication channels into a single dashboard. This allows agents to access everything they need without constantly switching tabs, ultimately improving response time and efficiency.
An example is Plivo CX’s unified agent desktop designed to eliminate data silos, unify all incoming customer requests, and integrate with homegrown systems, CRM, ERP, helpdesk, and more.
6. Establish KPIs and reasonable expectations
Establish KPIs, such as first response time, average resolution time, and first contact resolution, to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your support agents.
Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSATs) will help determine whether customers are getting the help they need and how they need it.
Plivo CX’s agent metrics and reporting tool enables you to monitor and measure your support agent’s performance while exposing gaps that need filling.
You also need to set individualized, SMART expectations and goals for your support agents. Ensure each agent does not handle more tickets—whether in quantity or complexity—than they can. This will reduce the incidence of customer service burnout and enhance the quality of your support delivery.
Scale your customer support operations with Plivo CX
Hiring the right support agent is just one part of building a functional customer support team. You also need to provide them with the right tools to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness.
That’s where Plivo CX comes in.
As an omnichannel platform designed to streamline support delivery, Plivo CX offers a unified agent desktop to centralize your support channels, multilingual AI-powered voice support, and OpenAI-powered chatbots to slash your ticket queue.
We also offer:
- Seamless integrations: Connect Plivo CX with your existing tools, including CRM, ERP, helpdesk, and more.
- Data-driven optimization: Track real-time analytics and generate custom reports to gain insights into customer interactions and agent performance.
- AI-enhanced efficiency: Prioritize urgent tickets, ensure brand consistency, and adapt quickly to changes with AI-powered support.
- Rich communication: Enhance interactions with multimedia support, including images, videos, and documents.
- Increased productivity: Streamline workflows with message templates, internal notes, and skills-based routing.
- Comprehensive features: Leverage call recording, IVR, multi-language support, and robust security features for a complete solution.
Book a demo today and start building a world-class support team with Plivo CX.
