Should You Take A Tiered Or Tier-less Approach To Customer Support?

Customers expect a resolution to their problem in 10 minutes or less — and they don't want to be transferred to 6 different support agents to get that answer.

Every organization knows that resolving issues quickly and correctly equals a better customer experience. But the issue of how to get there from an organizational standpoint is more complicated.

Traditional support models take a tiered approach, meaning that they group agents in tiers based on their level of knowledge or experience — and tickets are escalated and passed to different agents as the company works to solve a customer's issue. Other businesses are leaning into a more collaborative approach, meaning that agents work together — and customers who contact tier-less organizations have a single point of contact throughout their support journey.

There are pros and cons to each approach. Let's break down the differences between the two and identify what service model is right for your organization.

Tiered Support

Typically, the first tier is composed of less experienced agents who can address the majority of inbound support requests — but may need help solving a more complicated customer issue. When this occurs, the stumped agent escalates the ticket to the next tier where, hopefully, the higher tier agent will resolve the case. In this setting, less experienced first-tier agents are appropriately utilized as the front line of support, individually resolving easy cases quickly and escalating complex cases to more experienced higher-tier agents.

The tiered support model is best suited for businesses that receive high volumes of support requests, the majority of which are basic and can be handled by all agents (e.g., "How do I reset my password?"). Tiered support also has the added benefit of simplicity and familiarity throughout the support industry. For larger organizations, or organizations that deal with regular attrition, tiered support is often easier to implement at scale and onboard newly-hired agents.

So what's the downside of tiered support? The main concern is whether first-tier agents can handle a sufficient share of inbound requests.

When too many requests are escalated instead of resolved at the first touch, customer wait times can grow as agents in later tiers struggle to keep pace with their backlog of requests. This escalation process can prolong the customer's support journey to the detriment of their overall satisfaction. In some cases, tiered support can also contribute to information silos among agents. First-tier agents are often disconnected from the resolution of escalated tickets, and, consequently, they miss the opportunity to learn from the case and prepare themselves to resolve similar cases in the future.

Collaborative Support

The collaborative support model aims to deliver an improved customer experience and reduce average time to resolution through agent collaboration.

Customers who contact tier-less organizations have a single point of contact throughout their support journey. Agents who first begin working with a customer — whether they are assigned a support request via internal triage or they assign it to themselves from a queue — are responsible for resolving that case themselves. These agents rely on help from others when addressing difficult support requests. This process can vary: it can involve crowdsourcing answers from a group (e.g., in a Slack channel), reaching out directly to a known subject matter expert, or even contacting specialists outside of the support organization, like product owners or engineers.

The benefits to both customers and agents are straightforward in this model: customers avoid the frustrating and repetitive experience of explaining their issue to multiple agents, resulting in decreased wait times and higher customer satisfaction. On the flip side, agents see the entire resolution process, meaning they are constantly learning more about the product and how to solve the most complex cases.

Still, the tier-less model is not without its drawbacks and may not be the best for all support teams. Implementing a tier-less support model can be more challenging than a tiered model, especially for larger organizations. Typically, tier-less support requires more training to ensure that agents have the necessary knowledge and skills to handle a wide range of issues. It also requires additional software tools to facilitate collaboration among agents.

Once in practice, tier-less support is often more resource-intensive, as it relies on more employees — and more combined working hours — to address any given support request. Its lack of hierarchy can also contribute to internal inefficiencies, such as highly qualified employees (e.g., product specialists) being distracted by support requests that should be handled by support generalists.

In other words, there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to perfect customer support. But we can take a look at how organizations can determine a best fit for them.

So, again, which is better? That depends on your team and the pain points you're looking to address. Before you move to make any drastic changes to your support organization, you should take a step back to assess your goals for customer support.

What's clear is that there are trade-offs for either model, which you should consider together with your organization's pain points and support goals. Luckily, Yext Search for Support is built to help teams provide better, more efficient customer support irrespective of their organizational model, product mix, or customer base.

A successful support organization is hyper-focused on its performance, regardless of its agent structure. With an AI-powered search solution, you can enable your support teams and customers to resolve issues faster — whatever model you choose.

Customers who search on an AI -powered help site or case submission page can find answers they need themselves, instead of submitting a request to your support team. This can significantly reduce the volume of inbound tickets your agents must resolve on a daily basis. For our customer, Three Mobile, implementing Yext Search led to 42% reduction in online support contacts.

With the right tech investments, your agents can easily access all the support content they need in a single unified search experience. Regardless of the support structure you implement, agents will have the knowledge at their fingertips to solve customers issues.