Lessons from Vercel: Scaling technical support in a high-growth environment

As part of a fireside chat organized for the Support Driven community, we recently sat down with Scott Parker, Senior Customer Success Engineering Manager at Vercel, to discuss how they've managed to scale technical support in such a high-growth environment.

Support at Vercel had originally started as an all-team effort. 5 years and 500 employees later, support is managed by a dedicated team of 20+ support engineers that handle several thousands of customer questions per month.

Here are our 10 top takeaways.

On handling scale

Build for the short-term, with one eye on the future. When growing a support team, you can't solve for every future problem, but you also can't completely ignore the future. Make every decision with a focus on your current needs, without losing sight of what the next step of scale will look like.

Focus on answering questions first, then preventing questions. The first priority is always to make sure customers are replied to, quickly and accurately. Once you've accomplished that, you can shift focus from handling questions to preventing questions. With more structured quality assurnace and reviews of customer satisfaction, you can identify areas where you can provide customers with more information upfront so that they never need to reach out in the first place.

At some point, you'll need specialists. Enter the V-shaped team member. At the beginning, a "T-shaped" support team works: everyone has a broad base of knowledge, with some expertise in specific areas. As as product complexity and velocity increases, it becomes impossible for every person to deeply understand each product area and feature. That's when you should evaluate pivoting from a "T-shaped" team to a "V-shaped" team, where each team member builds expertise in specific areas and looks after support for those.

On customer focus

No amount of user research can replace understanding the pain points that customers are experiencing first-hand – and support is a great way of doing so. Even if whole-company support isn't feasible, you can build small ways for the broader company to engage in support – for example, by helping answer a few tickets once a month, or doing so as part of onboarding. It’s important to make sure that people at every level of the company are engaged with support to build empathy for customers.

Support represents, and is intertwined with, the brand of the company. Everything from a support response to incident communications affect a company's brand perception. It's critical to ensure that the support team always represents the company’s values when talking to customers.

As your product surface expands, guide customers on how they should ask questions. Vercel has more than 150 different topics that a customer could potentially submit a support question about. You should not offload this complexity to the customer, but instead guide the customer in formulating their question to you and including the right information along the way.

On internal collaboration

The support team is the internal ambassador for customers. Align the support team's objectives with the company's objectives, so that they are treated as such. Since there is a clear correlation between customer satisfaction and net dollar retention, focusing the Vercel support team's priorities on improving CSAT made it easy to tie their success to that of the wider organization. Making sure that the support team's priorities match up with leadership’s priorities – and identifying how the team can help influence those priorities – is key.

When things go quiet, it means there are unaddressed problems. Part of the support team's responsibility is to ensure that communication is ongoing and to empower each person in support to match the communication style of their counterpart in engineering.

Documentation is the best tool to foster all-team support. Constantly listen to your support team, your engineers and your customers to understand what type of documentation is being referenced, what is lacking. Identify what exists and needs to be made public, and keep an updated list of the things that can't be made public to protect confidentiality.

At the end of the day, accountability lies with the manager. Even if support managers aren't always involved as the first line of response to customers, they are still accountable for the communication of their team. Make sure your team knows you've got their back.