"Beginnings are always messy, but they are also full of potential." 

Building a customer service team for a fintech company like Afriex requires careful planning and execution. There were a few hiccups along the way, which is to be expected. 

These guidelines were the major backbone of every decision we made on how our team would be built and structured. Before building a team, it's important to know what you want to achieve with your customer service. 

1. Define customer support goals and objectives: We had to determine what we wanted our customer support team to achieve. Some of those goals were improving customer satisfaction, reducing response times, increasing customer effort scores, reducing customer complaints, increasing retention rates, and improving brand reputation.
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2. Determine the number of customer support specialist needed: This was based on the volume of customer inquiries and the complexity of the product and service we offered. To calculate the number of customer service specialists that are still needed to effectively handle customer inquiries, we factored in the anticipated goals.
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3. Hire qualified and experienced customer support specialists: We searched for individuals with strong communication skills, empathy, problem-solving skills, a good understanding of financial products and services, good knowledge of our product and the fintech space. We  advertised the job opening on various job boards or worked with recruitment agencies and in-house human resource department  to find suitable candidates.
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4. Train the customer support team: Provided comprehensive training to the customer support team on our product, customer service skills, and communication skills during their onboarding and allowed them to learn on the job! It was important to be thorough to ensure that they understand the company's policies and procedures, and how to handle different types of customer inquiries.
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5. Provide the right tools and resources: A customer relationship management (CRM) system, an internal knowledge base, communication channels, and tools for internal communication were all provided to the customer support team in order to facilitate communication with customers and team collaboration.
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6. Create customer support procedures: We created a number of standardized procedures for responding to questions and grievances from customers. Customers received reliable, prompt, and high-quality support as a result. 
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7. Continually assess performance and offer feedback: We continuously assessed the customer support team's performance, offered/continue to offer regular feedback, and made adjustments as needed to improve performance.

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I am confident that anyone can create a strong and efficient customer support team by following these steps, which will ultimately help to improve customer satisfaction, foster customer loyalty, and spur business growth!