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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Inquiry Assistant

💰 $ - $

Customer SupportClient ServicesOperationsData & AnalyticsQuality AssuranceAdministrative

🎯 Role Definition

The Inquiry Assistant is responsible for receiving, triaging, resolving, and escalating customer and internal inquiries across multiple channels (email, chat, phone, social, and ticketing platforms). This role acts as the first point of contact for customers and internal stakeholders, owning follow-up communications, documenting interactions in the CRM, maintaining and updating knowledge base content, and contributing to reporting and continuous improvement initiatives to optimize response quality, speed, and consistency.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Customer Service Representative
  • Administrative Assistant
  • Call Center Agent

Advancement To:

  • Senior Inquiry Analyst / Senior Support Specialist
  • Customer Support Team Lead / Supervisor
  • Escalations Specialist or Technical Support Representative
  • Customer Experience (CX) Analyst or Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Knowledge Base / Documentation Specialist
  • Quality Assurance Analyst (Support QA)
  • Operations Coordinator or Process Improvement Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Receive and prioritize incoming inquiries across email, live chat, phone, and social channels, ensuring each ticket is logged accurately in the CRM or ticketing system (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom) and assigned the correct priority and category.
  • Triage complex or ambiguous customer issues by gathering necessary context, reproducing problems when possible, and escalating to technical or product teams with clear, concise summaries and reproduction steps.
  • Respond to customer questions and requests with timely, accurate, and empathetic communication, adhering to company tone of voice and SLA targets to maximize first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction.
  • Maintain and update ticket documentation, including contact details, issue history, troubleshooting steps taken, and escalation rationale to ensure consistent case ownership and auditability.
  • Monitor and enforce SLA adherence, proactively flagging at-risk tickets, following escalation paths, and coordinating cross-functional responses to meet service-level objectives.
  • Create, edit, and publish knowledge base articles, canned responses, and FAQ entries to reduce repeat inquiries and empower self-service across web help centers and internal knowledge repositories.
  • Conduct root-cause analysis on recurring inquiry themes and collaborate with product, engineering, and operations teams to implement long-term fixes and process improvements.
  • Provide detailed daily and weekly reports on ticket volume, resolution times, backlog health, and trending issue categories using reporting tools or basic SQL/Excel/Looker to inform management decisions.
  • Use CRM and ticketing workflows to merge, split, tag, and triage tickets correctly, preventing duplication and ensuring data integrity across support records.
  • Escalate high-severity incidents and cross-team blockers following incident management protocols, documenting severity assessments, steps taken, and expected timelines for resolution.
  • Deliver personalized follow-ups to customers, including status updates, workaround guidance, and confirmation of issue resolution, ensuring a positive customer experience and closure of outstanding items.
  • Support onboarding and training for new hires by documenting standard procedures, delivering shadowing sessions, and providing feedback on process documentation and knowledge base content.
  • Participate in daily stand-ups and weekly cross-functional meetings to align on priorities, incident trends, product releases, and anticipated support impacts.
  • Validate account and billing inquiries, process changes, and fulfillment requests in accordance with company policies, verifying identity and authorization before taking sensitive actions.
  • Collaborate with QA and product teams to reproduce bugs, provide logs and customer steps, and validate fixes in staging and production environments prior to communicating resolutions to customers.
  • Maintain accurate metrics and KPIs for individual performance and team health, including CSAT/NPS feedback collection, time to first response, average handle time, and resolution rate.
  • Conduct proactive outreach campaigns to users affected by known incidents or product changes to reduce inbound volume and improve user satisfaction during transitions.
  • Implement automation suggestions for common workflows (macros, triggers, routing rules) and help partner with engineers to pilot workflow automations that reduce manual touchpoints.
  • Ensure compliance with data privacy, regulatory, and security requirements when handling customer information, escalating potential breaches and following data retention policies.
  • Coordinate with billing, legal, and account management teams on sensitive or escalated inquiries to ensure correct remedial actions and unified messaging to customers.
  • Review and rate support interactions for QA purposes, provide coaching feedback to peers, and contribute to continuous improvement of support quality and consistency.
  • Manage multilingual or region-specific inquiries where applicable, using translation tools or routing to local teams and ensuring cultural and linguistic appropriateness in responses.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist marketing and product teams with customer insights derived from inquiry trends and VOC (voice of the customer).
  • Support periodic audits of the knowledge base, updating outdated articles and consolidating duplicate content.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency with CRM and ticketing systems (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom, Freshdesk) for logging, routing, and resolving inquiries.
  • Strong written communication skills for clear, professional email and chat responses; ability to craft knowledge base articles and canned responses.
  • Familiarity with SLA management, escalation workflows, and incident management processes.
  • Basic data reporting and analysis skills using Excel, Google Sheets, Looker, Tableau, or basic SQL to generate insights and operational reports.
  • Experience creating and maintaining knowledge base content, FAQs, and help center documentation with version control.
  • Comfortable using collaboration and project tools like Slack, Jira, Confluence, and Trello for cross-team coordination.
  • Basic troubleshooting skills for product/platform issues, including reproducing issues, collecting logs, and describing technical steps to engineering teams.
  • Experience handling billing and account adjustments within CRM platforms while following security and authorization protocols.
  • Familiarity with automation tools and creating macros, routing rules, or triggers to streamline support workflows.
  • Multichannel support skills, including live chat management, phone etiquette, and social media monitoring and response.
  • Understanding of data privacy and compliance requirements (GDPR, CCPA) when managing personal customer data.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional customer empathy and active listening skills to understand complex customer needs and de-escalate frustrated users.
  • Strong written and verbal communication, with an ability to tailor messaging to different audiences including technical teams and non-technical customers.
  • Problem-solving mindset and analytical curiosity to identify root causes, propose fixes, and iterate on improvements.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to manage high-volume inquiry queues while meeting SLAs.
  • Attention to detail and strong organizational skills to maintain accurate tickets and documentation.
  • Collaborative team player who works cross-functionally and shares knowledge openly.
  • Adaptability and comfort working in fast-paced, evolving environments with frequent product changes.
  • Ownership mentality: follows through on open items and proactively communicates updates to stakeholders.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills when coordinating refunds, exceptions, or customer remediation.
  • Coaching orientation and willingness to provide constructive feedback to peers to raise team performance.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • High school diploma or equivalent; strong customer service track record and technical aptitude.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Communications, Business Administration, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Communications
  • Business Administration
  • Information Systems / Computer Science
  • Customer Experience / Service Management
  • Data Analytics or Statistics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 1–4 years of customer support, client services, or inquiry management experience in a SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, or B2B environment.

Preferred:

  • 2+ years supporting customers using CRM/ticketing platforms (Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom).
  • Demonstrated experience with SLA-driven support teams, escalation processes, and knowledge base management.
  • Experience using basic data analysis tools (Excel, Looker, Tableau, SQL) to produce actionable reporting.
  • Prior exposure to cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, operations, or billing teams.
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