Constantly improving the service offered to customers is vital, this checklist will help you get started.
Becoming a support Jedi Master means improving the customer experience. Whether you are dealing with internal users or external clients, the people you support have expectations that need to be met.
This checklist will take you through the four fundamental facets of great support — better, faster, smarter, stronger — and how these are achieved.
Better quality of support
For service users, “better” support is easily defined — receiving the help they need, when they want it. They want issues resolved as quickly as possible, preferably on first contact, and with minimal input from themselves.
- Train helpdesk employees to ensure skills are current, and that they are able to properly use support tools.
- Issue users with tickets that allow them to track the progress of every support call.
- Lighten the user’s load by using technology and experience to minimize their input — they just want a fix.
- Keep the customer informed so that they know their issue is being worked on.
- Deliver on your promises, providing updates and fixes according to an agreed schedule.
Faster delivery of support
IT issues dent user productivity, and it is the help desk team who take the blame for every delay. Delivering more support more quickly helps keep the business moving and reduces the overall cost of your help desk service.
- Reduce desk-side visits by using a remote support solution to solve problems.
- Pre-deploy remote support solutions so you can connect immediately when a user logs a call.
- Share support knowledge so your entire team learns how to deal with future occurrences.
- Implement mobile device support to help customers when they — or you — are on the move.
Smarter support provisioning
Deploying your support resources more intelligently improves the quality of service on offer and helps you better control support costs. How you route calls, emails or instant messages, and who you assign them to, will directly affect the time to fix.
- Use topics to flag incoming calls so they can be properly prioritized.
- Analyze support history to identify peaks in demand and allocate resources intelligently.
- Deploy an end user portal allowing customers to track the progress of their issues, saving them time and effort chasing updates.
- Stay connected to the team using your support solution to update cases, ask for advice, and to share knowledge with other agents.
- Consolidate support tools and have all your resources in one place to increase the efficiency of your service delivery and reduce operational costs.
Stronger support frameworks
Building support processes is essential to properly managing the flow of incoming calls and seeing them through to successful resolution. These processes need to be embedded into operations and supported by your support tools to reduce administrative overhead, and allow your technicians to focus their energies on solving customer issues.
- Establish clear paths of escalation to keep incoming support calls moving towards conclusion.
- Replicate these frameworks in your support tools to streamline the delivery of support, and to automate escalation and allocation wherever possible.
- Work your support tool, identifying and grouping similar issues so the same agent can work on, and close, several calls simultaneously.
- Centralize your data to make every aspect of your support provision available to all your agents.
Takeaways
- Great support is a moving target, so you must continually be looking for ways to improve.
- Using the knowledge and experience of your team, and the insights available from your help desk support solution, you have the raw data that will help inform these improvements.
- Focusing on working better, faster, smarter and stronger will help you to improve the customer experience moving forward.
Share this checklist with your colleagues so they can improve the IT customer experience.
