Here’s how you can be a productivity master with remote access solutions and boost your customer’s business productivity too.
What do customers really value?
Is it your products? Your services? The experience delivered by the customer support team? Either way, the answer’s in an old consultant’s catchphrase: you’re there to improve their company’s condition.
Whether your customers are internal or external, they want the same thing. To do work that drives their business forward. To make that extra sale. To improve that complex process.
That means your goals are their goals.
Excellent customer service means delivering backup and support quicker and simpler. Across multiple devices and levels of customer knowledge. The reward is an uptick in retention rates — keeping customers productive and profitable through thick and thin.
It’s an area where technology choices are critical. Technology that works harder on making you work smarter. Remote access software is one such technology. Let’s look at some scenarios.
Make the service experience about productivity not pain
It’s a basic question to ask of anyone who uses the service desk: do they dread having to get in touch? The long wait for an answer, the difficulty of describing their problem, the uncertainties of secure messaging and unanswered emails — all these factors make problems persist, as people sigh wearily and find workarounds. With the end result that they stop doing business with your company.
But productivity isn’t about workarounds, it’s about turnarounds. So the first scenario to imagine is how you might make dealing with the service desk a pleasure. When a customer seeks support, list all the ways delivery could fail. Where are the roadblocks, the points of friction?
Remove those blockages, and you’ve raised both the customer’s productivity and your own. Solutions like TeamViewer can also integrate into other applications — making the customer experience near-seamless. How many man-hours is that worth to you?
Look at ways of passively monitoring indicators
The easiest customer service issue to solve is one that never happened. That was stopped in its tracks before it caused a productivity-sapping fail for the customer. Yet many customer service systems don’t give service professionals the big picture — rather, they force you to solve problems one-by-one.
MPW Industrial Waters puts its technicians in front of thousands of machines remotely.
“Without TeamViewer, I’d be on the road all the time. It literally saves us thousands of man hours a year traveling all over the country,” says Joshua Nye, Applications Engineer at MPW Industrial Waters. “When you think about the cost dollar-wise, the savings are astronomical.”
That’s firefighting, when you could be fireproofing. That’s our next scenario: when you see the same issues come up again and again, and you know the warning signs that they’re about to happen, can you map those red flags into your customer service infrastructure?
TeamViewer administrators, many of them customer service professionals, monitor huge networks of devices with a single management console. Keeping track of red flags so a small issue cannot inflate into a company-wide crisis. How many lost days would that recover for your customers?
Save time by operating not talking
One frustration of customer service is customers being told to do it this way. The service professional explains what to do, but the customer lacks the tech-savviness to execute the instructions. They usually get there in the end, but in the meantime the hours — and the frustrations — add up.
A better approach is doing it for them. Using remote access software means more than seeing what’s on a customer’s desktop — with the appropriate authorization, you can operate those remote machines, whether or not they’re on the company network.
TeamViewer, for example, doesn’t need to log into a customer’s work network; its encrypted connections tunnel through firewalls. Useful when your customer’s on another network.
So a problem that’s minor to a technician, but insuperable to an end-user, can be solved by the technician directly — without two hours explaining what to do to the customer. How much work time would that free up for your customer?
Build relationships with positive results
Your customers may or may not be able to quantify the time and energy your customer service strategy is saving them. But they’ll feel it. A problem solved quickly, a bottleneck swiftly removed — these measures all foster positive emotions. And that’s the basis of our end goal: to retain the customer over time, in a sustained and productive relationship.
It’s five to 25-times more expensive to attract a new customer than retain an existing one.
So that’s our last scenario: imagine treating your customers as people, not just trouble tickets. The most useful metrics are sometimes the least easily quantifiable. So, in all the variety of ways you connect to customers — out of hours, on their smartphones, when they’re at home with their tablets — sometimes, it’s a good idea to just ask them how they’re feeling.
When people know you care about their hopes and dreams as an individual — rather than a KPI of getting them off the phone quickly — they tend to feel very positive about the company providing the service. And with the management and control capabilities of remote access solutions like TeamViewer, you have the tools to solve their problems twice as fast, as well as earn their trust, thanks to high security and bulletproof user and device IDs. If just one in three customers felt warmer about you as a result, how would that affect your average retention scores?
That’s what remote access can do. It’s where productivity gets personal. See problems before they happen, turn conversation into a collaboration, and act at a distance to solve issues while your customer goes for a coffee. You’re boosting their productivity — which means you’re also boosting your own.
Takeaways:
- It’s five to 25-times easier to retain a customer than acquire one — remote access drives both acquisition and retentions
- Resolving problems for customers with remote access takes less time and gives you more opportunity to meet your KPIs
- Monitoring with remote access can flag up issues before they become problems
- Improve your customer’s productivity, and you’re making yourself more productive
- Goodwill isn’t easy to measure, but it’s easy to see the difference it makes
