The human body is truly a remarkable thing.  You never realize how intricately connected everything is until you wound one part.  No matter how big or small the injury—whether pulled back muscles or a stubbed toe—the entire body attempts to compensate for the hurt which in turn puts added strain on every other muscle. 

Business is the exact same way.  If one part of the business is problematic, then every part of the company feels the pinch; if customers get a bad experience from any department of a company, they often choose to go elsewhere for their dealings especially if that bad experience was in the customer service department.

But never fear, that’s why customer service and support software was invented.  It can help you revamp your customer service department.  With customer support software, your customer service will leap to new heights and run smoother than ever before.

A Self-Service Center package allows the customer to rebel against the old social norms of waiting on hold for the next available agent, inevitably wasting precious time that they could be spending with their families.  With self service customers can get online at any time and look through forums, knowledgebases, and FAQ sections to see if other individuals have had similar problems and what the solutions were.  They can even send in their own incident ticket.

For those who like the personal touch, live chat software allows a company agent to work with several customers at once in real time.  And that agent can consult someone else inhouse during the chat if needed.

Customer support software keeps track of service tickets and levels, stores information,  and provides a solutions database. It follows the trends in incident reports and tickets, work orders, billing, customer information and much more. 

On demand software does everything the regular software does with the added bonus of not having to invest in a lot of hardware or IT support staff. The best software can update a field in a page without having to reload the entire page. Ideally you can work with multiple windows, and customize your screen.

For a look at these types of abilities you can request a look at PhaseWare Tracker. Contact us for a demo and discover the PhaseWare difference.

One of the best things you can do for your customers and for your company when providing customer support is to answer their questions and fix their problems the first time they call in.

The First Time.

How much does it cost to field a support call from a customer? SupportIndustry.com's 2009 Service and Support Mterics Survey indicated it can cost from $10 to $24. Each time. If a customer has to call more than once to resolve an issue, the amount of money spent supporting that customer shoots up rapidly. Call volumes go up, customer satisfaction goes down, and money goes flying out the window.

Here are some tips and tools for Getting It In One.

Hire and Train:

When you hire a support rep you must find a way to determine if he or she will be able to handle support. Let's face it, being a support rep ain't for the faint of heart. So this rep will need to be able to handle emotional customers, intricate products, and mandatory processes. This rep must be trained about your product or service in depth.

Training must include the hows and whys of troubleshooting, what information to elicit, what the results of troubleshooting steps mean, when to escalate. All parts of the process must be taught and the culture of the company inculcated into your newly hired person who will be the face of your company to your customers.

Create Knowledge Bases:

Create a knowledge base containing information on your products/services, solutions to known issues, steps for troubleshooting, advice from other support reps and other customers (via online forums), anything that could help answer a question or solve a problem.

Clean the data, make certain all is correct, and give your support reps access to it. This puts answers immediately at their fingertips which not only improves first call resolution, but can speed up handle time too. (Better yet, give customers access to the knowledge base from an online self service center - now you have zero call resolution aka call deflection. But that's another post.)

Give Authority:

Once your support rep has been thoroughly trained and has access to the knowledge base, you know what you have to do? You have to let them go. In other words, it won't do any good for this person to go through all the things he is supposed to and knows what to do if he cannot make decisions himself. If the rep is not going to have the authority to implement the best solution without checking with someone, or if he is forced to follow a script or set of tasks without deviation, then everyone's time has been wasted: the rep, your company's, and the customer's.

Give Support:

That said, no one is an island. That rep needs a support framework in order to continue to learn and improve. She will need encouragement, acknowledgement, and a way to measure how well she is performing, including first call resolution rates. Technical supervisors, managers, all the way up to the CEO, must find ways to help this rep succeed, be it with further training, better tools, awards, or other motivation and assistance.

So there you have it.

Hire the right reps, train them, give them a knowledgebase and a support network and get the heck out of their way! First call resolution, here you come.

Now, not every call can be handled on first contact. There will always be problems that require further work or help. But with a higher first call resolution rate, your reps will have more time to deal with those bigger problems appropriately and the customers who can get a fix the first time will be more loyal than a customer who never had a problem in the first place.

 This is cross-posted to the ITtoolbox blog:

Moving from a Helpless Desk to a Helpful Support Desk.

This will be a short posting because really, all I want to do is ask you, the readers:

What is it you would like to read about most regarding customer service and support, multichannel support, knowledge management, incident management,, trouble ticket tracking, customer support metrics, etc. etc.

This blog is written for you . In order to provide you with the information you need, with topics you want to talk about, I really need to hear from you. 

I hope that what I have written in the last couple of years has been helpful, but I would sure like some feedback on how I'm doing and what gaps you feel you have within the sphere of customer service and support.

 I look forward to hearing from you.

We have all had what most of us call "one of those days."

You know the kind of day where everything goes wrong from the minute your alarm goes off in the morning? Or rather doesn't go off which ends up being the catalyst for the rest of the waking nightmare. The rest of the morning includes missing breakfast, spilling scalding hot coffee all over your brand new white shirt that cost a fortune, a flat tire even though you just replaced your tires, then you finally get to work and the boss yells at you for being late!

Everything rolls down hill and over the cliff, and there you stand at the summit listening to echoing squeal of your day falling to pieces. After all that mess, you don't want to call customer service about something that broke, waiting forty-five minutes for the next available agent only to be passed around like a football moving towards the end-zone. None of us enjoys that experience, so why do we in the business community waste our customers' precious time by putting them through it?

The best avenue to customer satisfaction in any instance is first-call resolution. First-call resolution deals strictly with live phone calls which are resolved with the first agent, so the customer isn't passed around like a football.

A couple of ways to measure it:

• the agent checks a box after the call saying that the issue was resolved, or
• the customer gives a glowing review in a post-service survey.

A high first-call resolution rate is often an indicator of how well a company trains and educates their agents. A business that spends more time training their call-center and help desk employees will have a higher rate of first-call resolution along with a higher rate of customer retention.

Having a low FCR places your company at risk for losing customers, and if a customer has been passed around so much or has called back enough times that they can recite their story word for word in their sleep, more than likely that customer has already chosen to defect to another company the minute that their issue is resolved with yours.

No one likes making calls to customer service because they expect the worst, especially if it has been "one of those days." When your company gets those calls, be the one who salvages the customer's day by fixing it right the first time.

Your customer support reps have just put in a long day answering a deluge of phone calls and producing trouble tickets, or incident reports, along the way. Some of those get closed immediately after being opened because the issue was resolved on the first call and your product was not defective which would then require a more comprehensive resolution.

What about the rest? When do the rest of those incident tickets get closed?

Of course, it depends a lot on what the ticket is about. If there is a major issue with your product, it may take some time to resolve. Once resolution is reached all tickets related to the issue must be closed. But do you know which ones those are?

Then there are those tickets left open for followup. But do you know which ones those are and when they can be closed? Or do they get buried behind newer tickets like Twitter posts that travel down the page until you can't find them anymore after a couple of hours? 

What if an incident was worked on by more than one person? Is there any way to tell who is responsible for that ticket? Or will it get thrown around like a hot potato between participants because nobody wants to claim it?

Can you tell from the tickets opened today and over the course of time whether there is a trend in any important metric, such as products breaking down earlier than product testing indicates it might? Or how many days tickets are remaining open that should have been closed? 

Maybe you call this ticket tracking or incident tracking. Or maybe you use a different term for reports of a problem with a product. Whatever you may call the process, you need to be able to know where a ticket is and how many tickets about the same problem are open. You need to be able to assign a ticket to someone who is then responsible for it until it is closed. Your CSRs need a way to remember to go back and close tickets that were left for followup. Plus you would probably like to gather some metrics such as number of tickets older than 7 days or how many widgets are cracking in the franistan right after installation.

These are just a few of the problems that can occur when you do not have software developed specifically for customer service and support. A spreadsheet may tell you the answer to some of these. If you run multiple applications to cover all required activities of customer support, you might be able to get some reports easily while others cannot be extracted. If you are trying to keep track manually....well, let's just say that after a particular point this becomes impossible.

A good customer service and support software solution can track each incident from open to close. Multiple tickets about the same issue can be grouped together into a larger project and be automatically closed all at once at resolution. An alert can be set on a ticket as a reminder to come back and close it at a later date or to remind of a needed followup call. An incident is always assigned to a specific person and that assignment changed whenever there is a change in the person or department working on it.

Additionally it can generate reports on just about any permutation of ticket tracking and trending possible. Issue trending, ticket aging, and tickets opened per CSR can be put into a report. In some instances, a dashboard with real time information on these tickets is available.

Too expensive you think? How much money is being lost in unproductive time spent trying to find where the tickets are, what the issues are, and who is responsible? How much is being lost from customers leaving because their needs are not being met when CSRs must put them on hold or call them back because information is not available? And, heaven forbid, if a regulatory agency should ask for records which cannot be reliably produced, how much might the fine be?

Makes the software seem quite a bit more reasonable, doesn't it? If the software is offered over the web in a delivery model called Software as a Service (SaaS) a good portion of the up front costs are eliminated. In  fact, it may even be possible to subscribe to that software directly from a developer's website. As with everything, even customer service and support software vendors must exhibit the customer support you need to get started and to take care of any questions or problems (not all of them drink their own koolade).

Do some research. Decide what problems you need the software to help solve. Lock down your requirements. Then go to Capterra or other software catalog site that has reviews and look the different solutions over. There is certainly no shortage of websites that give advice on how to find the right solution. So get out there and take control of your tickets.

What? Are you still here? Get going before your competition gets the customer support software message.