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.