Practices, Resources & Other Suggestions for Cust. Support? 18
drshannon asks: "I have recently been placed in charge of our small Customer Support part of the company (just 2 people right now). I have never done any customer support before, and would like to ask the community about tools, policies, resources or ideas that work well for them. I'm sure there are a ton of resources, and most Google searches turn up specific help desks for companies, not ideas about supporting customers! What is a good CRM for a small business? How do you handle documentation to easily publish documents for User Guides, and for the web? What are common tools for a good customer support desk. We try and pride ourselves on good support, but we do need to improve, and can with your suggestions."
Publish everything you can.... (Score:4, Informative)
Tools and Freedom (Score:3, Informative)
As someone who's worked on a phone help desk for 4 years, I've run into a couple things that I've found that help me when I provide support:
Note the "easy-to-use" part. No repition of data, easy to reopen tickets and the more integration the better (user's name should bring up address/ph#/passwords/etc.).
Let the techs make their own knowledge base on the intranet. We know what we want there, more than the best content authors you can find. A good KB will keep all your techs (no matter how many) on the same page.
Let the techs solve the issues, and not get bogged down by red tape. Give them hard guidelines on what to support, then give them a say statement or the like if they can go outside them to get a user going. That just looks good to a customer, and it'll keep the company and techs out of hot water.
That's just the tip of the iceburg, but I do hope it helps you out. :)
Out of my personal experience... (Score:3, Informative)
1) Vague statments from customers that donr know how to define the problem. So first of all, design a standard questionare (ASAP-as simple as possible) , cause usually customes are ppl with lots of money that know shit
2) Manage ur knowledge, never let a valuable piece of info pass by without recording into a DB that u know its design, therfore i recommend the suggestion above about ut own SW to control ur KB.
3) Give ur techs their chance to strenghten their knowledge, Support is not like programming, when ur a support tech, u have to know lots of issues regarding various and extreme technologies, cause u might be supporting ur product on several platforms and db engines, its not like u have 1 or 2 programming languages and thats it.
4) Minimize customer interaction, by adding a support page with FAQ's and info on first aid troubleshooting steps on ur website. This will eliminate a big percentage of problems.
5)Last but not least, if the cusotmer has paid his support fees, contract or whatever....then.....
Re:Problem Management Software (Score:2, Informative)
We do have an internal crm solution that was devel'ed in house and it is very sweet, web based and will soon be open sourced.
We have head sets, it is the only way to go, remember to get the type with VERY long cords.
All of the rest of the above is true, however I would ask that you remember one thing. Some customers will complain, it happens, when they get passed to managment make sure you are not going to shout at the staff afterwards, it is most of the time not their fault (if you have done well in selecting the staff it won't be) this will mean that your staff will not be afraid to transfer them through. (not that this happens in my place)
Oh yea, and let them use any system they like as long as they can get their work done, it sounds silly, but I am more efficient with linux than windows because I know it better, same goes with mac users, they are going to do a hell of a lot better with a mac than win.
Re:Out of my personal experience... (Score:3, Informative)