Providing a successful software support service… our thoughts

During a recent discussion about customer service desk techniques, we shared our experiences with various service providers like banks, phone companies, and dental offices. We talked about the pros and cons, good experiences, and less satisfying ones. This led us to brainstorm ways to improve our own service desk. I’m pleased to say that we already meet most of the criteria that we feel are important:

• Multi-channel Support: We offer support via phone, email, and text. While we don’t currently offer live chat on our website, it’s something we’re considering based on customer demand.
• One-stop Support: Our customers typically get their questions answered or issues resolved in one interaction, whether by email or phone. They aren’t asked to call back or transferred through multiple departments; the first person they contact provides the solution.
• Screen Sharing Technology: A picture is worth a thousand words. Seeing exactly what the customer is doing helps us understand their questions visually, significantly reducing the time needed to provide a comprehensive answer.
• Remote Access Tools: For customers who are able and willing, we use remote access to their systems to provide support without them needing to be hands-on.
• Fast turnaround: Absolutely all queries are responded to within one working day and very frequently within an hour and sometimes within minutes.
• Approachable: we adopt a calm and friendly approach to handling customer support requests – it’s not a cold, unsympathetic “provide your name, company name and account number” demand when you call.
• Accessible: all of our customers have our mobile numbers; it’s not necessarily something we encourage because we may be in a meeting, working on another support call or project, or out of the office, but we definitely don’t discourage a direct call either.
• Flexible: we’ll frequently work outside of the standard 9am-5pm UK time business hours to help customers outside these hours and/or work on installs or upgrades to avoid customer downtime.
• Tracking System: We have processes in place to track and manage enquiries or support requests through to completion.
• CRM Integration: Our support agents have access to a complete history of customer enquiries, enabling more personalized support.
• Training: We provide ongoing internal training to keep our agents’ product knowledge up-to-date.
• User Feedback Analysis: We analyze common questions or issues to understand trends that may affect other customers.
• Community Knowledge: We regularly monitor public forums related to the software we support to better understand common questions, issues, or requirements.
• ‘Vanilla’ Test Environments: When investigating software issues, we use clean test environments to quickly determine if the issue is software-related or a configuration problem.
• Security and Compliance: We ensure that customer data is handled securely and in compliance with relevant regulations and standards.
• Knowledge Base: We provide an online support portal for common questions that customers can access 24/7/365.

In our humble opinion, we believe the support we provide our customers is excellent. The only potential gap we identified is the absence of online chat. Implementing this feature, along with leveraging AI technology, could help us 1) provide quicker answers to common queries, and 2) reduce the burden on the support desk during busy times. However, we’re unsure if our customers want this feature, and we value the personalized touch of speaking directly with our customers.

What are your thoughts? Have you had a good, bad, or indifferent experience with our support desk? What do you think we could do to improve it? Feel free to contact me – steve@hilltopsit.co.uk – to comment or discuss.