Tag: customer support

Blueprint for better support

On January 12, 2016

When I start a new job supporting people with technology I look for the excited. I look for the passion. I look for people who care about the work and about the mission.

I’m often disappointed.

I find people going through the motions. I find people who have given up and given in to the rote memorization of their lines. They answer phones and reply to emails. Not with any urgency or excitement but with disdain.

The joy is gone. If it was ever there to begin with and I ask myself if I’ve made another mistake. I keep looking for people who care about their work. And I’m looking in all the wrong places.

The Challenge

There is a certain challenge to supporting people within a rigid structure such as government. The tools are limited. The ways are structured and set forth, usually long ago. But there’s still room to make the work easier.

There are places to supply information and point people in the right direction. There are ways to decrease the number of calls and give those who want to seek knowledge a place to find it.

How?

Where is the wiki? Where is the knowledge base? Why are support techs asking others for emails? Why does a new member of the team have nowhere to go to get the information they need to excel?

The easiest thing a support team can do is create a centralized place to store information, tips, fixes, and other vital knowledge the team needs. This is the first, and usually, last place a support tech should go for answers.

Step 1: Create a team knowledge space.
Be it a Sharepoint site or a wiki. Start small, with a collection of documents or a One Note notebook. Start somewhere and put everything in one place.

It will help the seasoned support staff because they won’t have to hunt for their past work. It will be right there. It will help the new support staff because they have a place to start looking before asking questions. They have a place to read and learn and get up to speed faster.

Step 2: Create a place for customers to get answers.

I don’t know how many times I’ve answered the same question by copying and pasting emails to customers. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the same questions asked and answered because the customer has nowhere to get this information.

By creating a place for the customer to help themselves, it will not only cut the number of support calls. It will help the support techs because to write good documentation, you have to fully understand the product you’re supporting.

Step 3: Consistent Improvement

Neither of these resources can be built in a day. They will be built over time. The team will build the structure they’ll use internally and keep changing it until they get it right. Nobody knows how to build a perfect system from the start. By building a living system, it will improve and become the support resource the team needs and relies on.

The same thing goes for the customers. In the beginning the space can be stocked with documentation that already exists. Collect everything that gets sent out to the customers and put it there. Give it a home. Put a URL on it. Send the link to people instead of the content.

A link can be shared and bookmarked. An email is designed to get lost under the mountain of other identical text.

This is what I believe in and this is what I am going to build.

Be Personable

By Carl

On March 16, 2015

In Observations

When you work in tech support, you often don’t know who you are talking to. You don’t know if they’re high-powered or the new intern. You don’t know their level of technical ability or their patience.

But one thing you do know is they are human. So talk to them like it.

So many times, I get an email back from a tech and all it says is “This account has been deactivated.”

That’s nice, computer. I am happy you processed my request in an efficient and timely manner. But it would have been even nice if I knew you were a person too.

Now let’s compare that to:

Good Morning Monica,

I’ve deactivated the account for John Morris effective immediately.

Is there anything else I can do for you today?
Thank you,
Carl T. Holscher

I address Monica by her name.
She is a person. I am a person. There’s no reason I can’t address her by her name. It’s add a little humanity to our interaction.
I told her exactly what I had done.
That way, she knows immediately what this request is about. It doesn’t rely on her to remember what she had asked me for. She’s busy. She doesn’t have time to sit around and wait for me to get the work done. She is doing other things, so don’t make her guess.
It also verifies to me that I have made the correct change. It’s easy to make a mistake, especially when dealing with a large number of requests. Repeating back the action I took helps me to double-check myself.
I used my name.
I am not a team. I am not a group. I am an individual and I did this work for her.

Whenever I am about to send an email to someone, I ask myself if this is the email I would like to receive.

If it is, I hit send. If not, I take a moment to improve upon it. Spending those extra seconds can make a big difference in how you come across to your customers.

It’s hard to be as warm and friendly over text. But it is easy to impart some humanity in your words. Use them.

Getting Things Done in IT

By Carl

On July 9, 2013

In Observations

I have the secret to planning out my day as an IT Support Technician. Stop.

Just stop. There is no amount of planning and scheming to make a day where the entire job is to respond to calls for help orderly. There is no Getting Things Done scaffolding to wrap my day in to make it better. There is no way I can have a tidy list of tasks and an order to them. It’s just not going to happen because the only constant is change.

I used to work for a print shop. It was my job to run copiers all day. I produced the customer’s print jobs and managed the queue of work. Every morning, I’d attend a daily planning meeting. We would go over the work we had in, the work we expected and set up a queue. We met every morning at 9am for about 30 minutes.

By 10am I had thrown out the plan because everything changed.

That is the life of a Customer Service Representative or IT Support Technician. (These jobs are the same.) no matter what the plan says, the overriding principle is to serve the customer. We are here to fix problems and make customers happy. And people don’t work on a schedule. They don’t care how many things you have to do or what you’re in the middle of or even how your day is going. When they call for help, we answer. Because that’s the job. That’s why we’re here.

I learned to top trying to plan out my day. There’s no system in the world that will bring order to the chaos of working with people. My failing wasn’t in not finding the right system, but in thinking any system would work.