Better to quickly help than long to sympathize
Technical support employees are the performers of client desires. How quickly and well engineers are able to solve customer issues forms the attitude towards the company. If before, the “face of the company” was marketing, now the role itself is actively trying on the service, because Positive feedback on service now means more to consumers than bright promotional brochures.
How to make the experience of contacting technical support more enjoyable for customers, engineers and management - in this post.
Those of you who are familiar with the classic optimization tools of the support service can skip the first part and go straight to the “sweet” - the goals of building proactive support and ways to motivate employees.
What do customers want? Get an exhaustive answer to your questions that would be provided instantly. What does a business want? That the client was satisfied, and it cost the company nothing (ideally), or it cost minimal money. How is this problem solved? The correct answer in a rude form is: “In order for the cows to eat less, and give more milk, they need to be fed less and milked more.” In the language of business, it looks like:
To achieve these global goals, many different good ways have been invented, here are just the most proven ones:
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All these are wonderful tools that have proven their effectiveness in practice. They really solve the task, which, I repeat, sounds like “the fullest and fastest possible processing of all incoming customer calls”. This formulation of the problem is a consequence of the principle: there is no conversion - there is no problem.
I will reveal the secret - the principle is wrong. It often happens that users prefer not to contact support even if they see an error. There can be many reasons for ignoring support:
It would seem, yes, and God bless him - since the users do not care what technical support can do? Saving drowning people is the work of drowning people, right? Not certainly in that way. The situation here is that someone Fedot, a user of a software product, did not fully understand the capabilities of the system, stubbornly continues to work incorrectly, or stops working altogether in the system, citing the fact that it is bad. It hurts the business a lot, because money invested in the system, but no result. For a software company, such a situation is like a stab in the back - after all, it was implemented, trained, everything seems OK - there are no complaints. And then, suddenly, it turns out that the head of the client company showered you with unflattering statements for the fact that you took the money, and everything works like during the reign of Peas, making everything manually.
To reduce the risks of such a situation, there are own methods - conducting training, creating instructions, automating workflows. But in these mechanisms it is impossible to lay all business scenarios once, because business is matter subject to constant change.
I described all this with the aim of leading you to the conclusion that the classic tools that companies use to help their customers are not sufficient. Therefore, in Terrasoft, we have come to a simple but essentially non-standard idea - what if we ourselves turn to the users trying to find out how they work for them, are there any questions or suggestions to conduct training webinars for them? In short, we decided to build proactive support in order to be in constant contact with customers.
This approach to providing support is a reflection of the strategy of the whole company, which can be expressed in one word - engagement. Priority number 1 in Terrasoft - every client who bought our product should be able to use its functionality to the maximum, to be as satisfied as possible from the use of our solutions. If the user doesn’t have enough skills, knowledge or time to study the Terrasoft solution - this is not the user's problem! This is our problem, which we try to solve as quickly as possible.
For this, a Customer Success Management (CSM) department was created, designed to communicate with end users after sales and implementation. But the functions of CSM are not limited to this - at the department all services that provide any services to customers are locked in, so all work is orchestrated from a single center. Invoicing, sending documents and textbooks, a reminder about training - all these and other things are controlled and centrally controlled.
You can, of course, argue for a long time about how cost-effective and expedient this step is. Of course, service optimization in short-term planning is always a cost. But in the long term, it is the service that will allow to receive additional (super-) profits. Examples lie on the surface. Google was not originally intended to make money - they wanted to give a way to quickly find information. Facebook did not hurry to monetize traffic - they created a platform for communication.
It is my deep conviction that if a company places a client’s interests above its profits, it will be successful.
Let's go back to Terrasoft. I said for a reason that the reasons for the success of the company are my opinion, my beliefs. All employees share these beliefs, because they are part of the corporate culture. The fact is that the formation of attitudes towards customers, principles of work and culture is one of the most important tasks of the company. And what kind of culture the company instills, whether employees share the values ​​of the company and whether they are motivated in many respects determines the success of its initiatives.
Since we started talking about motivation, it’s not enough to be friendly and positively disposed towards customers at work — you need to work a lot, however banal it may sound. Issues such as culture and strategy are important issues. But the strategy must also be implemented correctly, and it must be done by people whose “eyes are burning”. So we went to the issue of building a motivation system.
How to build a work so that employees work (a) in good faith, (b) quickly, (c) with initiative? It is necessary to measure the speed and quality of work in any quantities - minutes, points, percentages. Then these indicators can be tied to the element of motivation, for example, cash bonuses, gifts, additional weekends.
To assess the quality of work, you can use 2 parameters: assessment of the employee’s work by the client and the percentage of closed incidents, which then had to be rediscovered. The first determines the ability of the employee to find a common language with clients, the second - to close questions.
Now speed. First, the sooner the issue is resolved - the more satisfied the client. Secondly, the more questions a engineer can close a day, the more effective the business. Here it is impossible to rely only on one consciousness of employees and their loyalty to the company. Not because employees can not be trusted - the reason in psychology. Take the task, which takes you 4 hours, and put yourself in the schedule, specifying the deadline for 8 hours. And, lo and behold, you will do it for 8 hours. Not feeling the need to work quickly, a person's efficiency drops. Therefore, the indicator of work should be the number of closed requests. Another thing is how to count them.
The problem is that some queries are simple, others are more complex. If you enter, for example, the rate of 10 closed requests per day, then the most successful will be the engineer who picked up tasks easier for himself. This is only half the problem. One employee closes authorization requests more quickly, the other with integration. It is clear that the first one will not want to take on the integration task, since half a day is taken with her, and only one request is counted for him. That will hang this task unsolved.
The first step towards remedying the situation is to enter support lines. The first line is the simplest requests, the second is complex. For engineers of each group, enter a different number of requests that need to be closed.
The second step is to introduce skill groups. Engineers of one group specialize in one area of ​​expertise. Therefore, it is more rational to send requests for, for example, export / import of reports to the export / import skill group.
The third step is to balance the requests so that, if necessary, the engineers are interested in taking requests not from their skill group and are motivated to solve complex requests. This requires a small "feint ears" - you need to bring all requests to a common denominator, for this you can enter points. For example, empirically you considered that one engineer of the II line per day can close 10 of his queries. Let each such request is 1 point. Total, to get their bonuses, the engineer must score 50 points per week. If a request comes from another skill-group, then more points can be awarded for it. Thus, an engineer can score his quota of 50 points in various ways.
The fourth step, he is the last. Points are awarded only if the customer satisfaction score for closing the request is not lower than the established threshold value and the incident did not lead to a second appeal within, say, a week. Thus, engineers will try to work as efficiently and quickly as possible.
At the same time, I will immediately state that this situation is an ideal scheme, a framework requiring a large number of iterations, collecting and analyzing statistics, consistency and a systematic approach. A miracle will not happen overnight - even a simple calculation of the time spent on solving problems and their classification can take a lot of energy.
But if you give support enough attention, create all the conditions for engineers to work with full dedication, the result will not take long to wait. By making your employees happier, you make your customers happier. On this topic, even a study was conducted, which led to a statistical dependence between how much you need to make the employees happier so that customers feel positive changes.
At the beginning, I mentioned that service for a brand now means not less, and maybe even more than marketing. Nowadays, it is extremely difficult to stand out among competitors with the help of the product. One successful attempt to create an interesting product has an unimaginable amount of unsuccessful ones. Edison at one time went through 6,000 samples of materials for his filament, until he found the right one.
In such conditions, it is possible to bypass competitors not so much due to the product, as due to the high quality of service. The service that you like will be remembered and will make the client want to stay with your company as long as possible.
PS I can't help but brag - for CSM we received the CRM Service Award, which we were awarded by a very, very authoritative edition of the bourgeoisie CRM Magazine.
How to make the experience of contacting technical support more enjoyable for customers, engineers and management - in this post.
Those of you who are familiar with the classic optimization tools of the support service can skip the first part and go straight to the “sweet” - the goals of building proactive support and ways to motivate employees.
Classic instruments
What do customers want? Get an exhaustive answer to your questions that would be provided instantly. What does a business want? That the client was satisfied, and it cost the company nothing (ideally), or it cost minimal money. How is this problem solved? The correct answer in a rude form is: “In order for the cows to eat less, and give more milk, they need to be fed less and milked more.” In the language of business, it looks like:
- Do not inflate the staff of support staff
- Help engineers work more efficiently and close more tasks.
To achieve these global goals, many different good ways have been invented, here are just the most proven ones:
- Self-service portals that allow you to leave applications, track the status of their completion, write a message to the engineer and do other things useful to the client. Portals work 24x7 and allow the client to obtain information about his application without the help of an engineer.
- Knowledge bases, usually in the form of wiki pages, FAQ., May contain a search by tags, store comments, response rating, etc. Helping customers search for problems themselves, as well as engineers to search for answers to typical queries, so as not to re-write the solution.
- Dividing all employees into support lines and skill-groups — to direct tasks of varying levels of complexity to employees with the necessary competence, thereby balancing the workload of engineers.
- Formation of service levels defining the support framework (urgency of response, additional services, availability of support, etc.) The more expensive the support package, the wider the scope and priority of requests.
- Automation of working processes. Each treatment has its own life cycle, consisting of such stages as circulation, diagnosis, repair, restoration of work, closure. By automating the sequence of steps, the system can take on routine tasks, freeing engineers from bureaucracy and helping them spend more time with customers.
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Classic is not always good. Proactive support
All these are wonderful tools that have proven their effectiveness in practice. They really solve the task, which, I repeat, sounds like “the fullest and fastest possible processing of all incoming customer calls”. This formulation of the problem is a consequence of the principle: there is no conversion - there is no problem.
I will reveal the secret - the principle is wrong. It often happens that users prefer not to contact support even if they see an error. There can be many reasons for ignoring support:
- once,
- the error seems insignificant
- rang but was busy
- half an hour trying to break through the IVR. Tired, quit this occupation,
- can repair itself?
It would seem, yes, and God bless him - since the users do not care what technical support can do? Saving drowning people is the work of drowning people, right? Not certainly in that way. The situation here is that someone Fedot, a user of a software product, did not fully understand the capabilities of the system, stubbornly continues to work incorrectly, or stops working altogether in the system, citing the fact that it is bad. It hurts the business a lot, because money invested in the system, but no result. For a software company, such a situation is like a stab in the back - after all, it was implemented, trained, everything seems OK - there are no complaints. And then, suddenly, it turns out that the head of the client company showered you with unflattering statements for the fact that you took the money, and everything works like during the reign of Peas, making everything manually.
To reduce the risks of such a situation, there are own methods - conducting training, creating instructions, automating workflows. But in these mechanisms it is impossible to lay all business scenarios once, because business is matter subject to constant change.
I described all this with the aim of leading you to the conclusion that the classic tools that companies use to help their customers are not sufficient. Therefore, in Terrasoft, we have come to a simple but essentially non-standard idea - what if we ourselves turn to the users trying to find out how they work for them, are there any questions or suggestions to conduct training webinars for them? In short, we decided to build proactive support in order to be in constant contact with customers.
This approach to providing support is a reflection of the strategy of the whole company, which can be expressed in one word - engagement. Priority number 1 in Terrasoft - every client who bought our product should be able to use its functionality to the maximum, to be as satisfied as possible from the use of our solutions. If the user doesn’t have enough skills, knowledge or time to study the Terrasoft solution - this is not the user's problem! This is our problem, which we try to solve as quickly as possible.
For this, a Customer Success Management (CSM) department was created, designed to communicate with end users after sales and implementation. But the functions of CSM are not limited to this - at the department all services that provide any services to customers are locked in, so all work is orchestrated from a single center. Invoicing, sending documents and textbooks, a reminder about training - all these and other things are controlled and centrally controlled.
You can, of course, argue for a long time about how cost-effective and expedient this step is. Of course, service optimization in short-term planning is always a cost. But in the long term, it is the service that will allow to receive additional (super-) profits. Examples lie on the surface. Google was not originally intended to make money - they wanted to give a way to quickly find information. Facebook did not hurry to monetize traffic - they created a platform for communication.
It is my deep conviction that if a company places a client’s interests above its profits, it will be successful.
About motivation
Let's go back to Terrasoft. I said for a reason that the reasons for the success of the company are my opinion, my beliefs. All employees share these beliefs, because they are part of the corporate culture. The fact is that the formation of attitudes towards customers, principles of work and culture is one of the most important tasks of the company. And what kind of culture the company instills, whether employees share the values ​​of the company and whether they are motivated in many respects determines the success of its initiatives.
Since we started talking about motivation, it’s not enough to be friendly and positively disposed towards customers at work — you need to work a lot, however banal it may sound. Issues such as culture and strategy are important issues. But the strategy must also be implemented correctly, and it must be done by people whose “eyes are burning”. So we went to the issue of building a motivation system.
How to build a work so that employees work (a) in good faith, (b) quickly, (c) with initiative? It is necessary to measure the speed and quality of work in any quantities - minutes, points, percentages. Then these indicators can be tied to the element of motivation, for example, cash bonuses, gifts, additional weekends.
To assess the quality of work, you can use 2 parameters: assessment of the employee’s work by the client and the percentage of closed incidents, which then had to be rediscovered. The first determines the ability of the employee to find a common language with clients, the second - to close questions.
Now speed. First, the sooner the issue is resolved - the more satisfied the client. Secondly, the more questions a engineer can close a day, the more effective the business. Here it is impossible to rely only on one consciousness of employees and their loyalty to the company. Not because employees can not be trusted - the reason in psychology. Take the task, which takes you 4 hours, and put yourself in the schedule, specifying the deadline for 8 hours. And, lo and behold, you will do it for 8 hours. Not feeling the need to work quickly, a person's efficiency drops. Therefore, the indicator of work should be the number of closed requests. Another thing is how to count them.
The problem is that some queries are simple, others are more complex. If you enter, for example, the rate of 10 closed requests per day, then the most successful will be the engineer who picked up tasks easier for himself. This is only half the problem. One employee closes authorization requests more quickly, the other with integration. It is clear that the first one will not want to take on the integration task, since half a day is taken with her, and only one request is counted for him. That will hang this task unsolved.
The first step towards remedying the situation is to enter support lines. The first line is the simplest requests, the second is complex. For engineers of each group, enter a different number of requests that need to be closed.
The second step is to introduce skill groups. Engineers of one group specialize in one area of ​​expertise. Therefore, it is more rational to send requests for, for example, export / import of reports to the export / import skill group.
The third step is to balance the requests so that, if necessary, the engineers are interested in taking requests not from their skill group and are motivated to solve complex requests. This requires a small "feint ears" - you need to bring all requests to a common denominator, for this you can enter points. For example, empirically you considered that one engineer of the II line per day can close 10 of his queries. Let each such request is 1 point. Total, to get their bonuses, the engineer must score 50 points per week. If a request comes from another skill-group, then more points can be awarded for it. Thus, an engineer can score his quota of 50 points in various ways.
The fourth step, he is the last. Points are awarded only if the customer satisfaction score for closing the request is not lower than the established threshold value and the incident did not lead to a second appeal within, say, a week. Thus, engineers will try to work as efficiently and quickly as possible.
At the same time, I will immediately state that this situation is an ideal scheme, a framework requiring a large number of iterations, collecting and analyzing statistics, consistency and a systematic approach. A miracle will not happen overnight - even a simple calculation of the time spent on solving problems and their classification can take a lot of energy.
But if you give support enough attention, create all the conditions for engineers to work with full dedication, the result will not take long to wait. By making your employees happier, you make your customers happier. On this topic, even a study was conducted, which led to a statistical dependence between how much you need to make the employees happier so that customers feel positive changes.
At the beginning, I mentioned that service for a brand now means not less, and maybe even more than marketing. Nowadays, it is extremely difficult to stand out among competitors with the help of the product. One successful attempt to create an interesting product has an unimaginable amount of unsuccessful ones. Edison at one time went through 6,000 samples of materials for his filament, until he found the right one.
In such conditions, it is possible to bypass competitors not so much due to the product, as due to the high quality of service. The service that you like will be remembered and will make the client want to stay with your company as long as possible.
PS I can't help but brag - for CSM we received the CRM Service Award, which we were awarded by a very, very authoritative edition of the bourgeoisie CRM Magazine.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/143472/
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