How we ran online tech support
Exactly one year ago on hh.ru we launched technical support for users via online chat: first for customer-employers, and then for applicants. During this time we were able to help solve the difficulties of almost 50 thousand users. The first obvious advantage of this service is that the user does not need to have any additional software.
It seemed to us quite a year to figure out whether it was worth spending on this service and how much it added the convenience of users and technical support.
')
At the start of the project, one operator worked in it, which could help a maximum of 150 users per day (which, you know, with attendance of 11 million unique people, is a drop in the ocean), but now there are already three operators. Over the year, they gained experience and are fully able to advise up to five hundred users on a different day. And all the same, when there are a lot of people who want it, and the operators are fully loaded, the button “Technical support online” periodically disappears from the page. This, by the way, seems to us a logical decision in order not to “marinate” people in a chat for several hours without an answer.
Before the introduction of technical support via online chat, we deliberately turned off the address hhsupport@hh.ru (Do not write to him anymore, it is really disabled). For many years, he lit up so much that spam filtering could no longer cope. But our main complaint about the communication of users with technical support by mail is that it is very difficult to quickly solve the problem with a lot of clarifications. The solution of short questions (and we have a lot of such) sometimes stretched for 2-3 days. For example, one of the common questions is resume locking. You need to learn a lot from a person before making the right decision or explaining why resumes are still blocked. At the same time, the user has already come to us with a negative, and by long correspondence we irritate him even more. In the chat you can quickly extinguish the fire of anger and find out the details. At the same time, a chat consultant is a full-fledged technical support specialist with all the necessary rights and access rights.
The work of technical support operators via chat looks like this: one person works in Yaroslavl from our office, keeps abreast, and the other two from home. Such a solution allows the company to reduce costs, and the children - not to dangle in the office, wrap themselves up in a blanket, brew mint tea and carry kindness to the masses :) It seems to us that the support specialist must be in good spirits, otherwise he will be badly helped.
We still communicate with users by mail - they write to us through the feedback form , and technical support responds with a letter. But with the introduction of chat support, we were able to reduce the flow of letters by 20%, although the expectations were higher: we still receive about 7.5 thousand requests per month. It turned out that these are two different audiences: people who use the chat, do not write in the form and did not write in the mail. So, as a matter of fact, now we not only gave a new way to tell about our problem, but also began to help those we did not help before.
If we entered this service now, then we would immediately implement an API for collecting data about the user, so that the user would not have to enter his data into the window and notify the operator of his login (which he often encountered, to put it mildly, a person’s misunderstanding). This opportunity did not appear immediately. Now, using the already regular API that appeared a few months ago, we are passing user data as an object with parameters. Operators already know in advance the name of the person who applied, the mail and client number if it is an employer, and also have in the program a ready link to a company profile or a list of resumes. In the near future, we will integrate the program into our CRM and with a single click will be able to record the history of appeals to our customer relationship database. Now while such incidents start up manually, which, of course, takes a decent amount of time.
From the very beginning we should have put a limit on the number of chats that the operator simultaneously maintains. This did not allow to distribute the load correctly between the operators, and people sometimes waited a long time for a response in an already open window. Now we fixed it.
By the way, if you implement such functionality on your website, we recommend immediately putting a button with which the user can evaluate whether we helped him solve the problem or not. The presence of such a button allows us to identify errors made during the dialogue. We sort out the “jambs” on a weekly basis - we take all negative chats and analyze them together, this helps a lot to improve the quality of support.
Management tips for those who are thinking about starting their technical support in the chat, we have tried to reduce to five simple points:
The technology platform for the service provided LiveTex. Of the competitors of the system we have launched, it is worth noting netroxsc.ru, redhelper.ru, they are the closest in functionality to what is now working with us. They too can and should be considered as candidates.
And the development of our technical support this year will be directed, first of all, to the creation of a full-fledged and competent help-center, that is, to self-service. This does not mean at all that we will turn off the chat and stop responding to emails, but at least a third of the questions can be easily solved by the user, our participation will not be required.
It seemed to us quite a year to figure out whether it was worth spending on this service and how much it added the convenience of users and technical support.
')
Ship launch
At the start of the project, one operator worked in it, which could help a maximum of 150 users per day (which, you know, with attendance of 11 million unique people, is a drop in the ocean), but now there are already three operators. Over the year, they gained experience and are fully able to advise up to five hundred users on a different day. And all the same, when there are a lot of people who want it, and the operators are fully loaded, the button “Technical support online” periodically disappears from the page. This, by the way, seems to us a logical decision in order not to “marinate” people in a chat for several hours without an answer.
Before the introduction of technical support via online chat, we deliberately turned off the address hhsupport@hh.ru (Do not write to him anymore, it is really disabled). For many years, he lit up so much that spam filtering could no longer cope. But our main complaint about the communication of users with technical support by mail is that it is very difficult to quickly solve the problem with a lot of clarifications. The solution of short questions (and we have a lot of such) sometimes stretched for 2-3 days. For example, one of the common questions is resume locking. You need to learn a lot from a person before making the right decision or explaining why resumes are still blocked. At the same time, the user has already come to us with a negative, and by long correspondence we irritate him even more. In the chat you can quickly extinguish the fire of anger and find out the details. At the same time, a chat consultant is a full-fledged technical support specialist with all the necessary rights and access rights.
Crew well-being
The work of technical support operators via chat looks like this: one person works in Yaroslavl from our office, keeps abreast, and the other two from home. Such a solution allows the company to reduce costs, and the children - not to dangle in the office, wrap themselves up in a blanket, brew mint tea and carry kindness to the masses :) It seems to us that the support specialist must be in good spirits, otherwise he will be badly helped.
We still communicate with users by mail - they write to us through the feedback form , and technical support responds with a letter. But with the introduction of chat support, we were able to reduce the flow of letters by 20%, although the expectations were higher: we still receive about 7.5 thousand requests per month. It turned out that these are two different audiences: people who use the chat, do not write in the form and did not write in the mail. So, as a matter of fact, now we not only gave a new way to tell about our problem, but also began to help those we did not help before.
What would cost the team at the start
If we entered this service now, then we would immediately implement an API for collecting data about the user, so that the user would not have to enter his data into the window and notify the operator of his login (which he often encountered, to put it mildly, a person’s misunderstanding). This opportunity did not appear immediately. Now, using the already regular API that appeared a few months ago, we are passing user data as an object with parameters. Operators already know in advance the name of the person who applied, the mail and client number if it is an employer, and also have in the program a ready link to a company profile or a list of resumes. In the near future, we will integrate the program into our CRM and with a single click will be able to record the history of appeals to our customer relationship database. Now while such incidents start up manually, which, of course, takes a decent amount of time.
From the very beginning we should have put a limit on the number of chats that the operator simultaneously maintains. This did not allow to distribute the load correctly between the operators, and people sometimes waited a long time for a response in an already open window. Now we fixed it.
By the way, if you implement such functionality on your website, we recommend immediately putting a button with which the user can evaluate whether we helped him solve the problem or not. The presence of such a button allows us to identify errors made during the dialogue. We sort out the “jambs” on a weekly basis - we take all negative chats and analyze them together, this helps a lot to improve the quality of support.
Management tips for those who are thinking about starting their technical support in the chat, we have tried to reduce to five simple points:
- Carefully read the thematic forums and study product demos to determine the pool of companies to choose among.
- Determine the goals that you plan to solve with this online chat system. This will allow to specify and formalize the requirements for the supplier.
- Decide what tools your website or other software product will need to modify for full-featured online chat, how quickly and efficiently you can do it. From this will depend on the launch date of the project.
- After drawing up the TK, discuss specific plans for the implementation of certain "chips" that will be needed for the normal operation of the online chat on your site (integration, API, etc.).
- Try to prescribe in the contract the terms in which the technical support and online chat developers are ready to assist you and correct the bugs arising in the process of the software.
Platform and Plans
The technology platform for the service provided LiveTex. Of the competitors of the system we have launched, it is worth noting netroxsc.ru, redhelper.ru, they are the closest in functionality to what is now working with us. They too can and should be considered as candidates.
And the development of our technical support this year will be directed, first of all, to the creation of a full-fledged and competent help-center, that is, to self-service. This does not mean at all that we will turn off the chat and stop responding to emails, but at least a third of the questions can be easily solved by the user, our participation will not be required.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/169793/
All Articles