Principles of successful technical support

This text was conceived as an attempt to structure the basic principles of successful technical support and communication in general. In this context, “successful” means a positive reaction of the client directly to the quality of service, i.e. his specific subjective opinion on the basis of contacting technical support.

A little about the author: I did not receive any psychological education, I did not take courses in communication with clients, so all conclusions are based solely on personal experience. I started working in technical support more than 8 years ago, at Acronis, which was still very small, and the technical support staff did not exceed 10-15 people. Today, more than 250 people participate in technical support, supporting customers in nine languages ​​of the world. Over time, I went through all the stages - from working in a small team with a virtually zero level of personal responsibility to control and interaction in a large infrastructure, including automatic collection of statistics for each employee to measure his personal KPI (key performance indicators).
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Thanks to long-term communication with users (usually English-speaking), the manners of successful communication crystallized on their own - what exactly you need to do and how to behave so that the client is satisfied. These rules are equally applicable not only to technical support of software products, but also to communication with clients in any other industry, so I hope this opus will be useful not only for narrow specialists, but also useful in everyday communication. Personally, it helped me a lot.

Start with yourself

If you are an expert, you will occasionally come across elementary (from your point of view) questions that, apart from irritation (after all, the answer has already been given 100,500 times) do not cause anything. This attitude needs to be changed - people who have reached out to a specialist are waiting for help and really do not know the answer to any questions, even if the answer is given in the first line of Google search. It is necessary to clearly realize and understand that the client has come to you not to annoy or provoke, but to get qualified help.

Respect for the client is a fundamental principle, following which one can successfully conduct a dialogue with people of any level of education and competence (even with Gopniks on the street level “Eh, hear, come here yes!”). This respect comes primarily from the inside, even if you do not show it directly, by indirect signs (intonation, speech) the client will always feel a real attitude towards himself. Each message is a dialogue of personalities, so if you think that any client is just another suffering guest of a mental hospital who can hardly connect a couple of words and cannot clearly explain his problem, then the dialogue will not work.

Life example : On Sunday at 8 in the morning, after a sleepless night, I drove by car (I slept for 3 hours, so it was appropriate), and I was stopped by a comrade in uniform with a red and blue flasher on board. Says, they say, something you look bad. Let's open the trunk, make an external inspection and, if you do not mind, we will pass for examination. What were my options?

1) Refuse, insist on the presence of witnesses (in general, get into the bottle and escalate the conflict)
2) Allow an external examination, even if not completely legal, without the presence of attesting witnesses.

Entering into the position of an employee of our valiant police, I could understand him - some strange people at the wheel, all rumpled, red eyes, hands trembling. And I tried to convey to him my respect and understanding.

- Yes, I understand you perfectly, I do not look very much - I slept too little, but I had to go on business, no matter what. Now I'm going home to sleep. If you want, I can go with you to the medical center for examination, I do not mind, because really my kind is suspicious.

To which I received the answer:

- Indeed, you do not look too good, but you communicate quite sensibly, so I will let you go. Go home, sleep. Happy road!

Events, depending on my answers, could follow a completely different scenario, leading to unnecessary nerves and loss of time. But, avoiding irritation at the police officer (respecting his decision and conclusions), understanding his “problem”, I managed to avoid the escalation of the situation and reduce the dialogue to a successful ending. This dialogue followed several principles of communication listed below. But back to the topic of everyday communication with customers.

Understanding and acknowledging user problems

Customer confidence must be earned. The easiest way to show this is to understand what the problem is. It is not necessary to constantly interrupt the user's story with clarifying questions, but at the end it’s worth briefly speaking the essence of the problem - this is necessary in order to make sure that you understand the client correctly. Here, experience in a specific area is important (knowledge of a product supported by a specialist, its features, subtleties of settings, etc.) and over time, you can identify the problem (translate it into the language of developers) by indirect signs mentioned by the client only in passing.

In addition to understanding, you have to admit that the problem is really a problem (acknowledge), so to speak, even if it is a slight UI shift, noticeable only with a tenfold magnification on a fifteen-inch monitor, every third Thursday of a month in a leap year.

Recognizing the importance of the problem means for the client that there is no need to prove this fact and focus directly on the solution (the dialogue will immediately be directed to the constructive direction).

Self confidence

Let me remind you that a customer calls technical support not because he wants to quarrel or shout at an unanswered specialist - he first of all needs to solve his problem. He needs to be sure that he will really get help. Literally from the first words, it becomes clear to him how competent a person is at the other end of the line, and if the client has the feeling that the specialist is inexperienced, does not understand the question, then problems begin with all the possible consequences. An angry customer can apply arguments and requirements from absolutely any area that does not even relate to the area of ​​his initial problem: “connect me with the manager”, “what nonsense are you”, “your products are terrible”, etc. Even if you are not fully familiar with all aspects of the subject matter - this is not a problem, because impossible to know everything. The problem is that you showed it to the client - such an impression is very difficult to change if it was formed incorrectly in the first minutes of communication.

Example : A newbie sits on the phone and takes the first call. The client asks a technical question to which the novice does not know the answer. Wrong scenario (one of the typical mistakes):

The newcomer says that at the moment he does not have this information and will ask for advice from a more experienced specialist.

What happened from the point of view of the client: “Aha, so he does not know the answer and wants to find out the information from a colleague! Why don't I talk with this colleague, who will give me the right answers first-hand? Why do I need a newcomer to train on me? ”

In this dialogue, the specialist of those support loses the trust of the client (even if at a subconscious level), which results in a biased attitude to everything that will be discussed later.

The correct option is :

The newcomer says that at the moment he does not have this information and he needs a little time to get a response in his database.

What happened from the point of view of the client: “Um, well, the question seems to be quite complex and specific - let him look for and give me information.”

The reaction is certainly not the best, but neutral, and this is the best that can be obtained in such a deliberately losing situation. Nevertheless, the specialist does not lose his dignity with the client and can continue to carry on a dialogue with him at the same level of trust. Note that I do not urge a specialist to lie (the correct option is 100% honest) and to simulate competence. It is only necessary to formulate the answer in another way. It must be remembered that first of all the user expects psychological support from you, and your wording should not deceive his expectations.

Tuning to user wave

Imagine the situation: you are an admin, and a tragedy happened - an important server fell, every 5 minutes the boss and all the employees take turns to find out when everything will be fixed. In this stressful situation, it suddenly turns out that restoring a backup to a new hardware does not work. You call the technical support of the program responsible for the restoration, and quite emotionally and quickly (deadlines are pressing) to explain your problem. At the end of the wire, you hear a slow, measured voice of a specialist who phlegmatically follows the memorized patterns and first asks for your client identification number (support is paid) and very slowly begins to find out the details of the problem. But you have everything on fire! Need a solution here and now! You start to get nervous, break into a specialist and hang up in the hearts.

What happened? The client called with an extremely important problem for him, he was excited and needed an appropriate attitude. The specialist did not try to enter the position and simply followed the standard patterns, uttering all the phrases slowly, measuredly, as he used to, without taking into account the mood of the client. Here it is the intonation of the voice and the general attitude that is important. For example (K = client, C = specialist):

K: Please help me urgently, my server has fallen and I need to quickly restore it!

Incorrect answer:

S: Please provide your customer ID number. I need to put it in the database for correct processing of the treatment. If the check is successful, then we can begin to solve the problem.

The client immediately notices that for the specialist the problem is not important, but the formal process is primarily important. Plus, the client pays attention (subconsciously) to the fact that, despite the obviously critical problem, the specialist continues to communicate in the same neutral tone, as if he didn’t care. As a result, the client immediately loses confidence and begins to get nervous (nervousness will increase like a snowball as it communicates).

Correct answer:

S: Okay, I understood the urgency of the problem, and we will try to solve it as soon as possible. I will need your client identification number in order to properly process your appeal, but we can skip this step because of the importance of the problem. Please tell me the symptoms.

The specialist immediately makes it clear that he does care, and he shows this not in word, but in deed. It is important that this phrase be pronounced again not in a neutral tone, but following the intonation of the client. Of course, you do not need to immediately excitedly scream and beat yourself with your left heel to the chest, but shifting intonation towards a more emotional one is vital.

Problem escalation

There are situations when the client already had a bad experience with technical support (they did not help him, did not understand the problem, the specialist was incompetent, etc.) and asked to escalate the problem above. What should the second specialist (as a rule, the manager) do when the situation is already tense and the client is not satisfied at the very beginning of the dialogue? From my own experience I can say that practically always there is a way out of such situations - it all depends on how you build up the further dialogue. Here it is important first of all to listen to the client and acknowledge the problem: “Yes, I understand that you had an unpleasant experience in communicating with our specialists, and my task is to fix this priority task. I'm on your side.

However, in simple words, you will not correct the picture and you need to have the actual way to solve the user's initial problem, which in these cases is a priority. When he sees that the problem really begins to be solved, while with the previous specialist the solution was not visible even in perspective - this instantly sets up a positive mood. Perhaps the problem is so complicated that there is simply no solution at the moment, but you should always have a plan for how to solve it (not now, then later, by attracting developers, testers, but who only needs to).

Such dialogues bring excellent experience, which allows you to understand how you can “drag and overcome” an unpleasant discussion, turning it into a summer walk with talk “for life” instead of intense skirmishing of fans of two rival teams.

There are also situations where the decision is quite trivial, and this only frustrates the client even more: “How did you put one tick and it worked after 2 minutes, and the previous expert talked with me for an hour empty ?!”. It all depends on your competence - how can you explain this fact. In these cases, you can tell in more detail about the product, how this tick relates to the problem, why you put it. In other words, you need to tell the details of your decision. The more details you tell, the more the client will trust you (“This specialist really knows his product — you can trust him”).

An important point: in no case can you discredit your colleagues, telling the client that the previous specialist was not experienced enough / works with us for only a month / we will fire him soon. This path does not lead to anything except to the loss of confidence in the company as a whole and in particular to you (Russians do not abandon their Russians in a war)

Conformance to expectations

I will begin with an obvious, but nonetheless extremely important thing: if you tell a client that you call back on Tuesday at 12 o'clock in the afternoon, then you should call back at the appointed time, by all means, or warn in advance that you will not be able to reasons. There is nothing worse than a missed call or a remote support session - this extremely demotivates the client.

If you tell the client that the problem will be solved in the next update of the product, then you must be 100% sure that this will be so.

Even the bad news cannot be hidden: you know that a certain feature requested by a client will not be included in the product before 2020. You can say the following phrase: “Thank you for your feedback, we will definitely consider it in the future,” giving false hope and forming a wrong wait. It is better to answer truthfully: “This feature is on our list, but comes with low priority. Unfortunately, it should not be expected in the near future. ” Honesty is highly valued by customers because they can trust the company, knowing that their expectations are met.

“If we did not meet your expectations, these are your problems” - this is definitely not our slogan.

findings

Summarize the above points in short theses:

1. Start with yourself: respect for the client / interlocutor comes first
2. Remember that you are a specialist and you can solve a client’s problem.
3. Customer problem is your problem
4. Feeling the mood of a client and matching him is priceless.
5. Communicating with a frustrated client is not a stress, but an opportunity to get a good experience in conflict resolution.
6. Meeting expectations is the key to a customer’s heart.

From myself I want to add that I successfully followed these principles myself and tried to instill them in the Acronis technical support team (yes, yes, without advertising here in any way :)), which I love and respect immensely for the constant striving for the best.