3 controversial ideas of the support manager

In young and inexperienced companies, as well as in large and stiffened ones, the trouble with support happens due to errors at three stages:

1. Accept appeal
2. Process the appeal
3. Remove statistics.
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Let us analyze today three typical mistakes in the organization of the reception of appeals when, at first glance, good ideas with thoughtless realization turn out to be a failure.

Write a few addresses on the site

What they think: Let customers choose an address and write immediately to the right department. Then we will not need to send letters to each other and there will be no need for an individual person who works as a router. And also set the address of the boss, if any claim, customers can directly write!


Here, hang routing to different departments on the client

In fact: Never. Will not be. This. And so it will be. Clients on the site see a bunch of addresses, get lost, and eventually write anywhere. Employees are still sent from the department to the department of letters and spend on it 30 minutes of working time per day. At the same time, in the departments, not all specialists know to whom the letter is addressed and are not sent there. It was necessary to the technical support department, and sent to the usual support. Or they are sent two times: in an ordinary outlook it is not visible that a colleague has already sent this letter to the accounting department an hour ago. So the necessary letters are lost, problems are not solved, customers are angry.

Then they start inventing crutches inside the team. Or maybe when sending to another department, we should also put a copy in the other department, so that we know that the letter was forwarded? And let's gather a meeting for a couple of hours to discuss the order in which letters to send to whom and determine the format and deadlines? This is all garbage and never works.

When the list of e-mails on the site, it is easy to make a mistake and select the wrong recipient. For example on the site: "Accounting - for payment." And if I have a question - how much to pay according to my tariff? Is it about payment, or is this general information? Unclear. How does a client know exactly what “payment issues” bookkeeping deals with.

As it should: One entry point - ideal for the client. He has no time to think about which of the addresses to write. Give him one clear email. As you already understand letters there, the client doesn’t care.

- And who will redirect the letters? So we have at least part of the letters on the subject!

If requests from outside come to different departments, then the first step to correct distribution is to replace a bunch of addresses with a reverse form with the choice of the request subject. You will pick up this form to the e-mail of the required department, depending on the chosen topic.

By showing the client, instead of the list of e-mail departments, a list of questions, you help to relate the problem formulated in the client’s head with the proposed topic. This is a conversation in the language of the client.


Feedback online store OBI - a lot of topics, but it's convenient to choose

If you have correctly formulated topics, then there will be fewer errors in routing. But what about those letters that still fell into the wrong hands?

The second step is to relieve the redirection of letters within the team. To do this, all customer issues need to be addressed in one program. There is no other recipe. Only the program where each employee comes in and sees all requests that require a response. Here you can see the solution chain. Here you can see in which department the question is stuck. Even if the first line support team is already working in the helpdesk, but the questions are sent to the second line in the outlook, Skype, weak and so on - the chain breaks. In the helpdesk there is no end in sight. In Outlook at the second line - the beginning of communication is not visible. Therefore, when the client writes to the first line again, the status of the decision will not be promptly indicated to him.

For delegating questions to Yusdesk, there is a function of assigning to a group or to a specific employee. This is just one button - while the request is not lost sight of. Departments that only help support answer customer questions and this is not their main activity need not work in the program and wait for the request to be assigned. Got used to work in the mail - no need to relearn. You can receive notifications in the mail and reply from the mail. The comment will be pulled to the desired request and the chain will remain in one place.

Internal comments help keep the conversation with other departments in one place.
The third step is to automate the routing of customer issues. How to do this, I told in the article about automation.

Need more communication channels with customers

What they think: Let's start groups in social networks, accounts in Telegraf, Votsap and Vaybere, + chat on the site. Customers will like it, they can now apply as they wish and we give them a choice, 21st century in the yard. It makes us terribly different from competitors.

In fact: the group in the VC was given to the SMM to lead the agency, they cannot clearly answer any question and send clients to the support mail. We talked more about this in the study.

At best, one message a day comes to messengers, at worst - employees are torn between several tabs, answering typical questions that are in the knowledge base on the site. But WHY stupid clients do not read it, but immediately write in support. With questions on which it is necessary to deal with another department, generally rubbish.

The client writes to Telegram:
- I have an error 500 on the site, I can not pay.
- Send a screen, please!
- Here.
- Thank you, we will give our technical department and write to you. Try to pay later ..

Next thing happens inside. An employee writes a letter to the technical department. Here it is time to be on the alert - from Telegram, communication on the issue has flowed into another channel. At best, the employee sets a reminder for himself somewhere, so as not to forget to "kick" the technical department, at worst - he writes himself down on a piece of paper - "TEXTDEL, check in an hour." The technical department is already celebrating March 8th and will find a letter the next day. Then the correspondence between the employee and the technical department will be tied up, which will be interrupted at any moment by the fact that “someone did not see the letter, but we answered”.

In the meantime, the client writes again, his error has not disappeared. The message gets to another employee, he does not know that the issue has already been solved with the technical department. And he writes a letter again. Already guess what's next.

As it should: The customer doesn’t care which channel to contact you. He is important to solve the problem. Preferably not after 3 days. If you know how to work only by phone, take calls by phone. If you do not know how to talk with clients, let them write only to the post office. What is the use of a messenger or chat, if the staff cannot respond quickly there? You expect customers to be delighted with new communication channels, and they are only upset if these channels are only decoration.

In order not only to receive appeals in fashionable channels, but also to solve problems, we need to connect the history of communication with the client in different messengers, chats, by mail and by phone. The second task is to figure out what to do with "long" problems that cannot be solved online.

For this, we have integrated Yuzdesk with Telegram, Vayber, Facebook messengers and Vkontakte. Messages from different instant messengers fall into a single operator window and automatically become a request. Further request can be reassigned to another department and solve it offline.

Ticket number must be sent to customers

What they think: We will send an auto-response to the client about the receipt of the letter with the ticket number. Let the client know that we have already registered the appeal. He will trust us more. And then when he calls and asks - what about my ticket number 100500, we will quickly find the ticket and answer it!

In fact: No one knows the word ticket and does not know where to look for its number. Just like the order number, voucher and invoice number, mortgage, transactions and other internal identifiers in the company. Customers ask: where are they to look, then they are looking, they are looking, they are looking for, they don’t find - “I will call you back” - and the truck stays in place. As a result, support spends even more time resolving the issue.

How to: In the auto answer, please inform the time when the client should wait for an answer, so that he doesn’t worry and throw letters.

If the client calls again, identify him by the data he will call immediately: what is his name, phone number, e-mail, question. Save the client from having to remember your IDs. If the story is stored in one place in the client profile, you can easily find the right treatment, no matter who and when communicated with the client.

Sending ticket numbers to customers is not a crime, when it only helps in your processes and does not harm the impression of customers. If in your company the system with the ticket numbers got accustomed, you taught the clients to call the numbers and answer in the correspondence without changing the subject - I shake hands.

Remember

1. Do not show customers more than one e-mail on the site. Formulate the topics of questions in the language of the client and add to the feedback form. Routing automate already inside with the help of helpdesk.
2. Calls on all channels are stored in one system. Do not add new communication channels until you adjust the processes in the old ones.
3. Identify the client as it suits him, not you.