By Ben Stephens, Service Strategies
With cost pressures throughout the service industry, customers of support centers providing direct phone support are experiencing longer hold times before connecting to a qualified support engineer. In response to this mounting pressure on service levels, it is tempting to introduce call diversion methods to reduce hold times. These include routing customers to voicemail, routing customer to engineers with secondary skills in their problem area or routing customers to administrative staff to log the case for call back. While each of these techniques and other more creative do at least temporarily to reduce hold times, what is best for the customer?
First, the customer is contacting the support center because they are experiencing some issue with the product and they expect to speak a qualified engineer. The best time to resolve a customer’s issue is as close as possible to when they experience it. At this time, they have a clear understanding of how the issue occurred, are motivated to resolving it and have asked for help. Typically, customers are always willing to hold longer if they can speak to a qualified engineer and therefore have the greatest chance to resolve their issue. Diverting them to voicemail or secondary skilled engineers results in lower first contact closure rates, higher case backlogs, more inbound calls and the inefficiencies associated with callbacks. So what is the answer…?
Everyone’s first thought is to request more support staff. Well, that solution is usually not an option. So what can be done?
- Don’t respond too quickly to spikes in case volume let the wait time stretch out so the customer connects to the right technical engineer. History shows that case closure capacities of a technical support center vary widely throughout the year. Case closure rates per engineer can fluctuate as much as thirty to fifty percent during peak volume periods.
- Provide a robust integrated electronic support environment within your product and support website to facilitate finding solutions and submitting a more focused support request.
- Route calls for existing open cases to the assigned engineer rather than the front line product queue. This can be accomplished manually or through the phone switch. Routing status update calls to front line staff dedicated to new cases is a poor use of those resources and will impact service levels.
- If you have staff with secondary skills, first assign them to work open backlog cases that they can resolve quickly, reducing backlog for the more qualified staff and reducing customer status calls on open cases. This will also provide practical experience to the engineer and increase their confidence levels and closure rate.
- If peak call volumes are overwhelming, say greater than 50% and are defect or product quality related, solicit help from other groups, such as QA, services, training or wherever, recent support members have migrated. During the defect discovery phase of a new release, respond fast with qualified staff to find and the fix critical and frequent defects.
- Finally, if you’ve exhausted these and other effective methods and continue to set new case closures rates per engineer and record backlogs, it’s time to revisit staffing.
Note that providing quality technical support is much more that just responding to customer cases. Support engineers need time for personal development, maintaining knowledge assets, working with QA and Engineering, testing new releases and providing proactive support to customers. Time must be allotted for each of these areas to ensure customers succeed in obtaining the value they expect from their investment in your product and services.
Thanks Terri and James for the comments… I’ve got to recognize Ben Stephens for contributing the post though! Great work Ben… Another excellent article.
Great article Greg!
It is always interesting to observe the customer behaviors that develop from answering the phone to quickly. When considering your second bullet, there is an opportunity to encourage customers to engage readily with their “integrated electronic support environment ” because the experience exceeds that of a phone being answered within seconds. Many times I have observed that a more conservitive ASA pairs up with an active e-service environment.
Thanks for the great read.
Terri Kolander
Hi Greg. Great list and very similar to the advice we give clients and the changes we help them achieve. We’ve split this problem into 2 elements: reducing calls for support and making the call resolution process as efficient as possible.
We achieve call reduction through monitoring, reporting and improvement activities, usually setting up tight teams with product development staff to reduce defects and product quality related issues. We attack each issue as a single bite size issue to be resolved and have significant success in eliminating calls through this process. We often work with groups other than services to improve QA, Professional Services, or Training. Through this approach, we have not only eliminated many causes of support calls, but also improved support for new releases, which has flow-on in response times, resolution times and further issue reduction.
Our primary approach to improving the productivity of Support Staff and therefore getting through more calls with the same or less staff and reducing support costs has been to assist our clients in implementing and managing solid integrated electronic support environments within their products, but more importantly in their support websites and knowledge management. The goal is to make support less of an ordeal and provide solutions when the customer needs them. We have achieved significant breakthroughs using normal language recognition and easy to navigate tools that facilitate quick access to solutions and a simplified support request process.
Using this automated approach allows answers for the 20 – 30% of issues that create the calls that generate 50 – 60% of workload to be answered quickly and with only the time required for the specific caller. Counter-intuitively it frees up time. We then establish processes to take the freed up support time and use it to build in more answers.
We are using telephone technologies (VoIP and traditional), social media, traditional systems and a range of other techniques, to produce significant results for our clients, many of whom had already achieved high performance levels. For a number of them, it has also opened up opportunities to reduce costs, raise service levels and bring work back home thereby reducinge the amount of off-shoring they had been doing.
A spin-off of the automation has been that we have made it easier for our clients to basically remove queues and to utilise staff with secondary skills to provide high quality ‘expert’ support and resolve cases thereby almost eliminating backlogs. We’ve even managed to make work-from-home, on-demand support work seamlessly (any time support at a reasonable cost). An added advantage of the approach we use is that it makes all request recipients appear as experienced and knowledgeable, rather than just warm bodies. And most importantly it raises their resolution accuracy, speed and closure rates, which increases their confidence levels. This in turn improves the customer experience and frees up more time for customer engagement, which customers tell us they see as greatly improved service levels.
So in a nutshell, we reduce service costs, improve the support experience, raise customer satisfaction and loyalty levels and achieve great staff satisfaction. Not a bad outcome for those who take your advice.
Take care,
James