Sometimes, even experts can go wrong and this applies to service agents who think they are experts in handling the customers. Customers can be an unpredictable lot who are either satisfied easily or not at all, it all depends on various factors influencing their behavior at that moment. Sometimes a quick response satisfies them or even 10 calls with them won’t do any good.
Agents providing helpdesk services need to understand the expectations of the customers and if they are meeting them. Customer expectations matter as it allows service agents to about their business accordingly and make their own checklist to get through the tickets.
Improved services can only be provided if there is no confusion from either of the party – customer knows how to raise a ticket and when to expect a reply and agent knows how soon to send an email and get on a call. The end point here is to offer a consistent service and resolve tickets before the customers loses their patience. At the same time, never set a customer’s expectations higher than required because that will raise conflict.
To achieve this, it is always better to follow certain techniques that will improve your service:
It is always better to first analyze and examine your current activities than creating the improvement plan. Understand how you are providing helpdesk, customer experience and other support services. There might few good techniques already in use or some duplicate activities with no real benefit. See if you have checklist in place which needs reviewing. Usually, businesses have knowledge base that can be a beneficial aspect of your helpdesk. Check if that needs to be revised, require new additions or activities like that.
Having well-defined SLAs (service level agreements) always comes in handy for businesses offering helpdesk services. It makes the job easy because both the service provider and the customer have defined few service agreements, and these services are expected to be provided. Now, using these SLAs service leads can prepare defined KPIs for the agents. This allows you to not only set expectations right for your customers but also measure the service you are providing.
It is always a good practice to know what you are spending where, Especially when it comes to providing services, you know your phone bill going to go sky-rocket. So understand how many calls are being made, along with cost and purposes of those calls. So in any case, your service agents are making calls for basic ticket issues like password reset then find an alternative to cut calls for such minor issues.
Documenting the status and any communication of a ticket is a good practice to follow as it allows others to understand the issue at a glance. Having a complete transparency on when was ticket raised, the first response, on call or email interaction, ticket resolved data and feedback matters. Another reason why complete transparency is helpful because in case if the original ticket owner is not able to resolve, any other agent can jump in and still understand what was done or not. Customers should get regular updates on the ticket status and agents should track the ticket progress.
Expertise in product knowledge is always beneficial and can be used in tricky situation. Many a times, service agents depend on product managers to answer few queries and that’s where they lose time. Resolving tickets quickly matters to your customers and having a complete knowledge on the product removes the dependency. Understand the features, use the product/service and gain insights from the developers – these will help you grasp about the product/service better.
Times when your service team received one of the complicated issues that required more than one agent’s attention and was passed to other agent to find a resolution, document it. One out of five tickets have a chance of getting a repeat issues resolved earlier, and in such cases these documentation can be helpful. Because this time, you wouldn’t need to pass along the ticket to get it resolved but use the document to resolve it in one go.
Having a strong knowledge base with training videos, product webinar recordings, how-to articles or videos and expert articles can be beneficial for a customer when the agents are not around. It’s a true fact that agents can’t be there 24/7. However, customer issues are not going to stop coming in. In such cases, customers can take help of knowledge base and try to understand if their issues can be resolved using of the directory material. Knowledge base is like a self-service portal that is easily accessible to both agents and customers, and can used by any.
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