Customer Support and Service Articles

The January edition of our customer support newsletter is here! And it is overflowing with Customer Support and Customer Service Advice, Articles, Tips and Tricks.

TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) – the popular provider of web-based customer support and help desk software solutions – has announced the release of a powerful new screen capture capability. It gives users the ability to record audio and video of a discrepancy and embed it in tickets submitted to a TeamSupport-enabled customer portal.

Available to users of both TeamSupport’s basic and advanced ticket submission portals, the option offers an “Add Screen Recording” button below the description box when filling-out a new support request. Users can add audio, such as a detailed narrative, to their recorded video. The combination of visual and verbal input gives Help Desk staff a compellingly clear understanding of any issue. For details, please visit: http://help.teamsupport.com/integration/screen-recording

“This feature will help customers relay more useful information with greater ease,” said company CEO Robert C. Johnson. “Support teams can more rapidly resolve issues when they’re able to fully visualize, understand and replicate the variables. It’s one more tool we’re adding to TeamSupport in our ongoing efforts to improve the customer support experience.”

Employed by customer support and help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

In her article 7 Ways IT Can Improve Customer Service Kate Leggett discusses several ways that a company can improve customer support. We find her insights spot on! Providing outstanding customer service is truly the differentiating factor in so many successful businesses. And reaching that level of customer service excellence truly IS a challenge. When pressed to choose between two establishments providing similar products, the customer service experience can very easily tip the scales in favor of one over another. The steps outlined here are ones that if taken into consideration when evaluating your own help desk and the level of customer service being provided can hopefully elevate that service standard and your business.

It’s a brand new year, and now is the perfect time to plan out the rest of 2012 for you and your entire customer support team! Just like New Year’s resolutions, it’s good to have milestones throughout the year to remind us to pick up the pace or improve our situation.

Making a calendar can keep you from putting off important maintenance, especially when it’s so easy to dismiss and do something else – but it’ll be the holiday season again before you know it! So here are some events you can schedule throughout the year to help keep your customer support game in tip-top shape.

Schedule More Help During Busy Times

When are your busiest times? Naturally, a lot of companies have increased business during the holidays, but that might not be the only really busy time for your team. If you own a fireworks company, for example, you’re most likely swamped during New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July as well.

Look back at your past schedules from the last couple of years to find out when your most busy times are. Instead of your team getting overly stressed and strained during these times, map out these cycles and perhaps consider bringing on a few more people to share the load during these periods.

Training Days

Speaking of new help, you need time to train them properly. Even if they stay for just a few weeks or months, you will want for them to know how to properly handle any customer service situation. And a refresher could not hurt for the rest of your staff!

To this end, schedule a few days or weeks during the year to catch up on training. Not only will new situations arise during the months between, but your agents will most likely have new questions that they can address and get answered. You can also take this time to forecast plausible problems or issues you’ll face in the future.

FAQ Improvement

Want to cut down on your agents’ work load? Updating your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) is a great way to insure that your customers don’t leave your website again without getting the answer they are searching for. When your customers have troubles, they can simply check the FAQ and hopefully avoid calling or emailing your service center. With this tool properly utilized, all of your agents (and you) will have more time to do other things than field commonly asked questions again and again.

Morale Building

You most likely are not slammed 24/7. Well, I suppose it’s possible, but then you clearly need to go back to point #1 and reevaluate your staffing needs! In any case, there will eventually be down times for your customer support team. During these instances, you still want to keep your team busy and engaged, and you can’t train all the time.

What better time could there be to hold some team building and morale boosting events!? Take everybody out for a night of bowling or have a random party or potluck in the office. So when making that calendar, be sure to schedule for some fun and recognition!

ANALYTICS ADD POWER TO LEADING SAAS-BASED HELP DESK & CUSTOMER SUPPORT APP

TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) – the popular provider of web-based customer support and help desk software solutions – has announced the addition of analytics powered by Zoho Reports. Using the collaborative tools, TeamSupport clients can easily filter, sort, view and analyze their business data. An intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes easy work of creating dashboards, graphs and reports to share with all, or selected team members.

Once the integration is set up, TeamSupport automatically updates Zoho Reports with Ticket data, Portal Logins, Chat Requests and Knowledge Base Traffic – all in near realtime. As a TeamSupport add-on, licenses—based on database size—are available directly through Zoho; a free version may be sufficient for the smaller TeamSupport account. Please visit TeamSupport.com for further information.

“Linking Zoho Reports to TeamSupport was an easy choice for us, as it complements our existing integration with their popular CRM software,” said company CEO Robert C. Johnson. “Among our top goals at TeamSupport is providing our users with the best tools available to help make well informed business decisions; Zoho Reports definitely fits in that category.”

Used by customer support and corporate help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

Lots of Customer Support and Customer Service Advice, Articles, Tips and Tricks in our December customer support newsletter. Happy New Year and best wishes for 2012!

Have your customers ever submitted an issue that they felt was urgent only to find out later it really wasn’t? If you are a part of a support operation, I am pretty sure your answer is “yes”.

So how do you separate your customers severity from what you believe the severity really is and avoid pissing anyone off? It can be a bit tricky sometimes. In fact, many organizations do not offer the option for the customer to identify their severity – mainly because the selection is often abused.

It’s important to understand customer perception, even though you might not always agree. On the other hand, everything cannot be urgent all the time – and if it is, something else may be going on!  To help this conundrum, we have an easy way to deal with this situation in TeamSupport by simply creating a custom field on your support portal.

Ticket severity is a stock field on all tickets in TeamSupport – and that is the field you should use as your internal severity. Simply create a custom pick list field on the ticket called “Customer Severity” and make it visible on the customer portal.  This way it will be a selectable item when your customer is submitting a ticket.

The next step is to make sure urgent tickets created by your customers jump out at your team.

To do this, create an automation trigger that looks at the custom field you created and perform an action when a tickets “customer severity = urgent” (or whatever you decide to use in your custom field).

Some actions you might add may be to notify someone on the team or perhaps escalate to a manager – or simply log a private note in the ticket that says “the customer has indicated their issue is urgent” which will notify the ticket owner(s). You can even have the trigger auto assign the ticket to an “urgent severity group”.

There are tons of actions you can perform against tickets using our automation feature to help make tricky situations not so tricky, and also save time and resources.

This little tip will allow your customers to express their urgency, and also provide your team the opportunity to review their issue and align the severities more accurately and avoid the risk of upsetting someone.

Some days, it’s really easy. A customer sends you an email saying your product has an issue they would addressed. It’s not a problem, they say, because mistakes are made and they like your company. You have a pleasant conversation via e-mail exchange and are able to quickly resolve the issue and fix their problem. Customer support success!

Other days, it’s not so easy. An all caps, irate email arrives in your inbox on a gloomy morning informing you that not only is your product total garbage, but you’re apparently a useless waste of space. It seems you quite possibly have ruined countless lives just by waking up today.

What am I referring to? I’m talking about keeping a smile in your voice – even when answering an email.

That may sound strange, but it is an absolutely vital tactic when dealing with customers. It doesn’t matter if you’re having the worst day imaginable; when you hit send, the customer should believe you skipped your way to work humming the Sesame Street theme!

So how do you pull off this magical feat? Luckily, it’s fairly simple, even if you’re not in the best of moods. The customer can’t hear your voice, so inflection is taken out of the equation. All that’s left is the words you use and the punctuation you choose. Let’s take a look at a scenario handled both with that smile and without and break down the customer impact of each:

Horace Horason sends an email to the helpdesk saying the robotic possum he purchased leaked oil and ruined their couch. The agent answers with:  “Too bad about the couch. It’s never happened before. Are you sure you assembled the product correctly? Anyway, send the possum back if you want and I suppose we’ll repair it. Peace, love and chicken grease, CSR #1. ”

Understandably, the customer is going to be a little upset with this response. The agent did manage to get across that the company is (sort of) sorry they were inconvenienced and they can get their robot fixed, but not in exactly what you would call a nice manner. The representative even managed to insinuate the customer may have goofed up the assembly of the product, so the damage to the couch is now their fault

Imagine instead a response sent something more along these lines:

“I am so sorry, Horace! We take pride in our Robo-ssum 5000X line and are upset such an error could occur. We will immediately send paid shipping supplies to you so you can return Robo-ssum 5000X to us for repair. If you would be so kind, please call us at 1-800-555-5555 to discuss what to do about your couch. Again, we apologize and I hope we can remedy this ASAP. Thanks, CSR #2.”

In this response we have a customer service agent who IMMEDIATELY takes the blame away from the customer. The customer usually knows it wasn’t their fault, but oftentimes an improperly handled exchange can make them feel like it is. When one goes out of their way to acknowledge this, it quickly sets the customer’s mind at ease that things will be okay.

They then go on to describe the actions the company is taking to amend the problem: send out shipping supplies, and call us about the couch, presumably because they need higher-up approval to fix that particular problem. Then they say they’re sorry again for added measure.

Another big difference is the tone. CSR #1 doesn’t seem like they really want to be there, do they? It’s more casual, with lots of somber sentences that all end in periods and even includes some passive language like “I suppose.”

You can see in CSR #2’s email there is that “smile” mentioned before, even when faced with a big problem like an oil-leaking robotic possum. This response includes a few handy exclamation marks where appropriate. You don’t want to come off sounding like an excited teenager (“We are so sorry Horace!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”), but one or two in the email can really make those sentences stand out. In CSR #2’s case, it lends greater sincerity to the initial apology.

As for professional vs. personal tone, there’s a delicate balance to be struck. This balance often depends on the type of email you’re responding to. In this example, it’s an apology/let’s fix things email, so best to err on the side of professionalism. However, if the message is more along the lines of a question or even a compliment, then feel free to mix it up a little more.

Just remember:  no matter what kind of day it turns out to be, keep that smile in your (written) voice!

TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) – a popular provider of web-based customer support and help desk software solutions – has announced immediate availability of a year-end software release. It adds a broad assortment of technology and customer-centric functionality enhancements, among them:

• TeamSupport Mobile – with support for all the major platforms, TeamSupport’s new mobile interface enables clients to exceed customer expectations from the office or on-the-road.
• Ticket Deflection – this advanced technology gives TeamSupport the ability to automatically offer likely solutions to issues, increasing customer satisfaction while reducing the volume of inbound tickets.
• Ticket Automation – a very powerful new feature offering the ability to automate selected support ticket actions. TeamSupport users can establish detailed rules governing ticket response, escalation, transfer within the organization, and a wide range of other essential functions.
• Reminders – can automatically remind users to perform follow-up tasks associated either with a specific ticket or individual contact within TeamSupport.
• Customer Portal – TeamSupport’s user-facing portal has been completely redesigned with a more customer-centric interface to enhance the experience for both first time and frequent visitors.
• Facebook integration – TeamSupport is now accessible to more than 800 million users of the mega-social network. Companies with a Facebook presence can use this tool to integrate a TeamSupport tab within their pages.
• New 3rd Party Integrations – The list of TeamSupport partnerships continues to grow with the addition of CRM providers BatchBook and Zoho, as well as e-mail marketing provider MailChimp. Additional functionalities have also been added to the Salesforce.com interface.

“Feedback from ‘hands-on’ users is the key to TeamSupport’s dynamic and successful growth,” said company CEO Robert C. Johnson. “Our software developers are committed to providing our customers with practical, user-tested business-building solutions. We created TeamSupport to improve communication between manufacturers, their customers, and key client-facing teams within their organizations. Happy customers and better products mean more sales,” he concluded.

Used by customer support and corporate help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

In our last blog we took a look at some of the businesses that are ranked among the best in providing online customer support. We discussed what makes them stand out and how your business can benefit by emulating some of their practices.  We came across a similar post on Software Advice that we thought we would share. Their 2 part series lists ideas for obtaining customer service preparedness around the holidays in part one and assessing your help desk’s performance in part two.

While the posts are full of insightful ideas, we especially liked the comments regarding Internal collaboration:

Internal collaboration – You have spent the last nine months preparing for the holidays. You have anticipated everything and you know what steps to take to solve whatever problems may arise. Mitch Lieberman, VP of Marketing at Sword Ciboodle, calls this the coordination period. But during the holiday rush, it’s all about collaboration. “Collaboration is when something is outside what could or should have been easily coordinated,” says Lieberman. “Are you ready to collaborate on these emergency issues that you didn’t predict?” The holidays are a great time to monitor how your departments collaborate and problem solve during what is likely to be a stressful time.

Collaboration is one of the primary focus points of TeamSupport. Our customer support software was developed with the goal of bringing teams together. Departmental silos can handicap a customer service team. If every one is in the loop, customers included, we believe that serving the customer will be a much simpler and smoother process during the holidays and year round.