Using Today's Support Trends to Your Advantage

We all have a customer support horror story to tell. Who hasn’t clocked hours on the phone waiting to resolve a problem or had to repeat details over and over as an issue gets passed from agent to agent? We’ve all been there, and it can be downright exasperating. But there’s hope on the horizon.

Before we jump to the hopeful part, however, we need to take a good, hard look at the changing landscape of the world of support:

1. The technology we use is changing. We have universal connectivity. Technologies are increasingly complex, integrated and changing rapidly. We’re much more aware of our online behaviors and the information we share.
2. The people we support are changing.​There are more technology choices than ever before. ​Workers are more mobile and remote. ​And there is nearly unlimited data, almost all of which is searchable, usable and digestible for people to use in a variety of ways.
3. Customer expectations are changing. When it comes to support, we expect it to be available all the time and in the channel of our choice – email, phone, twitter, snapchat and so on.We expect products to be simple and seamless. ​

Without a doubt, these changes are increasing the demand on help desks. Fifty-five percent of organizations saw increased ticket volume in 2017 and unfortunately, budgets aren’t keeping pace.

So how can you use the trends affecting support teams to your advantage today? Think about optimizing processes and leveraging new more efficient technologies to help meet the new demands of customers.

From a process perspective, you can start by exploring new methods like Shift Left and Skill-Based Routing. A Shift Left approach pushes people to specific channels and teaches them to resolve issues on their own while Skill-Based Routing pairs a support request with the most suitable support agent, rather than simply assigning a request the next available person.

​For tech, self-service is all the rage and for good reason. Intelligent self-service applications like dynamic search bars and conversational chatbots enable users to successfully find the information they need without having to call into the support team – resolving customer issues quickly and keeping support agents free to focus on other tasks. Creating an exceptional self-service experience is all about ensuring it is simple and adaptive. For example, make your self-service applications available where your customers or employees already are – like Slack or Facebook. And ensure any AI component incorporates natural language processing to help users engage the way they would with a human support rep. If a user can’t find the answer via a self-service channel, ensure there is an easy and elegant way to reach a human agent and leverage technologies like remote support to help those agents identify the problem quickly and resolve it in minutes. ​

By ​taking advantage of trends and employing new processes and new technology, you’ll be on your way to faster support, faster resolution and happier end users. ​And in the end, you will be able to do much more with far less than you ever thought possible.

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