Getting more from your support tickets – are you tuned in to what they’re really telling you?
Customer Service Experience 4 Comments
Customer Support
Ask James Watson, Director of Customer Relations for Webs.com about support tickets and he’ll tell you they’re the absolute best form of two-way communication between you and your customers.
Webs.com is a social publishing platform and is one of the top 80 most trafficked sites on the Web today. His nine-member support team gets on average 13,000 service requests a month.
James and his team went about changing their customer support mindset from a “numbers” game focused solely on deflecting inquiries to reduce costs … to using the tickets to really listen to users. So rather than judging success just on how many tickets were resolved and how fast, James challenges his team to do more than simply resolve the issue and move on to the next ticket.
Here’s a little insight into his approach.
First, James asks each CSR to think fundamentally differently about customer support and stay focused on the importance of each and every communication with customers. Take a broad view of the customer’s underlying problems that go beyond the product and the one ticket.
Second, act differently. From the ticket content, are there gaps in the knowledgebase that could and should be filled? The information gained through tickets is a perfect way to build the knowledgebase properly. And when it comes to an effective knowledgebase, it’s all about quality, not quantity. Ask your CSRs to keep an eye on the knowledgebase ratings. And be sure the folks who interact with customers the most are involved in building the knowledgebase, not just the product team.
Finally, ask your specialists to question that status quo, says James. Encouraging out-of-the-box thinking mixed with pragmatic business judgement can enhance both the organization and the user experience.
What do you think? Does the “hidden information” in your support tickets make its way to creating a better knowledgebase? Are you getting the most out of your support tickets?
I would like to speak with a sales rep and get updated product and pricing information. We are now budgeting for an enhanced customer support platform and the timing is good.
Contact via email, I will schedule a time for a phone conversation then.
This is all too true. I’ve returned to the Helpdesk space after several years in Strategic Project Management. I have actively been trying to influence a paradigm shift in our organization to support these principles.
To reiterate what Mr. Watson already stated so succinctly and provide some real-world usage:
1.) Every helpdesk ticket is an opportunity. You have the opportunity to find out the issues that pain your users the most. You also have the opportunity to influence how they feel about your product/service/organization. A bad service experience can have a negative impact on even the best applications and a superior customer service experience can make up for gaps in your product/service until you have the opportunity to address them. In my support organization, we leverage trending data from the Helpdesk tickets to identify the largest opportunities and then prioritize our defect reduction and enhancement efforts to focus on the 20% of our issues that generate 80% of our Helpdesk volume. We also survey 10% of our 500 weekly Helpdesk tickets. Every complaint is investigated and feedback incorporated into how we do our work to improve the caller experience. Our resolution times have improved 75%, first call closure rate doubled and customer satisfaction improved 15% as a result.
2.) It’s always about quality over quantity. 1000’s of knowledge articles or self help references are useless if they are difficult to find or out-dated. A smaller, yet accurate knowledge base that touches 80% of the issues is much more likely to have a lasting impression and leave your users with reason to go back for more. We had a knowledge base with literally 1000’s of articles but found that users (and even internal staff) rarely referenced it. We’ve started streamlining the content, removing stale material, updating it on a monthly basis and now internal staff are using it and even touting it’s benefits to others. It is contagious.
With regards to questioning the status quo, my team uses a Lean and supports it with Six Sigma to help focus our efforts. Management needs to support them whenever they ask “why” in interacting with other teams supporting our operation. We’ve gotten to the point where anyone on the team readily challenges the most detrimental phrase to process improvement, “we’ve always done it that way”.
We have support tickets as part of our contact management strategy but it’s horribly under utilised, only 3% of our monthly contacts use the ticketing functionality. The knowledge base is maintained but the process seems “clunky” compared to picking up the phone or sending us an email. Any advice gratefully received !!!
It’s great point. In our organization, we have home grown ticketing system to support customers. The support staffs are educated to think out of the box and ask open ended questions to uncover business problem and potential oppertunities. But in reality, it’s kind of tough as they are heads down to solve the ticket. So they either forget to ask specific questions or don’t have skill to ask right question.
It would be nice to see a tool that can analyze tickets and provide valuable insight that can be helpful for upper management. I beleive every ticket can be an oppertunity for future sales, process improvement and building knowledge base.