How do you deliver world-class service when your support traffic doubles but your staffing doesn’t?
Customer Service Experience 1 Comment
Heavy support traffic
Support traffic can spike for any number of reasons: a less-than-perfect launch or an unexpected bug in a product is discovered, a new ad campaign takes off, or maybe a hot new product is released.
That’s what Chris Henderson, Senior Manager – Customer Service for IGN Network faced. IGN is an online entertainment community of Web sites all centered around the busy world of video games. And in Chris’ case, last September three of IGN’s most popular games all went live in the same month. Her challenge — how to help all these customers at once, without driving up wait times.
Here are some tips from Chris on how to approach it.
- With bigger than average support traffic, reduction of redundancy is critical. Start with making smart use of your support front page. Chris urges customer support managers not to shy away from calling attention to what the majority of your customers want. Make your hottest topics stand out. Use graphics. Her point: you run ads for sales, run ads for support topics when you need to. Customers get the answers they need faster, and that’s what it’s all about. Also, change the front page often to keep it as current as possible. Make it a working “go-to” spot for customers. Minimizing redundant inquiries/tickets that don’t require a human is one of the best ways to ensure your customer support reps can deliver really great, quality support.
- Know the psychological model of your customers. Common sense, but knowing who your customers are is key to knowing the best ways to support them. In IGN’s case, with a video gaming community, they knew that their customers strongly preferred anonymity and weren’t necessarily comfortable with in-person interactions. IGN customers are particular savvy about online service. Use auto response, but don’t try and “fool” your customers. Tell your customers it’s an auto response and give them links to articles pertaining to their question. For example, “This is an automated response based on the ticket fields you chose when submitting your request.” Or, “Based on the subject of your request, we’d like to suggest the following.” Automating your response can ensure your customers are served without using staff time to answer redundant issues.
- To be most effective, use your knowledgebase creatively. In IGN’s case, their customers want graphics buttons (oversized, with minimal words) and movies. According to Chris, videos rule. She uses a lot of videos that are pausable, and walk customers through everything. They’re more likely to click on an email with a link to a video than to read an FAQ.
Finally, especially during high support traffic times, give your customer support reps time to give great quality support.
How has your organization successfully or unsuccessfully handled service & support traffic spikes? How will you handle high traffic in the future?
Having Parature has helped with support traffic spikes immensely. When there is an issue affecting multiple customers, we are quickly able to update our support portal, mass email our customers, and mass action any support tickets for the issue. Previously, we would have to wait for the tickets to start rolling in, and handle each one individually- you can imagine the amount of time wasted there and the aggravation our customers faced when not being notified promptly.