The Number One Goal for Most Support Departments: Decrease the Overhead for Customer/User Support.
Companies face a large overhead tied to the amount of agents needed to field inbound requests- whether it be by email, phone or chat. Depending on the medium the customer uses to interact with the agent, the cost to the company can increase or decrease. Example: a phone call will usually cost more than an email exchange because it is easier to multi-task with email and you can pull from scripted responses.
The first step companies take to decrease their overhead is to cut the number of support agents. This typically results in poor customer satisfaction because there rarely are enough agents left to handle the volume of tickets.
Before Cutting Agents, First Understand the Lifecycle of a Customer “Issue”
A better way to approach this is to understand the customer issue lifecycle:
Looking at the Customer Issue Lifecycle above, “Self-Troubleshoot” is the number one step any customer takes when they have a question. When self-troubleshooting doesn’t work they continue on through the cycle until eventually the company’s support team gets involved.
There are a variety of user stories for this kind of functionality. In short, it’s either user/group/role based permissioning or URL based variations on content. In some scenarios it requires creating a master documentation, or base docs, that all other derivative docs inherit. Here are a couple that come up pretty often. These are the most common user stories we hear and address (in no particular order):
Most well run companies steer by defining and tracking key performance indicators (KPI) that gauge success at a departmental and company level. You can always find examples of this in customer service teams. Ticket backlog, inbound tickets, length of calls and mean time to resolution are all useful gauges to track. However, how do you know your KPIs matter? Are you a slave to your gauges? Are you serving the machine or are you serving your customers?
