CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Educational Article

THE 10 WORST PRACTICES FOR TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM

In today's challenging economic climate, providing superior service and support is more important than ever as companies strive to differentiate themselves from the competition and struggle to survive. Compounding the difficult business climate is the underlying pressure to improve customer service and reduce support costs with fewer resources and lower budgets. It is in this environment that many support professionals seek to implement best practices for technical support. However, in many organizations, service quality, productivity, and financial performance are often governed by worst practices: self-inflicted wounds caused by short-term thinking. This white paper will explore 10 of the "worst practices" that are common to customer support operations. Each will feature a section discussing how these worst practices can creep into your contact center and new ways to deal with them. We will touch on how to eliminate well-intentioned management blunders that can hurt your performance from within, together with good and bad uses of support technology. Taken together, the guidelines in this report represent a summary of a new kind of best practices for support. We will also mention the latest innovations in remote technical support tools that can be utilized to increase the productivity of your support teams and boost the overall customer satisfaction levels of your customers.

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The 10 Worst Technical Support Practices

1. Use Your Performance Metrics as a Blunt Instrument
Good metrics are one of the best things that has ever happened to support centers. When used properly, they allow you to analyze trends, find gaps in operations and quality, and maintain service standards. The problem with metrics comes in when they start becoming swords instead of plowshares. Whether it is disengaged agents trying to reduce their average handle time by pushing customers off the phone, the frustrations of good employees trying to reach a bar that has been raised too high, or the shallowness of inappropriate forced upselling, your rules often have unintended consequences for both your agents and your enterprise. Here are some additional ways to know when your metrics aren't serving you well: When they favor process over outcomes. Want to guarantee robotic, disengaged support calls? Overemphasize script adherence. Want to lower your customer satisfaction ratings? Push everyone on average handle time. And time-in-seat can all too easily become the magic ingredient that turns a motivated workforce into caged chickens who time their bathroom breaks with a stopwatch. Now, bear in mind that all of these so-called process metrics are actually quite important. But when you manage too heavily against them, instead of using them for their proper purpose (namely, by observing and coaching people who deviate too far from group norms), you will generally lower the outcome metrics you should be managing against, such as productivity, turnover, revenue and customer satisfaction levels. When you measure too many things. Think about the last time you played a video game that was a little too challenging and you could never get to the next level. Did you ever play it again? The same psychology is at work in your support team. People are motivated by success, not failure. Most people start life in your support center wanting to do a good job and if possible to excel. So when you measure 14 different things, suddenly everyone fails at something. And worse, when you punish people for missing any of these 14 standards, that 100% turnover rate you and your management team complain about starts to make logical sense. When metrics make you think in absolutes. You want everyone to hit your objectives every time. So you set what you think is a reasonable goal for limiting escalations, or case logging, or selling add-on products, and promulgate it throughout your team. Guess what? You've just killed the motivation of the rep with great people skills who isn't as fast or as "technical" as the rest of the team, or the agent whose heroics regularly save important accounts, but who doesn't always "dot the i's and cross the t's" of her case notes, or the experienced employee who doesn't quite meet your average handle time standards, but is a great path of escalation for others. To make performance metrics work best for you, look critically at which ones are important ticket-ofentry competencies, and which ones better serve you as soft rather than hard guidelines, then use them as a strategic tool for coaching and performance improvement, rather than as rigid rules that de-motivate and weed out good people.

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Measuring Support the Right Way

Here are some ways to use remote support automation tools to help you measure the right things: 1. Are you using pre- and post-session surveys as you deliver technical support? Whether providing internal or external support, adding a pre-session survey allows you to discover what the issue is and get that person to the best rep to resolve the issue. You dont want to send someone with a Mac issue to someone who knows only Windows. This improves first call resolution and builds upon the skill sets and experience levels of your support team. Using a post-session survey can then give you metrics on how you are doing in resolving these issues. 2. Do you integrate metrics with transaction records? Having a session record provides management with great visibility for seeing how people are working together to solve customer problems. For example, a support rep who brings in a subject matter expert will not be penalized by handing the customer off. 3. Why wait until after the fact to react to performance metrics? With robust support platforms, supervisors can be bridged into a support session to observe the actions of agents during a remote support session and provide escalation and collaboration services in real-time as needed. This allows a supervisor to model correct support procedures within a live customer transaction, educate agents as they observe an issue being escalated, and even pull together a group of senior agents working collectively on a problem within the same remote support session.

2. Reward Secondary Goals Instead of Primary Goals

The flipside of using metrics to push people is that your reward structure can also be a minefield. Author Michael LeBoeuf once described "the greatest management principle in the world" as being that people will do what they are rewarded for, and these rewards can work for or against you. For instance, industry analysts describe the concept of "Total Contact Ownership," where a service desk takes responsibility for the life cycle of a transaction. The best way to sabotage this is to preach customer satisfaction twice a year and productivity twice a day. When agents are judged on individual performance, but your economic success depends on team outcomes, guess what wins? No matter what you say publicly, few agents will collaborate with others if it "costs" them at evaluation time. Any single reward measure can be a potential problem if it isn't managed carefully. For example, suppose that everyone is rewarded according to their productivity. Good luck motivating people to see lengthy problems through to the customer's satisfaction. How about problem-resolution rates? Look for a lot of issues to be prematurely "closed," resulting in repeat calls and lower customer satisfaction levels. And what about upselling revenue? Beware of people annoying the many to sell to the few. Even the seemingly safe area of customer satisfaction can be a point of contention within a support team. Customers tend to be more satisfied with quick, complete answers and less satisfied when there are complex problems with no easy solutions, so rewarding people for customer satisfaction alone can lead people to jettison tough cases and turn your path of escalation into a game of "hot potato." Does this mean that you are forever doomed to some loosey-goosey world where people dont have to worry about their performance, like a university without grades? Not at all. But what it does mean is that when you reward people, you need to look at balanced objectives. Create a matrix of competencies that combines performance, revenue, customer and team goals. Use tools like customer satisfaction surveys and 360-degree performance reviews to assess real outcomes. And above all, keep tracking these outcomes to make sure your rewards are congruent with your mission.

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Do you use methods to formally determine customer satisfaction related to support performance?

Answer
Yes No No Response

0%

100%

Number of Responses
77 13 12

Response Ratio
75.4 % 12.7 % 11.7 %

Total

102

100%

Source: SupportIndustry.com, 2010.

3. Use "Smile Training" Instead of Skills Training

An important customer is demanding a refund for her $30,000 software installation. Will the things you learned from that last motivational speaker on "creating magical moments" help you resolve this situation? Probably not. But teaching people the mechanics of how to resolve and defuse critical situations (which are all procedural, trainable skills) has a direct and measurable impact on morale, turnover, performance and the bottom line. Here is one quick example: listen to how your agents paraphrase or acknowledge what a customer is saying. These are totally mechanical skills, but they can make an enormous impact on how customers feel, particularly when they are not happy, and, in turn, how productively they work with your agents. But more often than not, they will not know how to acknowledge a customer, unless you teach them how to use one of three basic approaches: Observe: Reflect what a customer has expressed or is feeling. For example, "I can tell by your tone of voice that you are frustrated about this situation." Validate: Let customers know their feelings are valid, by comparing them with other people. For example, "No one likes to have to wait for a technician to come on site." Identify: Put things in terms of your own experience. For example, "I wouldn't like it if that had happened to me either." Everything else that happens between you and a customer, from how to make people feel really good in the opening seconds of a call to how to respond to an angry person or an unreasonable request, involve specific, procedural skills like these. They have more in common with fields like hostage negotiation or psychotherapy than they do with how to smile. And these skills should be taught to everyone in your contact center. The single biggest reason why agents bolt support jobs is the discomfort of feeling like deer frozen in the headlights during difficult support calls. But the sad fact is that most customer service training courses are based around courtesy and attitude, not high-impact communications techniques. Think of your contact center as a magnifying glass, where the kinds of human situations that most workplaces handle once in a while happen daily or weekly. You need weapons-grade communication skills that can be trained and more importantly, coached for everyone on your team. If you search "customer service training" on the Internet, you will find nearly a million hits. Don't just look for what comes up on page one of Google: find training programs that specialize in the needs of high-volume contact centers and ask for recommendations from your peers. Look for trainers who customize their offerings around your specific needs and who use extensive role-playing and coaching instead of just lectures. And above all, look at this kind of training as part of an integrated coaching and skills-development plan for each of your agents.

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A Closer Look at Remote Connectivity Solutions

A 2010 SupportIndustry.com survey found that as workforces globalize and telework becomes the norm, remote connectivity support tools are seeing strong uptake. With these tools which technicians can use to help end users anywhere, quickly diagnose problems and enact fixes support departments see both customer satisfaction and bottom-line improvements. Thirty-two percent of respondents say that they are able to fix 75% to 100% of their end-user issues with these tools. If you use remote diagnostics/remote control, how often are you able to successfully resolve a problem and avoid an onsite/deskside visit? Answer
Less than 10% 10% - 25% 25% - 50% 50% - 70% 75% - 100% No Response

0%

100%

Number of Responses
11 8 6 19 33 25

Response Ratio
10.7 % 7.8 % 5.8 % 18.6 % 32.3 % 24.5 %

Total

102

100%

Source: SupportIndustry.com, 2010.

4. Equate "Coaching" with "Criticism"

There is no such thing as constructive criticism in a support center. Unless your employees are starting shouting matches or stealing toilet paper, a positive strength-based coaching approach based on skills development is critical (no pun intended) to creating buy-in and long-term performance change. As managers, we tend to be very good at noticing flaws and taking corrective action. But as people, each and every one of us is exquisitely sensitive to criticism, no matter how politely it is delivered. So how do you do the kind of positive, strength-based coaching that actually motivates people to buy in and change their performance? By taking a page from recent trends in communication psychology and learning how to engage your team: Start in a safe place. Compare these two statements: "You were a little short with that customer." versus "I can tell this customer was bothering you. Tell me about it." Learning to make neutral observations or having people tell you how they normally handle a situation are usually much better places to start than fault-finding. Take a learning posture. Good questions like, "What frustrates you about situations like these?" or "Tell me what happens with these kinds of customers" perform two important functions: they help you gather data to coach people effectively and they show a genuine interest in the agent's experiences. Validate the other person. When you make it clear you understand what your agents say and do, you open the door to productive dialogue. Use phrases like, "I can see why you handled things that way. Now I'd like to show you what the best agents do in situations like these," to help clarify that you see the way your agents look at the world.

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 Keep it factual and not emotional. What is the problem with statements like "You messed up" or "You didn't handle that well" or "You seem to be just going through the motions"? Not only do they sound threatening, but they are useless in coaching. There is no such thing as an anti-mess-up drill or a procedure for not going through the motions. Instead, emulate good sports coaches and break things down into the mechanics: teach people how to do skills like the ones we mentioned above, such as acknowledging, paraphrasing and positively taking control of the conversation. Good communication, problem-solving and technical skills are what will lead to the success of your agents - and your own coaching skills will drive your success or failure in developing these skills. Learn to be more of a coach and less of a critic to get yourself and your team where you want to go.

Using Technology to Reduce Agent Frustration

Having the right tools can often be an important factor in your agents job satisfaction. The new breed of remote technical support tools can boost your support metrics, as well as the morale of your team. Here are some ways these tools can help: 1. See the whole problem With remote support, your agents can see an issue instead of having a customer get frustrated trying to describe the issue over the phone, particularly for issues foreign to customers such as configurations, incompatible versions and service packs. Once an issue is identified, agents can push instructions to customers via the chat feature to send them a detailed diagram or instructions. They can take remote control of a customers machine and conduct a quick training session that will not only resolve the issue the first time, but go a long way toward preventing repeat calls. And by logging these issues into your system, you can identify areas that may need to be addressed from a knowledge-based or web-based self-service to deflect more routine calls. 2. Turn escalation into collaboration Agents with the most experience or who have a second and third tier of support can all work together to address issues, while being able to bring additional reps into a support session. This allows first-tier or new agents to address issues by chatting internally with a subject matter expert and possibly resolving the issue without escalation while building up their own knowledge and skills, and, if necessary, seamlessly transferring a customer to the next level. 3. Use chat as a first point of contact This allows agents to respond to simple and easy situations quickly. Integrate your remote support solution to your PBX and ACD to have chat mirror the way you handle calls and prevent agents from being bombarded with multiple calls at once. Moreover, you can allow them to handle multiple chats, but drop out of the queue in a remote support session. Tools like these give your agents more support options and, ultimately, more control over their workflow.

5. Ignore Your Turnover

Support is a stressful, entry-level job where turnover should be expected, right? Not so fast. If you don't analyze your turnover and, more importantly, learn from its root causes, you risk having your chances for long-term success corrode from within. Above all, do not buy into the myth that turnover is inherent to support: the author once managed a 25-agent 24x7 call center that had no turnover in an entire year, and celebrated a "turnover party" with ice cream and (of course) apple turnovers! One of the insidious things about turnover is that it tends to happen at the worst possible times, when workloads and stress levels are high. Even if the published costs of turnover seem a little intangible to you, you know that the human cost of constantly retraining people and bringing them up to speed represents an emotional and performance drain on your group.

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Moreover, continued high turnover often represents a sign that something needs to be addressed, whether it is shift schedules that interfere with people's lives or a toxic management culture that sucks the joy and motivation out of its employees. One of the obvious ways to explore the roots of turnover is to leverage exit interviews with agents who are leaving, but surprisingly this may not always be the best way. People who are leaving know that you represent a reference for their next job and may fear retaliation if they are totally honest, or they may not want to invest the energy in helping you improve, given that they are leaving. Perhaps your most important feedback on turnover may come from the agents who remain, since they (a) probably have heard the honest comments of those who are leaving and (b) have a stake in the quality of the workplace moving forward. Consider using a third-party service to anonymously interview or survey the opinions of both current and former employees, and encourage people to use their observations to help you reduce turnover. Above all, listen to what the data is telling you, and use it to make positive long-term changes that help make you an employer of choice.

Using Support Tools to Increase Job Satisfaction

You can also use web-based customer support to help expand your agents roles from simply solving problems to becoming customer advocates, while salvaging more online opportunities. For example, if customers become stuck when making an online purchase or filling out a registration form, a customer support rep can initiate a proactive chat and help them complete the transaction. This approach reduces the purchase abandonment rate and also increases company revenue. Managers can then identify the reps who are making a noticeable difference to customer service and satisfaction, and who also have a direct effect on bottom line revenue.

6. Make Everyone the Same

Look out over all of those cubicles. Do they all have the same job? The same title? Then you are missing an important opportunity to help everyone feel important when they walk in the door every morning. You might think that what makes people happy is the amount of their paycheck. And you would be only partially right. Particularly when you have talented people who want to learn, grow and progress in their career, the traditional model of having lots of front-line agents backed up by a handful of tier-II experts has some built-in constraints to career satisfaction, especially for the vast unwashed masses. If a high percentage of your employees have the same entry-level job description, you may be unknowingly institutionalizing low morale, burnout and high turnover. A good support center needs training coordinators, team leaders, subject matter experts, development liaisons and many other roles that can ride on top of everyone's time on the phones or on line. These roles do not necessarily have to be occupied by senior people. Nor do they imply that you have to suddenly promote everyone. But mixed in with support center work, they add a boost of personal skills and career development that will ultimately benefit both you and them. Another subtle but important point is that many of the most important daily roles in your team, such as training, coaching and interaction with the rest of the company, are often best performed by peers, not "bosses" or senior people. Agents often prefer to be coached by talented peers instead of having a manager looking over their shoulder. New employees like being trained by someone who has been where they are going. And communication and collaboration often takes place best between people who have lunch together, instead of some fearsome figure in a corner office.

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With the right oversight, peer responsibilities can often be the magic ingredient that supercharges your performance and professionalism.

7. Manage From Above

The most important tool in managing your support team is your support team. Whether it is making front-line agents part of the planning and decision-making process, or leveraging the skills of talented peers within a team, no manager is an island. Unfortunately, many managers feel that leadership in a support center can only come from the corner office. To the uninitiated, involving your agents in policy and operational decisions may seem a bit like letting the inmates run the asylum. In reality, there are important benefits on both sides for involving your team. As a manager, you get to "test fly" your ideas using the knowledge of your people. You learn about potential roadblocks ahead of time and, above all, you help get people to buy in to change by making them part of the dialogue. Meanwhile, team members become heard and feel like stakeholders rather than victims of your organization's decision-making process. Below are some areas where team input can be particularly valuable: Hiring. When people have a say in who should join "the club," and particularly when they take an active part in the interview process, it increases morale and builds a strong culture. Metrics. No one knows more about what reasonable standards are than the people on your front lines and, more importantly, what the unintended consequences of new standards might be. Training. Team members know what did and did not work for them when they learned the ropes, and you can leverage their knowledge (and perhaps their training abilities) for future new hires. Product and service quality. Your support team deals with your products, services and customers every day. Their experience represents valuable feedback for your product development, operations and marketing teams. Management theorists have often gone back and forth about the benefits of top-down versus participatory management styles and will probably continue to do so for decades to come. There are valid questions to be answered about how much input leaders need to make the really tough and sometimes unpopular decisions that have to be made in any business. But, in the meantime, ask yourself whether you want everyone on your team to think like an owner or a disengaged combatant, and use your answer to guide you to new ways to involve and engage your team.

8. Treat Support as an Island

Customer support operations have evolved from being "the complaint department" to become a strategic information center and a goldmine of information about your customers. Unfortunately, many firms never let this information escape the customer contact center. The best organizations leverage their support automation tools to integrate their support operation into the overall workflow of their business. For example: Giving senior management and other teams a view of the ticketing system or their CRM environment. Having a way for their product development teams to get information on the types of issues being raised by customers. Letting marketing see how the website works or is not working, and how online impressions may affect brand perception. Helping operations see how their policies impact the overall customer experience.

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In addition, support data can tell you a lot about your customers: their preferences, likes, dislikes and stuck points. In particular, they can help you learn what kind of brand impression they have of your products and services, once they get past the point of purchase: are you creating "raving fans" or selling lots of people something once or twice? Particularly when you move from a simple "break/ fix" model of support to creating interactive, online user communities, you can create a valuable ongoing "temperature check" of what your most active purchasers are thinking and feeling. These in turn become valuable steps toward moving your entire organization in the direction of engaging its customers as stakeholders in a profitable, long-term relationship.

Best Practice: Using Remote Support to Improve Service Productivity

Remote desktop tools allow support technicians to quickly resolve customer issues by sharing control of their computing environment. Sessions can be started through chat and voice calls, by e-mail or via a website, and can employ any of five modes for sharing or controlling a customers computer. Tools like the ones listed below increase customer satisfaction, problem resolution and, above all, productivity. Total Control: The support technician controls the customers computer. Observer: The support technician views the customers desktop as the customer uses it. Administrator: The support technician has service level control, including the power to reboot, reconnect and maintain the session. Desktop Share: Shared control of the customers computer. Demonstration: Online presentations, demonstrations or training for up to five people conducted from the agents desktop.

9. Those Who Forget the Past Are Doomed to Repeat It

Quick, what are the top five things that have changed for you, and your customers, in the past year because the lessons you learned from your support system, your customer surveys and your employee feedback? More of us are capturing more information from our transaction streams than ever, but even well into the 21st century too many of us still lack a system for turning it into actionable intelligence. The data from your support operation holds the seeds to your own performance improvement and efficiency. For example, seeing that many people contact you about software installation problems can help you improve your customers' out-of-box experience and reduce needless support. But you can only reap benefits like these when you step away from the fire hose of daily operations and make the time to perform good analytics on your support data. Finally, good ideas are a little like fertilizer: they work best when spread around. The author used to host an annual "best practices workshop" for his own support team, where he would engage in such activities as sharing the biggest trends from both the industry and his company's own customer data with everyone on the team. By exposing everyone to the trends of your operation, you keep its goals top of mind for your own support operation and engage them as part of your organization's own leadership. For instance, advances in the types of machines and applications in the marketplace are not always matched by support centers today. Is your product available on Linux or a mobile device? If so, can you provide remote support for those types of machines? Are you still handling all your support calls over the phone or via email? Todays consumers, especially younger consumers, have real-time expectations of all of their interactions, not only with each other, but also with the companies they make purchases from.

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10. Stand Still

Technical support is not a process that must be continually improved. It is a paradigm that must continually change. Someday people will laugh at support models that involve break/fix thinking, heavy human intervention and customers pushing information at us one word at a time over the telephone. One of the most exciting hotbeds of technology nowadays is the point where computing, the Internet and customers intersect. Instead of blindly leading customers through phone and chat sessions, we can now interact remotely with their own computing desktops. Instead of just waiting for problems to happen, we can educate them en masse via webconferencing. Rather than just measuring our performance, we can keep our finger on the pulse of it through real-time statistics. And, best of all, with the growth of software-as-a-service (SaaS) models, the costs and overhead of implementation are lower than ever. All of this means that perhaps the most dangerous "worst practice" of customer support is to simply keep doing what you are doing today. Someday we will live in a world of greater customer interactivity than ever, where today's support technology will seem as quaint as an 8-track tape cartridge. So what are you doing to help your organization get there?

About the Author

Rich Gallagher is a nationally known author and former customer support executive who heads the Point of Contact Group (www.pointofcontactgroup.com), a training and development firm that helps organizations learn how to communicate in their most difficult customer and workplace situations. Rich has a track record of dramatically turning around the performance and morale of customer support operations by changing their communication and coaching skills. His eight books include What to Say to a Porcupine (Amacom, 2008), a national #1 customer service bestseller and finalist for 800-CEO-READs 2008 Business Book of the Year, as well as How to Tell Anyone Anything (Amacom, 2009), a fresh approach for making difficult workplace conversations painless.

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