Getting Through the Financial Meltdown

With all of the media screaming "Gloom n Doom" 24/7 for the past week, it can make it difficult to get on with business. But you must.

My advice? Turn off the TV/radio/World Wide Web/Newsgroups or anything else spouting depressing financial news. And take care of business. Just keep slogging ("just keep swimming, just keep swimming....") and sooner or later we'll all come out the other end of this. We always do. It may not be the way you planned it, it may not turn out the way you wanted or dreamed, but these things are not forever (it just seems like it at the time).

Meanwhile....
Hold tight to your current customers.

Give the absolute best customer service you can muster.

Know that you will still find new customers.

This too shall pass. And we will probably go through it again in the future; we humans don't seem to learn from history very well. Just keep swimming.

CRM Buzz Interview with Hoyt Mann

I was honored with an interview by the Business Software Advisor regarding self service on the web and assisted knowledge base searching. The interview can be found here.

It is my opinion that the future of customer service and support lies in using multiple channels for customer service and yet give the customer as much assistance with their problem as possible. The assisted knowledge base search helps customers find the answers they need without sifting through a large number of articles. It guides them to pertinant articles within the knowledge base itself, in the FAQ, the forums, the notices, and other places using a single universal search and keywords garnered from the customer's issue. This negates frustrations the customer may have with attempting to use the knowledge base for help.

One of our other new features is subscription to forums so customers can keep up on topics they are interested in rather than visit the Self Service Center to determine if anything new has been posted that is relevant to them. It all comes down to creating a pleasant customer experience and being favored by their loyalty in return.

PHASEWARE, INC. RELEASES TRACKER and SELF SERVICE CENTER v. 3.1

McKinney, TX – PhaseWare Tracker and Self Service Center v. 3.1.0.0, the latest upgrade of the most comprehensive Customer Service and Support solution in the industry, is now available.

PhaseWare Tracker and Self Service Center 3.1 offers even more enterprise-level features made affordable for small to medium businesses.

For incident deflection, both the Self Service Center and Automated E-mail response now have the capability to offer suggested solutions related to a customer’s issue. Self Service Center uses the Assisted Knowledge Base Search: for each potential incident entered by a customer, the Self Service Center offers links to possible solutions prior to incident escalation. Successful solutions are tagged and the incident entry is not completed. For each incident submission initiated through e-mail the Event Engine feature automatically responds with potential solutions to the issue. Successful solutions are tagged and the incident is closed. Both features are optional.

Customers stay on top of the latest information of interest using the subscription option for the Self Service Center. Customers are notified via e-mail or RSS feed of new content in any of the Self Service Center applications related to their interests.

Increased operational efficiencies are realized with e-mail and incident journal enhancements, and new customer level file storage. Now e-mail and incident journals are drag and drop enabled for easy file attachment. E-mail recipient selection is quicker than before. Customer level records allow attachment of files and documents such as contracts, service agreements, and other customer specific documentation. These files are optionally available to the customer through the Self Service Center on a per-folder and file basis. Outside contacts can be authorized to attach documents as well.

There are many other productivity enhancements available with this update. To see more visit PhaseWare, Inc..

PhaseWare, Inc. is a North Texas-based customer support software provider offering solutions for a diverse group of clients world-wide. PhaseWare Tracker, Event Engine and Self Service Center solutions provide customer support process automation, tracking, escalation, and resolution of trouble tickets from origin to close, along with a wide variety of self service options.

PhaseWare, Inc. was founded by CEO Randall Nelson and Company President Hoyt Mann.

www.phaseware.com
1-866-616-6629

4 Ways to Add Strategic Value to Your Customer Service Desk

Smart companies have realized their customer support desks have strategic value. The Service Desk can:

1. Operate as a profit center rather than a cost center
   
2. Handle business growth without adding headcount.
   
3. Improve communication internally throughout the organization and externally to customers.
   
4. Leverage existing IT investments while implementing next generation technology.
   

How?

Since the service desk already has contact with the customer, there is the chance to up-sell or cross-sell.

Through automation and self service, more business can be handled by the same number of staff. Moreover, incidents can be tracked from end-to-end.

Through knowledge management, the same information is available to everyone from the service desk to the self service center. Everyone from customers to internal staff will receive the same answer to a particular question.

Existing IT solutions can be integrated with a next generation customer service solution that can scale with the company's growth.

5 Ways to Automate Customer Support Processes

"The service desk is the centerpiece of a successful IT Service Management operation."

So states ITIL - the IT Infrastructure Library. One of the marks of success is efficiently resolving problems. But when the number of problems becomes large enough, some processes are missed, leaving some customers thinking that the service desk isn't serving them very well at all. Tickets are not escalated properly. Resolutions are slow in coming. Calls are not closed in a timely manner. Incidents are poorly recorded and tracked.

Many of the processes that bog down when handled manually can be automated so the system takes care of the busy work, leaving agents to handle calls. Here are 5 ways automation can help your IT Management operation, or any other help desk operation, succeed.

1. Automatically escalate tickets to higher support levels along with an automatic notification of a new issue.

2. Automatically create tickets from e-mails rather than manually transferring information from the e-mail system to the incident management system.

3. Automatically update customers about their open issues. Always communicate in a timely manner with the customer, even if the news is not good or is only "still waiting".

4. Automatically receive alerts about increased activity. Promptly discover backed up phone queues, increased activity on the part of one customer, or if an SLA is about to be missed.

5. Automatically receive or send reports via e-mail on a predetermined basis.

Each of these steps is one (or more) fewer tasks for the agents to cope with. This leaves them to do the important work: helping customers.

To learn more about help desk automation, go to www.phaseware.com for information on the PhaseWare Event Engine, which works with Tracker to take customer service to a whole new level.

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Why I Would Call It Quits Too

DestinationCRM ran an interesting article entitled Calling It Quits about the tremendous increase in contact center agents leaving their positions or having high absenteeism rates. One of the ways given to combat this trend is to empower the agent to actually be able to answer the customer's question rather than simply put them on hold for someone else.

As it happens, I had to call my internet service provider today to report a service outage. The contact center agent I reached obviously had been given a script to follow for this scenario and she was going to follow it no matter what I had to say. She insisted on going through a lot of troubleshooting steps that I had already performed before calling her but she apparently didn't believe I was capable of doing it right. I repeatedly told her it was not an issue with my equipment and that everything was fine a short time before. But because there was no notice on her end about an outage, we were by golly going to troubleshoot my system. Sad to say, I got disgusted and hung up on her. A few minutes later I called back only to hear an automated message about a service outage in my area. Imagine that!

Was this contact center agent empowered? No. Putting a script into an agent's hand to deal with specific scenarios does not empower anyone to do good customer service. Good customer service would have meant listening to me instead of treating me like I was unintelligent. Good customer service would have meant doing a simple test to see if my modem could be pinged. Good customer service would have meant recognizing that I was becoming upset and abandoning the script in favor of a more helpful approach. This agent did none of those things and probably has never been trained how to be an independent thinker; instead she is required to follow a script no matter what.

I don't know how she felt about being hung up on or if she understood what had happened. But if I were her, I would be feeling frustrated at being tied to a single mode of operation without the training to deviate when it was warranted. I would probably become just another statistic in articles like the one above. I have no doubt she will be one soon.