Better – and cheaper – customer support!
Original article date: April 1999
Technical support is becoming more of an issue these days. With computers, this is partly because the advent of Windows 95, etc, has made computers more complex behind the scenes – while apparently more accessible to total non-techies. This is pretty apparent when you look at the new crop of ‘free’ internet service providers that are coming into existence. The main service is free but any kind of support is on a one-pound-a-minute premium line, which accurately reflects what really makes up their costs. But technical support can be a problem whatever line of business you’re in, not just computers.
One problem with support lines is that they have to cater for a wide range of caller abilities. An ever-increasing percentage of calls might be solved with “are you sure it is turned on?” while 1 in 100 might genuinely need a complete expert to solve the problem. The two difficulties here are: not winding up the serious caller with trivial questions; and not boring the expert techie support staff by making them sit through hours of ‘have you turned it on’ all day.
What is needed, in my opinion, is a call filtering service. That is, a series of multichoice questions while you are held in a queue which get progressively more difficult until they figure out how much you know. Then you’d get a support person commensurate with your knowledge and experience.
Of course, this kind of thing would cost a lot of money to implement, and is beyond the reach of most companies.
Enter the web. Simply create a comprehensive troubleshooting flowchart, implement it as a series of linked pages, and make sure that only when they have gone through the whole thing (and answered no to “did that still not fix it?”) do they even get to see the tech support phone number. At least that way there is a fighting chance that they might find the answer unassisted and be happy to get such a quick response, and you might cut your support costs for your product.
But there is also technical sales support. Many products need a complex set of calculations as part of the specification process, and this is done one of three ways: by the customer longhand; using a disk or CD program given away; or with significant input from the technical sales rep.
I received some feedback from a reader which suggested that there are several companies out there that use underqualified sales reps (and reward them on commission) then leave the tech support guys to carry the can when the customer cannot cope. Once again, I strongly believe that good step-by-step aids to finding the correct answer could be implemented on the web and could save a lot of grief, while ensuring all customers have a consistent set of correct information whoever their local rep is.
Web based data is also incredibly fast to update. Every awkward question that had to be dealt with by tech support can then be added to the ‘Frequently asked questions’ section of the support page, so people would not have to keep answering it by phone in the future.
So why, you might ask, have some companies not got a web site at all? Well, many smaller companies seem to believe that the costs of setting up a www.ourcompany.co.uk site (rather than www.ourcompany56.freeserve.co.uk) are prohibitive. But here’s a sample of the sort of costs that it can be done for:
- 1st year setup, domain registration and rental: (UK pounds)135
- After that: (UK pounds)80 per year
- Good FTP software to upload pages to your website: (UK pounds)20
- Software to design your pages: nothing!
Then you can either pay someone for the page design or learn how to use the free software. In fact, you can generate basic pages for your customers (such as troubleshooting info) in something as simple as Word without any fancy pictures or the like. When someone is looking for a quick answer, they won’t need lots of pretty pictures. Yes, it can be time consuming. But compare that to tech support time! It really needn’t be prohibitive.
The bottom line really is knowing where to start. I am sure the reason we’re not seeing more companies doing this on the web is because there are many people who make money out of pretending this is all very difficult – and the companies who charge far more than the costs I mentioned above are keeping the existence of the low cost alternatives well under wraps.
April 1999