The processes that you rely on to document and track customers' requests for support are so straightforward that it may be tempting to think of them as trivial. But when you consider these processes from a customer's perspective, it's clear how essential it is for your organization to reassure customers that it does all it can to assist them.
For years, a number of vendors have offered software that enables call centers and IT departments to track requests for support, respectively, from external customers and from internal colleagues. These days, the type of software that call centers use to view information about external customers is often available within customer relationship management (CRM) suites, although some customer support tools are still available standalone. For this reason, we will focus on software that fulfills broader functions beyond tracking requests for support in our coverage of CRM software in an upcoming article.
In this article, we provide an overview of trends in how support centers keep track of customers' requests for assistance. In another upcoming article, we will focus on knowledge management software, which enables call center agents, as well as customers, to locate information about the organizations the centers represent.
Trends in Support
How are customer support teams adapting the ways they assign and track requests for assistance from external customers?
Some developers, such as BMC Software, offer answers that reflect a focus on internal support. As Scott Sloan, a senior manager with BMC Software, observes, "the customer support center can be involved in helping understanding and driving resolution of problems, but the IT operations team is responsible for ensuring quality service."From his point of view, the aims of customer support tools are "to help IT operations find problems earlier, fix problems faster and, ultimately, prevent problems from occurring."
Many of the capabilities that Sloan says IT departments seek with regard to the software they rely on to assist internal colleagues are similar to the capabilities you seek from software that your team uses to support external customers. For example, like your counterparts within your IT department, your team needs to be aware of the priority of and timeframe for fulfilling a given customer's request. Members of your team also need to know about the tasks a request entails, the sequence in which they have to perform these tasks and the respective timeframes for completing each of these tasks.
This is why the concept of a service level agreement (SLA) becomes crucial. For one thing, the process of escalating support requests is largely dependent upon whether or not your team addresses them within the SLA's timeframes. An escalation is sometimes unavoidable if a customer's request for help requires a higher degree of knowledge than the support reps are able to provide. When we refer to higher levels of escalation in support, we often mean that we are directing customers to individuals with expertise in specific products, and not an escalated request from an agent to a supervisor. The higher the level of escalation, the greater the likelihood that the individual the customer reaches is part of another department, such as engineering, who may work closely with, but operates outside of, the immediate purview of your customer support team.
In theory, a support center's SLAs ought to reflect customers' priorities for resolving their requests. But the reality is that support centers, like other customer care teams, have to recognize which customers, and which circumstances, require more attention than others. Customer support teams balance how much time they have, and how much time they need, to fulfill a request for support in the context of that request's SLA.
That's why, says Dan Derin, president of U.S. operations with Genticity, a key attribute of customer support software is "the ability to set and monitor SLAs right down to the type of transaction tracked." The practice of establishing an SLA is not confined to the practice of technical support. Citing the example of an SLA for an airline contact center, Derin points out that "a call about lost baggage may require an eight-hour response, while a call about a lost pet may require a two-hour response, with appropriate escalations for each."
The process of documenting and tracking a support request dovetails with routing. That's why some vendors, such as FrontRange Solutions, offer multimedia routing systems alongside their software for tracking support requests.
Jason Holmberg, service desk senior product manager with FrontRange Solutions, finds that customer support teams "are looking for the same capabilities that their skills-based routing telephony systems provide" in their customer support tools.
Elisabeth Granozio, product manager with Numara Software, concurs.
"Many customer support centers are facing an increasing number of customers relying on various support avenues," she says. "Customers are moving away from calling on the telephone and want the same level of customer service, if not better, when using the Web, email or chat."
To achieve the kind of load balancing that routing systems strive for when they direct calls to agents, Holmberg says that "FrontRange is currently working on the ability to distribute assignments based on workload to help ensure that tasks are designated evenly throughout a team" that supports customers.
Besides offering software to track customers' support requests, Genticity and Numara Software also provide modules you can use to create and maintain knowledge bases.
Genticity's Derin presents a rationale for doing so. "We are seeing continued drive for first-call resolution," he says. "The complexity of content and changing nature of content is driving our customers and prospects to look at integrating their knowledge base with the customer support or product tracking systems to improve the ability of agents to solve the issue themselves on the first call."
In addition, a growing number of customer support software vendors integrate speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) systems with their tools for tracking support requests. Genticity is among these vendors, and Derin says that the company plans to introduce this type of integration by fall 2007.
Ryan Terrell, a vice president with GWI Software, highlights globalization as another significant influence on how companies support their customers. "If there is one trend I have noticed, it's that big companies are reorganizing their many independent, regional service centers to a central, collaborative model," he says. "In a global economy, where companies are acquiring and merging at such a rapid pace, you need a customer manageable tool that allows you to reorganize at a moment's notice. The most knowledgeable service reps for a product may be in Ontario today, but due to an acquisition or reorganization, they may be in Bangalore tomorrow."
Just as globalization enables organizations to overcome limitations of distance and geography, advances in the practice of customer support enable organizations to maintain a holistic view of service, rather than emphasizing one set of customers at the expense of another.
"There are two schools of thought: one is [to] go with the customers who have the most potential in the future and concentrate on them; the second is to provide an equal amount of support no matter who the customer is," says Maria Miller, director of marketing with TechExcel. "Changes in technology have allowed these organizations to create a seamless environment for both sets of customers." Miller specifically refers to software, such as tools from TechExcel, that can allow organizations to learn to improve their products and prevent recurrences of issues they uncover as they respond to customers' support requests.
Indeed, a key premise of knowledge management is enabling companies to discover best practices that customers share when they support one another. It is this customer-driven approach that we will highlight as we continue our discussion of customer support in our upcoming coverage of knowledge management software.
Customer Support Software Resources
Here's how to contact the companies mentioned in this article that offer customer support software.
BMC Software
FrontRange Solutions
Genticity
GWI Software
Numara Software
TechExcel
