What makes a customer support center different from a call center?
Until customer support emerged as a discipline in its own right during the last decade, you barely had to think before responding. Support was much like any other departmental operation. Businesses maintained help desks for employees who encountered problems related to their computers. Companies that sold high-tech products or services staffed their call centers with small percentages of support reps whose main jobs were to fix problems over the phone.
The economic boom of the mid- and late 1990s, fueled by a surge in demand for technology and Internet services, also created unprecedented demand for support among consumers. But unlike the boom that ushered in the PC age of the 1980s, which introduced new kinds of products for which support was necessary, the dawn of the Internet era prompted a radical shift in how consumers receive support.
Suddenly, tools for documenting support requests and viewing knowledge bases became available not only to support reps but also to practically any consumer with a computer and an Internet connection.
As a result, the needs of organizations that support external end-users started to diverge from the needs of help desks that provide technical assistance to internal colleagues or IT departments.
Much of internal support has to do with administering a corporate network to deploy software, gain remote access to employees' computers and collaborate with IT staffers to resolve technical issues affecting an entire company. Internal support also involves maintaining an inventory of, and gathering diagnostic information about, corporate assets like computers, software and other items that employees use.
How is customer support different? Since the 1990s, customer support has broadened its purview beyond technology, and now refers to any ongoing assistance a company provides to customers concerning its products or services. If a call from a customer isn't a purchase order, a billing inquiry or a complaint about service, chances are the caller is asking for support.
As we noted in our customer support case studies last month, effective customer support is essential to your business; it's what ensures you retain and develop the reputation that helps your company acquire more business.
With that said, most developers of customer support software aren't likely to attempt to transform their products into customer relationship management suites, as they did in the late 1990s. Instead, the newest releases refine the most important component of support: tracking customers' requests for support.
The widely-adopted term for this component, trouble ticketing, is a holdover from the days when companies didn't consider it necessary to distinguish between internal and external support.
But make no mistake: trouble ticketing is where customer support software is undergoing its most significant evolution. A sidebar on-line describes key examples of other tools, like software for creating knowledge bases, that enhance trouble ticketing systems even further.
WORKFLOW TAKES OVER
The most recent developments in trouble ticketing have less to do with technology and more to do with workflow.
How does workflow relate to support? Customer support tools represent tasks in the form of trouble tickets. An open ticket indicates that someone is working on a task, and a closed ticket means that someone has completed it. In the context of support, workflow is the process of defining a series of interrelated tasks your support team frequently performs.
Usually, the opening or closing of a ticket is the responsibility of the support rep you assign to it. An essential requirement of a trouble ticketing tool is that it should let you establish service level agreements (SLAs), which can include timeframes for resolving all support requests, individual requests or certain categories of requests.
Categories, in turn, can reflect reasons for requests, such as when a customer asks for a new password. If you charge customers more for faster responses to their requests or for 24x7 support, categories can also correspond to different levels of support to which you entitle customers.
An increasing number of support tools enable you to create or designate an existing trouble ticket as a subset or superset of other tickets.
As an illustration, let's say a customer purchases a couch from a furniture chain. During the delivery of the couch, the customer notices that the fabric is the wrong color and the pillows have the wrong pattern. The customer also sees that a coffee table, which she purchased with the couch, has a large gash in the middle.
To resolve these problems without having to track down the person at the store who sold her the furniture, the customer calls the furniture company's nationwide toll-free support number.
The support rep who answers the customer's call creates a master ticket based on the customer's purchase order. The rep then creates three separate tickets: one about the damaged coffee table, one about the patterns on the pillows and one about the color of the fabric on the couch.
Through the support center's trouble ticketing system, the rep ties these three tickets, each of which has its own SLA, to the master ticket. The SLA for the master ticket indicates the timeframe in which the support reps must complete the three tasks associated with it. The center can only close the master ticket by resolving the issues described in all three of the other tickets.
Customer support tools have different ways of enabling you to set up workflows. Some ask you to specify what type of trouble ticketing you need before you define procedures for handling support requests.
During installation, UniPress Software's (Edison, NJ) FootPrints 6.0 allows you to choose from among several default trouble ticketing systems, depending on whether your support operation serves internal colleagues or external customers. UniPress provides a wizard to customize FootPrints further. With the wizard, you can add and subtract fields, priority codes and status codes for support requests.
FootPrints 6.0 is more flexible than previous versions in enabling you to delineate roles for members of your support team. You define a role by outlining what information your colleagues can view, edit, contribute or report. For example, FootPrints allows you to set up roles so that managers can only view, create, edit and report on trouble tickets associated with the support reps they directly supervise.
The primary means of establishing workflows is by building templates. To create a template, you indicate what kind of data FootPrints automatically includes within certain kinds of trouble tickets and what data support reps have to provide.
Templates enable you to minimize or eliminate the time support reps spend on documenting routine requests. The fewer details agents ordinarily gather from customers to open a specific category of trouble ticket, such as a request to reset a password, the better that type of ticket lends itself to a template.
Keep in mind that multiple instances of the same request are different from multiple instances of the same problem. If you notice that lots of customers encounter an issue that your support center hasn't yet resolved, FootPrints allows you to encompass all requests for support about that problem under one global ticket.
With FootPrints, you can enable customers to subscribe to receive notification about the status of specific global issues. The software automatically sends e-mail messages to customers when your center finds solutions to global problems they've reported. FootPrints also allows you to determine which colleagues have the authority to designate a support request as an instance of a global issue.
If the support reps whom you initially assign to trouble tickets aren't able to resolve them within the timeframes you specify, FootPrints 6.0, like earlier releases of the software, lets you automatically escalate the tickets to other members of your team.
With the current version of FootPrints, the creation of a trouble ticket doesn't generate additional tickets unless you set up an escalation procedure in advance. Yet your center may receive support requests that not only comprise multiple steps, but also prescribe an order for completing these steps.
Such options will be available with FootPrints by early next year. Mark Krieger, UniPress' president, says that an upcoming version of FootPrints will allow support centers to set up workflows where trouble tickets launch other tickets without requiring escalation. The software will also enable support managers to create rules that specify how the status of a ticket affects the status of other tickets.
FootPrints 6.0 starts at $995 per named user. Pricing per concurrent license begins at $2,495. This fall, UniPress is offering a hosted version of its software for an annual fee of 12% above the combined costs of licenses for individual and concurrent users. Maintenance will continue to be separate, and comes out to 18% of the cost of software licenses.
Version 2.4 of GWI Software's (Vancouver, WA) c.Support, which runs on Lotus Domino Server, and Windows 2000 Server or later, also lets you build templates that create trouble tickets.
With c.Support, you can enable the template to generate tickets independently of one another, or launch tickets depending on the status of other tickets the template produces. Within a template, c.Support also lets you establish a hierarchy of tickets so that a master task you outline within one ticket consists of various tasks you describe within other tickets.
The Windows variant of the software lets support reps access c.Support with the same passwords they use to authenticate themselves on the network. In addition, c.Support enables you to restrict who has permission to change information about the status of trouble tickets.
Pricing for c.Support version 2.4 starts at $1,000 per concurrent user.
At press time, Remedy was in the process of updating its Action Request System. We'll provide more details about what's new with this software later this year.
BY THE NUMBERS
After workflow, reporting is the next big area of improvement in customer support software.
Better reporting is crucial to better support. Until recently, support tools largely dictated what you could report on. Even when trouble ticketing systems permitted you to define your own fields within trouble tickets, you couldn't customize reports unless you used third-party software like Crystal Reports. Fewer ways to report translated into fewer opportunities to validate decisions.
Kelly Blice, director of product marketing for FrontRange Solutions' (Colorado Springs, CO) HEAT trouble ticketing software, remembers this scenario all too well.
"I ran a technical support department, and 90% of my decisions were based on gut," says Blice. "I did not have the data to back it up."
The situation wasn't always much better with standard reports.
Consider a metric as basic as resolution time. A few years ago, you couldn't always be sure that resolution times accounted for the period when support reps were at work. If your center received a support request on a Friday afternoon, and was closed on weekends, your trouble ticketing system ran the risk of documenting that the resolution of the request took several days. That was likely to happen even if a support rep responded promptly to the request the following Monday morning.
