Are you ready for 2020?
By Françoise Tourniaire, Founder and Owner of FT Works and Member of the ASP Executive Advisory Board
It’s this time of the year when we think, or rather, we know that we are walking into a brighter future. Here are 5 ideas for improving your support operation:
- Use support data to improve the product/service. You know you want to, you know you could. What’s stopping you? Is it poor data quality? Improve and streamline how you track case information. Is it a lack of proper reporting? Fix it! You can use similar tools and a similar approach to influence how products are sold, and how customers are onboarded. Good data provides confirmation for the stories you already collect.
- Kill stupid metrics. You know you have some lurking around: new KB articles (what about quality?), portal page views (really?), daily updates to P1 cases (so easy to game!), and many, many more.
- Provide proper training to the team. There’s never enough time, and rarely enough money, right? So do you prefer providing mediocre support to customers? Be creative. Brown bags sessions and other low-key approaches can compete favorably with formal training. Here’s a completely free idea: ask the support engineers to bring “though customer” stories to the staff meeting and discuss/mentor around them.
- Get reliable customer feedback. If your customer satisfaction survey has a low response rate (anything under 10%), you might as well throw it away. The magic formula is often: use a one-question survey (shorter is better); send it to everyone (customers have proven they are very good as disregarding overly-frequent surveys), and act on the results (yes, you need to contact all customers that report being dissatisfied, and quickly, too.
- Try something new. Aim to run at least one experiment at all times. 2020 will likely be the year of support AI. Give it a go. Go kick a tire or two with a vendor.
If FT Works can help reaching your goals, or clarifying them, let me know. And tell us (in the comments): what are your 2020 goals?
Francoise Tourniaire blogs on customer success and technical support topics on the FT Works website.
This post was originally published on ftworks.com
Related Posts
Issue Resolution Should be the Beginning and Not the End!!
It’s pretty natural that Customer Success representatives or teams celebrate once an issue is resolved. Customers also tend to relax because the service or the software is restored and back to being operational.
ASP Best Support Websites of 2022
For the past 24 years ASP has audited support websites. Each site is scored by five independent judges in 22 different areas.
The Support Experience
ASP is partnering with SupportLogic to help them with their upcoming event SXLive. This conference will be virtual on April 5-7, 2022. The focus is on the Support Experience, something that we believe is of vital importance in this subscription economy for technology (and other) products and services.
ASP , TSANet, & FT Works-Leaders Workshops
ASP, TSANet and FT Works today announced remote workshops for Support Leaders. There will be six sessions over six consecutive weeks, February 24, March 3rd, March10, March 17, March 24, and March 31, 2022. Registration is now open.
ASP , TSANet, & FT Works-Support Engineers Workshops
ASP, TSANet and FT Works today announced remote workshops for Technical Support Engineers. There will be three two-hour sessions over three consecutive weeks, February 17, 24, & March 3rd.
ASP Announces Best Support Websites of 2021
Press Release August 26, 2021 Hot Springs, AR 71913 ASP Best Support Websites of 2021 Announced Al Hahn, Executive director of the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) today announced the winners of ASP's Best Support Websites 2021 competition. The top scoring websites were, (In Alphabetical Order:) NetApp Nutanix PowerSchool Red Hat Extra praise was garnered by Nutanix and PowerSchool for being best