All customer support is increasing, with consumers expecting a closer connection to the products they use. IBISWorld has calculated this growth to be steady but consistent at a market increase of 2.7% annually.
The result is increased pressure on customer support departments in all sectors, including IT. This article will help you to scale your IT customer support without compromising the quality of the service you provide.
Define Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Targets
Your customer support service should be run the same way you would run a new program or service online. KPI targets must be set and kept to, ensuring that the customer support is fit for purpose.
Customer support KPIs require active consumer participation, showing very directly what experiences customers have had. The most popular KPI is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), whereby customers rate how satisfied they were with the service.
Similarly, Customer Effort Score (CES) invites customers to show how easy it was for them to resolve their problems. If either of these metrics falls below the target you have defined, it is time to look closer to find the problem.
Reducing Points of Human Contact
Finding the time to improve the quality of your IT customer support can be challenging if your customer support staff are held up with menial tasks.
Developing or commissioning AI customer service capabilities can categorise and even answer some customer support inquiries, removing the need for human contact with the customer apart from particularly challenging cases.
Particularly small businesses are concerned that this technology will make their company feel less personable to their small consumer base. However, such technology is currently used by around 31.7% of major companies, which is constantly growing.
Therefore, customers have come to expect encounters with AI chatbots when accessing customer support and will appreciate that they are used to improve the overall quality of your IT customer support.
Invest in Human Capital
All IT providers often forget that behind the technology is a person; therefore, they sometimes forget the power of human workers to solve problems. The technology described above is useful, but at the end of the day, the customer support workers usually leave customers with the end solution.
Therefore, your customer support staff should receive adequate training and education and are then allowed to act autonomously to get the best result for the customer. You should also create space for your customer support staff to communicate their best practices and anecdotes, rather than leaving all customer interactions up to rigid and pre-defined policies.
Scaleable, High-Quality IT Customer Support
As your business grows and IT technologies continue to evolve, your IT team will be in greater need to keep up-to-date with issues they will be required to resolve quickly.
Customers will expect high-quality support from these overstretched workers, and solutions must be provided to allow them to do their job well enough. The three key suggestions outlined in this article are vital starting points that cannot be ignored in your efforts to support customer support personnel.
