Support Tip - Tracking calls and escalation

Most business managers in technology industries would agree that customer support is critical to their success. From the customer's perspective, the most important issue is getting their problem resolved. From a business perspective, you need to meet the customer's expectations in order to keep them happy. Clearly defined policy, and a Help Desk system that supports your policy will help you maintain customer satisfaction.

Resolving Problems

So what are some of the aspects of your support policy that will enable you to more easily resolve problems?

• every problem that is reported is logged
• every action associated with a problem is logged
• information is shared between staff
• build a knowledgebase of common problems

Whenever a customer calls with a problem, you need to record the date, the time and the description of the problem that they give you. This is critical to be able to gauge how quickly you are resolving problems and when a problem needs to be escalated (see the section on Customer Satisfaction below). It is convenient to assign each problem a unique tracking number - this is useful to you and your customer as a handle on this particular problem.

Whether the problem is logged by a phone call, email or web site, the basic process is the same.

Next you need to track all the actions associated with resolving the problem. This will be important in the troubleshooting process to ensure there in not duplication in testing. Also it provides an important record to demonstrate to the client your commitment to resolving their issue.

This applies to each phone call, email, etc, and also to research on the problem. As an aside, for your internal processes it may also be important to record the time associated with each action for billing and cost allocation purposes. Of course, your Help Desk system should take care of this automatically.

As this information is being gathered, it needs to be shared among all your support staff. If the engineer working on the problem is away, someone else needs to be able to pick up what has already been done and continue to assist your client.

Once a problem is found, it remains recorded in the Help Desk system for future reference. If it is deemed to be a problem that may occur again or at other sites (e.g. frequently asked question), it can be listed more formally into a "knowledgebase". The knowledge base will typically include a description of the problem and its solution, some associated keywords to assist searching and possibly a reference to the relevant product(s). It is also wise to reference the original problem (ie tracking number) in case someone needs to work back through the troubleshooting process in detail.

Of course, searching the knowledgebase would be one of the first steps in researching a new problem. For this it is important for the Help Desk system to provide search tools - for both exact match and fuzzy searching.

Customer Satisfaction

A basic premise of sales and maintaining your customers is correctly setting their expectations and then meeting or exceeding those expectations.

So what happens if your customer expects an immediate solution? In some cases they may be disappointed, and even though they have their problem resolved eventually, they may go away having had a bad experience.

It is helpful to have a clear policy regarding what will happen once a problem is reported, and what happens if it is not resolved quickly. It is a good ideal to define timeframes so your support staff are clear on their responsibilities and customers know what to expect.

For example your policy may be to

• have a support engineer respond to a problem within 4 hours of it being reported, and

• escalate a problem to a higher status if it is not resolved within 2 days.

Your Help Desk system can help you to ensure customer satisfaction by taking automatic actions if these conditions are not met.

So for example, if the assigned support engineer has not logged a response within the 4 hours, they get an email reminder and their manager is notified by email. Action can then be taken to ensure the policy is met (re-assign resources, etc).

If the problem goes unresolved past the 2 days, management can be alerted to take further action. Again this may mean putting more resources onto the problem, contacting the client, finding a temporary solution, etc. At least the Help Desk system has raised the alarm so that Customer Satisfaction can be maintained.

Service Level Agreements

The reality is that response and escalation times will vary for a variety of reasons. Some customers will pay more for a higher level of support, some will be higher profile and you will want to provide a higher level of support, while the nature of some products may mean they are not business critical and do not need such stringent resolution times.

It is convenient to be able to associate a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which defines these parameters for the particular client. This again strengthens your chance of meeting the customer's expectations because you have clearly defined to them the timing of the actions you will take when they report a problem.

The Help Desk system will automatically recognise the SLA for the customer when the problem is reported and then raise alarms at the appropriate times.

Help Desk Systems

In evaluating Help Desk systems, you should look for support of these facilities. Ensure the Help Desk system properly logs the problems and then tracks all the associated actions. Check it has a knowledge base and that all the information is readily available to all staff. It should provide service level agreements (with a contract expiry date) and a methodology to handle problems that do not get proper response or resolution in the required time.

In addition, the Help Desk system should be part of a complete CRM system - with integrated applications for contact management, marketing and sales force automation.   Using independent solutions for each of these functions leads to islands of information automation and database duplication. Vital customer information is not available without jumping from system to system.

These are important considerations for even smaller businesses. Once you have more than 3 or 4 employees, you should consider how you can effectively share information and maintain a professional support organisation to ensure customer satisfaction.

Commence RM: Australian Edition provides all of these capabilities, along with many more Help Desk functions: customer logging & query from web site, logging by email, billing calculation, and product register to track installed base. In addition Commence RM: Australian Edition has modules in Sales Force Automation and Marketing, as well as a bi-directional interface to MYOB.