Fix it For Me!
Staying Ahead of the Customer Sat Curve with
Proactive Technology
When you think about reducing customer service costs and cutting margins while improving your service levels, most people go right to the concept of self-service. It’s true that with an effective knowledge management solution and self-service portal, you can achieve these goals. You’re harnessing knowledge of known issues and deflecting them to your self-service portal. In today’s instant gratification world, customers prefer the convenience and immediacy of fixing it themselves.
But even self-service is no longer enough for the masses. They want to chat, too, and if they pick up the phone after unsuccessfully lurking around on your site, your customers expect you to know about their issue. Adding channels and putting your agents and organizational knowledge at the center of these channels seems not only daunting, but expensive.
The dollar signs in your head always have you searching for quick fixes—you’ll just put a band-aid on it, right? But wait. The return on improving your customer service and support infrastructure can more than pay for the investment.
Beyond Chat
Let’s start by considering adding chat to your arsenal: The projected ROI seems decent. By implementing a chat channel, many companies have seen:
- Increased capacity resulting in reduced call costs;
- A 15%-20% reduction in handle time per contact; and
- Increased support representative productivity due to handling multiple cases simultaneously.
Customer demands change faster than the weather, so when chat alone doesn’t cover it, consider what you could do with chat PLUS remote access support and prepackaged pieces of code designed to automatically resolve known issues.
How many calls do you get on known issues where even the knowledgebase article is just not doing its job? What if, instead of offering relevant, accurate knowledge articles, you could offer up a button that says “fix it for me”?
Imagine this scenario: your customer service rep is on the phone or chatting with a customer who has not been able to solve his problem via self-service. The rep offers to remotely diagnose and solve the problem. With the user’s consent, your remote access support application queries the remote endpoint, instantly pulling critical diagnostic information such as OS type and hardware profiles that can be used to automatically identify problems. Mind you, this information was not acquired after a three- (or 20-) minute conversation instructing the user on how to provide this information, but instantly and automatically.
With the relevant information in hand, a misconfiguration is identified within seconds and a support action is sent to repair the problem. A few seconds more, and the user confirms that the problem is fixed, gushes praise to the technician and vows to post a Facebook update trumpeting how easily his issue was resolved.
Because your representatives knew exactly where to start looking for the problem, the resolution time was significantly decreased and the crux of the advantage of remote access support can be fully realized. The actions run in the background, and are generally unnoticed by a user. An audit trail of agent or admin actions can be created and shared with the user so there is no question of who did what and when.
Historically, remote access required a software client to be installed on the target machine to facilitate connectivity. Today’s remote access applications are clientless, leveraging ActiveX and other browser-supported functionality to give you remote access without the pain of providing, installing and maintaining software clients to thousands of remote endpoints.
In addition, end users are more comfortable than ever with this type of support. Those who first experience it are delighted, and those who have seen it before expect it.
Beyond the Beyond
So what comes after chat and clientless remote access support? What if you could resolve issues before your customers even knew they had them? Once established with the help of the user, endpoint access can be accomplished without further user interaction, allowing for not only the automated remote diagnosis and repair of misconfigured endpoints, but the automated push of updated drivers and patches to facilitate the resolution of problems before the user even knows they exist.
Consider the following true story: Recently a large PC manufacturer discovered that a popular XP patch applied an incorrect audio driver. Of the 5 million targeted problematic endpoints, 1.5 million allowed the proactive support patch to be installed. Assuming only 10% of these users would have ended up calling for support, at a conservative estimated cost of $5 per call, the manufacturer alone avoided 150,000 support calls and saved $750,000.
How much money could your support operation have saved in a similar scenario? All the users really wanted was for someone to fix it for them (and in this case, the users didn’t even know there was an issue), and now you can while saving money and increasing customer satisfaction in the process.
Consona CRM offers the only combined knowledge management and incident management product that is KCS Verified v4 by the Consortium for Service Innovation. More than 1,000 customers worldwide use Consona CRM solutions to manage process efficiencies, drive revenue and enable extraordinary customer experiences. Visit www.consona.com/crm.