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Take an in-depth look at the new visual technology and help desk solutions available that can improve the service provided by your IT help desk and technical support.
The Importance of Customer Experience
These days, customers expect nothing less than excellent customer service and technical support. If you can’t meet those expectations, customers will respond with their dollars and cents by taking their business elsewhere. To compete in today’s economy, not to mention have a chance to experience real growth, it’s time to take customer support seriously.
Consider this sobering fact: according to Microsoft’s 2016 State of Global Customer Service Report, 68% of 18-34-year-old consumers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single poor customer service experience. One single negative experience and that customer will turn to your competition. Companies lose an estimated $41 billion every year due to poor customer service.
But all hope is not lost. By arming your technical support center and help desk with innovative visual tools, you can deliver exceptional customer service which will keep customers loyal to your brand. So, what solutions should you invest in for the future?
Customer Self-Service: an ideal solution for everyone
Self-service as a help desk solution has been the trend for the last couple of years, and the number of innovative tech solutions available reflect the growing popularity of it amongst users. When you give your customer effective tools to solve their problems on their own, you empower them. You give them freedom. They don’t have to wait for business hours, hold on a call or wait for a technician to come over. A self-service option offers the least amount of friction and frustration.
The better your self-service is, the more issues customers can resolve on their own. This enables you to achieve the impossible – improving customer satisfaction while lowering the costs of support, a surefire way to building a successful, profitable contact center.
In the long term, an investment in a good self-service or help desk portal and corresponding technologies will give you a significant ROI. And, if your brand is focusing on millennials, a self-service portal is even more crucial as 84% of this generation uses it as their go-to source for information.
How to Create a Self Service Portal
Building a self service portal is not as hard as it sounds and there are plenty of tools out there to help you. These include major brands such as Oracle and BMC, andsmaller start-ups such as HappyFox, Helpjuice and Solvvy.
These companies and others offer different configurations and solutions, from a complete portal and ticketing system to an evolved knowledge base solution that will integrate with your CRM.
Finding the best self service portal for your organization requires some research, but the benefits are immense. The ideal solution will help you with FAQ pages, community forums, a knowledge base, video support sections and possibly bot solutions as well as managing the transition from the self-service portal to a human agent.
Ensuring the Success of your Self Service Portal
Remember to ensure your self-service portal is mobile friendly, either through your dedicated app or through a mobile responsive website that customers can access from any device. Monitor the success of your content and self-service capabilities and constantly update it to make sure you have the right content. Customers should be able to easily find a resolution, through your step-by-step instructions and video tutorials.
Every time you release an update for your product, make sure to include relevant information in your help desk center and review the documentation often. An effective help desk and technical support center is always evolving just like your company and product.
For further information and guidance on how you can implement your own customer self-service as explained above, click here.
Augmented Reality: it really works
No matter how complete your self-service portal is, some of your customers will end up needing your support center to resolve their technical problems. Often that happens when the problem is more complex and requires some real technical assistance.
Even the most well-informed agents are challenged when having to resolve technical issues by relying on their customer’s verbal descriptions alone. Customer frustration intensifies when there is a communication barrier. Poor communication leads to misunderstandings, and that leads to unresolved issues and an unhappy customer which is detrimental to your business.
Remote Visual Support
The solution that will turn this type of situation around is remote visual support. This innovative technology allows your agents to see exactly what your customer is seeing by utilizing the camera on the customer’s mobile device. All of the sudden, your agent and customer see the same view.
This video contains a useful example of remote visual support in action:
Augmented Reality at the Help Desk
The next level of remote visual support is Augmented Reality (AR). AR is a game-changing technology when it comes to remote visual support solutions for service centers. In a nutshell, augmented reality allows for the layering of actual reality as captured live with virtual objects and markups. Practically speaking, AR enables your agent to mark up, annotate and point out in real-time the actions the customer needs to do to resolve their issue.
By equipping your technical support staff with an innovative AR service solution such as the one provided by TechSee, your support center will see improvements across all performance KPIs (First Call Resolution, Tech Dispatch Rate, etc.) while increasing customer satisfaction exponentially. You’ll also be keeping your technical support services miles ahead of the competition by using cutting edge, up to date technology. Innovation in this area is a win-win solution that can’t be beat.
Innovation for Customer Service and Help Desks
Today, big data analytics is growing and expanding, and social media is being used increasingly as a platform for customers to communicate with and about brands. Businesses must therefore adjust to a reality where good customer service, which drives customer satisfaction and brand sentiment, is now a measurable function of the organization.
More than ever before, businesses can measure the ROI of a customer service solution beyond the constraints of the call center. They can measure the effect of a good customer service solution on new accounts and on customer churn. That ability to measure real ROI makes customer service solutions a topic of conversation in the corporate C-suite and in P&L meetings. This in turn drives a dramatic increase in the demand and therefore the offerings in the marketplace.
Augmented Visual Support and Self Service Portal are two innovative help desk solutions with proven ROI, contributing significant value to the bottom line of any business using them. They work because they affect both sides of the equation. They lower the costs of providing support while improving success rates and customer satisfaction. If you haven’t implemented them yet, it’s something you should be looking to focus on very soon.
