Kris Oldfield and other FSN authors have told us that the new normal will be a touchless service for many businesses. The customer will interface with the equipment, and the OEM’s technical support team will use AR/MR/VR to help the customer troubleshoot and repair the equipment. The question is, “How will customers feel about touchless service over time?”
Organize Technical Support
Getting the experience “right” is critical for the business because in the B2C world, and increasingly in the B2B environment, the most frequent customer interaction with the company is with technical support. And the quality of each experience is important because the individual’s cumulative perception of their experience with a business is the brand. To make matters worse, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner and noted Psychologist, has written about the Peak-End Rule. This states that for a reasonably short duration, we ignore most of the details except for 1) how we felt when we had the maximum “good” or “bad” feeling and 2) how we felt while the experience came to an end.
Related reading: Use The Peak-End Rule To Make Your Customer Experience Program Cost Effective
We may not know when our customer has reached the “peak” point, but we certainly know when the journey ends. So, getting each transaction to leave a positive memory in the customer’s mind is especially important.
One way to ensure good outcomes is to organize and staff technical support organizations around customers’ technical skills. The challenge of this strategy is that we have to direct calls, emails, and chat sessions to the support person at the same level as the customer.
First, we must understand the technical level of the people who contact technical support.
In a B2C situation, the technical support engineer usually communicates with a Level 1 operator, a Level 2 person with more experience, or a trained Level 3 FSE. Here are some examples of each:
In a B2B company, there are also three levels of knowledge that technical support works with:
Notice that in the B2B environment, the personnel at all three levels are well-trained and know the limits of their knowledge. In the B2C situation, Level 1 and 2 people may think they know more about taking care of their equipment than they do, so the technical support people have to take extra care to ensure that these people do not create a bigger problem than what they started with.
Read this post to learn how service and support add value to your customers.
Given all of the above, the best we can do is organize technical support organizations into levels that match the customers’ stories. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done since the company has little control over who calls in to get aid to fix a problem.
The easiest solution for the OEM is to have a great reference library organized into FAQs that cover the issues that Level 1 and most Level 2 callers can safely attack. And then encourage the callers to look there before talking to a live agent. But we know this solution would frustrate many customers and lead to many negative comments on social media. Your NPS score would drop into negative territory, and your Sales partners would make your life miserable because you were now part of the “Sales Prevention Team.”
Another solution is to implement Chat and use that as a Level 1 triage, and when that does not work, the agent can escalate to either Level 2 or 3 Tech Support as appropriate. If you try this route, consider having the Chat agent arrange a callback by a tech support agent. As long as the call is complete in about 3 minutes or less, the customer waiting for the call will generally not be upset.
In conjunction with the chat/live callback solution, you can ensure that your company certifies the internal people calling for Level 3 support. That way, they can have a dedicated telephone number. You have a good chance that the people calling in are trained enough that your experienced tech support agents can spend their valuable time dealing most efficiently with customers.
Whatever strategy you implement, ensure that your callers always feel their time is respected and that you take their problems seriously. Empathy and understanding can go a long way to doing touchless service into a positive experience.
About Middlesex Consulting
At Middlesex Consulting, we partner with the field service teams of B2B capital equipment companies challenged to grow their top and bottom lines. We use value creation, services marketing, and customer experience techniques to identify and create service offers that achieve customers’ desired business outcomes. To discuss how we can grow your business write to Sam here.
Image credit – Image by Ernesto Eslava from Pixabay