To help your support team in quickly resolving issues, they need the right resources at their fingertips. When we've looked at the ways our best customers are reducing their support loads, this comes in three forms: People, Tooling, and Content.
One important thing to keep in mind here, is that as important as reducing general support load is, in no way should the customer experience ever suffer. In fact, if done well, the customer experience should actually improve at the same time that your support loads are reduced.
We'll touch on the three main ways to reduce support loads of those below, with actionable steps to help you get you going.
People: Remove Domain Expert Bottlenecks
It’s common that you’ll have a few people who are “domain experts” when it comes to knowing all there is to know about a certain feature or part of your product. While it’s important to have people who have such depth in a certain area, it’s also important that you aim to spread this knowledge across your team as best you can.
This will help reduce the impact when a domain expert is on vacation, or leaves the company.
Tooling: Create Internal, and External Facing Content
Having a well filled out knowledge base is imperative for any product, however to help an agent in resolving a customers question quickly often public content is not enough to tell the agent how to help resolve the issue. This is where internal content can be more beneficial as it’s written for a different audience, your team.
Internal content should be written in a much more shorthand way, be more process driven, and guide the agent through steps on how to help understand the issue at hand, where they can get any extra information required to debug / resolve the issue, as well as who on the team they should reach out to for more help if they’re still stuck and can’t resolve the issue on their own.
Ideally, when a support ticket comes in the agent that picks it up should be the sole owner of that ticket throughout its lifecycle, bringing in other people behind the scenes where needed, so they can actually learn how to resolve this issue themselves when they see if again rather than simply passing it up the chain which increases the ticket resolution time for the customer and adds to the domain expert bottleneck issue.
Content: Provide Easy Access to Agent Docs
Once you have this internal facing documentation, you should make it easy for your agents to surface and consume that content so when they’re working on a support ticket they have easy access to resources that will guide them through not only how to resolve the issue, but how they should respond to the customer.
The easiest way to do this is to store your internal facing content in the same system as your public content, just restricting its access to your staff only. This will mean your agents will have the best of both worlds, as there may be content that is surfaced that is actually public and can be directly shared with your customers. If you have your internal and external facing content in two different systems, you’re making life too hard for your agents and slowing down the resolution process (not to mention fragmenting any analytics & reporting on content usage).
A great way to make sure your agents have access to the docs they need from anywhere, is through the use of a Chrome Extension.
