Support departments have always been overworked. They can make life
easier for themselves by implementing self-service customer support
- as long as they don't take things too far, says Danny
Bradbury
If there's not already a patron saint of IT support
professionals there should be. Better than that, why not just
canonise them all? They deserve it. They have to deal with
end-users who are annoyed, or uneducated - and in many cases
both.
The "help" in helpdesk should be as much about helping support
professionals as about helping customers. Automating support as
much as possible frees support executives from the mundane,
annoying calls and lets them concentrate on the harder problems
that take more time to solve.
The question is, how much of the support process can you
automate? It's easy to go too far. Customers who call for help are
often annoyed to start with, so channelling them through endless
touch-tone phone options is likely to leave them livid.
But it is nevertheless possible to automate certain aspects of
support, says Anthony Rondoni, vice-president of marketing for
Support. com, which is an outsourcing organisation specialising in
handling the support process for overworked customers.
One way that companies can automate support is by using good
systems management techniques to head off problems before customers
even know about them, says Rondoni. Using systems and network
management technologies, it is possible, for example, to measure
motherboard temperatures and other key system parameters, watching
for potential problems.
Geoff Willett, business manager at IT consultancy Lynx
Technology, explains that remote monitoring can save a company
plenty in support costs. "A more limited resource can be shared
among the customer base. It only takes a couple of hours a week to
manage the network of servers," he says.
Similarly, remote system rebuilds can be used to repair software
that has become corrupt on an end-user's desktop. Companies such as
ON Technology, for example, provide software administration
services that enable you to remotely repair software installations
that have, say, a DLL file missing. Such software problems are one
of the main causes of erratic behaviour in software, and the
consequent loss of application services.
Many support professionals believe that it is possible for
support staff to hide behind machines, only engaging the customer
when all the automated channels of support have been tried.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is one tool that you can use to
offload some work from the support staff, but you should keep it
simple. A rule of thumb for Web-based support is to get the user to
where they want to go in three clicks or less. Similarly, the rule
for IVR should be to get their problem resolved or put them into an
agent queue in three steps.
Bruce Leith, managing director of customer relationship
management company Primus, believes that the Web is probably the
cheapest support automation tool that a company can have. "There
are many things you can do in terms of simple, follow the bouncing
ball stuff," he says, alluding to the conventional self-service
support tools on the Web such as lists of frequently asked
questions. But he argues that there are other, more sophisticated
types of Web support too.
Using tools that monitor the users' activities on the Internet
can create lots of information about the difficulties that they are
most likely to experience. This can then be used to build more
relevant lists of FAQs, and can also help the company to solve
faults within their product or service.
The idea of finding out what types of questions end-users are
asking and building FAQs in response to them is only a step away
from one of the other great traditions of self-service support, in
the form of the knowledge base. These repositories of searchable
information about a product or service can be a great help for
people trying to navigate their own support on the Web, claims
Leith, who believes that it can benefit support staff and end-users
alike. "The cost of getting an agent active can be halved, because
you have this knowledge base of FAQs," he says. "Because it uses
simple language, there's nothing to learn."
However, there are drawbacks. Knowledge bases have be carefully
queried to avoid getting too much information back that is not
relevant to the problem.
Many companies, including Microsoft, have promoted natural
language searching as a means of returning a more relevant set of
queries. But the value of these is limited, especially if end-users
don't know what to ask for.
All being well, judicious use of prevention and self-service
mechanisms should filter out the majority of support calls, leaving
you with the more difficult ones. You can still automate some parts
of these calls, thereby reducing the time spent on each individual
caller, and decreasing your overall support cost.
Using remote diagnostic tools will help your staff to find out
what is wrong with an individual's software or hardware even when
they don't know themselves. Simply having them describe the
symptoms of a problem can help your support staff to analyse data
delivered to the helpdesk remotely over their network and then find
the solution.
Remote control tools enabling support staff to gain control of
an end-user's PC and manipulate it for them have existed for years.
It can be difficult and time-consuming for support staff to try and
guide non-technical end-users through menus and dialogue boxes,
especially if they can't see what the user is looking at on the
screen. A better option is to do what needs to be done for them,
using a remote session.
Of course, if all end-users had a basic level of technical
awareness they wouldn't have to make so many support calls in the
first place. Training users will help them to help themselves out
of the less problematic situations, and if they are properly
trained in how to use things like personal productivity
applications, they will be less inclined to call and ask how to do
this or that in Word or Excel.
Anita Monteith, co-founder of online training portal www.world
oftraining.com, says support engineers can be proactive in helping
the human resource department decide which training courses
end-users should be sent on. "I came across a lot of people who
said they needed a Word for beginners course, when they have
actually been using Word for a year," she says. "The IT support
guys can recommend courses on the types of question that are being
asked."
The portal offers a service for companies where support
engineers can log into their company's dedicated page on the portal
and make course recommendations that can then be accessed by the IT
department. In this way, she explains, companies can use support
calls as a source of information to make end-users more aware of
relevant IT issues, and less likely to call about similar issues in
the future.
Clearly, you're never going to be able to do away with all
end-user support calls, and support automation can only go so far.
But by following sensible practices and creating an environment in
which both end-users and support staff have access to more
information and are more proactive, you can go a long way towards
easing your support burden and saving your IT department some
valuable cash.
Ten tips for keeping end-users happy
The world would be a better place without end-users, as far as
many support staff are concerned. But they're not going to go away,
so it's best to learn how to deal with them. Ideally most
end-users' calls should be kept away from the support desk by
encouraging them to help themselves. Here are 10 top tips:
1. Forewarned is forearmedThe best way to deal with end-user
problems is to stop them happening in the first place. Implement
remote monitoring tools in the form of systems management software
so that you can spot problems both on the server and the desktop.
You can then rectify them before the end-user knows there's a
problem.
2. An educated user is a less troublesome userMinimise the
number of "idiot" calls by educating end-users. Give them the
skills to sort out the basic problems themselves.
3. Use self-service toolsÉMaking end-users access self-help
tools in the form of Web-based support will filter out some of the
simpler support queries.
4. But keep them simpleSelf-help tools are useless if you need a
support engineer to help you use them. Make sure that Web sites are
easily navigable, and ensure that any interactive voice response
systems you implement to help route calls through the network don't
have too many options.
5. Keep a record of user informationThe more information you can
gather about end-users the better. Your asset management software
should tell you what systems and software they're using, and a good
customer relationship management system should enable keep a record
of support calls they've made in the past, so that you have an idea
what to expect in the future.
6. Maintain a decent knowledge base. Use support queries to
compile a knowledge base of problems and potential solutions. Make
it as easy to search as possible, but don't rely too heavily on
this as a self-service tool. They can be difficult for
non-technical staff to use but they can make life easier for
support staff.
7. Gather as much information as possible from the end-user's
desktop. Ideally, remote diagnostics software should tell you a lot
about the performance of an end-user's desktop. Is he complaining
about poor application performance? You should be able to check the
size of a Windows swap file without asking them to do anything.
8. Remote control is an invaluable tool. Once you know the cause
of the problem it will save you time and money if you can solve it
yourself, remotely, without having to guide the end-user through
the software interface.
9. Centralise your software. The best way to ensure that your
customers' software is working properly is to put it all on your
own server. Run a thin-client installation where they access as
much of the application infrastructure as possible over the
network. Of course, that means that your network infrastructure
must be able to cope.
10. If a job's worth doing, get someone else to do it. If all
else fails, outsource your support. End-users' problems can be a
nightmare. Get some other schmuck to deal with it, but be prepared
to pay handsomely for the privilege.