Successful customer support

Welcome to the service management show from the team here at effic code I'm Gary blower uh I'm a the IT service manager practice lead for eode in the UK and in this episode we're going to be talking about managing a customer support team and I'm pleased to say I'm joined by James would you like to introduce yourself James thanks Gary yeah my name's James stride work at FK and I'm the customer support manager um I've worked here since 2018 my role's kind of changed over the years but right now um my main focus is supporting customers and uh social support Thanks James so yeah so we've covered lots of topics in this show so far everything from it experience management through to Asset Management I thought we haven't really covered the the kind of core thing that most people use uh service desk and most people in service management do which is providing support to customers so um James here as James said has been you know working this role for some time now I thought it would be good to sort of share experiences of that role you know what kind of works what doesn't work all that kind of stuff so first question to you James when you obviously you do this for a while now when you think of customer support what are the kind of key things that you that you feel you are providing to provide that level of support now I think first off is to ensure that you kind of understand the customer um what quite often we find that customers are giving feedback where they just kind of get automated responses or they're being pass to a URL or something like that whereas we try to offer kind of a Hands-On approach to make sure that even if it is some information we're trying to get from an article or some sort of Google result we are actually interpreting it and putting it into a way that the customer understand and you know in your experience uh of the role you have now what sort you know what's the kind of typical customer interaction you have or or is it always different um it always depends on the customer ear a lot of people like interacting just over the tickets um Some people prefer to have a phone call or jump on a screen share and of course we're open to any of that I think it has changed quite a bit since um Alasia has become Cloud first we're doing a lot more screen shares now than we did previously um so that's quite a big change that the team have had to adapt to um but as I say we're happy to jump on any method that the customer requires do you do you find doing you know like doing screen shares that do you find that's easier or do you find it's harder than before let say um I think it does take a different skill set you have to kind of be prepared um sometimes you can't be because you're just jumping in blind on a call and then you're given the problem there and then and you have to kind of think on your feet um so it I would say it is more difficult on a ticket you've got time to review it maybe go away and test something and check the know exactly how you know something works before you send your reply um at the same time it's something that we talk to the team about and and we practice um on as well and you mentioned at the beginning that you know one of the important things for you in providing customer service is to understand the customer is there a mechanism you use to to do that you know do you is all like do you collect feedback or do you do surveys things like that yes yeah we um have multiple methods of collecting feedback the main one being um cat surveys that are sent out um each time a ticket is resolved we send one of these out originally we were using um the built-in JSM uh satisfaction function but we found that was quite lacking with just having stars and and a comment so now we use uh qual Trix so that gets sent out I get a link to this survey and it has a lot of detailed information in there that's something that I review on a regular basis and then look where we can improve um the product and what we can offer okay now you mentioned uh you mentioned about you know Customs raising tickets you um you know obviously heart code we use Lum products so you're using Jos service management but of course you could use any sort of um uh help desk or service their system so what what are the important features for you of a kind of help desk or service desk that you can use to support your customer um I mean I think the main one is ease of use and the multiple communication Avenues uh no one wants to have to jump through hoops to have to raise a ticket so with uh JSM we've I mean we've always worked with that kind of practice what you preach it's something that we so I mean we're very versed in how everything works with it so we've got everything set up and workflows Etc that we think would work best with the customer um as something we're always looking on improving on um we're actually looking to migr to a different jir site at the moment that's going to add some more features in there too um but uh again as soon as a customer mentioned something we've had some um what we called listening listening lounges as well at one point a couple of customers wanted some other communication Avenues so we've kind of set up slap channels and um other methods like that as well but the actual core features from jir itself we've never had an issue with and it's always been great okay uh interestingly the listening louage you refer to that actually links back to the previous show where we talked about it experience management and and you know how you understand the value you're providing to your customers that's that's quite a nice link back to that particular topic you mentioned you use like qu trick and few other things are there any kind of key metrics and measures that you you take from the service disk and from the customers uh the main ones for myself is um there's a question of just simply was your request resolved obviously that's what we aim to do is resolve them so that's what I look at as well as the actual scores and then the comment as well um sometimes a team members mentioned say it's important to give the positives to the team as well as well as look for areas that we can improve um so they're the main bits I know that uh the CSM team we work closely with they also pull out a lot of information um and then kind of uh they have a customer Health score um that kind of gets applied to all the total support customers and that's something I can look at too so if someone's a bit low I can look at the reasons why and if support can help in any way so all that data is used and how we refer back to it but what about internally if you got like specific like SLA thresholds that that you have to meet yes yeah we have to hit our SLA goals so um it's part of the total support and our support packages as all the SLA goals that we have to meet um that's something that I review monthly um and yeah I'll just action if if there's anything required um on an individual ticket basis as well I look through at what was breached if there was something and why and see if we can um improve on that and what what uh what sort of slas are you working to is things like time to First respond time to resolution yeah so we have initial response detailed response um and then resolution okay oh nice and um if you have you know if you have a major breach you know if if we're talking to it you know you're talking to somebody else and you're giving their advice when you have SLA breaches what's the best way of kind of dealing with those within the team um so firstly when I'm reviewing them it's just why it breach so quite often it could just be um sometimes the customers will revoke our access so we have to stop Midway through a ticket or something like that so quite often it's something like that yeah but if there is a reason behind it then that is something that I will bring up internally and then actually get um the assign of that ticket so I can actually understand why that's happened yeah um and yeah go from there okay just kind of feeds back into that luk you mentioned earlier of trying to improve things if there's a way to impr prove it oh great um so you know you obviously been doing this for a while now and um yeah I think uh you know probably between you and I we've probably run Service Des for for quite some time um what would you say you know when you think about if you were thinking of starting from scratch tomorrow so you're thinking about people processes and tools um and you were look you know you were asked okay I want you to set up a new customer service desk customer support fun fun for something where would you start tomorrow if you had to start from scratch do you think um I I'll build off what I know really so firstly you'd select the tool so in this case jir and then um Bas of experience as I say it just want to keep things simple but then effective as well so you just want to have an easy method of being able to reach out so you want kind of multiple methods really so you want the standard email and then the actual Port itself as a minimum um and then one once that's in place you want um automation I mean we rely on that heavily at the moment so anything that comes in it will come we get notified on slack it'll go through into a queue um a message will go out to the customer all of that's kind of automated right away before we actually need to action anything yeah um and then just making sure the actual workflow um for each ticket works as you expect and there's um it just kind of flows smoothly really sometimes you can get issues where if you have to pass from one person to another things get lost or it just gets stuck or what have you just need to make sure that doesn't happen um and you don't really want customers chasing you going oh why is this being put on hold or why what's happening like this it just needs to be clear and understandable yeah the infamous hot potato as it's known yes it just gets passed around from from person to person I people who know me know I've told this story many times but I had when I worked at a big bank and I ran a service desk there I had this issue once where we had a we had an incident for a customer we knew how to fix it it would take 15 minutes to fix it was a databased script that had to be run Day based to knew I descript it but when it went into that customer support Channel it got bounced around from different teams until it found the right team and it took five hours so yeah it happens and I'm sure everyone who's is watching and listening recognized is the Hot Potato is something we don't really want um thinking of internally if your teams and know you know you've got a you got um you know team that does all this stuff is there any kind of internal training or anything like that that you guys do yeah absolutely um we get together on a monthly basis um as for an internal day and as part of that internal day it's to not only upskill but look at our processes as well make sure everyone's happy with those but in terms of actual um training so we have um we have to pass acps we also um look at the alasan offerings on their University I know at the moment they've got some free badges that's something that we're all kind of working on together um and also I mean as part part total sport we offer training so we utilize that as well and um Paul has been spending some time with some of our the support team couple of hours a week just to make sure they're brushing up on the new all the new features that are available on the applications nice yeah Paul are head of trading in the UK I I'll just elaborate there yeah um so again thinking of say if someone came to you and said you know I'm looking to set up a customer a help desk customer support function what are your top five tips what would be your kind of top five tips for that you would give somebody uh who starting new uh keep it simple um sometimes you can be given a portal link and there's a hundred different buttons you can press on it and and it's just a bit overwhelming if someone's to get yeah you just want some help there um uh keep knowledge bases another thing that really irritates me is when I'm trying to get support myself you bring up a form you put in your name your problem the application you're using and then you get someone going hi how can I help well I told you what I need please don't make me ask again because yeah it's not um what else would I say um I'll just have the right team in place as well um the last thing you want is for a ticket to be sat there especially if it's a high priority one and you kind of in the background you're not sure who to pass it to so just make sure you got your internal processes in place as well and um men feedback yeah I was about to say feedback for those as well so just to ensure especially when you're first starting out you're always tweaking you're always improving and the best way to do that is feedback so just make sure you have that in there as well I think they the main points yeah and I think the other one you mentioned earlier it was automate you know um automation you can you can over automate of course but some automation is is always desirable rather than everyone having to do anything manually um right so final thing to ask you about and it's all I'm afraid it's one of those topics that it actually irritates me a little bit right because uh it's been around for some time but AI artificial intelligence it's worth just talking a little bit about that so obviously atasan intelligence is now available as part of the JSM platform obviously in my role I talk to a lot of customers and Prospects about it where do you see atlasic intelligence and even AI in general because I know we internally use AI tools as well where do you see that helping you in your in your role yeah I mean as everyone knows there been a massive AI boom in the last couple of years and it's something that we have been looking into something that we can Implement internally but you have to tread a fine line between trying to just point your customers to a chatbot when actually a lot of our customers want that Personal Touch so we did look at um when a when a ticket comes in that request gets fed to um chat GPT that then generates its answer and then puts a comment on the ticket but I didn't really like that because as you know that I mean some of these are quite bespoke um and you need to make sure and it's just giving you more work to have to double check things so that wasn't anything that we put forward but as you mentioned we do use that kind of um AI uh internally just to double check things putting us in the right Direction I mean but actually what we will use customer facing I don't there's nothing at the moment there I mean that I know there's virtual agents that um alasan use currently yeah um but again you're kind of being pointed somewhere and you need a bit of knowledge before you start asking it yeah again that's something that we just want to offer the help helping hand to the customer so right now we're not making any big changes around that but there are there is stuff happening in the back end that we use yeah yeah and I think um that's been my experience as well actually you know with other customers is that the people who like the idea of the V virtual agent tend to be service managers and the people who don't like virtual agents are actually the real customers so uh you have to be very very careful quite gentle with the way in which you use Virtual agents and where they can be useful is doing sort of where a customer doesn't know what they want you can sometimes give them a little bit of a nudge in the right direction with it but yeah then it's no never going to solve the problem and you mentioned some of the other stuff um yeah I think behind the scenes things like AI Ops you know the ability kind of filter you know for the AI to kind of you know work out where you're getting lots of thoughts being raised in the same thing or something which is at last in our adding soon which called customer sentiment you probably haven't seen that yet what it will do is it will read the ticket and then it will basically give you a suggestion as as to what it thinks the customer is asking so it can kind of help with vague questions I guess but um I think you're right I think using AI in a very careful and selective way is the way to proceed yeah uh any other sort of you know you mentioned you're rep platforming to a to a new Cloud instance any any other exciting things that you're looking to try to do with your your customer support yeah the the main one that's kind of coming with it is a live chat feature so that's an add-on we're from appfire that we're going to be implementing we've tested um and we've put processes in place uh obviously it's fair it's it's hard to say how it will pick up it may be that we just get one or two or maybe we get quite a few um so it's a bit of an unknown at the moment um because we are quite a small team so it's not like we're going to be able to handle that many and we're still working to SLA so the difficulty is well your SLA is we're responding four hours where you can't really respond in four hours on a live chat you you kind of expect someone to get back to you within a few minutes yeah so it's so it's just um getting that expectation in place really okay well yeah um Good Luck to good luck with that um if people want to find out more about you know the customer service that you provide um what should they look for where should they go uh if you I mean the simplest way would just be Google EO total support and that'll bring you to our website and the products and what it offers and um that's where my team sits brilliant right thanks so much James so so we'll wrap things up there um so as usual if you're enjoying these shows then pleas please do share these uh vasts with your friends and 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