8 Tips for Help Desk and Tech Support Success

8 Tips for Help Desk and Tech Support Success. Tackling the more technical side of customer service can be tricky at times. Directing customers to helpful resources—like video tutorials, step-by-step instructions, and user forums—that provide immediate answers to common tech problems can be a great way to speed things along. Figuring out a customer’s level of technical expertise makes it easier to point your team’s response in the right direction. Previous tickets may have notes that let you direct customers to a better solution or fast-track them to the right department to better solve their issues. 5) Direct customers to self-service solutions like Q&A, forums, and video Cultivating a variety of self-service options that provide solutions to common problems can be a powerful way to cut down on the time spent on individual support tickets. 7) Make it easy for customers to follow up Nobody likes getting what seems to be a good solution to their problem only to find that it doesn’t actually solve it—after they’ve already hung up or waited hours for an email response. To avoid this, make sure customers are given a quick way to follow up if their issue persists and requires further assistance, whether that’s a direct phone line to the agent who helped them initially or an email address. 8) Be prepared to escalate tougher support requests Agents who serve as the first point of contact for tech-centric customer support inquiries should become experts at gauging the difficulty level of a request, so they can be prepared to escalate the support ticket to the appropriate team members with the right expertise and skill to troubleshoot more involved customer challenges. Successful help desk and tech support is all about tackling challenges as they come and finding ways to make life easier for customers while solving their high-tech troubles in a hurry.

Author: Nathan Meunier / Source: Business 2 Community

Tackling the more technical side of customer service can be tricky at times. When customers need a more specific solution to a tech challenge, there’s value in knowing how to resolve the problem in the fastest, most effective way. While many of the same core principles of customer service apply, help desk and tech support often require a more specialized touch to master.

It’s worth noting that many companies roll the help desk and tech support roles together. In general, however, help desk is most frequently considered the first line of defense for handling initial customer contact and more easily remedied tech issues, while tech support is the more specialized second tier that tougher problems get escalated to for resolutions that require deeper expertise.

A customer support ticket that comes in through phone, email, or any other channel your team uses will most often hit the help desk, where an agent will work to resolve the issue or gauge whether it needs to be escalated higher up the knowledge ladder. If it’s a simple solution—for example, if a customer purchased a product that’s missing a key component and they’d like a replacement part it’ll get resolved at the help desk level.

If a customer is experiencing more in-depth problems with a product that help desk doesn’t have a workable solution for, however, their inquiry would be bumped up to tech support. For example, if a device is acting unusual and normal steps to reboot or reset the device aren’t working, an agent with more intimate technical knowhow on the product can help tackle the problem.

Depending on your company, your products, and your team makeup, help desk and tech support might be either consolidated into one role or broken down further into a larger number of tiers or departments for each role or product line.

Whatever your approach, here’s a selection of top tips to help boost the techie side of your customer support team.

1) Identify and evaluate the problem level

Customer issues of a more technical nature can run the gamut in terms of complexity and ease of resolution, which is why it’s important to pinpoint the problem immediately and quickly evaluate whether it’s something that can potentially be solved with a simple fix. On one end of the spectrum, a customer might simply need instructions on how to recover a lost password or directions to return a defective product for replacement. On the upper end, they might need to troubleshoot an unexpected device failure or report a software-halting glitch they’ve encountered that’s never been seen before.

Directing customers to helpful resources—like video tutorials, step-by-step instructions, and user forums—that provide immediate answers to common tech problems can be a great way to speed things along. However, it’s also useful to identify more complex issues early on so they can be routed to team members with the proper expertise to solve them.