Technical support employees probably have the highest turnover rate in the entire IT industry. Finding a good technical support specialist is difficult, and a newbie, after working for several months, tends to move to less hectic positions. Technical support often takes on the negative emotions of users. Enduring a flood of negativity day after day is hard, but not necessary. Much in communication with users depends on the behavior of the employee himself. What should a technical support employee do so that his work is not so hard?
Give the user hope that you will help them.
For you, a user's call is a new appeal. The user has already spent enough time on his problem - attempts to figure it out on his own, waiting for telephone line, and perhaps he has already been kicked off a couple of times with phone calls to various IT services. Should we be surprised at the initially negative attitude? Finally, listen to what his problem is, and only then proceed to the formal filling out of the application - finding out the identity of the user, department / company / contract number, etc. Notably, support scripts often offer the opposite.
Before you tackle a problem, make sure you're tackling the right problem.
You can spend half an hour trying to figure out a problem that doesn't exist. The first thing to do is to make sure that the situation that the user sees is not part of a larger incident that he has not yet noticed.
For example, the user calls with an appeal "My mouse is stuck."
One scenario is to find out: optical or mechanical, wired or wireless, whether the diode glows and whether it glowed before, etc. Talk for 20 minutes, and you may never get to the problem.
Let's try to go from the other end: “So, your mouse is not working, but everything else on the computer is working fine? For example, try switching to another program using the "alt» + « Tab” or start the program from the start menu with “ctrl»+« Esc"and shooter".
If everything works, then you can try to find out what happened to the mouse. If not, then the mouse has nothing to do with it and you need to deal with the computer already.
It is not necessary to find out what the user has already done.
A typical stereotype that technical support employees are subject to is that 80% of user problems are corrected by the phrase “Have you tried turning it off and on?”. Well, yes, it often works. At the same time, most users are familiar enough with the computer to take these steps on their own.
They answer “Yes” without even thinking about your every “Have you already tried…”
Have you tried turning it off and on?
- Yes
Did you hold down and when you pressed ?”
- Yes
Did you hold the computer over your head while performing the ritual dance?
- Yes
Instead of asking what the user has already done, it is much more efficient to give the user a task that he needs to do right now and talk to him about what he saw. Effective Method- go through the steps all the way the user to his mistakes, for example, by running the same programs. If the error appears on your computer, then this is a good reason to escalate the incident to other specialists.
Technical support should use the same working environment as most users.
You can't land tech support on Linux if the users are on Windows. You shouldn't migrate your IT department to Windows 8 if your company is still actively using Windows XP. It is very important for a technical support employee to have an environment close to the one that the user has on the computer. So he can predict the normal behavior of the computer and tell the user the right steps. The working environment of a computer is the best clue in any situation, if you at least roughly know what to do.
Don't pretend you know more than you really do
Many users believe that technical support should know absolutely everything about computers and software. You and I know that there are no such people among those who work on the first line, but many are trying to pretend to be them. Often tech support tries to guess the right solution. As a result, a couple of unsuccessful guesses and you completely lose the trust of users. What to do? Parity is the best policy. If you don't know the solution and can't hand the user over to someone who does, then try to figure out the situation with the user. Search the Internet, ask if the user found a solution there, try to go through this solution together with the user. Many feel stupid and insecure when dealing with tech support. Engaging the user in finding a solution can give them confidence and increase their satisfaction with technical support.
empathy
Empathy is a very intangible concept. However, for example, the advice to smile when answering a phone does work. Users feel your attitude. Unfortunately, empathy for user problems is not a quality that distinguishes most services. technical support. Indeed, what kind of sympathy can a person who cannot even turn on a computer without outside help arouse. On the other hand, it is enough for most users to explain the correct procedure once in an accessible way in order to avoid their requests in the future. Technical support employees should more often remember that they also do not know much and do not know how, which is generally a completely normal situation.
Your goal is to make the user happy.
IT professionals in most cases do not consider themselves educators kindergarten for users. Even jokes when communicating with users are most often specific and little understood by “mere mortals”. There is such a good, but gradually out of circulation word Help Desk - help desk, however, the option with the support service is also not bad. The task of technical support is to help and support users. If users end the conversation happy, then you will most likely feel satisfied with good work, which means that it will be much easier to work.
Video help
This video contains the following information:
— General information about the project;
– Registration procedure in the network of Orthodox sites Prihod.ru;
— Authorization in the network of Orthodox sites Prihod.ru;
— How to create your first website on the web;
— Filling out the site registration form;
— Basic information about site templates.
If you have already created a site, then hover over "My Sites" in the lower left corner and select "Add Site" from the drop-down menu.
To create a site, you need to fill out a special form. It is in this form that data is collected for the catalog of churches and the global map of Orthodox churches, the position of the organization in the church hierarchy is established.
You can edit the entered data in the site console in the "Registration" section.
Site registration form
When filling in the fields on the left in the black window, a hint appears on how to fill in this field. If you entered erroneous data, a notification will also be displayed in red font.
Help tab. On the "Help" tab, you are offered a link to a video that explains how to fill in the fields during registration. If you do not have the opportunity to view it, you can use this instruction.
Also on the "Help" tab, you will be asked to select the main language of the site.
To proceed to registration, click the "Next" button.
First step. In the first step of registration, you need to specify general information About the site.
First, select a country, it depends on which domain your site will be located on. Each site on Prihod.ru is given a third-level domain name. For Ukraine, this domain is church.ua, for all other countries - cerkov.ru or for Orthodox organizations pravorg.ru. In the future, you can.
Please note that our project creates only official websites of churches, monasteries, deaneries, dioceses and their organizations. Sites created on the independent initiative of users without the blessing of the rector are not published in the network of Orthodox sites Prihod.ru.
Site name (domain) - specify the name that your site will have. Click the "Check" button to see if this domain is available for registration.
If you do not plan to use it as the main one and you have your own domain that you will bind, or you are creating a trial site, do not take good domains (for example, pokrov), leave them to those users who will use these names as the main ones.
Note! Sites related to Ukrainian Orthodox Church, must have domain name on church.ua(for example, yourHram.church.ua).
So, you will get a domain name like domain.cerkov.ru, domain.pravorg.ru or domain.church.ua.
We do not recommend giving the full name of the church (Local Orthodox Religious Organization ‘The Parish of the Church of So-and-so’), because it turns out a very long name, it confuses unenlightened laymen. It is better to indicate this: ‘The Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, the village of Dobroe’.
Second step. On the second step
A site template is a stub site that has a specific set of sections and settings. The use of templates does not in any way limit the possibilities for creating sites, but it makes it easier to start working on a project, saves time, offers well-developed information structures of sites, contains recommendations and examples for content that can be changed and supplemented at your discretion. If you want to create everything yourself from scratch, you can choose the first template - it contains only one page.
Below each template is short description its features. The template is set by default. .
It is impossible to change the template already in the process of working on the site, but you can simply delete unnecessary pages, categories and posts or add new ones. The most cardinal option is to completely delete the site and create it again.
How to customize themes, work with site content, configure side columns and menus is described in detail in the section, there select the desired section in the right column.
Third step. In the third step, you need to fill in information about the temple or organization whose website you are creating.
One of the key points of any business is communication with customers, in the Internet this is expressed in the form of technical, informational and other support. Many hosting, registrars, online stores, affiliate programs and other services that provide services have a person or a group of people on their staff who communicate with customers, answer questions, etc. For a small site, this can be organized using regular mail, but if we talk about small, medium and big business, the situation is much more complicated. Here, one simply cannot do without a special software. Generally in Lately I often see how Internet companies change self-written scripts for ready-made products. Today we will talk about one of these solutions - Support Desk service is a new and one of the few projects in RuNet for creating and organizing professional service support.
In general, support can be organized both for the classic case (hosting), and for example, when communicating with clients (customers) in any other business. All requests from them will be sent to you not by e-mail, but in the admin panel of the service, while, of course, you can split requests into categories and even appoint a responsible employee for each of them. Instead of being scattered in different directions (mail, tickets, icq), it would be logical to start all these flows in the Support-Desk and sort them there depending on the topic of the appeal. For example, all commercial offers, you read cooperation issues yourself, payment invoices automatically go to the accounting department, and user questions go to technical support.
All this is quite convenient both in use and in configuration. You can create your own support service from scratch using Support-Desk and understand it in 10 minutes. Of course, you will have to spend time filling in typical answers to questions, adding employees, etc., but the actual installation is very simple, no special knowledge is needed. Availability is one of the most important advantages of the service., everything is clear, there are tips, documentation and even video tutorials.
There are no questions about the functionality of Support-Desk either, it provides the entire basic necessary set of functions for such projects:
- Convenient correspondence with advanced features (statuses, redirection, personal comments for administrators).
- Departments and sub-departments for processing letters with different topics (support, complaints, payments) + setting user access rights to them.
- Database of answers to typical questions with categories, comments, ratings of answers, as well as selections of favorites and popular entries. It is also possible to search the database.
- Employee management- adding, access rights, activity statistics, etc.
- Gmail integration- will allow you to completely transfer all mail related to technical support or site operation to the Support-Desk admin panel.
- Help Center Enhancements- internal mail, request archive, response templates with macro support.
The following presentation will help you visually evaluate the capabilities of the service that I just mentioned.
As you can see, everything is very simple and fast. To get started, you need to register on the Support-Desk.ru website. After that, the choice will be 2 tariff plans- Standard and Pro. In the first case, you can only have 2 employees who process up to 10 tickets per day + decide on your own which options you need (integration with Gmail, statistics, internal mail), etc. All the basic features of the ticket board and the database of questions are included. The cost of the Standard tariff is 5r/day, Pro will cost you 10r/day, contains more employees, tickets and all additional advanced features of the service without restrictions.
A nice feature of Support-Desk is the ability service testing before purchase. Immediately after registration 200 rubles are credited to the account and you can use them to get acquainted with the service from the inside. In fact, I took advantage of this offer. From the very beginning, you will need to set all the basic parameters for working with the system:
There are both simple options like a name, a form template, and more advanced options for working with users, departments, etc. Then you go directly to control Panel. Here, in the admin panel, there is an opportunity to examine and configure everything in more detail. The main items on the menu are:
- Tickets - a list of recent and deleted tickets.
- Account - profile settings and editing, integration with the site.
- Service management - at any time you can expand your standard tariff with the necessary functions, if necessary.
- Departments (categories of tickets) - here you can create and edit them.
- Employee management - adding, setting access rights, etc.
- Answer database management - to create a set of standard questions and answers, work with question categories and comment moderation in the same place.
- The event log is a useful option for the administrator, which allows you to see a list of all the actions of employees.
- Internal mail for quick communication between employees.
- Users - when creating an application, users are automatically registered on the site.
- The account is the history of your payments.
- Integration with mail - we use to connect Gmail.
- Settings - both for the ticket board itself, and options for managing files, stop lists, letter templates.
Actually, it is not difficult to understand this for a user who, for example, works with the same Gmail mail or simply understands the Internet. It took less than 10 minutes for the basic introduction of all parameters, viewing the Support-Desk admin panel, after which I could already see the result of my work:
If, nevertheless, problems arise, then on the Support-Desk website there is a special Help section. There are detailed video tutorials, instructions, a database of answers + the opportunity to ask your question. There is plenty of information, although again I didn’t have any particular problems with the admin panel.
- advice and assistance to customers on technical issues around the clock
- processing of technical requests from e-mail
- registration of applications for specialists of technical departments
- quality control of work performance (for example, installers) - calling customers
- call transfer to your specialist (if necessary)
- processing requests on relevant topics on the company's forum in social networks
The organization of technical support services is our strong point, as Open Line specialists have the appropriate specialized education and extensive experience in organizing such services.
The service is a service of incoming calls from subscribers with technical issues.
For your project, we will select operators with the necessary qualifications and with the appropriate education. They will greet subscribers on behalf of your company and will do everything to resolve the issue.
The company's specialists are trained and tested their knowledge and skills in the field of communications with different types subscribers, conflict resolution technologies, stress resistance skills. Periodically trainers call center Together with the Quality Service, they will conduct attestation of project employees and qualifying exams.
In the case of "particularly difficult" subscribers, it is possible to transfer the call to the senior shift or supervisor, who will work out the appeal efficiently and professionally.
Our contact center will provide you with a personal project manager who will monitor the appropriate quality of call processing from clients and generate monthly reports on the activities of agents.
Our equipment allows you to measure the peaks and drops in loads - thanks to this data, the project manager will select the optimal schedule and the amount of work of operators on your project. This will increase the availability of dialing, reduce the waiting time on the line, increase the loyalty of your subscribers.
After analyzing your business processes, the project manager will offer you the optimal call distribution scheme. In some cases, it is effective to divide calls into 2 types: general questions, which will be worked out by cheaper specialists (first line), and narrow-profile technical questions, which will be the responsibility of Technical Support engineers. This leads to optimization of costs for processing subscribers' calls and improves the situation with dialing, as it unloads the line of highly qualified specialists from calls with simple questions (for example, “where is your office located”, “its working hours”, etc.).
The high qualification of our specialists will help reduce the number of applications for your service engineers, as we will be able to resolve the issue of the subscriber remotely, without calling a specialist at home. Thus, you will not need to keep an additional number of engineers on staff, they will work with fewer applications and process them faster. Such a scheme of work will reduce your costs, increase subscribers' loyalty to you, keeping customers from the temptation to switch to competitors with the quality of the service provided, even during the period of launching special offers and promotions.
During periods of a significant increase in the flow of calls, we are ready to expand the number of operators on the line to increase the comfort of subscribers when dialing into the company.
The detailed reports generated by us on the activities of the Technical Support Service allow the Customer to increase the transparency of this process and own up-to-date data on the project.
All dialogues are recorded and archived, and in case of controversial situation You will always have the opportunity to listen to the recording of the conversation to form your objective assessment.
The advantages of using our resources compared to your specialists:
- optimization of costs for the customer service process while improving the quality of service (employee salaries, office space rental, maintenance of professional equipment)
- the possibility of withdrawing additional specialists in the event of an increase in subscriber requests
- Possibility to provide 24/7 service
- training, certification, going on vacation or illness of a specialist - the solution of all these issues lies in our area of responsibility
- Your specialists will be unloaded to solve specific profile issues
By using the service, you will receive
- reduce churn and increase customer loyalty
- statistics on incoming and received calls
- rhythms of customer requests by months, days, hours
- other types of reports upon your request
Aug 14, 2014 oleg Organization of high-quality technical support. Theory and practice.
Let's be honest - you are unlikely to wait for the moment of a call to technical support, regardless of whether you are a home or corporate user. Endless music on the phone, workers trying to forward your call to someone else, and this other one to someone else, incompetence when no one understands how it works and how to fix it - I think many of you have experienced similar horrors at least once.
As an experienced manager who has managed several technical support departments, I am well aware of these problems, in fact, they annoy me more than others simply because I know what needs to be done to organize technical support with a customer satisfaction rate of 97.5%.
Based on my experience, two key factors in building a technical support department are people and process management.
Cadres are everything.
1. Look for people who are motivated.
The support team should be composed of people who are interested in the technology they will be working with (in our case, storage and virtualization technologies) and who enjoy helping people. Identifying such people is not easy, especially if you only have 30 minutes at the interview to get to know each other better. But even during this time you can learn something, for example, from answers to questions not related to technical part. Knowing what a candidate's hobbies are outside of work can give an answer to how motivated they are. If he is doing volunteer work or any other activity aimed at helping someone is good sign. A diploma with high marks may be an indicator that the candidate is able to remember the material, but does not give us any hints about how motivated he is, what his real knowledge is, and whether he is able to work in a team.
Don't be surprised if you're given a logic puzzle in an interview - solving it in a limited amount of time can help you find out how capable a candidate is of working under time pressure - very important quality for a support person. And don't be afraid - I'm primarily interested in assessing the candidate's approach to solving it, and not in the correct answer. What matters to me is not how smart a person is in general, but how smart he is able to act in the performance of his work duties.
2.Communication.
Technical support engineers must be able to convey information concisely, clearly and in a way understandable to the client. Watching the hired people, I realized that our education system does not teach business-style communication at all - the skills of correspondence, presentation and communication with users, as well as logical thinking, and this is very important.
3. Team solidarity.
For a technical support team, it is important that its members share common values and want to do their best work. In addition, I believe that not only teamwork is important for rallying, but also team games and other entertainment. Karting, paintball, hiking, songwriting and more are what I use to build team spirit outside of work hours.
You can compare effective teamwork to a flock of fish. Scientists believe that many species of fish stick together to reduce friction on the water and save more energy when moving. In a group, it is easier for a fish to get food, since in addition to it, dozens of eyes and noses are involved in the search. Like a flock of fish, it is easier for a team with common values to overcome various problems, because joint work allows you to maximize the resources of the team, find new ways to solve problems.
Teamwork is not limited to the technical support department, as it is often necessary to interact with the engineering department, sales department, etc. to solve problems. The ability of different teams to organize joint work is very important. But, nevertheless, the most important thing is the interaction of support workers with each other, their ability to act as a single organism, the ability to provide and receive assistance.
Process management.
1.Documentation.
The work of technical support should be documented so that you can always return to the past. The processes should be simple and allow flexibility in case standard solutions are ineffective, and the main criterion here is to increase customer satisfaction.
For example, giving service engineers the ability to spend up to $500 (with a report, of course) to quickly and effective solution problems, such as sending a new piece of hardware or software with expedited shipping rather than regular shipping, have greatly improved satisfaction with our services. Properly designed and documented processes will allow an organization to track its results to see if its customers have achieved a satisfaction level of 97.5% or more.
2.Education.
The training program for technical support personnel should include as much practical material and simulations of life situations as possible. A simple study of methodological materials leads to the fact that most of them are forgotten, so I prefer a practical approach.
In our company, we have created a team guided by these factors and we will continue to work in the same spirit. We love to communicate with our clients and we consider each application an opportunity to show our company from the best side.
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