With the launch of SupportAwards, it has been great to see the increase in awareness for customer support and service.  I’ve been searching twitter every night looking for mentions of great customer support or service and recommending that they nominate the company for a support award.  If you get a message from @supportawards, it isn’t automated, I’m manually going through and replying to everyone.  While going through the tweets it has also gotten me thinking about the strategy behind customer support/service along with how a department can improve their customer support.  There are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to optimizing your support department, but ultimately I believe if your support agents truly have the desire and the tools to help people, then that is the foundation to a great support team.  This is one of the biggest mistakes large companies make when evaluating their customer support resources.  They attack it as a numbers game as opposed to an impact game.

Think of it this way:  A company is expanding and runs the equation, a standard support rep can handle x amount of cases an hour with the mean time for a case being x minutes.  If we look at the upcoming launch we figure that we will need x amount of agents to handle the expected number of calls/emails coming in.  Now while these numbers are beneficial to have, as it is good to have a handle on the sheer volume and time to resolution(ttr), it is also good to survey the issues that are common with the cases, how to be proactive about the issues to reduce the number of calls to customer support, and then following up with the customers after the fact to ensure that they were in fact pleased with the resolution of their case.  I believe in 100% customer satisfaction.  This doesn’t mean that you will not encounter an unhappy customer, but after working with the customer, they should be happy with the resolution.  The customer shouldn’t be unhappy after a case has been deemed resolved by the agent.  This is a tough policy to enforce because there can be some real tough cookies out there as far as cases, and customer support agents have to deal with more than just the customers: i.e. internal procedures/processes, the product team, and the pure limitations on control that the agent has over the issue.  But if the agent/company strives to ensure 100% satisfaction with their customers then that will help improve retention, it will make the customer more willing to accept issues/wait for a resolution(which helps keep the product team on a normal cycle), and it will make it easier for your support agents to work with the customers as the customer will know that the agent has the best intentions in mind.

If you run a large customer support department  (i.e. call center) then this may seem idealistic. You may be right, but I also believe that corporations view that they can solve a lot of issues by throwing volume and processes at it, instead of through compassion and care for the customer.

This is one of the main reasons I started support awards, I wanted to bring to light the hard working departments and agents out there that really do care about helping people and making a difference.  I encourage you to nominate a company at Support Awards for outstanding customer support.  If you have already nominated one, nominate another one.  Any company that works hard to help customers should be recognized.  Nominate Today!