Support Desks
Many of you are interested in the fine art of operating a Support Desk. After witnessing a multitude of support desks over the years I began feeling somewhat of an expert on the subject .As a result I decided to write a little manual on this and other webmaster related subjects.
I use some example situations that are specific to a hosting company but the principles are the same regardless of what type of service you are operating on the Internet.You will find that all Internet companies use these same proven techniques.
Chapter 1:Planning Your Support Desk.
The first important thing to do is to plan your support desk.
1)Do not overload your ticket system:
Do not make an obvious link to it on your home page.If you feel obligated to include a link on your index page, put it in very small text in your footer or hidden amongst a forest of other links.The purpose of this is to delay ticket submission as long as possible and potential overload of your helpdesk ticket system.
You can lighten the load on your ticket system by including a link button to a 24/7 support chat system. Be careful not to do this if you actually have 24/7 chat support.In your chat box enter the following: "Thank you for contacting support. All of our operators are busy answering other customers and will be with you shortly." Customers will appreciate that they are important among the hundreds of other customers you apparently have.
Another method of keeping ticket submission to minimum is to show a 24/7 phone support number on your site with a picture of a friendly girl in a phone headset.This is only possible however, if your operation is big enough to have a phone line dedicated to playing a revolving sequence of "your call is important to us" and some loud music.
2)Give your support desk a professional quality:
Set up different departments in your support system.This is especially true if only one person such as yourself will be manning the support desk. The more specialized each department is the better, and this also gives your service a sense of being a massive enterprise and having people skilled in dealing with all types of requests.Common names for departments could be technical,billing,sales,legal, product development,public relations,affiliates etc.
If a ticket is sent to the wrong department plan on returning the to ticket to the customer advising them of their error, and directing them to the proper department. This solidifies the corporate feeling to your service as well, by making it seem that it is much quicker for them to re-submit a ticket then for you to try shuffle and loose their ticket in your company communications.
3)Setting up priority response:
Because your support desk may be flooded with 2-3 or more requests a day it is often necessary to let customers know that problems will be dealt with on a urgency-priority basis. In a later chapter we will discuss the use of a drop down menu for ticket priority status. For now it is sufficient to know that this is window dressing. Seasoned veterans of support desk ticket systems will all tell you priority is always given to the easiest queries first thus keeping the clutter of unresponded tickets to a minimum.
4)Ticket response signatures:
A well managed support desk requires that all requests be handled in a manner specialized to that particular operation of your service. Because a small operation cannot staff in this manner does not mean that you can not provide specialized support. It just means that one must wear many hats and keep the departments as separate as possible to provide the type of service required. Billing questions must be answered in a very special way, usually much different than a technical response (as a for instance).
This is often facilitated by having different signatures to the responses. Try sticking to geeky sounding names on tech support such as T.J., Mike or Matt. For Billing use signatures like Mr.H.G.Humprey,Billing Supervisor. Similar signatures should be well thought out for the other depts. The use of separate signatures helps categorize and keep your companies tickets from getting confused as well.
5)Auto responders:
Absolutely critical in any ticket support system is the use of an auto responder. This allows you to tell the customer that their ticket is received and resolution is well under way.
This also enables you to advertise a fast response time to support requests and reassures customers from re-contacting while you sleep because they know their problem is being dealt with.
Remember that the key to a well run site or Internet business is the support customers receive. You will find the principles discussed here are universally accepted in most sites.
Source: webmaster-manual(see Signature)
Many of you are interested in the fine art of operating a Support Desk. After witnessing a multitude of support desks over the years I began feeling somewhat of an expert on the subject .As a result I decided to write a little manual on this and other webmaster related subjects.
I use some example situations that are specific to a hosting company but the principles are the same regardless of what type of service you are operating on the Internet.You will find that all Internet companies use these same proven techniques.
Chapter 1:Planning Your Support Desk.
The first important thing to do is to plan your support desk.
1)Do not overload your ticket system:
Do not make an obvious link to it on your home page.If you feel obligated to include a link on your index page, put it in very small text in your footer or hidden amongst a forest of other links.The purpose of this is to delay ticket submission as long as possible and potential overload of your helpdesk ticket system.
You can lighten the load on your ticket system by including a link button to a 24/7 support chat system. Be careful not to do this if you actually have 24/7 chat support.In your chat box enter the following: "Thank you for contacting support. All of our operators are busy answering other customers and will be with you shortly." Customers will appreciate that they are important among the hundreds of other customers you apparently have.
Another method of keeping ticket submission to minimum is to show a 24/7 phone support number on your site with a picture of a friendly girl in a phone headset.This is only possible however, if your operation is big enough to have a phone line dedicated to playing a revolving sequence of "your call is important to us" and some loud music.
2)Give your support desk a professional quality:
Set up different departments in your support system.This is especially true if only one person such as yourself will be manning the support desk. The more specialized each department is the better, and this also gives your service a sense of being a massive enterprise and having people skilled in dealing with all types of requests.Common names for departments could be technical,billing,sales,legal, product development,public relations,affiliates etc.
If a ticket is sent to the wrong department plan on returning the to ticket to the customer advising them of their error, and directing them to the proper department. This solidifies the corporate feeling to your service as well, by making it seem that it is much quicker for them to re-submit a ticket then for you to try shuffle and loose their ticket in your company communications.
3)Setting up priority response:
Because your support desk may be flooded with 2-3 or more requests a day it is often necessary to let customers know that problems will be dealt with on a urgency-priority basis. In a later chapter we will discuss the use of a drop down menu for ticket priority status. For now it is sufficient to know that this is window dressing. Seasoned veterans of support desk ticket systems will all tell you priority is always given to the easiest queries first thus keeping the clutter of unresponded tickets to a minimum.
4)Ticket response signatures:
A well managed support desk requires that all requests be handled in a manner specialized to that particular operation of your service. Because a small operation cannot staff in this manner does not mean that you can not provide specialized support. It just means that one must wear many hats and keep the departments as separate as possible to provide the type of service required. Billing questions must be answered in a very special way, usually much different than a technical response (as a for instance).
This is often facilitated by having different signatures to the responses. Try sticking to geeky sounding names on tech support such as T.J., Mike or Matt. For Billing use signatures like Mr.H.G.Humprey,Billing Supervisor. Similar signatures should be well thought out for the other depts. The use of separate signatures helps categorize and keep your companies tickets from getting confused as well.
5)Auto responders:
Absolutely critical in any ticket support system is the use of an auto responder. This allows you to tell the customer that their ticket is received and resolution is well under way.
This also enables you to advertise a fast response time to support requests and reassures customers from re-contacting while you sleep because they know their problem is being dealt with.
Remember that the key to a well run site or Internet business is the support customers receive. You will find the principles discussed here are universally accepted in most sites.
Source: webmaster-manual(see Signature)
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