The Challenge
Support Services organizations play an important role in your customer’s ability to effectively use your product. Are your customers able to get the help and support they need quickly and easily? When building a support strategy, it is important to understand how your customers want to be served. How many times have you heard a customer ask, “Why do I have to be on the phone for an issue like this?” It is imperative for a Support Services organization to understand their customers and the issues they face. Imagine if you knew, based on the customer and the issue, which channel would be most effective for a particular situation – and then had a process in place to drive (not force) the customer to that channel. The end result would be a better experience for the customer and the agent.
Our Solution and Approach
Overall Channel Optimization
Do you recognize which issues are most readily resolved in each channel? Do you help guide your customers to those channels based on who they are or what issue they face? We can help you optimize your channels by identifying the right time and place for each incident and setting up the environment to guide the customer in that direction.
Just as important, have we properly factored in cost into our channel optimization strategy? RTM Consulting and its unique ‘Shift to the Left Strategy’ can help your support teams ‘shift’ more support needs and incident handling from high cost channels to low cost channels.
Channel Scheduling
Do you struggle with the balance of scheduling agents for phone, chat, email and social support? Do your agents handle multiple channels? Do they prioritize these channels? RTM Consulting will review your scheduling practices, recommend changes to optimize that practice and lead programs to reinvent your scheduling and optimization of your agents.
Remote Solutions Support
New and innovative methods and technologies have made remote solutions support a much more effective channel for customer support than ever before. From on-line diagnostics, self-healing solutions, automated updates and much more, are making remote solutions support appealing to customers wanting fast solutions, and providers wanting to offer better customer services at the lowest possible cost. What is your company doing today to take advantage of remote solutions support?
Forums and Self-Help Optimization
Do you have a self-help strategy? Do you know what your customers want to resolve themselves? How do you publish content to these sites? Who answers these issues? Do you take advantage of a volunteer workforce from your other customers? We can help you implement self-help and forums or provide guidance to your existing programs based on industry best practices.
Chat Optimization
Do your customers utilize chat? Do you recognize what issues you want to stream through chat? Are you able to schedule chat analysts effectively? For an existing chat environment, we can compare and contrast your operation with industry best practices. Or, if you are just beginning, we can help select the right tool that meets your needs and your customer’s needs.
Live Agent
Live agents/analysts/engineers are among the most expensive investments for a service desk. Are you effectively getting the right person in the right place at the right time? Do you effectively capture non-productive (off-phone) time? RTM Consulting can help you more efficiently manage your investment in human capital.
The email channel by itself is an inefficient model without proper design. RTM Consulting can help make this model more efficient by reviewing and making recommendations on workflow and tools enabling agents to be more effective.
Telephony
There are many options for your telephony environment, both technologically and process related, you can utilize to be more effective. The telephony channel has many variables which can be optimized to reduce costs and improve performance, from agent scheduling to technology infrastructure. RTMC can help companies reduce their technology costs and make their agents and customers more effective.
Social Media
Social Media is the newest channel trend for customers to report issues to the service desk. To maintain loyal customers, it is vital for companies to have a social monitoring presence. RTMC can help companies set up monitoring strategies in the social sphere from recommending tools through operational start-up.
Summary
Support Services Organizations that don’t recognize the importance they play with the customer will not be in business very long. Forcing customers to a specific channel rarely works. RTM Consulting’s team of industry experts in Contact Channel Management can help your team with recommendations for improvement and drive these initiatives to completion. RTM Consulting will assess your environment versus our proven framework that will help you deliver services required to build loyalty and grow revenue at the lowest possible cost.
Contact RTM Consulting to gain access to our insights and experience with this critical aspect of running your business.