I’m sure many of you have had the experience of trying to help a friend or family member solve a technology problem over the phone. I know I certainly have, particularly when it comes to helping my father solve a problem that’s he’s been having with his computer at home.
My experience is complicated by the fact that my dad has a PC, he’s not the most tech-savvy individual, and for the last few years, I have mainly been a Mac user.
So, to help him I have to ask him to describe what he is trying to do, what has happened, what he sees and what messages he has seen so I can try and build a picture in my mind of what is going on and how I might be able to help him.
After those calls, I can often feel a little drained, given the amount of effort it sometimes takes to understand and imagine what he is seeing so that I can then help him.
That’s one of the reasons why I have so much respect for folks that work in customer service and support who have to handle numerous calls and queries like this on a daily basis.
The work they do is hard. It takes effort, imagination, tenacity and resilience.
As a result, it should come as no surprise that some customer service and support teams have to replace between 30 and 45 percent of their people every year often due to the stresses and strains that come with the job.
Therefore, imagine having a tool that could help bridge that initial understanding gap and where your service or support agents could watch an instant replay of everything that a customer has tried to do in the last few minutes on your site or in your app.
Imagine the impact on your first call resolution or the time it would take to diagnose and solve a customer’s problem, never mind the effect on the satisfaction of your customers.
Well, recently I spoke to Yaron Morgenstern, Chief Executive Officer, and Audelia Boker, the Global VP of Marketing, of Glassbox who told me that they have developed technology that does just that. What they have done is build an application in their experience optimization and analytics suite that allows an agent to quickly watch a replay of a customer’s website or app session to see what they have been trying to do and where they have been struggling. This facility allows the agent to understand the customer’s problem quickly and to see it from their perspective.
I think this is fascinating technology as it could really help agents get a quicker and better understanding of their customers problems, allowing them to provide faster and better solutions.
If it also helps to alleviate some of the stress and pressure that service and support professionals often experience and that, in turn, helps reduce agent turnover, then what’s not to like?
Now, in recent years, we have seen a lot of technological developments aimed at delivering enhanced experiences for customers. However, recently, I’ve noticed more and more applications, like this one from Glassbox, that are enabling those that work in customer service or support.
This is good news.
While customers will increasingly choose to self-serve or engage with automated technology to get the service they want, we should not forget that when things get complicated or hard, they will still reach out to agents. Therefore, anything we can do to help those agents do a great job will only contribute to better outcomes.
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This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
