Improve Support – Reduce Costs. Help Desk Solutions that Affect Both Sides of the Equation.

These days, customers expect nothing less than excellent customer service. If you can’t meet those expectations, customers will respond with their dollars and cents by taking their business elsewhere. To compete in today’s economy, not to mention have a chance to experience real growth, it’s time you take customer support seriously. Consider this sobering fact: according to Microsoft’s 2016 State of Global Customer Service Report, 68% of 18-34-year-old consumers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single poor customer service experience. Yes, you read that correctly. One, single negative experience and a customer will turn to your competition! Due to poor customer service, companies lose an estimated $41 billion every year.

But all hope is not lost. By arming your support center and help desk with the best tools, you can deliver exceptional customer service which can keep customers loyal to your brand. Gartner predicts that by next year, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer service innovations. So, what solutions should you invest in for 2017? We’re about to tell you.

Help Your Customers Help Themselves

Self-service has been the trend for the last couple of years and the number of tech solutions available reflect the growing popularity of it amongst users. When you give your customer effective tools to solve their problems on their own, you empower them. You give them freedom. They don’t have to wait for business hours, hold on a call or wait for a technician to come over. A self-service option offers the least amount of friction and frustration. The better your self-service is, the more issues can be resolved by more customers on their own. When that works you achieve the impossible – improving customer satisfaction while lowering the costs of support. In the long term, an investment in a good self-service portal and corresponding technologies will give you a significant ROI. And, if your brand is focusing on millennials, a self-service portal is even more crucial as 84% of this generation uses it as their go-to source for information.

Building a self service portal is not as hard as it sounds and there are plenty of tools out there to help you from major brands such as Oracle and BMC to smaller start-ups such as HappyFox, Helpjuice and Solvvy. These companies and others give you different configurations and solutions, starting with a complete portal and ticketing system to an evolved knowledge base solution that will integrate with your CRM. Finding the best solution is a subject for a different article and requires some research, but the benefits are immense. The ideal solution will help you with FAQ pages, community forums, a knowledge base, video support sections and possibly bot solutions as well as managing the transition from the self-service portal to a human agent.

Make sure your self-service portal is mobile friendly either through your dedicated app or through a mobile responsive website that customers can access from any device they own. Monitor the success of your content and self-service capabilities and constantly update it to make sure you have the right content that helps customers find a resolution including step-by-step instructions and video tutorials. Every time you release an update for your product, make sure you include relevant information in your help center and review the documentation often. A good help center is always evolving just like your company and product.

Augmented Reality Just Got Real and Accessible

No matter how complete your self-service portal is, some of your customers will need your support center to resolve their problems. Often that happens when the problem is more complex and requires some real technical assistance. Even the most well-informed agents are challenged when having to resolve technical issues by relying on their customer’s verbal descriptions only. Customer frustration intensifies when there is a communication barrier. Poor communication leads to misunderstandings, and that leads to unresolved issues and an unhappy customer which is detrimental to your business.

What you need to turn this type of situation around is remote visual support. This allows your agents to see exactly what your customer is seeing by utilizing the camera on the customer’s mobile device. All of the sudden, your agent and customer see the same view. However, not all remote visual support products are created equal.

Enter augmented reality (AR) – a game-changing technology when it comes to remote visual support. In a nutshell, augmented reality allows for the layering of actual reality as captured live with virtual objects and markups. Practically speaking, AR enables your agent to mark up, annotate and point out in real-time at the actions your customer needs to do to solve their issue. By equipping your support staff with an AR solution such as the one provided by Techsee, your support center will see improvements across all performance KPIs (First Call Resolution, Tech Dispatch Rate, etc.) while increasing customer satisfaction, not too mention keeping your support operation miles ahead of the competition by using cutting edge technology. It’s a win-win solution that can’t be beat.

Summary

With the growth of big data analytics and the rise of social media as a platform for customers to communicate with and about brands, businesses must adjust to a reality where good customer service, which drives customer satisfaction and brand sentiment, are now a measurable function of the organization. More than ever before, businesses can measure the ROI of a customer service solution beyond the constraints of the call center. They can measure the effect of a good customer service solution on new accounts and on customer churn. That ability to measure real ROI makes customer service solutions a topic of conversation in the corporate C-suite and in P&L meetings which drives a dramatic increase in the demand and therefore the offerings in the marketplace.

Augmented Visual Support and Self Service Portal are two help desk solutions with proven ROI and significant value to the bottom line of any business using them. They work because they affect both sides of the equation. They lower the costs of providing support while improving success rates and customer satisfaction.If you haven’t implemented them yet, you should before 2017 is over.

This post was originally published on TechSee Blog