Voice Support
The telephone is the traditional tool for providing live support, and has the advantage of being fast, simple, and available to all your customers. But it also has some disadvantages that are not so obvious. It is expensive, partly due to telecom infrastructure costs, but also because an agent can only handle one voice call at a time. It is also difficult to document the actual conversations, unless you use call recording or monitoring software, such as that provided by Telrex.
If you have more than one agent taking calls, you will require the routing and queuing capability of an ACD (Automated Call Distribution) system. Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel are among the major providers of such equipment. One interesting new product is Asterisk, an open source Linux-based PBX system. Using VoIP technology can drastically reduce your phone bills, and there are even virtual PBX’s and hosted call center solutions available, such as WhitePajama.com. These solutions will allow agents to take calls anywhere in the world with a broadband Internet connection. But keep in mind that sound quality and availability will be dependant on the quality of your Internet connection.
You should always provide both a regular local number and a toll free number, because not everyone on the web will be able to access your toll free number. I don’t know how many times I have dialed a US based 800 number, only to discover it is not accessible from Canada.
Email
The average person now spends more time reading and writing email than talking on the phone. A recent study by Jupiter Research showed that 88% of consumers surveyed expect a response to email inquiries within 24 hours. The problem is that only 54% of companies meet that expectation. That is not very good customer service!
Your website contact information should be easily accessible from every webpage, and it should always include your support email address. However, you need to be aware of “email harvesters” which are constantly scouring the web for new email addresses to add to their spam databases. If you look at our Contact page at ChatAgents.com, you will notice that while the email links are visible, the actual email addresses have been hidden using JavaScript. For an explanation of the various methods of “obfuscating” your email addresses, have a look at the article “Hide From Email Spiders” at netmechanic.com.
In addition to direct email, online forms and trouble-ticketing systems are other methods of acquiring online customer support requests.
For companies receiving a high volume of email enquiries, a dedicated email management system may be justified. A good example is Cerberus Helpdesk, which offers incoming email management designed with customer support agents in mind. It can track agent performance, average response times, total handle times, and service levels.
Self-Help: FAQ’s and Website Search Tools
If a website visitor cannot find the information they need, the first thing they will look for is a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). While this is technically not a “live” customer support method, it is something that ALL websites should offer, because it is free! What I mean by free is that self-help resources don’t require any interaction with a paid employee. In it’s most basic form, a FAQ is just a list of your visitor’s most common questions and answers. Click here to see how we implemented a simple FAQ at ChatAgents.com.
For those with larger budget, a more sophisticated searchable knowledgebase such as ActiveKB by Interspire.com could be implemented. Such a knowledgebase can be made available to the public in general, or limited to your own customer support agents. Another option is to add search capability to your website using Google Free. By adding a few lines of HTML to your web pages, you can create a Google search box, which visitors can use to search your site.
Conclusion
The modern day Internet user has grown accustomed to receiving customer support through a variety of channels: Chat, voice, email, and self-help. If possible, try to make the data collected from all channels available to all your agents, regardless of which channel it originated from. Otherwise, confusion will result when an impatient customer resorts to using multiple channels in his quest for an answer, and receives a different reply back in each case.
Of all the channels, chat support offers the greatest number of benefits; including lowest cost per contact, ease of outsourcing, and a wealth of marketing data and reporting. You have the option of running the software in-house, or at a hosted service provider. Choose your chat support software carefully, as dozens of products with different features and prices are now available. Happy Chatting!
Gary Fitzpatrick
General Manager, ChatAgents.com |
