What ails customer technical support

Here is a blog on why tech support sucks by Zac Garrett. He claims that lack of money and outsourcing are some of the reasons why tech support sucks.

Here is my take on this as well as CRM in general based on my experiences with the Customer help line of a bank and a broadband service provider.

I needed to order a cheque book. I knew only this and nothing else. Not the “TIN” or “IPIN” or anything. I called up the bank’s phonebanking and said to them that I knew just my customer id and nothing else. The friendly operator verified my credentials by asking few supplementary questions, placed an order for chequebook, bridged me to a “TIN” generator and helped to get a “TIN”. I felt so very happy after this transaction. Customer Relationship Nirvana.

I also had a chance to interact with customer helpline of the broadband service provider. This is a different ball game altogether. They too seem to have a CRM software in place. They identify the caller based on the phone number and also know about the detail of the equipment supplied and also have instructions for doing simple things. The operator at the frontend even bridges to the technical helpline in case of complex problems. But from here CRM breaks very badly. Here we were giving symptoms upon symptoms and that guy seemed to be in a different wavelength. He was asking us to navigate to Start>Programs etc trying to get the problem solved. It is wortwhile to say that as we kept on giving the symptoms the solution seemed to be getting more complex than simple.

Managing an IT services team, I can understand how difficult it is to troubleshoot problems remotely. The situation becomes complex because the solution to the problem is dependent on a lot of variables some of which would have been altered by the customer. And then we have varying types of customers from the dumb to a geek and it is very difficult to match the frequencies with the right person without knowing him intimately.

It was no surprise that the gentleman beside me during the call, who obviously was a non techie, got wild after the interaction with the technical person. His comment was that customer support was all about generating multiple fancy ticket numbers to a same problem and reconfirming the problem to the help desk multiple times if only to assure that we reported the problem correctly. The problem was solved after an onsite visit by the technical person, but not before a lot of goodwill was lost.

While Zac’s blog covers only the latter case, I deliberately brought in the Bank scenario to understand why customer support can be such a negative experience.

In general customer support works when processes are strictly defined and the variables are few. But once you have lot of variables customer support sucks.

Most importantly in tech support the success or failure depends on the person who handles the call. It is the person rather than the system that determines the customer support experience. More importantly he should be experienced enough to run through lot of use cases before the patience of the customer runs out. This comes only with experience.

But as Zac explains, there are not many experienced people in technical support. Just a few days before I had a chance to read this article which throws light on why it is the norm. The customer support technicians are our favourite whipping boys. No wonder they fly at the earliest available opportunity.

Quality comes with passion and dedication. Usually the customer support executives are on the fringes of the organization and are treated very lowly by their colleagues in their own organization. As the company grows bigger these people are relegated to even inferior positions or their jobs outsourced. So the bigger the company worser the customer support. As long as the company thinks that customer support is a cost center, the situation is not going to improve.

PS: Here is a supplementary to this post on how the recent developments in remote management technology can be an enabler in improving the customer support experience.