I became Support Manager at Epiphany in 2016 after working in technical support for Epiphany and learning the application. With 18 years’ experience in IT support, I know that a great product without great technical support loses customers to competition. Both factors, great product and great support, have to be in place for customer retention.
When I took over as manager, I found that Epiphany’s technical support team, like many other technical support teams, focused on closing metrics. My experience taught me that closing cases as fast as possible does not always satisfy our customers. Instead, using this method could lead to repetitive support calls on the same problem. I needed to change that metric and mentality to increase customer satisfaction and customer retention.
We changed the focus in our team. We asked them to slow down and focus on individual customer calls to thoroughly understand the root of the problem and not just the symptom of the problem. Focus on solving the root cause of the problem.
When our support technicians slow down, they spend more time discussing and understanding the customer’s environment and workflow requirements. They get to the root of the problem. They also spend more time documenting their findings and solutions. Greater understanding and documentation results in solutions that are leveraged by other team members when a different customer calls with a similar problem.
A further step in our changed process was the implementation of the ‘round-robin’ support model. Previously, support calls would get assigned to whomever was available. With a close-as-fast-as-possible mentality and metric, technicians were motivated to close support calls without digging down to the root cause. Once solved, they were assigned another support call and another support call and another support call. With round robin, there is an equal distribution of calls amongst the support technicians. Some cases are simple and some complex. The technicians spend more time getting to the root cause on both the simple and complex calls. When they are finished with the simple cases, they have time to thoroughly document their work and time to clear out any backlog.
Epiphany has a great product that makes a difference in people’s lives. Our job as a support team is to provide you, our customer, with great support. Customers under support represent 95.5% of our total installed base. We are focused on it; will continue to do so.
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Jeff Drabek |
