Improve: phone support

by Chance Smith

Whether your company is outsourcing your phone support overseas or not, please improve your phone support.

Don’t know how? Here, let us all pitch in some great ideas.

Let the phone support scenarios begin

I’ve split the scenarios up into three sections each.

Common - what happens often enough
Ideal - what would be really great
Improve - a way to improve

Here we go…

#Call waiting

## Common:

we don’t know how long we’ll be on hold for

## Ideal:

we could know how much longer until it’s our turn
how many people are available to support the call load?

Improve:

receive an estimate of time and number in line
update estimate and number in line every 2-3 mins (or when changed)
tell us how many representatives are on shift

#Representative picks up phone

## Common:

answer isn’t personal
we have to repeat ourselves over and over

## Ideal:

know our question before we have to ask it
save information across calls (phone, past questions)

## Improve:

ask questions while we wait
answer with our name. “Hey, Chance! …”
give representative the most information about us before they pick up the call

During call with representative

## Common:

we have trouble understanding the outsourced, overseas, support representative

## Ideal:

our knowledgeable neighbor picks up the phone

## Improve:

make the representative’s accent that answers relative to the customer’s accent

If customers received wonderful support, would they not pay more for your product? I would!

Anybody else agree?