Technical and customer support service
All about technical support: what it does, why it's needed, how it will help your business make money and more
Sophisticated technical tools are permeating the lives of ordinary people and ordinary businesses. Support – closely related to the service provided by the software and hardware manufacturer or project contractors (e.g. site development and subsequent maintenance), which helps users to configure and operate a complex product correctly, and to quickly fix problems that arise.
Is this the case? What does technical support do? How does it relate to selling the business? Who should think about its organisation and much more in our note.
Support functions
Technical support is in fact an after-sales service tool, if provided. Users contact their staff either after the equipment or service has been purchased or at the end of the project – this can be the development of a software solution, a website or even the implementation of an entire infrastructure – such as an integrated CCTV system. .
The role of support is to receive requests from customers who have problems, troubleshoot and resolve them (at the time of the request or after – according to a Service Level Agreement – SLA). Sometimes a response to a customer’s problem is sufficient to resolve the issue, while in other cases it is necessary to refer the request to a specialist who will understand the problem, provide a detailed explanation and return the solution to working order.
Regardless of the attractiveness, support specialists should restore the service infrastructure, software or service for which incident management mechanisms are used as quickly as possible. The formal definition of “as soon as possible” provides the Service Level Agreement (SLA) mentioned above, which support strives to meet or even exceed.
In addition to communicating with customers, support performs the important function of obtaining feedback from users (usually from dispatchers or the “first line of support”), i.e. providing information to the business development department – making suggestions for changes to existing product, service or project parameters, as well as for adding new features and capabilities. This link is particularly important in the B2B market, where the buyer of the solution (the purchasing department) is most often not the same as the user (the regular employees).
Technical support as an additional upsell tool
The quality of support not only influences repeat sales, but also the attraction of new customers. Comments by others that a good solution manufacturer ignores user requests are unlikely to go unnoticed by those who are still only interested in a range of similar products on the market. Conversely, a solution whose customers say that all their problems are solved literally “on the fly” is becoming increasingly popular. After all, potential customers need a company to operate with a minimum of errors that do not affect financial performance.
Technical support is thus also a tool for building loyalty among existing and prospective customers.
Since we are talking about loyalty, a distinction can be made between customer and technical in the support segment. The latter provides solutions to technical problems (“I don’t work here”), while the former works on building long-term relationships with customers in order to increase the total revenue generated per “contact”. We have already written in detail about the difference.
Support structure
To ensure the best level of service while keeping the cost of running the support department reasonable, it is customary to have several lines within the department, with responsibilities divided between them.
The most common distinctions are:
The first line (sometimes called the “Helpdesk” service). It receives calls and appeals through other communication channels, classifies and routes them to specialists, filtering requests to the wrong address and solving the simplest problems. Although technically the least skilled at this level, the first line is in fact the “face” of the company to its customers;
second line. It is a group or several groups of line specialists who deal with most problems;
the third line. These are highly skilled specialists (programmers, etc.) who are responsible for complex problems that do not usually require “instant manual intervention”.
Often, representatives of developers and third-party contractors are assigned to additional rows (fourth, fifth) if the product or project involves other people’s solutions. However, many companies limit themselves to just two lines, treating the other specialists as partners in solving individual problems.
Support systems
In today’s world, support, like any other area of customer relations, needs automation – driven by the market itself and by quite complex service processes. Customers are used to being recognised by ID, even in large retailers or financial institutions, instantly remembering the history of the relationship and not having to repeat the same story 10 times. They want the same from a B2B service. To meet these customer expectations, companies use software tools – helpdesk-class automation systems.
Helpdesk automation systems differ significantly from each other. When choosing, it is important not to get confused.