Your customer support operations benefit from Vtiger Help Desk in 3 important ways
Resolve issues in ways your customers prefer
Let your team adopt a customer focused process: from self care and preferred engagement channels to meaningful response/resolution targets and customer voice.
Set your agents up for success
Offload your agents from the most dreaded task - data entry. Let them handle equitable loads with realistic targets. Give them a clear picture of what to focus on while giving them easy access to needed information including intelligent recommendations. Make it easy for knowledgeable members to lend a hand when needed.
Make it easy for support managers to be on top of things
Let support managers proactively address important issues that need attention and prevent escalations. Give them a clear idea of what and why so they can address systematic issues with process or personnel.
Resolve issues in ways your customers prefer
Self-Care
Allow your customers to:
- Quickly find answers to common questions
- See status of outstanding issues
- Add comments to existing cases
- Close resolved cases
- Raise new issues
Case Flow
From case creation to resolution and closure, it is important to align with what works best for your customers.
Vtiger offers you a good starting point and allows full flexibility in defining a flow from how issues are reported to how they are routed assigned and handled.
Choosing the right channels for case creation:
Vtiger gives you the flexibility to create cases automatically from EMail, Webform and customer portal. Agents can create cases from Tweets, Chat and Phone with one click.
While customers would like the freedom to choose the channel they prefer, it is useful to identify what is effective. For instance, if your agents need specific information to resolve a case, it is a good idea to request this information during case creation. Email may prove to be ineffective and require your agents to put the case on wait while they request needed information. It adds to delays and increases unnecessary interactions. Leveraging a webform with mandatory fields may be the most effective channel in such scenarios.
Case Routing and Assignment
In Vtiger, you can leverage the flexibility of agent groups and automated routing and assignment to agents who can offer the best solutions most efficiently.
It is common for businesses to have product specific support teams like VIP customer support teams, regional support teams and more. You may also need to have teams with deep technical knowledge to resolve complex issues. You may need teams that handle returns, billing, IT issues etc. It is a good idea to identify what team structure will be most effective for your business based on the type and volume of cases your team handles and the competence levels needed to address these issues.
Once a case is routed to a group, it is important to assign it quickly to an agent who is available to work on it right away. Vtiger gives you the flexibility to assign cases using round robin or least loaded algorithms. You can choose which agents are exempt from automated assignments.
Managing Response and Resolution time targets
Business Hours
It is important to agree on when your agents are available to work on customer issues. Some customer may want 24x7. Business hours in Vtiger allows you to define working hours for agents. You can have multiple business hours based on region, or other criteria. Time outside of business hours are excluded when deciding whether or not an SLA was fulfilled.
Turnaround Time Targets
It is equally important to agree on response and resolution time targets based on urgency of the issue or other criteria (product, region, customer importance.) SLAs in Vtiger allows you define these targets. You can define multiple SLA policies depending on your need. You may have a VIP SLA for instance. It is important to make the targets realistic and meaningful.
Escalation Rules
Certain customers may want to escalate to account managers when urgent cases are not resolved on time. In Vtiger, you can specify escalation rules inside an SLA policy to achieve this.
Customer’s voice
While SLAs measure whether or not response and resolution time targets were met, they don’t capture the customer sentiment. By giving customers an option to voice their opinion, you get a better understanding of how customers feel about the quality of support. You may pleasantly discover that a customer was indeed happy with a resolution although it was not resolved within the stipulated time. Vice-versa may also be true.
Set your agents up for Success
Automation
Prebuilt automation in Vtiger helps you create cases, route to groups, assign priorities and SLAs and assign to agents within a group.
Cases can be automatically linked to the right contact and organization. When contacts and organizations don’t already exist, they are created automatically. Agents don’t have to manually input data into Vtiger..
Auto fill needed information
You can also have the system populate/update specific fields. For instance, when a case is routed to a team that handles returns and repairs, you can auto fill part number(s), serial numbers, warranty information, shipping details and more. So, agents who handle returns and refunds have all the information they need right in front of them. In addition, you can make these fields dynamic and they will appear only when a case is categorized as Returns and Repair..
Agents can set reminders that let them know to follow up on a case or task
Automate smart alerts that let agents know when important deadlines are approaching, and escalate when they are not met.
You can setup adhoc automations to notify the account manager when a negative survey is received on an urgent issue from a VIP customer or when an urgent case from an important customer is not assigned within 4 hours etc.
Account managers can follow what is happening with urgent issues raised by their contacts
Managers can find out when important things come to a standstill (either no activity and/or no progress) so they can intervene and get things moving.
Access to required information
To help agents prioritize tasks, you can set up specific criteria that allow them to work on important issues. By setting this up, agents know if they are supposed to address escalated or reopened cases first or address urgent issues from VIP customers and such. This removes ambiguity and allows agents to focus on resolving issues.
Once an agent decides to work on a case, important information pertaining to customers and issues needs to be easily accessible. In addition to Priority, Time left and Status, you may want them to know how important a customer is to your business. Role specific information helps agents get things done right and fast – for instance, agents who handle specific kinds of issues may need information that is directly related to it. Example, Employee ID and Company Name and Date of Joining may be needed to pull out payroll or benefits related information. Similarly, part numbers and shipping data may be needed for RMA agents.
Intelligent recommendations
Most businesses have a knowledgebase that may or may not be formalized. When it only resides within knowledgeable people, it is not usable by a larger community. From simple tips to answers to complex questions, it is always a good idea to organize the content as needed to help your customers. This means being able to find answers quickly. We have taken it a step further and have the system understand your intent and recommend relevant answers. Better yet, the system learns as your agents use answers and helps you improve your knowledgebase based on real usage or lack there-of..
Allow people with knowledge to lend a hand
Your agents may encounter situations where they know someone in their own team or another team has information to help them address issues. They can collaborate easily by bringing the issue to their attention. This could be advanced knowhow on a specific topic or a customer or a contact or a product.
Make it easy for support managers to be on top of things
Address issues proactively
A support manager on a day to day basis may want to know how things are going at any given point of time. Important metrics like how many cases are open, their priorities and where they are at, how much time they are held up in various states etc. More importantly see if there are any outstanding violations that need to be attended to.
Being able spot impending violations or escalations and being able to act on it is equally important. For instance if there is an important issue from a 4 star customer that is likely to breach SLA since the owner has not started working on it because he or she has a sizeable backlog. A support manager can then reassign the case to another member who is able to start on it earlier.
Addressing systematic issues
Every business has seasonal ups and downs in the volume of cases that agents have to work with. However, this should not be confused with systematic problems in your support operations. For instance, when a business launches a new product or forays into a new region, or when key support agent churn, you are likely to experience an increase in the number and type of issues that your agents will have to deal with. So, unless you plan for it by adding new agents and/or training current agents, the problem will get progressively worse. Even if you planned for it, it is rarely easy to do this right on the first go. Also when new agents are added, you may want to keep an eye on how they are onboarding on key metrics compared with best performers.
Trends on back log, resolution times, SLA fulfillment rates, customer sentiment, agent performance metrics with deep drill down will help managers understand what is happening, why it is happening and take necessary steps.
