BrandPost: Three Support Trends to Fuel Business Advantage
Who hasn’t had an infuriating support experience as a customer? We’ve all been there. Waiting on the phone. Repeating details. Being passed like a hot potato from one agent to the next. Has no one in the universe ever had or dealt with our same issue before? It can be frustrating, to say the least. And we’re shell-shocked the next time we need to reach out for customer support.
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Before we get there, let’s first consider why this is happening. If we look at the support landscape, we can see that it’s changing:
- The technology we use is changing. Think about how technology has changed over the last few years. Ten years ago, we didn’t have iPads. Now we have universal connectivity. And behind simple interfaces, underlying technologies are increasingly complex.
- The people we support are changing. End users are more mobile. People can work from anywhere, and they take their digital lives with them. And with nearly unlimited – and searchable – data, people are consuming information in a variety of ways.
- Customer expectations are changing. The more immediate and available our technology becomes, the more immediate and available we expect support to be. We expect to be able to reach out on any channel we choose – email, phone, twitter, snapchat, and so on. And we expect it to be easy.
These changes are impacting help desks. Fifty-five percent of organizations saw increased ticket volume in 2017. Unfortunately, budgets aren’t increasing accordingly.