Best practices for a Technical Support team
Best practices for a Technical Support team
Technical support staff are at the core of a smoothly running organization’s IT infrastructure support, whether they are in-house or outsourced. They ensure everything is running smoothly, but to achieve that, they have to stick to some best practices. Here we list the best practices for technical support teams that help them resolve issues in the most effective manner in minimum time.
Adherence to these best practices helps them troubleshoot issues faced by end-users while using software, hardware, and networking systems. If you’re looking for the best practice guide for your technical support role, you’re at the right place. Read on as we discuss the issue in depth.
1. Always have sufficient staff
No one likes to wait hours to resolve their queries, similarly, no one will want to be overburdened with work. To ensure your customers don’t have to wait endlessly when trying to resolve their queries, always have sufficient staff in your tech support team. Similarly, adequate staffing is important for team members to work efficiently and effectively. Having adequate manpower is at the core of your effectiveness in resolving issues. As a best practice, proper planning—considering the inflow of calls/cases, skills, and capability for a team member to address them, your systems, and the time required for solving the issues—is a must to estimate the right team size. For this to work, you also have to make it a point that when an employee hands in their resignation, the whole team is not overburdened. This is where creating a talent pool of technical staff will come in handy.
2. Maintain customer data and common issues database
Customers shouldn’t be required to explain their issue from scratch every time they contact IT support. At the same time, if we have already solved an issue and know the steps required to troubleshoot and resolve it, it makes no sense for another team member to start from scratch. Thankfully, with modern IT help desk software at your disposal, your team won’t need to do any of the above. Customer data management tools are able to store data and issues, which can be accessed for quicker resolution of queries. This not only makes the life of your customers much easier but will make the resolution of queries more systematic and linear. When you store the common issues and customer data in the right manner, neither the tech support nor the customer has to start from scratch—just pick up where the query was last left unresolved.
3. Build an omnichannel ticketing system
A simple and efficient way to get more out of your tech support is to ensure an omnichannel customer support system is in place. Make it easy for your customers to contact you over chat, email, social media, and calls—don’t limit yourself to just one channel. An omnichannel customer support application will allow seamless integration between these channels so that customer queries from different channels are visible to the team on one screen. This ensures easy touchpoints for the customers and is a great way to show your customers that you care about them and make them feel heard.
4. Implement a strong self-service strategy
Enabling your customers to resolve their own problems can yield significant benefits, such as reducing agent workload and cutting costs. By improving self-service options, you empower customers to address their issues without having to contact your support team. This can result in significant savings, increased agent efficiency, and an overall improved customer experience. Engage your technical support engineers to regularly update the self-help articles and guides, ensuring they are up to date and incorporate any recent feedback. If despite having a self-help article, customers still end up reaching support for a particular issue, it suggests that the article isn’t effective—your team members are best placed to optimize those articles.
5. Have regular training sessions for your technical support teams
In technical support roles, training is much more important than any other aspect. It is often more crucial than knowledge itself. This is why all new employees must go through training sessions and assessments at the end of the sessions. While many companies have this in place, you can excel by conducting refresher training regularly. These sessions should be especially useful when a new product is launched or after a software update. This helps your staff stay acquainted with the latest tech advancements and ensures they are not lagging behind technologically.
6. Train your employees to actively listen
Understanding a problem is important for solving it. To understand customers and their issues, tech support staff must listen carefully and avoid jumping to conclusions. Unfortunately, many people don’t listen well during conversations, which can hurt communication. For technical support engineers, not listening to customers is a big mistake. It’s important to train employees to listen so they can understand issues and get feedback. Being a good listener is crucial for tech support staff to solve customer problems. This helps avoid wasting time on misunderstandings and prevents frustrating experiences for everyone involved.
7. Setup quality monitoring for the technical support process
Quality monitoring is a crucial process for technical support teams to ensure that they are providing high-quality service to their customers. The purpose of quality monitoring is to assess the performance of support agents, identify areas of improvement, and maintain consistent service levels. Typically, quality monitoring involves reviewing calls, emails, and chat sessions to evaluate factors such as communication skills, technical knowledge, and problem-solving abilities. By monitoring and measuring the quality of interactions, technical support teams can continually improve their service delivery, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately increase their overall effectiveness.
8. Set KPIs and track them
How would you know the review of your tech support team? Did they do better than the previous month? Did the new refresh training have the impact it was supposed to have? Is the new employee able to feel the shoes of the old one who resigned last month? All these and many more questions are answered by keeping a track of KPIs.
Which KPIs to track depends largely on your organization and your goals so you need to use your judgment for that. The key is to know which metric to track and how often to track them.
9. Empower representatives to take decisive actions
Do not let your frontline representatives run to managers for every issue. This doesn’t bode well for the whole process and makes it time-consuming. Instead, empower them to make decisions. Let them make decisions based on their judgements and trust them to do so. This will ensure your customers don’t have to wait too long to resolve their queries.
10. Communicate
Set Clear Expectations and Communicate regularly
When team members understand their roles, responsibilities, and the goals they are working towards, they can better collaborate and work towards resolving technical issues efficiently. Clear expectations help to prevent misunderstandings and delays while holding team members accountable. By establishing open communication and clear expectations, technical support teams can provide excellent support to their clients and customers.
Use Real-Time Feedback
While it’s important to conduct annual reviews and conduct planned feedback sessions, giving real-time feedback can also be highly advantageous. This should not be confused with micromanagement. When team members perform well, offering immediate positive feedback can be highly motivating and can help them understand what they did right. Delaying positive feedback until a monthly or quarterly review can negate the benefits. Similarly, if a problem arises, it’s better to address it as soon as possible rather than wait for a scheduled review meeting. Providing prompt feedback can help team members understand their mistakes and learn how to correct their behaviour.
Communicating regularly and consistent feedbacks also help clarify priorities and fosters a culture of accountability.
The Bottom Line
The work of a technical support staff is no way a walk in the park but best practices and guidelines to make their job easier. Hiring the right people, and training them well and regularly is half the job done. But do also look out for the key KPIs to track your progress of the team and to ensure that the improvement curve is going upwards.
Author
Ravi Verma
Manager Technical Support
Ravi Verma is a seasoned technical support professional with over 12 years of experience. He has a wealth of experience in technical troubleshooting, managing escalations and customer handling. As a manager, Ravi is now responsible for overseeing the technical support function for his organization, ensuring that they are resilient, innovative, and capable of meeting the demands of their role. He also oversees hiring, training, and mentoring, as well as aligning his team with the company’s goals and market conditions. Ravi’s expertise, dedication, and leadership have helped him create a successful career in technical support.