- Customer calls help desk
- Help desk goes through normal troubleshooting mechanisms
- Problem persists
- Return to step 1
There is no way out of this loop until the customer eventually becomes so frustrated with his experience that he demands to speak with a manager, who may decide to take some special action that has a higher probability of resolving the issue. The challenge for a help desk is to recognize these situations early enough that the customer's frustration level does not escalate to this point. There are always going to be problems that are not resolved after going through the usual process; hopefully, this is a small percentage of the total. Designing a process to catch these exceptions is critical, since help desks are often judged by the one tough case, and not by the thousands of problems solved before the exception came in.
Best to break the problem down into two parts: identifying chronic callers, and actually dealing with and resolving their issue. Identification should be part of the measurement and reporting mechanism related to your ticketing system. The details of how you do this will depend on the system you use, but this is quite simply a flag that the same customer has called in more than a predetermined number of times recently. Recently can be defined as days or weeks, depending on the type of support you are providing. The flag that a chronic situation has been detected should be directed to someone who will know what to do about it; that could be the manager, a shift supervisor, or even the support rep who most recently dealt with the customer in question.
Once a chronic customer has been identified, it becomes much easier to turn the customer's perception of your help desk around. Just by calling the customer to notify him that his case has been flagged as special, and that he will be receiving special attention will do wonders. Rather than continuously calling in, sitting on hold and going through a resolution script repeatedly, the customer is receiving special, personal attention. Yes, this does take extra time, but nothing compared to the time your help desk would otherwise have spent taking repeated calls from an increasingly frustrated caller.
Actually resolving the problem is specific to the type of product or service your help desk is supporting, but in general this involves getting the right people involved. If the problem is technical, and the usual troubleshooting mechanisms have failed, the problem should be assigned to a more senior resource. For non-technical problems, it may be appropriate to assign a manager to deal with the issue; for example, the manager may need to make a decision about whether to replace a part that would not normally be replaced.
Chronic callers are frustrated, and frustrate the help desk as well. Having a well-defined process to handle these difficult cases will go a long way to easing tension on both sides of the desk.
Excellent...I am an Technical Support Engineer and i find it excellent to identify the types of customers and how to deal with them...
A Big Thanks
Posted by: Ramanath Krishnan | June 11, 2006 11:01 PM | Permalink to Comment