One of the biggest pain points for customers in any sort of support interaction is the feeling of being made to jump through hoops or repeat themselves because they didn’t use the correct channel.
We call this “friction” and it is the enemy of providing excellent support. The different types of friction generally fall into three types:
<aside> 💡 Frictionless support is the mechanics of removing the friction and moving every customer to resolution as seamlessly as possible.
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When the problem a customer is encountering is preventing them from the primary functionality of our product (e.g. A GiveWP customer being unable to receive donations after having previously received them), this is an urgent issue. The customer needs actionable support, and to be treated with urgency and accuracy.
This requires some discretion on the part of support technicians: just because an issue is urgent to a customer does not make it an urgent-tagged ticket.
Even if the person contacting us is on a tight deadline and has tremendous urgency, it does not fit the criteria for urgency unless the site was previously functional and now is no longer.
By this definition, a site that is not live yet or has never taken donations before can’t have an urgent-tagged issue.
When a ticket is marked as urgent (according to the above definition) and left in the unassigned box, all technicians on the unassigned box are to prioritize it.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be the one to answer, but that they should alert the technician who tagged it to answer when there is a response from the customer.
If the original technician is out for the day at the time of the customer response, the remaining technician(s) should take over the ticket, and respond. As long as the issue is still urgent, we leave the ticket in the unassigned box tagged as urgent.
Another aspect of frictionless support is escalating tickets to Senior Support Technicians, supervisors, or directors. The goal is to only respond to the customer with actionable, helpful, and constructive responses.
To say “I am looping in a Senior support technician” to the customer adds friction, and should only be used as a Queue Health Habit to get a response to the customer before logging off for the day. It would be far better to have a conversation with the Senior Support Technician and then respond with a fix for the issue.