A Sponsored Article by Support.com
It’s a little like that in tech support, as well. We’ve automated everything we possibly can and trained our agents thoroughly, but, once they pick up the phone—the most crucial point of the whole process—it’s just two people talking. The process is out of our hands, and there’s little else we can do to influence the outcome.
We’re still babes in the woods when it comes to managing, quantifying, analyzing and optimizing that part of the process during which the actual interaction occurs between an agent and a customer.
The reason is simple: It’s the only aspect of the support process relatively untouched by automation.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Just as rocket scientists learned over time how to build telemetry into their valuable assets, we’re now learning how to bring technology to bear on those precious few moments when one of our people is representing us to our most valuable assets.
This seminal white paper, authored by the Senior Director of Market Strategy for Support.com, sets down the basic principles of SIO (Support Interaction Optimization), which has been identified by Frost & Sullivan as an automation opportunity with the potential to claim the holy grail of the industry, namely reducing costs while dramatically boosting customer satisfaction. The paper describes the key issues faced by contact center managers trying to both understand and manage the agent-customer interaction with the same level of rigor as they manage the rest of the support process.
While Support.com is the vendor of Nexus®, a flagship SIO SaaS product, the paper makes no reference to any specific vendor offerings. Its purpose is to present a set of critically important concepts in a way that will provide practical guidance to contact center managers seeking to improve their operations to meet the challenges of an increasingly demanding customer base.
SIO: Automating the Last Frontier of Customer Tech Support is not an academic treatise but a practical, hard-hitting look at the natural last step in using automation to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center. Industry recognition of the opportunities inherent in SIO has led to a broad array of service offerings that make it easy and painless to exploit the possibilities. This white paper is the best place to begin understanding what those opportunities are and how to evaluate their applicability to your contact center.
The paper describes SIO in terms of five key concepts:
- Systematizing the best approaches to solving customer problems
- Applying those approaches consistently across all agents
- Providing tools to enhance the resolution process and speed the interaction along
- Continually fine-tuning based on data gathered from each interaction
- Providing feedback to the manufacturers to help them improve the products or services being supported
Groundbreaking White Paper Available for Download
SIO: Automating the Last Frontier of Customer Tech Support is available at no charge, compliments of Contact Center Pipeline and Support.com.
Download this white paper at: bit.ly/support-ss04.