Often times we get asked about ‘why’ does Rochen only use a ticket based support system? To understand that, it’s important to step back and take a quick look behind the scenes as to what happens in a typical support transaction.
Value
Rochen looks in detail at every step of our operation, in order to make sure we are giving and adding value to our customers.
A typical day on the Rochen support desk, may find one of our highly skilled support personnel fielding 5 to 10 customer tickets within a very, very short period of time. They may need to take time research a problem, or in some cases escalate that issue to second or third level support.
By using our ticketing system we can quickly and easily capture details and route tickets appropriately to meet our customers needs.
But..what about phone based support?
Reasonably, with Rochen’s large customer base in order to meet a telephone support system we would need to triple our staff. Now combine that with the random nature of technical support issues, we would often find we have too much staff or not enough. Either way this is a situation that is not good for our customers.
By taking a phone call our support personnel would be restricted to helping a single customer at a time, and not many. While you may not realize it, you’ve seen this problem in other areas of your life such as calling your bank. Unlike a ticket based system that allows our support technicians to respond to several tickets in the course of a few minutes, telephones restrict them to one problem at a time. The result – decrease in customer’s resolutions solved, longer resolution times and well of course, unhappy customers.
If you think about other industries such as the mortgage industry or credit card industry, when you call their support line, they will put you through a series of gating steps to buffer the time the customer service reps are taking with others. You may be asked to push “1”, then “2” or be asked what language you want to speak to a rep in. All these are not really designed to help you, they are designed to slow down, or buffer, the incoming calls.
During that situation, you likely have been asked to enter your Credit Card number or account number, only to have the rep ask you for it again. – Why doesn’t the phone call tie that information into the call for the rep?
With a ticket based system we have all your information available to us in a single screen.
Telephone support is costly, time consuming, inefficient and simply doesn’t give our customers, who need help from technical support the same result a written response does.
But I need to explain my problem to you by phone..
One aspect of the telephone support model is its inefficiency, due to the support person who may normally be fielding 5 to 8 tickets in a span of 5 to 10 minutes, will be tied up on the phone.
By providing our ticket based support system, it gives the time for the customer to write out their problem. Often times this will yield VITAL information that would be missed, or time consuming to get by phone.
Search that for me..
Rochen has an extensive knowledge base, but sometimes you don’t know the problem to search for. That’s where our support staff have the ability to review your problem and provide you the answer either from their own knowledge, or one of our KB articles. However, let’s say you have a reoccurring issue, or perhaps an issue that is not resolved, if we took that phone call, we wouldn’t necessarily have a proper record of the transaction.
Thus when you returned, you might find yourself explaining the problem again. Returning to a different industry, you probably have been on hold 20 minutes with a customer rep in a mortgage, banking, credit card, or other business.
You explain your ‘issue’ to the rep, they determine they can’t help you and will transfer you to a specialist. Often times, you find yourself explaining the problem all over again, no written history of your problem.
By entering your concerns or questions into ticket, we have a historical record of all your transactions.
“Your call is very important us, please wait”
Who hasn’t thought, if my call is important why is there a 30 minute hold time? It’s really no wonder the hold music is scratchy, horrible and is always something that gets stuck in your head. All the button pushing, music, constant reminder that you’re number 65 in line is because of the fact that phone support cannot provide the response time you need.
At Rochen we pride ourselves on answering questions as quickly as possible and hopefully resolving the issue the first time out.
Using a phone system would likely cause that quick resolution time to go to a “please wait, your call is very important to us” situation.
Looking back
History of technical issues is vital to any hosting company. At Rochen we take history into consideration into many ways such as training support staff, improving service, better knowledge base articles, new products and services and of course a trend that may indicate a bigger problem is at hand.
However with all that in the ticket history we get the opportunity to know our customers, their issues and needs and at Rochen that’s the most important thing to us, our customers and their needs.
How to get better support
With that, there are a few things that can be done on the customer side to improve the response you get. This is not specific to Rochen, its applicable to any industry that has a technical support desk. By increasing the detail you provide, will result in a faster resolution and a more accurate response from technical support.
Generally any technical support group, at any company faces the dreadful ticket that opens like this:
“My website is broke, please help”
That is essentially a useless ticket, we can take a guess at what is broke but we won’t know. For instance, there are a few things that come to mind when asked that:
- Does the site not load for you? Or for everyone?
- Are you getting an error?
- Is it a white screen?
- Any hundreds of other things
You can always help us help you by being as descriptive as possible, and when something is missing, our support personnel are there to guide and help you. If you don’t know, don’t worry! Just explain as best you can and go from there.
Forward Ho!
Rochen is in the process of updating our video KB tutorials with a fully refreshed set that will include many tools and Content Management system tutorials. Take time to review them and see how they can assist you.
And if you need help, we’re just a ticket away at our my.rochen.com ticket system.
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Tom Canavan is a member of Rochen’s ‘Enterprise Solutions Group’ focused on creating customized and complex hosting solutions.
