Question

Reducing Customer Support hold times with Guru

Rob Mueller

Hope that this finds you all well. 

We are a product manufacturer of clean energy solutions (solar+storage) and sell to distributors and installers.  We have a challenge to reduce our Technical Support hold times for installer who call in to ask a question or troubleshoot their system.  

I was looking for specific case studies or best practices about using Guru to surface knowledge quickly to chip away at these hold times. Trying to build a case for further adoption of Guru along these lines. Thanks in advance for your time with this. 

3 replies

Callie Rojewski
Userlevel 7
Badge +3

Hey @Rob Mueller ! Great question, thanks for turning to the Guru Community. 

 

First, I’d love to connect you to @Jag Gill and @Martin Evans . I’ve worked with both of them this year during Deep Dive events and learned about their approach designing Guru to make it faster and easier for their teams to speak to their respective products. Martin works in Clean Energy solutions as well.

 

 

Tactically, I recommend honing in on your team members’ specific needs with user testing. @Lindsey Hart  from Noom gave a great walk through of her approach on this recently, which you can check out here: 

 

Knowing the unique friction points your Technical Support faces can help you prioritize your approach. The following areas are always good to address when you’re looking to accelerate how fast your Technical Support team finds and applies knowledge.

  • Make it easier for your team to find the knowledge they need → Improve Search
  • Make it easier for the knowledge your team needs to find them → 
  • Improve your teams confidence in making the most of the knowledge they come across
    • Encourage your team to become familiar with the product information in Guru before they are on calls with customers by holding enablement sessions or incorporating Guru into onboarding (Jag speaks to how they use Guru AND Lessonly when training their team). 

 

I hope this helps! Keep us updated on your approach and if you have anymore questions. In the meantime, I hope you can join us this Thursday at our Deep Dive session. We’ll be breaking out into team-specific discussions. @Caroline Krueger  and other support folks will be sharing their Guru approaches! RSVP here. 

 

Martin Evans

@Rob Mueller In a market of substitutes the only product many of us really offer is customer service. I feel your pain.  To give you a 30k’ overview of how we are endeavoring to address reducing hold times, let me first mention that we try to resolve each issue at the lowest tier possible. So while our Tier 3 team can resolve all issues, it’s expensive (in various ways) to do so. To that end, each tier knows what they can and can’t handle and the escalate issues when the issue is beyond the scope of their tier. With that said, this is how we use GURU to reduce the dwell time of an issue in any given tier.

1) We are regularly creating and maintaining public-facing cards that offer solutions to common issues. These issues may range from quick access to documentation on how our Enerflo platform works to in-depth guides on how to perform a function in our software platform. Since these are customer-facing, the customer is the lowest resolution tier. We share the link to these cards as needed. I won’t rehash @Callie Rojewski recommendations about Knowledge Triggers, Browser Extensions, and AII Suggest. If an issue can’t be resolved by a customer-facing card, the customer can call or chat in to our Support team.

2) We are regularly building and maintaining internal-facing cards that allow our customer support reps easily pull up the information they need to resolve the issue or to know when to escalate the issue. 

3) Similarly for our Tier 2 and Tier 3 teams, we’ve created best-practices or Standard Operating Procedures cards which allow these teams to spend as little time as possible in the discovery phase of the resolution process so that can spend most of their time on executing the solution. 

I hope this helps you understand what we do and how GURU gives critical information to the right people at the right time. I will add that we are using other softwares to facilitate the escalation process and project management for the issue that turn into larger or longer-term tickets. If I can provide any additional clarity for you please feel free to reach out. 

Rob Mueller

Thank you for your responses @Martin Evans and @Callie Rojewski this detail.  I will review these recommendations and ask questions as they come up.  

Really appreciate your time on this.

RM

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