We all know that customers are the lifeblood of any business and unhappy or dissatisfied customers are one of the quickest ways for a business to fail. Customers are hard won but easily lost when a company doesn’t take care of them. Satisfied customers may tell others about their great experience with your business (upto 23% of them will tell 10+ people, according to the Harvard Business Review) but 42% will walk away from a brand after a negative experience, 21% never to use that business again (Accenture.) According to a 2017 Customer Experience Impact Report, a negative customer experience is the reason 86% of consumer stop doing business with that company. And every experience needs to be positive throughout the entire lifetime of the customer. So it’s fair to say that there is no room for complacency in customer support.
Well, there’s certainly no room at E-Max for complacency in customer support. We value our customers and strive to provide them with the best possible service and support on every occasion. As we approach the end of what’s been our most successful year on record, we thought it would be timely to review some of the changes we made to our Customer Support service and across the wider company (because we firmly believe great customer service isn’t restricted to one team!) this year and how these changes will ultimately benefit our customers.
Increased headcount
Our customer support team has increased to 6, with 3 new members joining in the last 11 months. In addition, we have increased our development team by 25%, so we can constantly be improving and adding new functionality to our software. Two of our current developers have transferred from our customer support team, progressing into the development team so their experience, in-depth product knowledge and understanding of what customers need and want can be used to shape our software.
Dedicated Technical Support Manager role created to lead customer support
To ensure we provide excellent customer support, in May we appointed Fraser Walker to manage E-Max’s technical support team. Fraser has been with E-Max Systems since June 2014, where he started as a trainee developer. On completion of his training, Fraser became one of our lead developers and has used his development skills and has worked in support, implementation and as a technical consultant on multiple projects. He has an excellent understanding of the capability of E-Max software and our customers’ needs. Bringing this knowledge into customer support, where he offers guidance and mentoring to the team, has already helped our customers get faster resolution to their support queries.
Improved response times
As part of the restructure of our customer support, we have implemented new methods of dealing with support requests. These are raised through our online portal and reviewed constantly by a dedicated member of the team. Support cases (or tickets, as they are known in-house) are immediately prioritised (using a matrix which includes impact to the customer’s business, urgency, importance to the customer and technicality) and assigned to an E-Max software analyst. Our process is flexible and allows us to quickly deploy resource where it is needed.
This has significantly streamlined our support process and has enabled us to reduce our customer ticket resolution times by half in over 70% of cases. Each team member uses E-Max’s dashboard to monitor their allocated support cases.
E-Max Online portal improvements
We have opted to provide our customers with an online portal to raise support queries. From customer feedback, we know our customers are familiar and comfortable with using an online service to raise an issue. Our online portal ensures customers can instantly raise a ticket regardless of time of day or night (how many hours have you lost in a telephone queue, waiting in line for a customer support representative to answer?) and is a more effective use of time for both our clients and our team. With one dedicated reviewer of tickets, the other members of our customer support team can focus on faster resolution without interruption. It also ensures every support request is tracked and actioned so no queries remain unresolved. Our customers also receive detailed responses to their issue and, in complex support cases, regular communication on the status of the support query.
Having all our support cases in one system allows us to review and detect common issues so these can be rectified before potentially impacting other customers. Likewise, if there is a common request for added functionality, we can identify this and schedule development time so all our customers can benefit. Training issues can also be identified and are fed back to our Implementation and Training teams.
Training developments
We are committed to developing our whole team at E-Max, not just our frontline customer support people. This year we have introduced weekly training sessions to improve product knowledge. However, product knowledge in isolation doesn’t cover the full picture and so we also offer training on our customers’ engineering and manufacturing processes and how they utilise E-Max in their operations. This holistic approach ensures our team has a greater understanding of what support queries raised mean in context to the customer. We also assess our support queries to identify any gaps in knowledge and use this information to tailor our training so we can provide a better service to our customers. Several of our team are also studying for external qualifications in customer care in software.
Whilst 2019 has seen us implement the above improvements to our customer support, we are not done yet! We continue to focus on customer support as a key deliverable to our clients and look to consistently review and improve our service, so please continue to provide your valuable feedback. As part of this commitment, we have exciting plans to introduce new support tools to our customer support portal in 2020 – register here to be the first to hear about these.