"Scope of Support" is a phrase that every tech support phone rep should be familiar with. It's the guideline that determines what you're allowed to help a caller with. It helps avoid the liabilities of messing with third party products, and makes sure you don't set unrealistic expectations for the next agent. It also causes headaches for customers and support agents alike who know the simplicity of what they're asking for, but simply aren't allowed to get satisfaction.
After years of being told "We don't do x" or "We can't support y" a handful of brave companies are shrugging off these limiting shackles and providing help for their confused callers. The genius move? They're also charging a premium for this service, allowing you to recruit them as your own personal 'tech people' for any issue that you might need to look into. It's like roadside assistance for your technology.
Today I'm sharing a Q&A with Ross Rader, the general manager at @Hover, a domain registrar built from the ground up with a slant on usability and customer service. Their new Ask Hover support lets you get help at a rate of $15 for a 30 minute session. From there, they'll help you configure your domain with competitors, and field any other questions you might have about the internet. (Ask Hover)
1. Where did the idea for this expanded scope of support come from? How did it grow from an idea to its own product?
We're really focused on making sure our customers get the best possible help we can provide them and we've always been fans of Apple's approach to retail customer service. Ask Hover is still mostly just in the "idea" phase for us and in many respects is our first crack at replicating some of what makes Apple's Genius Bar so great for Apple's customers. We already provide this style of service to customers that call us, and this new offering is our first step at formalizing the approach and hopefully turning it into something that provides lasting value to our customers.
2. Do you have dedicated staff for this? Any special training or extra procedures to consider when putting agents in an expanded support queue?
Nope, we generally don't have specific staff dedicated to this offering or that offering. Although our staff *is* very dedicated. :-) Our approach is slightly different in that we believe that there is no such thing as "second line" support. In other words, the person that answers the phone when you call in is fully trained on all aspects of our services, and 100% empowered to do what it takes to fully help you when you call - without having to escalate to second tier support, track down a manager or otherwise give you the run-around. So all we're doing here really is making our existing agents available at a time when our customers find it most convenient and giving them free reign to help the customer in any way that the customer wants.
3. What happens if/when you get stumped? Do you have any special resources for your agents to fall back on?
Well, we do a couple of things there. First off, we don't charge for the service unless the customer we're trying to help is perfectly 100% happy with the help they receive. The second is that we might simply say "I don't know, but give me a few minutes for both of us to figure this out together." If its an especially gnarly issue, our customer service agent might have to take the problem solving offline, learn a few new things and arrange for a followup call with the customer. We don't pretend that our customer service staff know absolutely everything, but we do promise that they will go out of their way to be perfectly helpful. We think that being honest with our customers when we don't know the answer is a perfectly good response, so long as we're able to really provide them with truly helpful answers in the end.
4. Any interesting feedback or customer stories that you can share?
Well, we only recently launched, and we're quite excited at the prospects and unfortunately, I don't have any great stories to share just yet. I do always like to encourage people to continue calling us for help with their vacuum cleaners though. Not a week goes by where we don't provide a misdirected Hoover customer with some sort of assistance with their dust busting woes :-)
5. With the blurring lines between online services and the products that use them, what do you see in the future of tech support?
I really deeply believe that the future of customer service is the future of ecommerce. There is only so much that a web site can facilitate. At some point, the human-machine interface breaks down and people have to talk to people to solve some sticky problem or another. I think smart companies intuitively understand this and are actively working on strengthening their human-human interfaces and supporting them with great ecommerce technology on their website. It will become increasingly difficult to offer something for sale via a website without having a solid customer service strategy to back it up. Take Google for example - they used to pride themselves on having a wholly automated business. Now they employ thousands of people in customer service roles and are actually providing some pretty decent customer service nowadays. People, customers expect a lot from their commercial relationships nowadays - I know I do - and organizations need to realize that the centralized customer service model that evolved during the eighties and into the nineties no longer works. With the rise of the Internet, customers have almost perfect information at their fingertips, are often highly organized and networked and in many regards, are more sophisticated than the companies that purport to want to sell them something. Many companies have yet to figure out that they need to develop a healthy respect for the modern customer and organize as tightly around each individual customer as they can. Thousands of companies are punished by their own ignorance every day and I'm alway surprised at how long it is taking some of them to absorb this message.
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