What does world-class support really mean? At InfoCaption, we believe that it means a support service that is constantly developing and improving through reusing and transferring knowledge to both customers and coworkers. At InfoCaption, we practice what we preach, and here are our top 9 tips!

1. Help your employees help themselves

The fact that a user can search for an answer to a question themselves not only makes it easier for the support but also increases the user's self-confidence. Sometimes, the threshold for contacting the support can be high; there can be pride in solving simpler problems on your own, but also because the user feels that "I should know this." Instead, time and energy are spent trying to solve the problem yourself, which sometimes leads to not finding a solution at all. With our self-help, the user can become more efficient, reduce the number of support cases, and feel proud that they are taking responsibility and becoming more independent.

2. Use videos

mages. The user can follow the process more carefully, which reduces the risk of missing something. Therefore, our self-help primarily consists of step-by-step videos, where no clip is longer than 30 seconds. In this way, the user can choose to either watch the entire video or navigate to a specific clip and get help with that particular part of the task. The user can thus save time by not having to fast forward to the sequences that are of interest.

A step-by-step video is both more educational and can be created faster than a guide with text and images. And besides that, there are several other advantages:

• The knowledge can be reused - next time it's needed, the film is already in the self-help.
• The knowledge is transferred internally - the support, and others who do not know the solution to a problem can use the guide to increase their competence.

3. Let the self-help cater to different user needs – all in the same place!

The answers that a user expects from the support can be very different. Questions can be specific and thus require specific solutions, while other questions can be about more general advice within a working method. Here are some examples of questions and answers in our self-help:

Question: How do I add keywords to a guide?
Solution: http://infocaption.com/2592.guide

Question: How does the ”unmatched searches”-function work?
Solution: http://infocaption.com/2968.guide

Question: Help me get started working in InfoCaption!
Solution: http://infocaption.com/1485.guide

Our experience is that the key to giving the user the best possible support based on their needs is to have all user support in the same place. The user must have an obvious place to go to get help, regardless of whether it concerns a question for support or more general training needs.

4. Encourage users to actively use the self-service functions

Include a link to the self-help in a support case's automatic response to a user. Perhaps the user finds the answer in the self-help so the topic can be closed even before the support has started working on it. Also, include the link in support staff signatures to remind users of its existence.

5. Actively use self-service in your support service

Support always uses self-help instructions to answer questions. In this way, users receive the best possible support and guidance whilst being encouraged to search for self-help the next time they have a question. Since the more straightforward matters then can resolve themselves, the time freed up can instead be spent on solving the more difficult and time-consuming problems.

6. Continuously expand and update your self-service

Our self-help is expanded daily based on user needs and questions. If there isn't already an instruction that answers a user's question, we make sure to create one. We also regularly review statistics on what our users searched for in the self-help without it generating a hit. We then use it as a basis for developing new instructions.

7. Be proactive

Try to anticipate what questions might come from users. For new updates to our product, our developers create videos that present new features. As we know from experience, there may be detailed questions, e.g., about a new look for a feature, and therefore, the videos are divided into shorter clips that can answer these questions.

8. Use an issue-tracking system that matches your needs

A good case management system in itself does not create world-class support - as the points above show, many factors come into play. But it is an essential prerequisite for all the other pieces to fall into place. Choose a system based on the number of cases per day and how many support employees you have. We evaluated several different options before concluding that we don't need a pure case management system. Since we have so few cases daily, we don't want to build our customer management around support. Instead, we chose a system that has CRM as core functionality with case management as an add-on module. We could start with case management from day one without complicated configurations, and there are also a lot of possibilities for adapting and developing according to our needs. This was exactly what we needed - a flexible, out-of-the-box solution!

9. Let your support service describe their own routines and work processes

When we introduced the new CRM system, there were many new routines and processes that had to be set up, especially in support. We let our support staff describe and constantly develop their work processes. In this way, we optimize the flows because they are designed by those with knowledge of and experience with the job. In addition, this type of autonomy leads to the employee feeling responsible for the results of their work and becoming more motivated, which you can read more about in this article

: Motivated Support Staff Creates Satisfied Customers - A Good Circle

This is an example of a process developed by the support staff at InfoCaption.

Effects

Does all this give us world-class support? It is up to our customers to decide, but the effects we can see ourselves are:

• Fewer and fewer incoming cases
• Knowledge transfer - the instructions raise the knowledge level of users and employees
• Reuse of knowledge - we can easily reuse the answer to frequent questions
• More motivated support workers (more on that in this article: Motivated Support Staff Creates Satisfied Customers - A Good Circle
• We are receiving positive feedback from our customers. That our response time is quick and that our personnel Is very helpful, for example.

World-class support

The Norwegian system vendor Webcruiter has created more than a thousand guides with InfoCaption, with between 2000-5000 views a day! Since they started using InfoCaption, their customers have been experiencing and reporting " A world-class support!".

Our platform helps you to deliver world-class support - 24 hours a day