Why aligning customer support and IT is the important thing to happier prospects

All functioning enterprises manage operations into departments with distinctive duties and targets. IT groups give attention to steady software program enchancment and system reliability, whereas customer support groups throughout the aisle are working exhausting to maintain up with evolving buyer expectations and remediating user-facing points as effectively as attainable.

Whereas it might not be apparent on the floor, these departments share a standard purpose — to cut back downtime. The roles and duties are completely different, however the shared purpose stays. 

Nonetheless, at most enterprises, IT and customer support groups seldom intersect, a lot much less collaborate. Within the period of digital transformation, each groups have undergone huge technological adjustments in recent times, however too often, they proceed to function in silos. This division is exacerbated by the very instruments and methods meant to assist.

Siloes damage each customer support and IT

Image this: A buyer experiences a glitch with the self-service portal on their insurance coverage firm’s web site and submits a customer support ticket. An agent receives the ticket inside their helpdesk system and, as soon as they understand the problem seems to be rooted in back-end expertise, navigates to a separate inner helpdesk system to create a ticket with the correct IT staff. The ticket then enters a queue of incidents.

As soon as the incident is resolved on the again finish, a developer updates the customer support agent over a separate inner communications platform. The agent then should concurrently entry their helpdesk ticketing system and communication platform to collect data and relay it again to the client. The multi-step course of creates pointless friction to resolve the problem, whereas slowing each the substantive response and the communication again to the client.

Even with all of the instruments at an agent’s disposal, they typically discover themselves navigating by way of disparate methods and duplicating data throughout platforms. Nonetheless, key particulars similar to whether or not the client’s concern is a identified incident and the way lengthy the problem will take to be resolved should not instantly obtainable. This lack of fluid communication causes a sequence response of delays finally leading to sad prospects.

It’s crucial that customer support brokers have a streamlined technique to escalate customer-impacting disruptions to IT whereas sustaining full visibility of the client ticket. Organizations already acknowledge that damaged collaboration processes between customer support and technical groups result in elevated downtime, in addition to slower response and backbone instances. A special perspective is required. 

How can we empower customer support groups with the visibility and knowledge they should reply buyer inquiries rapidly and escalate expertise points from the entrance strains when the back-office staff isn’t conscious of a customer-impacting disruption?

The client is vital

It’s time to acknowledge prospects as one other, and generally crucial, sign of system operate. Whereas customer support groups already do that, technical groups stand to learn too. If IT is ready to look to knowledge from buyer inquiries as a real-time reflection of the well being of their digital belongings, they may have the ability to higher perceive a difficulty’s blast radius, prioritize it accordingly, and intervene earlier than the influence is felt extra broadly. Conducting this requires an built-in strategy.

Each customer support and engineering groups have a robust need to interrupt down silos to reinforce the client expertise. As soon as either side of the aisle can rally round real-time buyer knowledge, two-way communication, and a completely built-in software stack, groups may have what they should act as a unit and resolve points quicker. Breaking down the partitions between customer support and technical groups will unlock new ranges of collaboration, benefitting not simply CS and IT however the end-users and the broader group as properly.

Justin Shie is CS at PagerDuty