I often claim that we can help some companies reduce their support costs by over 30%. The natural reaction is I'm talking tongue-in-cheek or making a sales pitch. This blog is specifically written to address that claim. While "making it happen" is not rocket science, you still need to use expert implementors with the right product. That's where ContextEngage can help you.
Feel free to jump directly to the Summary if you prefer.
Now down to the details.
A Typical Support Workflow
Every company has different workflows, but then again much stays the same. The following assumes the tasks for both customers and agents when a customer has a question that could be answered by content or questions that require a support agent's help. These are estimates based on experience. Understand the idea even if you take issue with some of the time estimations. The workflow also assumes a company is NOT using a support platform or does not have useful help content. Possibly, your company has some of the tools below, but not all of them so you can possibly calculate the specific savings potentials for yourself.
| Time (mins) | Problem | |
| Customer Effort | ||
| Self-service content in a separate platform to the product (if content even exists) | 5 | Effort forcing a customer to open a tab, search but cannot find the required content as the content is hard to navigate and out of date |
| Opens a ticket via email | 10 | Needs to write the ticket via email |
| Reviews a reply from the company and implements | 10 | Started a correspondence that was potentially unnecessary |
| Total | 25 | |
| Agent Effort | ||
| Manual reading of ticket to assign | 2 | No auto-assignment to the right team. Totally unnecessary stage. |
| Agent reads and understands ticket | 3 | Had to be done. But ticket should possibly have been deflected previously |
| Looks up relevant content on internal company portal | 4 | Started in a correspondence that was potentially unnecessary |
| Look up business related content in company CRM and ERP systems | 4 | Need to open additional tabs and look up customer details manually |
| Writes an answer to the customer | 5 | Necessary stage for any ticket that needs answering |
| Total | 18 |
The customer effort for solving this single issue is 25 minutes. We can assume the effort and waiting-time made will reduce their chances of product loyalty.
Agent First Response Time (FRT) is 18 minutes. As we will explain, this time could be completely eradicated in some cases or significantly reduced.
Using ContextEngage and Zendesk to reduce Times for Customers and Agents
Go 12 months ahead and the customer has implemented the following tools:
- Self-service content widget inside of their app (obviously not possible for hardware based products)
- Help Center for anyone to access content
- Web ticket page that suggests relevant articles when a customer has a query
- Zendesk platform that automates assignment and other tasks within the ticket workflow
- Provides the agent with all business related content relevant to the customer on the same ticket page
Savings in a number of Examples Scenarios
- Self-service Widget inside App
If a customer found the content and implemented the solution themselves using the widget in an app, taking 10 minutes only, it saved the customer 15 minutes. It was also immediate. In that case, it saved the company the full 18 minutes!!
For many companies, self-service can deflect over 50% potential tickets. That amounts to a staggering savings of half of present tickets * 23 minutes !!
The challenge is setting up the self-service content correctly within Zendesk.
For a real life example, sign up to www.ding.com and see the widget in action.
- Customer starts to write a ticket on a web page
The customer started writing the details about their ticket and a dropdown appeared with relevant content. For example, they were searching about how to setup new users in the system. The potential savings of this ticket deflection is the same as the bullet above.
Implement "Automatic Answers" and the customer automatically receives suggestions of related articles after sending in a ticket via email or other channels open to a customer. - Agent savings when a ticket gets passed the self-service effort
The agent has a number of apps on the same screen as a single ticket. They provide specific information to the customer from a CRM, ERP, e-commerce or any other business related and relevant application.
Agent FRT with Zendesk automations is down to only 8 minutes from 18 minutes!
In Summary
In the introduction we quoted potential support savings of over 30%. In our example, the savings are much higher. We reduced all tickets by 50% and FRT by 55%! Very considerable savings. We haven't even discussed in this blog the great improvement you will make to customer experience increasing satisfaction and loyalty.
It's very possible your company is already in a better position that our example. However, it's fair to assume there are still major areas to improve. Possibly you aren't using help content properly, lacking integrations with other business systems or lacking the automations to reduce time and help customers.
Contact us NOW at ContextEngage so we can already begin discussing how to bring the benefits above to your company. We achieve it by our experts implementing Zendesk to it's maximum usefulness to your company.
We are looking forward to the challenge.
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