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Part II In the first part of this story in May SILICON CHIP Barrie Smith tipped us into the maelstrom of the funny yarns about Tech Support. Now he gets serious and investigates how the major companies handle the floods of enquiries and queries that rain upon enterprises brave enough to market their products… and daring enough to back them up with help and comfort for the buying public. T ech support can be confronting for the caller. It can also be a challenge for the operator at the call centre… but the feedback from the buying public can be worth every cent of the centre’s operational cost in the way it channels into the hearts and minds of the customer. To get a feel for the business I spoke to a number of companies: Adobe, Canon, Microsoft and Sony. Adobe Adobe’s Asia Pacific area provides support in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Korean. Adobe operators can access an internal knowledge base to assist them with both technical and other information to resolve customer questions. Adobe describe this as a “living document”, compiled from three sources: core product knowledge derived from siliconchip.com.au the development teams during product development; information gained from the beta-testing stages of the product; then the continuously-added product information gathered after the product hits the market. Backing this is an on-line knowledge base providing customers with the appropriate information to resolve their own issues. Adobe feels the best tech support resolution it can provide is the one that does not involve the customer contacting Adobe at all! Canon Canon Australia support every consumer product the company has ever made (and sold in Australia). Some of that dates back a long time, so they have customers ringing in with a product that might have been last sold in the early 90s. Twenty operators and two team leaders are based in the company’s North Ryde NSW centre. Over many years Canon has built up an information base that can also be accessed by callers; much of this has come from Canon Japan. In addition to that, an internal knowledge base swells every time a customer calls, possibly with a unique problem and a unique solution… this is documented and added to the knowledge base Microsoft Based in Singapore, Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support provides more than 100 services, including tech support. Backing this up is a mix of resources in Australia, in the form of customer service, support and field engineering teams. Asia-Pacific callers can access care hot lines operating in 10 languages around 14 countries in the Asia Pacific region. June 2009  91 You may find the long wait for a tech support operator sometimes stressful … but what about the operator? Adobe admits that the role of a tech support operator “can be a high-pressure job,” so they try to mitigate this impact, even at the recruiting process, by assessing the motivational ‘fit’ of an applicant. If this indicates someone does not cope well under pressure, then they are likely not going to be a successful operator. Once on the job, Adobe attempts to put fun into work and reduce stress level, by running ‘events’ that range from holding fun competitive games during their breaks and asking staff to arrive at work in costume. Also admitting the stressful nature of the job, Sony compares it to the stress levels of aircraft controllers. The company recruits “people who really want to help customers. The only thing that would ever stress one of them out is if they get a really angry customer. Then they can take a couple of minutes off after that call and go and have a chat with their team leader. Microsoft admits that by the time a customer calls them, they must have encountered difficulties with their products or systems and are probably desperate for a fix. Their customer service and support teams have to handle different challenges with various levels of complexity and they have to tap on a wide range of capabilities to balance the demands that come with the job. They all acquire deep technical expertise, strong problem solving ability, communication skills and cross-culture knowledge and understanding. Sony believes they have the right levels of support for them now. Tech support staff have access to the information to do their jobs quite effectively, so they’re not scared of what the next call will be and whether they’ll know the solution or not … The truth is, no-one who is calling a call centre, is calling just to say everything is OK. 92  Silicon Chip A different sort of challenge is faced by Microsoft, with its mix of globallyused operating system and office software plus hardware products. Sony A team of four product specialist engineers at Sony’s head office interact with the various designer factory groups. Then a further six branch tech support people, in each of the capital cities, between the service centres, service providers, Sony and the customer during business hours. This covers devices like digital cameras, camcorders, TVs, VAIO computers etc. Sony’s approach differs in that it uses two front line call centres and from there calls can be bounced off to the various other service centres. Sony’s Tim Simons explains that “if it can’t be resolved over the phone or via the Internet then access to a knowledge base is made. This is growing all the time.” phone training, followed by product training and then further customer service training. Then they go into a so-called ‘nursery group’ for four to six weeks, dealing with a limited product range. More going on line for help Regardless of their level – beginner or advanced – any user can face challenges and need help, so need to make a call to tech support. It would be very hard to place an average time for a phone call. More and more customers are submitting their questions online versus a phone call. For one particular application, 91% of all issues were handled via the phone with only 8% online — nine months later the phone calls had fallen to 63%, with 37% online. Customers are increasingly preferring to go online for assistance, with companies focusing considerable efforts on making more tools and information available there. Training Tricky Questions For Adobe, training of operators can take anywhere from four to eight weeks. Even then, past the initial training there is ongoing education on a regular basis. This is mostly computerbased training and, depending on the detail and importance of the new information, can also be instructor lead. Training covers new tools, processes, software skills etc or new product information or upgrade releases. Canon’s company training is “quite intensive”. Recruits start off with about a two-day induction training program, a sort of ‘welcome to Canon’, emphasising the ‘quality first’ approach. Then they get an overview of all Canon products, followed by a buddy system where they’ll sit with experienced operators, watching them deal with callers. In general, Microsoft adheres to a 20-70-10 rule as guiding principles for training: 20% instructor-led, 70% on the job and 10% mentoring. Before every major product launch, a set of well-designed readiness routines are put in place to equip operators with all the knowledge, skill and tools necessary to serve customers. Tech support staff receives additional educational training courses as well as internal technical conferences. Sony begins with a two-week induction, including some system and Typical questions include assistance with installation, help on how to use a specific feature, dealing with error messages and issues when a feature fails to work as expected, often when interacting with a second party product, be it hardware or software. One of the trickier questions received frequently is when a customer calls in and states that they need to reset their password; this becomes tricky since some customers have a hard time explaining which password they wish to reset! Ocasionally slightly off beat queries are received; for instance a call from a customer “I purchased a very powerful PC — do you have software powerful enough for it?” And then there are customers call the support number by mistake. One example is a customer who called and started complaining about the amount of their phone bill!” Some of the tricky ones are where customers do call in with a really old product – like the query about a veteran electronic StarWriter 60 typewriter. Occasionally a customer calls in and they’ll rattle off a model number which tech support hasn’t heard of. When they check the data base, they find out it’s not even one of their products! siliconchip.com.au Or the customer who called in saying he had given out his fax number and people are faxing him and he’s not getting any of the faxes. So after a bit of trouble shooting it was confirmed that the fax machine was working fine – he had given out the wrong fax number!” And if they can’t help? Microsoft has ‘escalation engineers’ who deal with more critical support issues. There’s also a group of program managers who work with the product groups to ready our service infrastructure when new products are released or updated. Given that the company supports a wide range of customers, questions land on everyday use of its products, as well as very technical questions from customers who deploy the systems on a large scale. Typical questions include installing updates and configuration issues. One customer had an ongoing, nagging problem when their servers malfunctioned every evening at around the same time. Sensing the urgency in the case, Microsoft dispatched an engineer and flew him to the customer site to take a closer look at the problem. While there were no visible system errors or malfunctions, they finally found the air-conditioning unit automatically shut off in the evening and the server performances were disrupted by the high heat and humidity. In these days of integration with AV products, connection between brands is relatively straightforward. They mate relatively easily across common connectors but where the trickiness comes in is probably more in the computer space which is where a customer has got a Sony VAIO laptop and they are trying to hook it up to an HP printer or a Belkin modem or something like that… that’s where it becomes a little bit harder for tech support. Improving the breed The major benefit of running tech support call centres, apart from happy customers, is that the feedback from callers is a valuable resource, ready to be mined in the pursuit of product development. For one, Adobe’s product management teams ensure that customer feedback is considered in new product releases and that customers’ reported issues are part of the planning process for future versions. Who You Gonna Call? So your setup has gone bung, frozen, flat-lined, dealt a mortal blow by a cause unknown. You have to call Help HQ. Once you’ve made the decision to call tech support, make sure you have the following information on hand: • Device name and model. • Serial number. • If the device is computer-based, what operating system it is using. • What other devices are linked. • And finally, allow enough time to make the call and get an answer. In Canon’s case, customer feedback is channelled to the marketing team who send that back to Canon in Japan and that feeds back into R&D. Sony captures feedback on every call that comes in to the call centre. Any comment, whether it be the manual, the packaging, anything is passed back to the regional head in Singapore every month. So, it seems those long waits for an operator to respond are worthwhile in the long term and can sometimes lead to an improvement in the breed… a TV set, DVD recorder, digicam, software etc. SC Call centre operators often have to deal with a mix of home users, hobbyists, prosumers, and professionals. Typical caller questions include assistance with installation, help on how to use a specific feature, dealing with error messages and issues when a feature fails to work as expected. siliconchip.com.au June 2009  93