Ah, is there any part of the service experience that is more reviled by savvy customers¹ or by upwardly mobile support staff than the dreaded “tiered” model of support? You know, the one that made sense when we built these models when our customers didn’t know much about technology, and we knew best? Where we put friendly but inexpert people on the front line to protect expensive resources (that often were the reason the problems happened in the first place) from “simple” calls?

From the customer’s point of view, it is disconcerting—always starting at the bottom answering basic questions. There usually is no acknowledgement of the customer’s expertise or the context of his query. For example, whether you are calling because you can’t print a document to read on the plane or if you are calling because you are having trouble printing out a proposal for a multimillion-dollar project that is minutes away from the submission deadline, your query is usually treated the same. You have to go through the same hoops until someone determines the context and urgency of your issue. 

From the staff’s point of view, it is considered a necessary rite of passage—spend enough time dealing with low-level, repeated questions, and either defect to another group at the first opportunity or, if you survive, move up to more interesting, less routine work (Level 2).

Auspiciously, one of the emerging best practices in support revolves getting rid of the tiered support model for live support completely. In this emerging model, if you need assistance, you are connected with a generalist who is highly skilled, knows your business well, and is able to understand the context of your call. He is paid as well as the experts he may escalate your call to, as the skills he possesses are as highly valued by the customer community. He will typically be very knowledgeable about your situation and will have the power to bring the right level of resources to resolve your particular issue. I call this type of support “savvy support.”

To accommodate this change, the right tools will need to have not only the traditional CRM touches, but they also must layer in context and social networking aspects (to help identify support staff who have talents and interests that are not encompassed by their job description or title) as well as nuanced linguistics capability² in order for this just-in-time model to work. This “savvy support” approach will force us to break away from the “if this person has a title, they must be good” mentality and move to the “everyone has talent—most of it is not apparent in titles and traditional organizational charts” mode of finding out who has what skills that can be applied at the right time to the right issue.

This model works both for the customer (you get an advocate who will help you resolve issues at the first call if you do need to speak to a person) as well as for the support team (people in support love to solve problems, not being enforcers of procedures and rules). It is exceptionally customer-friendly, because in this model, the metrics that the service desk cares about are metrics like “customer impacted minutes,” not internal efficiency metrics like “time to answer.”

There are a few prerequisites for this to work. The first is leadership, because we will have to turn conventional support wisdom on its head and work with HR and others to make changes to compensation, reward, and metrics. The second prerequisite is a team that relishes solving new problems, rather than becoming complacent at getting good at handling routine (or known) problems. (In this model, repeated issues are ruthlessly eliminated and fixed so they don’t reoccur. This should save a lot of money.) The third prerequisite is a solid culture of sharing knowledge. Think this only works for smaller organizations? See the first prerequisite….

Notes
[1] No, we aren’t talking about maintenance fees; I’ll save that for another article.
[2] It will not only be Web-based, but also voice-based, as tens of millions of people will not be able to participate in reading English-only support on the Web.

About Phil Verghis………………………………….……….………….……

Phil Verghis is founder and president of The Verghis Group, a trusted advisor to service and support leaders, and author of the acclaimed book, The Ultimate Customer Support Executive. His book, The Ultimate Customer Support Executive, was on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge recommended list. Visit www.verghisgroup.com for more information.