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

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

Whereas it might not be apparent on the floor, these departments share a typical purpose — to scale back downtime. The roles and obligations 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 large technological modifications lately, however too regularly, they proceed to function in silos. This division is exacerbated by the very instruments and methods meant to assist.

Siloes harm 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 difficulty seems to be rooted in back-end know-how, navigates to a separate inner helpdesk system to create a ticket with the right 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 info and relay it again to the shopper. The multi-step course of creates pointless friction to resolve the difficulty, whereas slowing each the substantive response and the communication again to the shopper.

Even with all of the instruments at an agent’s disposal, they usually discover themselves navigating by way of disparate methods and duplicating info throughout platforms. Nonetheless, key particulars comparable to whether or not the shopper’s concern is a recognized incident and the way lengthy the difficulty will take to be resolved will not be instantly accessible. This lack of fluid communication causes a sequence response of delays in the end leading to sad prospects.

It’s crucial that customer support brokers have a streamlined methodology to escalate customer-impacting disruptions to IT whereas sustaining full visibility of the shopper 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 data they should reply buyer inquiries rapidly and escalate know-how points from the entrance strains when the back-office staff isn’t conscious of a customer-impacting disruption?

The client is essential

It’s time to acknowledge prospects as one other, and generally an important, sign of system perform. Whereas customer support groups already do that, technical groups stand to profit 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’ll be capable to higher perceive a problem’s blast radius, prioritize it accordingly, and intervene earlier than the impression is felt extra broadly. Conducting this requires an built-in method.

Each customer support and engineering groups have a robust need to interrupt down silos to reinforce the shopper expertise. As soon as either side of the aisle can rally round real-time buyer knowledge, two-way communication, and a totally built-in device stack, groups can 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 nicely.

Justin Shie is CS at PagerDuty