5 Wishes for 2020

It’s this time of the year when we think, or rather, we know that we are walking into a brighter future. Here are 5 ideas for improving your support operation:

1. Use support data to improve the product/service. You know you want to, you know you could. What’s stopping you? Is it poor data quality? Improve and streamline how you track case information. Is it a lack of proper reporting? Fix it!  You can use similar tools and a similar approach to influence how products are sold, and how customers are onboarded. Good data provides confirmation for the stories you already collect.
2. Kill stupid metrics. You know you have some lurking around: new KB articles (what about quality?), portal page views (really?), daily updates to P1 cases (so easy to game!), and many, many more.
3. Provide proper training to the team. There’s never enough time, and rarely enough money, right? So do you prefer providing mediocre support to customers? Be creative. Brownbags sessions and other low-key approaches can compete favorably with formal training. Here’s a completely free idea: ask the support engineers to bring “though customer” stories to the staff meeting and discuss/mentor around them.
4. Get reliable customer feedback. If your customer satisfaction survey has a low response rate (anything under 10%), you might as well throw it away. The magic formula is often: use a one-question survey (shorter is better); send it to everyone (customers have proven they are very good as disregarding overly-frequent surveys), and act on the results (yes, you need to contact all customers that report being dissatisfied, and quickly, too.
5. Try something new. Aim to run at least one experiment at all times. 2020 will likely be the year of support AI. Give it a go. Go kick a tire or two with a vendor.

If FT Works can help reaching your goals, or clarifying them, let me know. And tell us (in the comments): what are your 2020 goals?