Your support organization has a magic weapon. Use it!
Last week, after some intense wind storms in our area, a good friend and her husband became (most welcome) climate refugees at our house after losing power at theirs. It was fun to have work roommates!
Two days into the outage, the website of our local utility displayed this message: “estimated restoration to be announced”–a message that had not changed for over 24 hours. We could see that dozens of trees were down and that the crews were working hard, but we literally had no idea when we could expect relief.
What would have made it better? Very simple: the timeframe for the next update. Tell us when the team will complete its assessment, or when it will give an update.
In this case, the outage ended a few hours later, with no warning or announcement–so clearly in this case the onsite teams were working faster than the communication team…
In your support organization, how do you encourage your team members to always give customers a next step with a timeframe? Please add your response in a comment.
(If your team needs a refresher on this and other magic weapons, we can help. Contact me for more details.
We encourage Analysts to provide an Action Plan when providing a Support Update
Current Issue
Current Status
Next Steps
This makes sure anyone viewing that incident knows what the current issue is we are working (Problem Statement may have changed or sometimes customers lump multiple issues into 1 incident) and that they know what Current Status is and what next steps are going to be taken by support and when.
Good idea! So it sounds like it’s something you are recommending but not mandating. I see how it could be a little repetitive to always state the current issue if it’s not changing…