Your favorite childhood superhero correct answer required to proceed!

Recently I was personally assisting a family member to cancel an Internet Service plan with a very BIG provider.  The only way to cancel the service was to provide the correct answer to the question – “Who is your favorite childhood superhero?”  Although we could provide verifiable account information, phone numbers to call us back to verify the correct account, credit card details, the account deactivation depended upon the “childhood Superhero” correct answer. After 2 hours, many guesses as to the original answer we gave them including guesses of Superman, Captain Underpants, Batman, Spiderman,  others,  and 3 support call, 6 techs later, they finally let the account be deactivated without a super hero!   Flexible processes that could do simple account verification hung up the whole process for hours!

Having problems with those nasty phone tree support options and voice options?  Most support operations allow you to press “0” continuously to take you to an operator quickly!

No superhero question required!:  This week I was helping several clients upgrade their Web+Center help desk installation and could see how it is far more effective than the common customer support channels used by large corporations.  Web+Center users are creating and submitting support tickets on their own – No superhero questions required! Those support tickets get quickly dispatched to the appropriate technician for service in a method that does not require wasted time to confirm the ticket creation.  After the support issue has been closed,  the whole support processes gets continually refined with Web+Center customer surveys. Web+Center support systems are fast, affordable, efficient and seem light years ahead from the support processes I am forced to use with billion dollar companies that have incredible system design flaws for their support systems and lack of training and experience for the technicians and of course, rigid rules about correct answers to superhero questions.

Web+Center Simple Tips: Here are some simple tips we recommend for building a better IT support portal with Web+Center without significant time or resources.

• Customer Surveys – Web+Center has built in customer surveys with simple survey builder and reporting tools.  Given a healthy relationship between the IT managers, IT technicians and the staff, simple support issues of lack of resources or unhelpful staff can be identified quickly and easily.

• Enable File attachments – If you haven’t already done this, enabling it will allow folks to attach files and documents that are important to the support item at hand.  Refer to the Web+Center User Guide, and the last item in the System Configuration seciton of Tech+Center explains the File Attachment configuration steps.

• Evaluate your dispatching/priority practices and policies every 6 months –  There may be better ways to handle incoming support tickets with initial dispatching by configuring  Web+Center with different groups, group notification options or initial group assignment based on a category selection.  There are also customization options that require specific fields or categories to be completed before a ticket can be created.  A review of the options available with Web+Center in the User Guide might bring new productivity and flow to your organizational support processes.

• Review your Web+Center case categories, and single line text boxes – Verify you have created a customer/tech case form that is simple but effective for your support operations.  Modify and add case categories or single line text fields in your case form as things change or become more advanced for reporting and dispatching.

• Implement a Web+Center asset Management system – New import and reporting tools are available in Version 8.0 to enable a very effective asset management system.

• Find and promote a remote control program for your support operations that can be launched from links from your Web+Center Customer+Center page and your Tech+Center white board quickly.  There are many FREE remote control products out there, so find one that fits your model, and then make it accessible with Web+Center via links on pages for Customers and Techs.  We primarily use remote control products ofl Join.me and TeamViewer when connecting to clients machine for support.

Conclusions – Spending 2 hours researching, configuring and fine tuning your Web+Center may be time well spent.  Feel free to give us a call and we can help you through some of these configurations to build a better IT support portal.