Tech support isn’t straightforward. Depending on the wants of your users, it can be handled exploitation email, live chat support, databases, or maybe over the phone. As well as being offered on a spread of platforms, a well-structured school web also will be split into five distinct levels in it support . These five levels embody pre-support, self-service, initial line support, second line support and in imperative cases, the 3rd line of support.
- Pre-support
In the pre-Internet era, if folks had a product question, they asked family and friends or, they documented associate owner’s manual. Today, your users can merely “Google” it. And this suggests that almost all of your customers are browsing the online trying to find answers before they contact you. a number of your users are large advocates of your merchandise and supply unimaginable insight into the way to get the most effective out of them, and facilitate fellow users troubleshoot issues.
Sounds nice, right? Well, on paper, yes. But, it’s necessary to recollect that for each sensible review, there can be unnumbered customers querulous United Nations agency haven’t had their issues solved and square measure only too keen to share their expertise concerning it on-line.
With this in mind, it’s necessary to ascertain on-line forums, social media, and web site comments as your initial line of defence. As a corporation, you ought to be proactively seeking out these channels to regulate the speech, guide users towards your own school web and facilitate keep everybody happy.
- Self-service
The next level in-school support is concerning permitting users to self-serve and is managed through assistance wikis, FAQs and databases. for several users, this is often a fast and simple various to contacting a facilitate table and looking ahead to a response by email. Having a self-service level in situ will resolve the foremost common queries and unencumber initial of the line support for additional in-depth and complicated queries.
- initial line of support (human contact)
Unfortunately, FAQs and databases cannot answer everything. Sometimes, your users ought to speak to an individual’s. For many customers, initial line support is that the initial purpose of contact with somebody from your company. First-line support concentrates on the foremost common queries (which you’ll record, learn from, and use to update your database).
Tech support personnel at this level have a basic to the general understanding of the merchandise or service, however, might not perpetually contain the competence needed for finding complicated problems. still, the goal for this cluster is to handle 70-80% of the user issues before finding it necessary to step up the difficulty to a better level.
Most problems here are handled by email support, however, because the problems become additionally complicated, users can begin turning their attention towards phone support. The tougher the problems become, the additional possible they’ll wish to talk with a live school support agent.
- Second line of support (Complex issues)
At this stage, the problems are getting additionally complicated. Especially as finish users are getting progressively school savvy every year. In fact, the big apple Times found that seventy-three of school support managers same the complexness of support calls is increasing as a result of customers became additional technologically refined and might resolve less complicated problems on their own.
This means that the 25-30% of school support queries that couldn’t be handled in initial line support, find yourself here within the second line and square measure much more difficult. It needs workers with in-depth data of the merchandise to handle these support requests and supply technical steerage – and, the power to speak to users over the phone to assist them to realize an answer. But typically, even these requests need even additional experience.
- Third line of support (custom support)
This is the head of school support for the overwhelming majority of shoppers. Third line support deals with outlier cases that levels pre-support to the second line couldn’t handle, which suggests that third line school support is probably going to be managed by a chosen superuser, or maybe somebody from your R&D department.
Generally speaking, by the time a user issue gets to the third level of school support, it’s become this complicated that it possible involves custom work to resolve it.