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Guided Process Workflow Creation for Startup Companies

So you've decided to use cloud-based Help Desk / CRM software to provide your call center agents with a Guided Process Workflow with which to work from. The question written on the brick wall most people hit at this point is "Where do we go from here?"

The answer to this question really depends on a number of characteristics about your organization, and how you will provide support to your customers. SpiceCSM is always a great place to start.

One of the large differentiations here that can send you on vastly different paths towards success, is whether your company is a "startup", or if you are an existing company that has been (or has contracted a company to be) providing support to customers previously. A company that has experience supporting their customers will in many cases have a more clear direction as to what issues occur most frequently. This gives a starting point as to what guided processes will need to be developed to allow callcenter agents to best service the customer.

With a startup company however, you are largely left to the creative minds within the organization to determine what might lead customers to call, and how to best provide them with the service that they require. We have found over the years, that the key players in this process are often (but not always!) those "behind the scenes" of the company, rather than sales or marketing teams. Depending on your specific industry, this can mean software developers, engineers, financial experts, technicians, and even focus groups or test users that were utilized in the beginning stages of a project.

An objective point of view needs to be taken in order to "predict" (or maybe guess...) why your customers might call, and what might be the most time and cost efficient means of resolving their issue.

A working example of this might be an online retail establishment. When brainstorming, some of the issues customers might encounter could be:

  • Difficulties placing an order
  • Questions regarding a product or service
  • Questions regarding sales promotions
  • Questions regarding various aspects of shipping (why have I not received my order, do you have a tracking number, etc.)

Determining a relatively broad range of initial scenarios that may define your "support scope" will help to define issues within which you can delve deeper. In the previous example, under the "Difficulties placing an order" heading, their could be subsets related to credit card processing, "shopping-cart" questions/problems, issues with rebate codes, etc.This may be similar to how you were taught to write a story or essay in primary school. First you need a topic, and then within that topic you will need to expand and provide more detail.

It is the attempt to define subsets of issues with further detail that will allow your team to have a leg up when trying to provide support for a new company's products or services. We have seen many times the failure of companies that assume they can determine common issues after launching a support service.

A suggested Best Practice is to attempt to determine as completely as possible the issues that customers may experience, and be prepared to handle these issues. Once this support structure is in place, data can be gathered to determine the most frequently occurring issues, as well as the proper way to resolve them.

So contact SpiceCSM today and we'll convert your complex, decision tree, support processes into dynamic, interactive scripts that make your agents or self-serving customers smarter and faster.

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