Is Bad Technology Slowing Down Your Customer Support Team?

Creating your “ideal” customer support team can take extensive resources and cost a lot of money. There’s up-front staffing expenses (HR and recruiting), training, and of course the dreaded employee turnover. But, what if you could reduce your employment costs AND work more efficiently as a team? Poor staffing isn’t always the problem, in fact it could be bad technology that’s slowing down and hurting your customer support team.

Dimensional Research recently surveyed 300 customer support professionals to better understand their perception of their careers. What were the results? A staggering 97% of respondents want to provide excellent support, but approximately half of them need to sift through irrelevant information when interacting with customers. This is a waste of time and makes support pros feel less empowered with their work.

Simply put, a lack of confidence and empowerment can be directly attributed to professionals not having the resources they need to do their job well. Bad resources, such as the wrong customer support technology, can be a serious pain point. In the B2B (business-to-business) world, being unable to search customer information and fragmented customer data makes it difficult for pros to do their jobs. 93% of professionals said solving customer problems requires accessing multiple systems for information, with 35% of them needing four or more systems. That’s just bad customer support strategy. In addition, 41% of pros think their issue resolution process is cumbersome and takes too long, frustrating all parties involved.

So, what’s the solution? The key is selecting customer support technology that matches your industry. Far too often, B2B companies are trying to make B2C (business-to-consumer) support technology work when it’s just not a good fit. They have weird, convoluted integrations in place to get only some of the information support teams need to be successful. There’s features like social media monitoring that sounded great in the sales pitch but just aren’t very valuable to B2B companies. 46% of professionals want relevant features, including being able to sort by customer and contact as well as the option to save results from previous searches. Customer support software built for the B2B industry has more organizational capabilities and can also be utilized to track issues directly by specific products and inventory.

With all of this research in mind, take a close look and see if your technology is slowing down and hurting your customer support team. Focus less on HR efforts and when employees leave, take a moment to understand exactly why they are leaving (hint – it’s usually not because of some “gold star” gamification program). If topics of inefficiency continue to pop up, it might be a good idea to reevaluate your customer support technology solutions, especially if you’re trying to leverage a B2C solution in a B2B industry. Excellent employees are hard to find (and cost a lot to be discovered and courted), so don’t chase them away by matching the great recruiting efforts with poor technology choices.