More than 20 years ago, Salesforce started as a CRM platform. Today it is a more complete and broader ecosystem for organizations to enhance the customer experience and shopping journey. We can expand this view of customers for both end customers and clients as well as for partners and internal users of organizations. And the experience of each of them counts to make the wheel of the organization turn smoothly.
Your service and support strategy can be the key to enabling the productivity of your internal users, and it can ensure that your customers make better use of your products and services.
In this context, your strategy to support technology applications and users becomes essential, as it directly impacts the experience of internal users and customers. Two themes are fundamental to the success of supporting the digital transformation of your business.
Scaling Support Operations
Some methodologies can be applied to determine the size of the support division for each operation and organization. We have identified the following steps to forecast possible demand:
- Survey the history of at least six months of the organization’s support incident flow, identifying volume and recurring types of requests
- Define the service level agreements (SLAs) with the support partner to be able to scale the volumes to be served within the support service period. The average service time per channel, the average response time per call type and the profile history of calls can help determine the proper size of the service team.
- In addition to the size of the support team, it is also necessary to understand the most appropriate profile for the composition of the team. The balance between more communicative or more technical profiles varies from operation to operation. That may even change over time, but it directly impacts the planning and assembly of the service and support team.
- Most importantly, you must understand the behavior of your customers, how they usually seek support and which service channels are most helpful for their needs.
Phase Out and Knowledge Transfer
The Phase Out is the moment of transition when the development team delivers a project and the support team takes ownership of fulfilling user requests regarding the project. Knowledge Transfer from one team to another ensures that processes, rules and criteria are clarified so that the support team has the information necessary to perform their work.
The support team also needs to receive functional and technical training on the project, as they will need to guide users on possible business rule questions, how to navigate the system, map improvements, and even document incidents.
All levels of the support team (N1, administration and N3 development) aim to ensure satisfaction and a better service experience. This will be possible only with an understanding of what was requested, empathy and appropriate prioritization.
The digital transformation of a business does not end with the go live of the newest application. Adopting the new platform and using all its capabilities is critical to the success of the technological investment. There are no benefits to having a sophisticated solution if teams are not using it. And solid service and support strategy will ensure your teams adopt your new platform so you can maximize your time and financial investment in it.
To get help with your support strategy, visit OSF Digital’s Support & Maintenance Services page.
