3 Things Help Desks Can Learn from Businesses with Top Tech Support

by Stephanie Faris on Tuesday, March 14 12:00

Each year, Laptop Magazine releases its list cataloging the companies that provide the best tech support for their products. Called the Laptop Tech Support Showdown, the list looks at the most popular brands, reviewing the various platforms available for customers to get help as well as the overall quality of the support they provide.

Apple is a frequent visitor to the number one spot on the list and this year is no different. The company received 56 points out of 60 for its web support and a 37 out of 40 for its phone support. Acer came in a close second, followed by Lenovo. Asus, Samsung, and MSI came in last, with the magazine specifically calling out Asus's disappointing live chat and website. Here are a few things your help desk team can take from the results of this survey.

Lose the Obstacles

As the magazine pointed out, some businesses place obstacles between customers and the help they need. In some instances, it feels as though they'll be able to reduce calls by simply making it impossible for customers to get through to anyone. However, consumers use a business's bad tech support to inform their purchasing decisions, so that behavior could send customers to competitors. One of the best things a brand can do to earn a reputation for providing great customer support is make it as easy as possible to get help. By offering multichannel tech support, your business can join the many companies who have discovered that providing customer service that way helps you win.

Be Responsive

Apple gets accolades for its particularly speedy response times, answering customer questions in only six minutes on average. There are things you can do to improve your own response times, including sending alerts to senior technicians if a ticket isn't resolved within a certain timeframe, setting up a knowledgebase employees can go to on repeat issues, and monitoring metrics to challenge your teams to improve. Although customers aren't happy about being transferred from person to person, there should be senior technicians who can take over and quickly help customers with hard-to-resolve issues.

Knowledge Is Power

No tech support professional will be able to answer every question on the spot. However, technicians can easily feel pressured to know everything about the products or devices they're supporting. The best thing a business can do is invest in training for any specialized products they support. When new features or software is introduced, professional-quality instruction should be provided to everyone who will be serving as support staff for those items. Training sites like EdX, MIT OpenCourseWare, and Lynda.com can give your employees a resource for learning in their spare time, if they choose. You can boost your team's knowledge by letting them take courses during work hours while waiting for calls to come in.

Tech support teams consistently seek to find ways to better serve their customers. The best tech companies know how to deliver that service in a friendly, efficient manner. Although it may feel tempting to let tech support lapse in order to save money, cloud services have given businesses and consumers options when it comes to the software they use, making it more important than ever to put service first.