The Planet Blog

Hi everyone! I started working at The Planet a few months ago in the technical support department, and I’ve really enjoyed my experience here. I’ve been on the customer side of technical support calls for most of my life, so I’ve never understood what it was like to be on the supporting side of the call. Now that my perspective has changed a little, I’ve noticed that the best customer support occurs when the support provider and the support requester work together to create the best experience possible.

Shelves of books have been written about providing great customer support, but I haven’t seen many written about how to get great customer support. When you work with a service-based company, you’re likely going to interact with customer support representatives regularly. During these interactions, your experience will not be defined by your question or the issue you have. Instead, it will be defined by how you present your issue to technical support.

It can be extremely frustrating when a server goes down or a script isn’t working the way it should. When this happens, my gut reaction is to get upset and throw my keyboard. I’ve also noticed that when I am angry, I have a difficult time trying to explain my problem to technical support. I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in that regard, and with my newfound perspective, I came up with a few tips that might help you get the most bang for your buck when you work with customer support:

1. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter where the customer support representative is; they’re human, and their responsibility is to help you. I don’t have any empirical data, but human nature tells me it’s easier to be nice to someone who is nice to you. Once you realize there’s a person on the other end of the phone trying to do his/her job, it’s a little easier to thank them in advance for their help. It may seem insignificant, but if you thank me in advance for my help, I’ll subconsciously work harder in an effort to deserve that gratitude.
2. Don’t assume your request will be ignored. I’m surprised by the number of people who start or end their e-mail with, “No one will probably see this, but …” or “Not that anyone cares, but …” Don’t assume that you’ll be ignored. That assumption is more of an overarching negative sentiment than it is a “reverse psychology” play. The support process can be defined by the expectations you set for it, so get started on the right foot and expect that your questions will be answered and issues will be resolved.
3. Don’t start with a threat. “If you don’t do this, I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities,” or “If you don’t respond within 25 seconds, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer” … It’s not uncommon to hear things like this in the first message in a ticket. Starting with a threat never helps your cause. It’s much easier to help someone who seems easy to help. Invoking lawyers does not make your ticket seem easy to address.
4. Provide useful, descriptive and relevant information. This tip can be tough since it’s hard to understand what information is relevant, but think about it before you send a support request. If you are having trouble logging in, then “I can’t log in. Any ideas?” is not quite as clear as “Whenever I try to log in, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks.” That extra information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth e-mails between you and the support representative.
5. Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests. The longer your e-mail, the more difficult it is to read, diagnose and to respond. A representative has to read the entire ticket to find what’s meaningful and figure out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise and brief. If you’ve got a couple different issues for support to look at, break them out into individual tickets … different issues may need to be addressed by different departments, so multiple issues in a single ticket can lead to delays in responding to specific issues in the ticket.
6. More Tickets ≠ More Support. Don’t create multiple support tickets for a single issue … While it seems like you are drawing more attention to the issue and creating a sense of urgency, you’re really slowing down the support process. Support representatives might be addressing the same issue in parallel or information might be lost between tickets, elongating the time to resolution.
7. Escalate your tickets smartly. If you think a ticket should be handled differently or if you would like a supervisor to look into a specific issue, you should always feel free to request escalation to a manager or a supervisor. The best way to make that request is to update your open ticket, initiate a live chat or place a call into the technical support phone line. If you aren’t satisfied with your support experience, then we aren’t either, so we want to hear from you.

As you can see, the prescription is not too complicated: Prepare yourself to receive the best support, and you’re much more likely to receive it.

- Sean

Continuing The Planet’s feature coverage on WHIRtv, Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR sat down with our vice president of Customer Care Jim Picone.

Jim explains the major improvements we’ve executed in our customer care organization within the past two years and focuses on the benefits of our new phone, chat and ticketing systems. With these new systems, we can now track critical metrics to create best practices and monitor operational efficiencies.

Watch the video below to get additional insight into our call center and our vision for the continuous improvements we’re making in our customer care organization.

Non-verbal communication is becoming more and more a way of life in the customer service industry. In customer contact centers once dominated by phone calls, companies now communicate with customers via web chat, e-mail and ticketing systems.

Obviously, the technology industry has been at the forefront of this type of direct communication, with customers often placing more trust in these alternate methods than the traditional “give ‘em a call” approach.

Resolving problems with a ticketing system creates an entirely different support management paradigm than answering a phone call. Issues can be tracked and researched via the written record that exists in a ticket, but tickets don’t have the immediate feedback of a phone call. Because the vast majority of our support is handled through tickets, here’s a glimpse at the inner-workings of our support process.

When The Planet receives a customer ticket, the first thing that we do is conduct a “triage” to determine the problem that has been described and which department should take ownership. We have a staff of triage experts who do their best to insure that a ticket is routed to the right department as soon as it is received.

To avoid being “stuck in the slow lane,” give us as much detail as possible when you submit a ticket. While we can work with “my bandwidth is wrong” or “my server isn’t working,” advising us that different software showed a different amount of bandwidth traffic or that you can’t connect to your server will help us route tickets to the right department much more quickly. Give us as much detail as you can about the problem, and chances are we can resolve the problem more quickly.

Sometimes, ticket processing can be slowed when we request additional information from you by updating the ticket. If you have an open ticket, it’s important to keep an eye on it to see if we’ve asked for new information that will help us keep your account secure and resolve the issue. For us, there is nothing worse than missing one last piece of the puzzle, so we are often as anxious to hear back from you as you are to hear back from us.

When you do submit a ticket, there is a level of trust involved that we ARE working on it. It’s true that some take longer than others to process; it’s the nature of the customer service in technology. Resolving an incorrect server charge on your account will probably take less time than figuring out why a server won’t reboot, and it is our responsibility to keep you in the loop, so we have multiple systems in place to do so. Each department escalates tickets to higher priority levels when a ticket has been open too long without an update. We strictly adhere to these limits and take action when ticket times exceed our set warning levels. Our support managers are constantly updated in real time on the pending time to process all tickets we receive, and our support reps work diligently to get responses and resolutions to every ticket as quickly as possible. In the most complex tickets, cross-departmental communication or the need for additional research may keep us from resolving the individual tickets as quickly as we would like, but without these behind-the-scenes steps, we would not be giving you the best answer.

Moral of the Story: To keep your ticket humming along in the fast lane, please include as much detail as possible in your initial ticket and keep an eye out for requests for additional information. Please be patient as we work to resolve more difficult problems, and always feel free to request updates. We pay attention to comments made by our customers regarding the ticketing system, and we are always looking for ways to improve our work-flow and enhance the customer experience.

Keep this post in mind when (or should I say “if”?) you need to submit a new ticket so you can keep your tickets in the fast lane!

-John