Savvy Support Model - No more ‘tiers’
By Phil Verghis on April 16, 2008In my April newsletter, I wrote about how companies are beginning to relalize that the ‘tiered’ support model is counter-productive to customers and to staff. Given the number of responses to it, I’ve decided to reproduce it as a blog for a more widespread discussion…
————— (From the April 2008 edition of my newsletter, The Verghis View)
Ah, is there any part of the service experience that is more reviled by savvy customers* or by upwardly mobile support staff than the dreaded ‘tiered’ model of support? It made sense back when our customers didn’t know much about technology, and we knew best. When we first built these models, we put friendly but clueless support people on the front line to protect expensive resources (who often were the reason the problems existed in the first place) from ’simple’ questions.
From a customer’s point of it, the tiered model is horrible. They’re always forced to start at the bottom answering basic questions. There is no acknowledgement of their expertise or the context of their query. For example, all calls are treated pretty much the same, whether they are calling because they can’t print a document to read on the plane, or if they’re having trouble printing a proposal for a multi-million dollar project that is minutes away from the submission deadline. Every caller has to jump through the same hoops until someone determines the context and urgency of your issue.
From the staff’s point of view, the tiered model is treated as a necessary rite of passage. Traditionally, rookies had to spend a certain amount of time dealing with repetitive, low-level questions, then either defect to another group at the first opportunity, or if you survive, move up to Tier 2, which offers more interesting, less routine work.
One of the emerging best practices in support involves getting rid of tiered support for live calls completely. In this emerging model, callers who need assistance are connected with a highly skilled generalist, someone who understands both your business and the context of your call. He or she is paid just as well as the experts they may escalate to, because their skills are as just highly valued by customers. These professionals need to know a lot about the customer’s context and bring the right level of resources to resolve that particular issue.
I call this type of support ‘Savvy Support.’
To accommodate this change to a ‘just in time’ model, support tools must deliver more than just traditional CRM touches. To connect with people who have talents and interests not encompassed by their job description or title, these tools must also layer in context and social networking aspects as well as nuanced linguistics capability. This ’savvy support’ approach will force us to break away from the ‘if this person has a title they must be good’ mentality and embrace the ‘everyone has talent, most of it is not apparent in titles and traditional organizational charts’ mode of finding out who has the right skills that can be applied at the right time to the right issue.
This Savvy Support model works both for the customer and the support team. The customer gets a knowledgeable advocate who can help them resolve issues on the first call (if they even need to speak to a person). Support staffers win because they love to solve problems, rather than be enforcers of procedures and rules. This model is exceptionally customer friendly because the important metrics are things like customer impacted minutes, not internal efficiency metrics like time to answer.
However, a couple of prerequisites are required for this approach to work.
- The first prerequisite is leadership, because conventional support wisdom must be turned on its head. Leaders will need to work with HR and other departments to implement changes in compensation, reward and metrics.
- The second prerequisite is a support team that relishes solving new problems, rather than becoming complacent. It will no longer be enough to be good at handling routine (or known) problems. In the Savvy Support model, recurring issues are ruthlessly eliminated and fixed so they don’t reoccur.
- The third prerequisite is a solid organizational culture of sharing knowledge, such as Knowledge Centered Support.
Are you ready to learn how to get out of your comfort zone and smash your tiered support model? Call me at 617.395.6613 or toll-free at 800.494.9142. Another way is to attend my upcoming June 5th workshop, “Be the Voice of the Customer”
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As usual Phil, you are RIGHT on the money there.. We dropped tiers some years back. Our desk is a mix of seasoned pros and a few newbies and more resembles a bull pin then a old style call center:
Customers call and get Sam who is the Office expert, but their problem is printers which is Joe’s specialty. Sam passes it but listens in for pointers. Next printer call, Sam has one answer available and Joe is now listening to Sam explain Word template issues, and so on… Bill the intern sometimes feels lost, but he is learning how to switch perspectives on a dime, depending on the crisis du jours.
I appreciate the news letter. keep up the good work
In this Savvy model, aren’t you in reality just upgrading the talent pool at the Tier-1 level? You are still going to have people answering the incoming calls, and they will still need someone to escalate the more involved issues to. That’s been my methodology over the past 10 years or so - to eliminate the automaton answering the calls, and to have a skilled person as the first point of contact who has the ability and the discretion to work calls to completion from the outset, which has given us a high same-day resolution rate. Those issues that are more involved get moved up to Tier-2, and we do our best to minimize user downtime in the escalation process, asking the T-1’s to alert the T-2’s to particularly sensitive or critical issues.
The difficulty in the model you propose is convincing management to invest the extra dollars necessary to have that T-2 capable person working the phones. Most companies want to hire the cheapest folks possible to answer calls. I left Corporate America for government contracting at least partly for that reason. In the contracting world, due to how our contract is structured, we have the flexibility to improve our talent blend to provide the best results, which then puts more highly-skilled individuals on the front lines. We do shadowing and job-sharing as well, to help develop the T-1 techs, but we find that maintaining delineated roles provides us a better sens of order, and more control over the customer experience. We also use this structure to provide promotion opportunities, which has allowed us to grow from our “farm system”, as it were, and reduce the turnover at the T-1 level.
I’m not saying that eliminating tiers is a bad idea - if that’s what works in your particular environment then go with it, by all means! This is, after all, about providing what the customer wants.
Glad to see at least two organizations starting to use this model. Tony, you are right in that on the surface, it seems like just an upgrade of the front line folks. For this to work properly, the entire *culture* has to change. It means that the generalists have to be ruthless (and have the power) to ferret out and resolve issues that arise repeatedly. It means that what they do has to be valued as highly as the top folks. There has to be a robust knowledge management system in place (more than just technology).
In terms of cost, if you actually map out the cost to the customer and the waste and rework that happens over and over in typical reactive service desks/help desks, this model should be give you a substantial upgrade at a lower cost! Not a bad combination…
In the company I used to work at, I built this model and had people with master’s and Phds from top universities like MIT and Harvard (and of course amazing people who didn’t even have degrees) on the front line. They were compensated as highly as R&D and the customers noticed and loved it. Of course, we had a solid culture and knowledge management system behind it.