Super compelling 2024 customer support operational opportunities

When I take Beau and Oliver, our two high-energy, still very puppy minded dogs for a walk- I carefully plan strategy, operations, and leadership. Strategy- everyone will have fun; operations- training treats, cleanup bags, and secure leashing; leadership- always looking ahead for hazards - cars, scooters, cyclists, baby strollers, zombie texters - and navigate my crew accordingly.

I often talk about the ways that impactful customer support is the product of intentional business strategy, highly functioning operational capabilities, and solid organizational leadership. Of these, operational capability and management is key to strategy execution.?It sounds easy enough, but those of you who have done it know that planning, organizing, managing and running operations is anything but easy.?There are an infinite mix of variables to the inputs, people, processes, tools, business and environment that all affect capacity, throughput, quality, and outputs.?

What’s exciting is that this space- service delivery operations- is booming with innovation and opportunities, and I think 2024 is going to see a lot of paradigm changes.? I recently highlighted the TSIA capabilities landscape for customer support, with 1-2 year horizons for capabilities that will start to be leveraged broadly in 2024- including AI capabilities like case summaries and categorization, assisted troubleshooting (with relevant knowledge linking), contextual issue detection, intelligent ticket routing.? Add to this mix things like predictive search and optimized relevancy algorithms in self-help environments and issue aggregation which can rapidly surface emerging and high-impact issues.

More than just a list of jargon features- each of these have real ability to impact SLA, TTR, AHT, CES, Csat and more. What I’ve consistently found with operational processes is that in complex systems with a lot of moving parts and variables,?there is rarely a single silver bullet?that can move the needle on operational outcomes. ?Most often there are a lot of different levers that can be used together to deliver impactful and lasting results.

And guess what?? With the above, we’re getting dozens of really powerful new levers coming into production use in the year ahead!

....each of these have real ability to impact SLA, TTR, AHT, CES, Csat and more.

So, how can support leaders be looking at, and building with, these new tools??

• Approach your ?operational strategies thoughtfully (this is not new advice, but a good reminder in this context).? Seek, review, and analyze operational opportunities?as a continuous way of working, rather than a singular shopping spree.?
• Encourage, empower and reward your team for trying new things, anywhere and everywhere.? Habits can become ruts, and ruts are unexamined blindspots that can sap agility and erode important operational outcomes. For example, my athenahealth team found that customer requests that came in via web support channels often had long lags between activity, and discovered that when a live callback to work on an issue was required, doing so by email or web ticket took multiple replies to agree on an available time.? This alone burned several days while the customer issue remained open and active. ?In response, we implemented an automated scheduling link for customers to see, select and schedule a time with the analyst to work with them, and immediately saw reductions in incident resolution times, while customers loved the flexibility of one-click support scheduling.? With intelligent routing and complex issue analysis, something like this can probably be built into contact workflows automatically.
• Act decisively to identify and unblock information and collaboration pinchpoints.? Information flow and collaboration are critical throughout an operational organization, and enabling?every person to do whatever is needed to identify and unblock ?bottlenecks as soon as they see them?and to make quick decisions in how to do so is a?critical?organizational muscle. ?My team has often implemented simple solutions such as issue templates for consolidating technical information; targeted triaging for emerging issues; flexible issue reviews from several perspectives- tools, training, and workflow adherence- and real-time technical mentoring and subject matter expert assists.?These have been quick and direct actions to close gaps, and have been very effective.
• Be rigorous in reviewing the efficacy of longer term strategies and investments so you can adapt new opportunities quickly when needed.? Plans and strategies, as they get landed, become the day to day framework for resources, actions and outcomes, so regularly investing time to assess and position well for the future is vitally important. If something is working really well, double down - do more of it or leverage it more broadly; if it’s not working as expected, knowing as soon as possible helps adjust, pivot or retrench.? Problem Management and Release Readiness are two areas that have driven good outcomes for my team, but at some point they each needed some review and optimization over time. With this, we've also focused on new strategies around incident quality management, training, and KCS (Knowledge Centered Support), each with improvements for incident handle times, resolution delivery and customer satisfaction.? In the year ahead, issue aggregation, automated categorization and contextual issue detection are definitely ripe for exploration to further innovate in these.

Operational capability and management is a backbone of service strategy execution- and it’s going to be an exciting corner of the sandbox in 2024!

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About me:?I’m an experienced Customer Support leader, building, scaling and leading SaaS support and service delivery organizations with a mission to embed customer support into the product value proposition.

[email protected]?|??www.dhirubhai.net/in/robarmstrongpm/?|?robarmstrong.online?