Investigating how to offer, or ways to improve, real time technical support is not only an excellent way to bump customer satisfaction levels (while simultaneously mitigating churn), but also differentiate your business for the right reasons. So how can you immediately improve your real time technical support in a scalable, effective way? That’s what we’ll be investigating in this article.
What is Real Time Technical Support?
As of now, there’s not one narrow definition for this topic. But by and large, when we say real time technical support, we mean a form of customer service that solves customer queries and problems via technology. Especially as it relates to complex issues with a product or service. Needless to say, a key tenet of this idea is the notion that problems will be addressed quickly and effectively. All in a manner that is appealing to the customer.
The ‘immediacy’ aspect is especially important: people don’t like waiting to speak with customer support, and it seems as time goes on we’re only getting more impatient. For instance, one computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst – Ramesh Sitaraman – reported that technology has increased people’s reliance on instant gratification. Specifically, after examining the viewing habits of 6.7 million internet users in his study, subjects were “only willing to wait for content to load for 2 seconds.” After 5 seconds, ¼ of participants had exited their initial point of interest, while 10 seconds wait time saw 50% of participants had abandoned ship.
So what does this mean for your business? Well, in an increasingly impatient world, you’re at a strong advantage. If you can connect customers with your employees easily and expediently, while offering prompt technical support that yields results.
Methods of Support to Consider
The following list presents a breakdown of some popular methods of real time customer support. Depending on your business model, target demographic, and product/service, one or two of these may serve you better than others.
Live Chat
This can be with a chatbot or with a person. Alternatively, you can use a chat bot to qualify customer queries at the beginning of a conversation. You can then switch over to talking with a live person once your tech helper has nailed down the problem.
Phone Support
Good old fashioned call centers popped up in the 1960s and have stuck around since then. Keep in mind, they have severe limitations when it comes to offering more advanced real time technical support, thanks to communication barriers (65% of the US population are visual learners!) inherent in this offering.
Self-Service
Post-COVID 19, the real estate market is taking self service and using it to not only enable more home-shoppers to view more houses, but also to resolve issues as they arrive. For instance, Redfin’s Self Tour technology lets prospects into vacant listings. And if an issue arises during a viewing – users can communicate via their app to identify their problem (which will then make suggestions for a resolution), before they receive a call from a nearby realtor who will walk them through any further challenges.
Augmented Reality Software
We explain in this article more in depth about augmented reality. But essentially it merges the digital and physical worlds to create enhanced understanding, experiences, and even solve problems – like in the case of real time technical support.
Using augmented reality software, a customer and a service representative can connect via video call, and from there import documents, add digitized images, sounds, and other sensory stimuli, as well as write on screen, highlight and zoom in on problems, pause the video, and record the meeting (among other things). In a nutshell then, it allows your team member and your customer to feel like they’re in the same room. This is to expediently and quickly take care of technical problems, without the typical miscommunications phone support runs into.
Should you Use Augmented Reality Software to Improve Real Time Technical Support?
Augmented reality software can be an excellent customer service solution for your business if you have:
- Technical products or services
- Customers who demand a higher standard of care
- High paying, high priority clients who you do not want to risk churning
- Prioritized reducing unnecessary truck rolls or in-person calls (by at least 10 to 15%!)
- Set high KPI standards and want to improve on these to increase customer retention
Want to learn more about how augmented reality software could improve your real time technical support? Get in touch to request a demo.
