Technical Support
What is Technical Support?
Technical or ‘tech’ support is a form of customer communication that product-centric companies use to help their users get the most out of their products.
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Typically, this is done via knowledge bases, live chat, email or phone – and aims to solve technical problems such as installation issues, login errors and other technical difficulties that can have a negative impact on the user experience.
Tech support teams are responsible for handling installation errors, user issues and any other technical problem that prevents the customer from using your product. In essence, tech support focuses on helping customers to use a product more effectively.
The 3 levels of tech support
1. Pre-support
In the pre-Internet era, if people had a product question, they asked family and friends or, they referenced an owner’s manual. Today, your users will simply “Google” it.
2. Self-service
The next level in tech support is about allowing users to self-serve and is managed through self-help wikis, FAQs and Knowledge bases For many users, this is a quick and easy alternative to contacting a help desk and waiting for a response by email.
3. First line of support (human contact)
Unfortunately, FAQ and knowledge bases cannot answer everything.Sometimes, your users need to speak to a human. For many customers, first-line support is the first point of contact with someone from your company. First-line support concentrates on the most common questions (which you can record, learn from, and use to update your knowledge base). Tech support personnel at this level have a basic to the general understanding of the product or service, but may not always contain the competency required for solving complex issues. Nevertheless, the goal for this group is to handle 70-80% of the user problems before finding it necessary to escalate the issue to a higher level.
4. Second line of support (Complex issues)
This means that the 25-30% of tech support queries that couldn’t be handled in first-line support, end up here in the second line and are far more complicated. It requires staff with in-depth knowledge of the product to handle these support requests and provide technical guidance – and, the ability to talk to users over the phone to help them find a solution.