Header Social Media
Here’s Why Most People Hate Calling Tech Support
Technology has become the backbone of our lives. So when something breaks or malfunctions, it’s an interruption that makes you want to pull your hair out. And when your go-to IT guy can’t seem to help, you dread the call you know you’ll have to make to tech support. For various reasons, that call has become comparable to going to the dentist or working with a used car salesman. You grit your teeth and make the call.
When the phone rings on our end at Blue Ocean and we get your call, we know how frustrated you probably already are. Whether you’re an enterprise-level IT pro or an everyday consumer with no problem admitting you have zero computer skills, the bottom line is that your day has been disturbed by technical challenges. We know you need answers, and you need them now.
That’s why we’re so focused on hiring the right people for our outsourced tech support projects. We don’t just want to fix your problem; we want to wow you with an exceptional customer experience.
Here’s What Bad Tech Support Looks Like
Imagine you’re a high school teacher using an interactive digital whiteboard. It’s a cool piece of technology and your students love it. That is, right up until the moment it falters, unresponsive to anything you touch or tweak. Your classroom turns to chaos while you try to fix it, but to no avail. It’s time to call tech support.
You get on the phone and are greeted by an agent who immediately fires off a series of questions about the problem. You answer as best you can but the agent sounds impatient with the information you provide. Your frustration mounts. He slowly explains to about the appliance control panel, various modules, cables, VGA settings and LED signals. You try to explain that you’re not entirely computer illiterate, but the agent talks over you and brushes off your comments. He makes it clear that he’s the expert, and the problem is eventually, finally fixed. But the experience was exhausting and took up your whole lunch hour. Plus, you still have more classes to teach.
This is what bad outsourced tech support looks like. An agent who speaks down to you and clearly portrays an attitude that they know better than you isn’t someone we want on our team.
Here’s Outsourced Tech Support That Works
You might assume that technical savvy would be enough for someone answering those calls. But, as you can see from the anecdote above, we disagree. Personality, attitude, and soft skills make a huge impact on how successful a tech support agent will be.
While all of our tech support agents bring technical training, certification, and/or aptitude and education, they also have excellent communication skills and a predisposition to be patient and helpful. Many of them love gaming, gadgets, and other geeky pastimes, not to mention they’re typically the family go-to computer guy. But they can do more than just resolve the issue; they can guide someone else through the process while delivering the kind of service experience that leaves the end-user feeling good about their relationship with both the technology and the company that sold it to them.
And that’s the key. We hire problem solvers who can think outside of the box while simultaneously interacting with a wide spectrum of customers. Empathy is a must-have. After all, you don’t just need someone who can fix your problem; you need someone who actually cares about your problem in the first place. These people crave the satisfaction of helping to resolve an issue; that moment of success in helping someone sparks triumph and pride.
It’s also worth pointing out that we can often take someone with excellent customer service skills and average technical skills and train them to successfully deliver excellent tech support services. However, on the flip side, it’s vastly difficult to take a highly technical candidate with no soft skills and try to train them on communication, verbal skills, and empathy.
Choosing an Outsourced Tech Support Solution
It’s likely that your end-users and customers are no stranger to the high stress that comes with our increasingly digital world. And yet, issue resolution and troubleshooting are only half the story. Without an outstanding customer experience that reflects your company’s brand promise, your customers end up just as stressed as they were at square one. Their technical problem may be fixed, but they’re still unhappy.
That’s why we work closely with our clients to determine a strong agent profile based on personality characteristics and neurolinguistics traits in order to build an outsourced tech support team that can wow your customers. Find out more about our human approach to tech support call center outsourcing and let us know how we help you today.
