How we improve the work of Customer Service

Lately, we have shared news about changes in some of the Wialon teams. If you haven’t yet, please read more:

• about the transformed Customer Service department;
• how one of its teams – Project Implementation – adds value for Wialon partners;
• how Partner Growth, also a part of Customer Service, helps you succeed in offering telematics services.

My name is Nikolai Melnikov, and I am Head of Customer Service Center. In this article, I’m going to tell you about Quality Control and Training – another team inside Customer Service, and showcase the work they’re doing for improving operations of the whole department.

Read on to know which change we’re applying to every one of 2,000+ requests we are handling in the department monthly.

Quality Control and Training: what does the team do?

Maybe you’ve seen the survey about Customer Service work we were conducting with our partners recently. By the way, if you haven’t, I’m happy to receive your feedback at n.melnikov@wialon.com. Anyway, who’s actually reading the replies you left in the forms?

Quality Control and Training team works closely with the rest of the whole Customer Service department and conducts internal training, performance reviews, surveys and knowledge sharing. The team consists of the most experienced, skilled and knowledgeable experts. 

Yuliya Komarova

Head of Quality Control and Training

Customer Service, Wialon

"Our business model implies we’re offering support and services to partners, not end-users. When a partner contacts us, it is likely that the question is not an easy egg to crack. You need a high level of expertise to work in Customer Service at Wialon and help partners who are very often seasoned experts themselves. There’s lots of internal training, education and supervision involved!"

The Customer Service department now comprises more than 50 people. Measuring the quality of offered services, and figuring out how we can make things better, has become a full-time job of several people at Wialon.

The team works mainly in the background and occasionally reaches out to partners for feedback. Today, I’m sharing the results of their recent work.

Survey results sneak peek: half of partners said Customer Service rates 9 or 10, out of 10

Around 200 partners of different countries, regions and languages of use filled in the recent survey about Customer Service. Thank you so much! The more feedback we get, the more the results are actually representing the community, and the more insights we get both cross-survey and specific to issue type, team, country or region of the partner.

We would like to share some of the feedback the partners left for us.

• 49% of the participants ranked all the offered services at 9 or 10 points out of 10.
  

• 73% of those who took the survey agreed Technical Care helped them in finding the useful solution.
  

• Educational opportunities for partners and demo sessions were marked 90+% by those who used them.

• Wialon help center is used by 90% of the partners.

• For those who did use the specific services like mass elements creation or help with fixing the account hierarchy, 91 to 96% positively assessed the quality of these services.

A lot of the stats make sense mostly for our internal use. How exactly? Read on to know more.

How we work with survey results: examples

Of course, we received suggestions for improvements as well as saw them ourselves in the numbers. Here are just a couple to give you the idea:

• The percentage of the partners who use the services of Partner Growth or Project Implementation teams could be definitely higher. Have a look at how Project Implementation and Partner Growth may assist you in implementing successful solutions and promoting your growth as a service provider!

• Same goes for the number of the partners who know about our education and training services and resources – there’s definitely room for improvement.

• 73% agreed we helped them in finding a useful solution. 27% didn’t. For us, it’s still a high percentage because often the issues we’re tackling are not 100% about Wialon and lie at the intersection of software, custom developments, hardware, connectivity and specifics of the current project. To help you effectively when several variables are out of our control and to raise this parameter is our key goal.

And the next two points, I hope, will offer even more transparency on our decision-making process and give you more understanding of the ways technical support at Wialon is built.

To link or not to link: how we changed the recommended structure of replies to partners

Often, in their replies, Customer Service specialists answered with links to a certain source – most often to Wialon help center. The partners weren’t always happy with such replies and said a link wasn’t enough, even if it contained a solid answer on their issue.

Now, thanks to your feedback, we changed our policy of replying to such requests. 

From now on, all the answers you get from Customer Service will describe the solution in the reply body, and explain why the issue appeared in the first place. Links to Wialon help center are staying as an important part of of the reply. According to the survey, 78% of partners ranked this source as useful.

With our reply, we’re solving two tasks: resolving your issue, and helping a partner’s employee understand Wialon so that next time they’re capable of resolving similar issues. It’s also important you have those links at hand, so next time, you will know where to look for specific information and expand your knowledge in a particular area of working with Wialon.

This is how a typical reply from a Technical Care specialist looks like

We will add this criterion to our regular internal assessments to make sure the new format is used and maintained. From experience, we know changing the way we represent information in a pool of N requests a month heavily influences our partners’ experience.

Why Wialon technical support won’t offer online chats

One of the suggestions we’ve been getting from our partners for a while is to implement live chats for technical support.

As we absolutely get the reasons behind these requests, after repeated investigation, we are still holding email as the primary contact channel for technical support. Why?

• We receive questions neither end users nor partners know how to handle. This means we need to apply as much knowledge as we can to solve the problem. This includes consultations of various teams and specialists, often behind the scenes. It would be impossible to arrange this process of consolidated knowledge sharing within a live chat.

• While working on your requests, my colleagues investigate the problem. They pull up the partner’s account, look at the settings, duplicate the issue in a test environment, and although we arrange to do it swiftly, time is still required. Which diminishes the whole idea of a quick live chat reply, not even mentioning the safety of accounts credentials and end users’ data.

• Last but not least, we document, analyze, and investigate the requests we have already handled, including sharing knowledge and educating ourselves and our partners.

The current online chat instruments, sadly, do not provide this range of motion, while the current system we use for tech support does.

Sticking to email as the key source of communication not only for tech support, but with Wialon in general, is crucial for us being able to perform our work. That’s why we have added this point to theWialon policy.

Summing it up, providing tech support via online chat won’t allow us to utilize the core processes and methods needed for the end result – an answer which is helpful and solves your issue. 

What’s next for Customer Service?

Ultimately, our goal is to be #1 in the quality of the services offered to partners. To achieve that, here are the things we’ll be adding shortly.

Before, we did have internal evaluation by team leads and heads of departments, assessment tools, and of course we tackled your individual requests as well.

• Now, we will be adding regular partner surveys like this one to track our progress.

• Quality Control and Training will be conducting a complex multi-sided monthly review of the department operations and the teams inside it.

• Based on that review and your feedback, we analyze, see points for growth, and think how we can work on them in a consolidated manner – like in the examples I’ve shown you before.

The key criteria we will be assessing our work by are not a secret, since you’ve answered questions about them in the survey. For example, for tech support, they look like this:

• helpfulness of responses;
• quality of solutions offered;
• response time;
• politeness;
• attentiveness to the request, and complete answers provided.

With the help of the updated Customer Service Center and approach to evaluation, we now have tools to facilitate next-level growth of the team’s effectiveness and their direct impact on your operations as a Wialon partner.

That’s it for today! Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog not to miss the stuff we share about our services. And, of course, consider putting them to use for your growth and development as a telematics service provider. 

Any feedback on the work of Customer Service is always welcome at support@wialon.com. Stay tuned!