One of the more challenging questions I am often asked to answer is that of how to improve IT support. It’s one of the busier, more stressful industries for customer support, IT. Technical issues happen often, and it’s one of the harder places to implement new and efficient channels to handle the issues, due to their often security-sensitive nature and complexity abating the practicality of self service.
So, when asked how to improve IT support, it’s not uncommon for people in my industry to throw up their hands and go “Do what you can to make the call centers as good as they can be, I guess?” Well, I empathize with my colleagues there, but in recent times, there is in fact a technology that’s come along which can help.
Remember when I said that self service wasn’t terribly practical when it comes to IT support? Well, that’s not going to be the case when this technology actually becomes officially standard in practice.
It’s been a couple years since WalkMe first made waves in the training and tutorial creation industries with its unique and ridiculously easy to implement design. WalkMe, for those who aren’t familiar, is a web-based system which you program through very simple point and click scripting.
It offers a visual GUI design which can either replicate the layout of existing software for mockup training, or it can integrate into actual web services. When integrated with web services, it can be scripted to become aware of the states of all elements of the web form, and watch the states of them.
If you program it right (which isn’t at all difficult if you have common sense), you can design it to spot mistakes users make, or detect confusion indicated by their actions via the state of web form elements. WalkMe can then fix the mistakes itself, or make suggestions to the user, to guide them through the actions, watching closely to make sure they do things right.
This is used for “learn by doing” in software training, despite that not being its very first intended purpose. But, you ask, how can this system improve IT support?
Well, the issue people have with IT support are two fold. For one, IT support agents may have a challenge going through systems and figuring out possible problems, especially if the system being addressed is highly complex. This makes them slow and methodical with trying to diagnose issues, even if they have a guide handy. WalkMe can help by guiding them more quickly and help them rapidly diagnose problems.
But more than this, it can be used to finally make self service possible for IT. Finally, a user can reboot firmware, diagnose erroneous settings or fix configurations on their accounts themselves, because WalkMe could guide them, and courteously prevent them from accidentally accessing configuration settings they should not, or entering bad settings into fields you grant them access to.
WalkMe can talk them through diagnosing and fixing a lot of issues that before would have been too risky to allow them to handle on their own, due to security and complexity issues.
How to improve IT support has been answered, and from an unlikely place, that being the very amazing WalkMe.
With self service, you can improve the performance and make the customer very happy. They are surprised by the advanced technology and can share their great experience with others.
