A Day in the Life of Click4Assistance’s Support Engineers

Following the interest in our “A Day in the Life of a Click4Assistance Account Manager”, we’ve decided to continue in this fashion to explore the role of our support engineers. Once again I left the marketing department to spend time with some of the support team, sitting with Luke Churchyard and Yvette Roberts to get a better understanding of their department.

The first thing I learned is that support engineers have to be flexible for their workload. One minute they can have phone calls and chats demanding their attention, the next they can experience a 5 minute breather where they can turn their attention to administrative tasks or non-urgent enquiries that have been raised.

The only consistency comes from their morning routine, logging into the Click4Assistance system, checking both the support emails and their own inbox, and following up updates from the development team for any outstanding issues that have been escalated.

Working Together  

They work hand in hand with our account managers who will raise any enquiries of a technical or urgent nature to them. To keep a good relationship with our customers we prefer to dedicate one or two support engineers to an account, ensuring they have named contacts whenever they enquire.

When speaking with clients our account managers can receive suggestions to improve the usability and functionality of the solution. These are passed to our support team, who may also get these requests directly from speaking with our customers, which are raised with the development team. They consider these enhancements and add it to their roadmap if it will be valuable to at least 75% of our customer base. The support team will relay any updates to the client and/or their account manager, depending on who the initial idea was raised with.

Previous customer suggestions that have been integrated with the solution are:

• Receiving and answering enquiries from Messenger
• Auto storing chats when specific criteria has been met
• Meeting Rooms that provides chat amongst multiple participants 

As part of the helpdesk, our support team will also receive enquiries internally from members of staff with their own software and pc questions. They are then responsible for recording these and escalating to our operations team to action.

The support team are a very central piece of the Click4Assistance puzzle liaising with internal teams and customers, therefore communication is a key skill for keeping this oiled machine running.

Supporting Customers 

Our support engineers are available throughout the working day (9am-5.30pm) via chat and phone and via email 24/7, their SLA is 4 hours, which they have achieved 99.2% of the time in the last year!

With different communication channels to provide support, there are different benefits to each which Yvette discussed with me:

• Phone – you can hear their tone of voice therefore you can guage if the customer fully understands the instructions being given, you can then try an alternative way to explain something. This reduces the amount of contact needed before a resolution has been actioned.
• Chat – Enquirers can send screenshots via file transfer feature; therefore the support team can help more accurately. Enquiries can be answered instantly in chat as they don’t have to be raised as a ticket, saving further time.
• Email – Customers can also send screenshots within email. Our support engineers have a bit of time to look into the raised enquiry before having to respond, helping to resolve the question sooner.

“Screenshots are our friends. For most raised enquiries we ask for a screenshot so we can see exactly what the customer is experiencing and help them in a better and more efficient manner.”

The support team receive a range of chat integration enquiries, the most common questions involve:

• Forgotten passwords and logging in,
• Downloading the solution,
• Configuring their account, especially the routing groups,
• Customising the visitor facing aspects
• Bespoke development such as reports, which the support engineers will assist on how to spec out their requirements.

Before I left the support department, I had to ask them “is turning it off and on again really the secret answer to everything IT?” Yvette laughed, “Yes, I will say to customers I know it’s a typical IT thing, but have you tried turning it off and on again? It’s the first step to troubleshooting and in most cases the solution to their issue.”

Thank you to Luke and Yvette for letting me sit with them and running through their role with me. If you have an enquiry for our support team they can be contacted by emailing support@click4assistance.co.uk. For more information on Click4Assistance and our live chat solution call us on 01268 524628.