Providing exceptional support has been a key value from the early days at Streamtime. Making each individual Streamtime user better at their jobs, and helping them become experts as effortlessly as possible is a vision we try to apply to each client interaction.
We are constantly looking at ways to improve this experience, so we recently spent some time reviewing our current process, where it could improve and what things we wanted to change. After long discussions with our team, review of our support metrics, investigation of the more successful support interactions and a look at how other organisations who provide great support work, we decided to remove the option for inbound phone support – effectively guiding our clients to a brand new support landing page.
From a client perspective, no longer being able to call us seems like step in the wrong direction. We don’t see it that way and here’s why:
• Our metrics show that Monday mornings, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the busiest times for support. At these times, it was common for all of us to be on the phones which meant callers getting our voicemail system – not a great experience.
• Some of our staff have naturally gravitated towards certain areas of Streamtime and become experts in that area. Having that expert answer your specific question means the question is answered, a clear explanation provided and what steps to avoid in future discussed. Our contact page will get all our client questions to those experts in the quickest way possible.
• This change does not mean you will never speak to us. We recognise that for more in-depth questions, a phone call is best. So the best person will be responding to certain questions via a phone call, on average within minutes of receiving your request.
• Things go wrong in every piece of software in the world. Fixing those problems efficiently is vital. Having all questions come through into the one area means that our entire company have eyes on the requests. Everything is automatically logged and, if required, easily passed to development. This means faster resolution, and allows us to see trends which highlight troublesome areas.
• Our metrics also show that the majority of questions asked over the phone were training questions (our support is a mix of technical and ‘how to’). Often, scheduling a session with a trainer provides a better understanding of the area. Being able to differentiate between those two questions means our clients are not being ‘handballed’ to different people in the quest for an answer.
We want our support to continue to separate us from our competitors and help more individual users become experts. We believe that this change will allow us to provide a far more consistent support experience for all our clients, getting the answers they need faster.
