Hollie's top tips for providing outstanding customer support

We know what we’re talking about when it it comes to providing excellent customer support. Well we should as we recently won the coveted Best Cloud Support Provider in Computing Cloud Excellence awards.

We thought we shouldn’t keep our expertise to ourselves so we asked Hollie Armstrong, our Service Desk Manager to share her top tips for delivering first class customer service.

Team work. To provide great customer service you need an effective and happy team. It’s very important to create a great team atmosphere that promotes productivity, flexibility and a creative approach to problem solving.
Communication. It goes without saying communication is key both internally to the team and the wider business and of course with our customers. You do your best to keep customers informed and updated throughout the ticket lifecycle.
Personal service. We treat our customers as individuals not as numbers. Our goal is to make communication as personable as possible so our customers know we are here to talk to at the end of the phone; not just an automated answer from a computer.
Speak to your customers in the manner you like to be addressed. We’re a software house but we’re still all about people. We understand that providing updates in terms that our users understand is important to them; we interpret the technical elements and structure ticket updates accordingly to provide easy to read updates which are useful and informative.
Use positive language. We are optimistic people and try to share updates in a positive manner. So rather than saying “there seems to be a bug in your system” (feels rather negative) replace it with, “we’ve identified the best developer/analyst to look at your this particular issue and it is scheduled to be looked at tomorrow morning when they get in the office – update to follow”
Maintain high standards. I ensure my team and colleagues we work with are acknowledged for their hard work and from time to time I present them with a Arcus Certificate to say Well Done! Future Proofing. At Arcus we work with the agile methodology and when customers are transitioned to our Service Desk we like to investigate their incidents/tickets. With our analytical and investigative mindset we like to ask those questions (internally and also directly with the customer) which will enable us to pinpoint any improvements in business flow or processes so we can implement these with customer buy in to get ahead of the game and ‘future proof’ incidents .
Invest in good people. We have a particular culture at Arcus and it’s important that we find people that are a great fit for us – understand where we are going as a company with an eagerness to be part of that journey. We take great care in all our appointments and are very proud of our very first apprentice Dan who is gained an enormous amount of of knowledge since Day 1 and will soon be his turn to help a new starter when they join our growing Service Desk.
We involve the whole company. Customer service reaches much further than our Support Team. It goes far wider and embraces the culture we nurture at Arcus. It takes dedication from everyone across the business to get involved and address support tickets.
High standards and low response times. Above all else, our ethos is to always maintain high standards whilst keeping low response times.