How to Manage Customer Support Requests in the Telecom Sector

[#1]

No one can deny that customer support can make or break a business. So ensuring you're able to open channels with your customers to promote communication, is a very great tactic for the business in the long run. Unfortunately, doing so isn't always an easy thing. It can lead to inefficient customer support and higher expenses to try to manage things with more employees.

Let's take this example. A telecom company, with several support channels on social media, wanted to increase its productivity without hiring a huge team of agents per channel, so it could save on costs.

Disclaimer, I am part of Infosysta, the team that created two of the apps mentioned in this post.

The Challenge

The telecom company was focused on ensuring its customers can reach it no matter what platform they used. As social media is the most common way for people to contact their favorite brands and businesses, the company created an account on each platform. However, managing each platform separately caused a lot of problems with the workflow. This has led to a lot of dissatisfaction from customers, as response to their messages took longer than they would have liked. In turn, this gave the company a bad reputation and for it to get a lot of bad reviews. With nothing else to do, it was to bring on more temporary employees to better handle the workflow on each channel. This meant going overboard with the budget and expenses. 

The Solution

The company found a new way to manage the flow of messages coming in through the various channels it opened to the public. This solution was to integrate those apps with Jira Service Management. As the optimum ITSM tool available, this integration allowed for better service management and a much more comprehensive and easily manageable service desk. Since the company found its customers to be most active on both Twitter and WhatsApp, it found connector apps that helped promote this integration.

Social Media to Jira Integration

The challenge was overcome with the help of two of Infosysta's social media to Jira integration apps. The first was Twitter Connector for Jira. An app that helps convert Tweets and direct messages into Jira tickets. The second was WhatsApp Connector for Jira. An app that helps convert all messages into Jira tickets.

This is what happened when they implemented the system on WhatsApp:

1. A customer wants to inquire about internet services, so they used WhatsApp to send a message to the company.
2. This message was converted into a Jira ticket and assigned to an agent.
3. The agent opened the customer's question and responded, offering all the necessary details from different internet bundles to prices.
4. The response was converted back into a WhatsApp message.
5. The customer received the response and opened to find all the information they'd asked for.
6. If the customer didn't want to proceed with more questions, they sent a thank you and the agent marked the ticket as resolved.
7. If the customer wanted to subscribe to a service, the agent redirected them to the sales team.

 Once the interaction with the customer is done, the Jira ticket is marked as resolved.

The Outcome

Thanks to the integration with Jira apps, all the social media messages were converted into Jira tickets instead of appearing as separate messages.

This helped the company in various ways.

• There was a better handle on the flow of messages coming in
• All the messages were going to the same place, so the employees weren't overworked trying to catch up
• It didn't need to keep on hiring dedicated agents for each platform, saving on costs
• Agent productivity rose to high levels