Electronic Support Systems: A Great Way to Stretch Expertise
Wouldn’t it be great to have thoroughly trained experts
handle every issue and solve every problem in your
organization? Imagine what a perfect world it would be if,
after hiring bright and eager people, you could provide
them with a limitless amount of training to help make each
person become a rote expert in his or her job domain.
Likewise, imagine being able to educate customers to become
experts in every facet of using your offerings, regardless
of how complex they are.
If this sounds like a perfect world, perhaps it is, but
it’s also expensive and time-consuming. It places
tremendous emphasis on “installing knowledge” into the
brains of employees and consumers to handle complexity in
products, services, and internal procedures. This article
discusses alternatives to that approach, which include
electronic support systems.
Either Simplify — Or Offer Electronic Support!
We know that one way to reduce the need for both personnel
and customer training is to simplify, simplify, simplify.
This refers to everything from system interfaces, setup
tasks, and procedures to anything else related to what you
offer to your customers or require your personnel to do.
Simplifying your offerings makes it easier for your
customers to use them, and also makes them much more
straightforward to market, document, test, and maintain. If
your business could be made this uncomplicated, imagine how
much less effort you’d need to exert to pump information
into your employees and customers!
But what if total simplification isn’t possible, and
neither is perpetual training? Some domains of knowledge
are constantly in a state of flux as they shift to reflect
changing industry standards, government rules, and other
dynamic forces. If your offerings revolve around such
domains, even the best attempts at training people to
become cutting-edge specialists will fall behind the curve
eventually. An alternative would be to embed wisdom in your
systems and offerings so that you won’t need to plant it in
the minds of customers and employees.
Electronic support systems can help greatly in these
situations. These systems are integrated environments that
are easily accessible by each employee, or if they are
embodied in your offerings, by your customers. They can
provide immediate, individualized admission to a full range
of advice, guidance, assistance, information, software,
data, images, tools, assessments, decision support, and
monitoring aids. They thereby help people evaluate options
and accomplish their work with minimal support and
intervention by others.
More “People Power” with Less Know-How
Electronic support systems enable people to perform with a
greater level of expertise than they actually have, with
greater speed than they could otherwise, or when the
knowledge they deal with is so dynamic that no one can
reasonably keep up with it.
By supplying intelligent task assistance, these systems can
provide just-in-time information, instruction, and the
ability to do calculations; answer complex questions on the
fly; and guide relatively difficult procedures. They are
not necessarily cheap to develop, however, so they might
not be within easy reach of an organization with a small
budget. However, they have the potential to reduce training
and customer support costs dramatically.
Example #1: Consumer Lending
When applying for a loan over the telephone, you may have
wondered, “Gosh, how have things speeded up so much these
days so that in the course of one call, I can find out
within ten or fifteen minutes whether I’m qualified?” The
personnel on the other end of the call are probably using
electronic support systems to guide them in completing the
queries and calculations from beginning to end.
So, instead of having to acquire and maintain “rote
knowledge” of their subject, such personnel may be
depending heavily on a system, which is where much of the
up-to-date information, calculation speed, and
decision-making rules reside.
Example #2: Income Tax Preparation
If you’ve ever prepared your own income tax return, you
probably know exactly how challenging it is to struggle
through the tax preparation guides. Just staring at the
forms, which seem to change radically every year, can be
quite intimidating. You might have thrown up your hands, as
many people do, and sought out a tax preparation software
package such as Intuit’s TurboTax.
TurboTax is an excellent example of an electronic support
system that’s available to the public. Its step-by-step
process guides users through a series of inquiries that
helps them perform each task correctly, even if they don’t
know the first thing about the U.S. tax code. It greatly
reduces or eliminates customer training, which is one
reason why it’s so commercially successful.
Example #3: Technical Support
Technical support personnel always need quick access to a
knowledgebase of problems described by customers, and the
resolutions that were developed to solve those problems.
It’s ideal for the staff to be able to troubleshoot
problems quickly over the telephone, using some kind of
electronic support system, rather than having to go off and
research the same problem every time they get a call.
Customers are much happier with the quick response, and
personnel aren’t tying up their time hunting around for
answers.
In conclusion, wherever simplification leaves off,
electronic support can help facilitate the remaining tasks.
Such guidance can come in the form of interviews, tightly
interwoven tips and hints, overviews, demonstrations,
wizards, decision guidance, calculation tools, and other
systematic interactions that intelligently aid people in
achieving their goals.
If your organization aims to invest in an electronic
support system, the indicators that could be factored into
a payback analysis include customer satisfaction, the speed
and volume of customer transactions, and reductions in
average support call resolution time. These improvements
could generate impressive savings and benefits over time,
which might justify the costs of developing a system.
—————————————————-
Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of the award-winning
“Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance” success
program. She helps people “discover and recover” the
profits their businesses may be losing daily through
overlooked performance potential. Adele is a business
consultant and the president of an award-winning chapter of
the Society for Technical Communication (STC). To learn
more about her tools and resources, visit her site at
http://LearnShareProsper.com
