5 Steps To Create/Write Interactive Troubleshooting Guides For Customer Service

This makes it crucial for contact center managers to ensure agents are equipped with appropriate troubleshooting guides for customer service to deliver consistently high-quality customer experiences. 

What is troubleshooting?

Troubleshooting is the process of identifying, diagnosing, and resolving problems or issues that occur in various systems, devices, machinery, software, or processes.

What is a troubleshooting guide? 

A troubleshooting guide for customer service is a set of step-by-step guided instructions to assist agents in successfully troubleshooting the customer’s problem.

Even the most experienced agents cannot always remember every piece of information in the right order of steps, and a minor mistake can alter customers’ trust. 

To this end, a troubleshooting guide helps support agents drill down the customer issue and deliver mistake-proof solutions in compliance with the company’s standard operating procedures(SOPs).

4 Benefits of Customer Service Troubleshooting Guides

A customer service troubleshooting guide has far-reaching impacts on call center performance. Below is a list of overarching benefits of troubleshooting customer service guides at contact centers.

1. Reduces customer churn 

• Customers resist waiting and hold times, a common turn-off with phone support. However, they turn to agents for assistance when they cannot fix issues independently. 52% of consumers say a low-quality phone experience with an agent would leave them with a negative impression of the brand. Therefore, quality customer service at this juncture is the most critical. 
•  A customer service troubleshooting guide retains customers’ trust. It reduces customer churn by equipping agents with the right direction to approach customers’ problems and provide reliable solutions quickly with minimal customer effort.  

2. Bolsters support team efficiency

• A troubleshooting guide is documentation of the best practices and procedures to approach specific customer issues. It holds experts’ experience and the factual fiber designed to empower agents to deal with complex contact center scenarios.
• As a ready reckoner, troubleshooting scripts for customer service assist agents in reducing average handle time(AHT), providing solutions at the first go, and meeting their workflow targets. New agents can hone their problem-solving skills with troubleshooting guides and get up to speed with work, resulting in increased call center agent productivity.   

3. Increases customer satisfaction

• An interactive troubleshooting guide helps agents with the right questions to ask customers and eliminates the need for customers to share lengthy explanations. 
• This reduces the time to resolution and fast-tracks the troubleshooting process. Troubleshooting guides powered by AI further equip agents with contextual customer information to customize experiences, resulting in higher customer engagement and satisfaction.  

4. Reduces operational costs  

• Every second on-call costs money to contact centers. A troubleshooting guide for customer support ensures that agents have all the resources to deliver customer experiences with the right mix of speed and quality that new-age customers expect. 
• Besides empowering agents, troubleshooting guides can also be leveraged to create a customer service knowledge base that empowers customers to help themselves with guided instructions. This results in increased operational efficiency while reducing contact center costs.  

5 Steps To Create/Write Interactive Troubleshooting Guides For Customer Service?

To thrive in a fast-paced customer service world, the customer help desk needs the backing of robust and interactive troubleshooting guides to empower agents to deliver top-notch customer service. The foundation of a customer service troubleshooting guide rests on the right organization of knowledge and its availability at the right time to engage meaningfully with customers. 

To this end, knowledge management software can help organizations create, organize, manage, and disseminate troubleshooting steps from a unified dashboard. 

Creating troubleshooting guides from scratch may seem arduous, requiring exclusive technical strengths. However, Knowledge Management platforms like Knowmax offer no-code DIY (do it yourself) capabilities to enable any authorized platform user to learn from navigation guides and conveniently create troubleshooting guides on their own. 

Below are 5 steps to make interactive troubleshooting guides with knowledge management.

1. Identify the problem 

• It’s an everyday affair for service reps to find customers who cannot explain their pain points clearly. Therefore, troubleshooting guides for customer service should enable agents to reach the root cause of the problem and diagnose it correctly. 
• Creating a repository of customer problems is the way to make subject matter for troubleshooting guides. Customer journey mapping can help with insights into the most common issues encountered by customers while marking the problems into specific categories lays the foundation for an accessible troubleshooting guide.  

2. Add relevant questions and user responses 

• Once the core problem has been identified, it is time for agents to ask customers the right set of questions that lead directly to the resolution. 
• Breaking the problem down can help with the right questions to be added to a troubleshooting guide. In the instance of dysfunctional internet service as the core issue, the relevant subset of questions could lead to the type of network services the customer has, the validity of the internet plan, and whether the settings are correct. Multiple questions like these can be created for issue resolution.
• Possible user responses can be added to lead agents to the next best action step with each question. Knowledge management system like Knowmax enables users to create DIY troubleshooting guides in the form of troubleshooting trees that can be linked with multiple Application Programming Interface(APIs) to auto-traverse customer information from backend servers. This enables agents to ask the most relevant questions to customers for faster and more efficient resolutions. 

3. Embed articles and guidance tips for accurate resolutions 

• A troubleshooting guide for customer support consists of multiple steps, and the need for additional information can arrive at any time during the troubleshooting process. Traveling back and forth to different platforms for information can disrupt the troubleshooting flow and impact the customer experience. 
• It is critical to attach additional help articles, guidance steps, or warning tips to the appropriate steps in a customer service troubleshooting guide. This provides a single source of truth to agents, saving their time looking for information and reducing the time to resolutions. 

4. Include visual support for efficient troubleshooting

• Guiding service reps through support pictures helps them to arrive at solutions faster while reducing the chances of agent error. A comprehensive troubleshooting guide with visual aids can bolster support team efficiency and increase customer satisfaction with better service. 
• With the Knowmax Knowledge management platform, relevant screenshots can be uploaded or extracted from the standalone visual guides module on the KM platform. 

5. Give final touches and disseminate across self-service channels  

• 82% of consumers are now more comfortable using digital channels such as self-service and messaging via mobile. Giving customers the option to troubleshoot issues independently can significantly increase retention and satisfaction scores. 
• Before publishing a troubleshooting guide, it is essential to give it the final touches by assigning appropriate categories and keywords and checking the content preview for different devices. With an omnichannel KM platform like Knowmax, troubleshooting guides for customer service can be disseminated to multiple departments and channels to ensure consistent experiences and enable customer self-service. 

Conclusion

Identifying the right problem at the right time is critical to the customer service world. A customer service troubleshooting guide created with a robust Knowledge Management strategy empowers agents with problem-solving abilities and a unified dashboard for all relevant information needed to deliver consistently high-quality customer experiences.

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