Today’s home networks are complicated.
More often than not, they require at least some knowledge to be able to set up smart home devices properly. Even the simplest things can throw off a setup—like a customer not knowing that a 5-GHz network just doesn’t work for smart home devices, which almost universally need a 2.4-GHz network to connect.
This then turns into potentially painful calls to support.
When customers call in because they can’t connect a smart home device to their network, both the customer and the agent end up completely blind. The agent can’t see the problem, and the customer doesn’t know what to look for. Then, when the agent can’t solve the problem, the customer will give up and return the device.
What can smart home brands do to help shrink the WiFi network knowledge gap for their customers, and keep more devices in homes?
1. Provide controlled extra-credit reading.
Did you know that 67% of customers would rather solve issues themselves than pick up the phone or send an email? If you don’t have resources for them to do that, there’s a good chance they’ll end up on third-party forums struggling to find answers.
By providing resources like FAQs, knowledge hubs, and guides that customers can reference at any time, you can do a few things.
- You can guide them to information that helps them before they call in
- You can ensure the information they get is accurate
- And you can control the tone of that information (forums are chock-full of complaints and commiseration)
Note: The issue of technicality
One common pitfall to providing information like this is that technical people tend to convey information in a technical way. Make sure your resource material is written in layman’s terms so customers can use it without having to spend half the time looking up terms.
2. Give agents the tools to inform on calls.
Nine in 10 support calls require agents to teach customers to varying degrees just so they can resolve the issue. But this unfortunately doesn’t come naturally to everyone.
This is where templates or canned responses can come in handy because you can spell out what certain issues mean, and what agents can say to help explain the resolution.
To collect the information you’ll need to build these templates, talk to your most experienced agents to see what they’ve said in the past that’s worked, and what hasn’t. Work with them to put together guides that can help agents deliver a consistent experience in customer education, even for those that lack the knack.
3. Back it up with visual reinforcement.
Studies have shown that people learn better when they receive a lesson through multiple senses. There’s only so much you can do over the phone, though, right?
Support calls only use people’s auditory senses. And that can be hard for people to understand when they don’t know what the agent is referencing. Using visual reinforcement—through follow-up documents, virtual sessions, and the like—can help customers understand what the agent is explaining, and help them retain the information for future issues.
The RouteThis platform is a great example of this. With LiveView, agents can annotate pictures of the customer’s setup to show exactly what they’re talking about. And with Self-Help, customers have a way to find visual resources that support what they learned from the agent.