Modern products, especially tech-related ones, are more complex than they initially imply. After all, you don’t want to brag about your technology being too sophisticated since it sends the wrong message of it being too complex for a regular user. This means that your customers start using it with too much confidence, and when they get stuck, they have no one but you to blame for it. Inevitably, they’ll come around to ask you for help, and this is an opportunity for redemption. You might even end up in much greater favor than before. Still, organizing a tech support team is not an easy job. On paper, having the technicians on the job would make the most sense. You know, engineers, developers, people who are making or came up with the product. However, these people have far greater responsibilities, overcrowded schedules, and (frankly) too high hourly rates for these additional responsibilities. This is why the solution may lay where you least expect it – virtual assistants. Here’s how virtual assistants may help you set up and save your tech support department.

Troubleshooting

When we talk about tech support, you probably immediately think about some incredibly complex issues where you’ll have to alter the code, rewire the router, etc. In reality, this is rarely the case. In reality, most of these problems could be handled by the people experiencing problems by just carefully reading the FAQ page or watching a 2-minute-long YouTube video. So, what’s the problem? The problem is that the customer doesn’t want to have to handle their problems. They want to be taken seriously and that, when they have a problem, you also feel it is urgent. Also, They don’t want to be redirected to a FAQ page; they don’t want to be told by a bot just to unplug the device and try plugging it again. They want to talk with a real person on the other end of the line. So, you can put a virtual assistant in this role. With the simplest possible onboarding and short training, they’ll be able to resolve most of these issues, and if it’s more complex, they can direct a person to a specialist. In other words, they’re the ones doing a triage of what’s complex enough to sent to a real technician.

Real-time and email support

While chatbots can be incredibly sophisticated and quite capable of passing the Turing Test, they’re still not real people. A customer asking for support wants to talk to a real person on the other end of the line. Chatbots can be more cost-effective, but remember that this chat is not all that a virtual assistant does. By hiring a Rocket Station virtual assistant, you’re hiring someone capable of handling most of your real-time chat-based customer service. Combined, this drastically offsets the cost-efficiency in favor of a virtual assistant hire. Also, since you’re going through the agency, the scalability is no longer as big of a factor as you first expected. Remember that chat support is not the only customer support form out there. It’s not even the most common form of customer support communication. Most of this communication done via email, which is also a task that a virtual assistant can handle. This way, you’ll have far more unique and human-like responses.

Remote desktop support

With the help of remote access software, a customer support representative can easily and effortlessly resolve a customer’s problem. Sure, a bot can do this, but having a bot crawl through your computer may make many people uneasy. Now, remote desktop support is probably the most convenient way to handle these things. First, it can reduce the need for a field team, which is incredibly expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. It’s the fastest way to resolve these issues, and the speediness is one of the factors that will determine the user satisfaction the most. One more thing that this is especially useful for is user guidance. This way, you can show the customer or the rest of your team how something works in practice without leaving your desk.

Hardware assistance

The majority of technical support questions are related to the hardware setup. For this, a virtual assistant will have to know:

• The right way to assemble hardware or put it to use.

• The most commonly incorrect way to set up a hardware.

• How to diagnose a malfunction on one of the parts.

While these three questions may be confusing to your users, in reality, they’re not that complex. Another important aspect of hardware assistance is hardware upgrades, which are tightly intertwined with upselling and cross-selling features of your enterprise. When buying a setup, you can just hint about a superior product, a better solution, or an improvement (like an Apple Watch for an iPhone user). This might impact their decision-making process in the future. No, this is not a hard-sell technique, more of a slight influence.

Documentation

The last thing you need to remember is the documentation issue. Every customer support request must processed, filtered, and put into an archive. While this is done automatically, having human supervision always helps. Also, remember that documents like patch notes, FAQ updates, and troubleshooting guides must be updated regularly. Who can update them better than someone in direct contact with the customers having these complaints? Their contribution and collaboration shouldn’t be underestimated or downplayed, even if they’re not making their documents. Reviewing, storing, and handling these documents, in general, is a demanding task. Therefore, you want someone who can provide customers with their needed assistance. Virtual assistants can even support internal teams greatly when put in charge of these documents.

Wrap up

In the end, you need to be careful with using your resources, and labor is the scarcest resource in any enterprise. Virtual assistants are affordable labor capable of handling simple to moderate technical tasks. At the very least, they can handle the simplest of requests and handle an arbitrage of tasks that are complex enough to be sent upstream (to engineers and developers). Moreover, they serve as a buffer between the highest-paid part of your enterprise and a regular customer.