5 Ways Customer Support Teams Close More Tickets with Tango
5 Ways Customer Support Teams Close More Tickets with Tango
Hannah Cohen
Updated:
June 1, 2023
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June 1, 2023
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10 min
Hannah Cohen
Tango Content Marketing Lead
Hannah is a semi-recovered perfectionist and longtime subscriber to the squiggly model of success. She spent 11 years learning from the best at brands like HubSpot and Food52 and loves running, cooking, and helping people feel A++ at work. 🤗
This post is a part of Guidance at Work, a series dedicated to helping people get sh*t done without inefficient screen sharing, long videos, or wordy documentation.
If you’re in Customer Support, you don’t have it easy. Objectively, you actually have it really hard.
On one side, you need to minimize costs, response times, first contact resolution rates, new hire ramp time, and agent burnout. On the other, you need to increase customer satisfaction, NPS scores, and process excellence.
Oh, and don’t forget the new software to master, policies, procedures, and how-to guides to create, repetitive tasks to automate, third-party service providers to manage, knowledge gaps to fill, and service-license agreements (SLAs) to hit.
It’s a lot. And a lot of it’s urgent.
That’s where Guidance comes in.
💡 What's Guidance?
Guidance delivers interactive walkthroughs with personalized insights, created in seconds—in the flow of work.
So everyone can get stuff done. Without stopping to search for answers, send in a help ticket, or pull people away from more important work.
In this post, we’ll cover five ways to use Tango to resolve more tickets and delight more customers. Find out how to:
Let’s start with the foundation for everything else—standard operating procedures (SOPs). 👇
1. Quickly align your team on procedures
The last time we checked, 75% of companies have less than half of their processes documented. Which makes improving internal process alignment and ensuring consistent service quality pretty hard, if not impossible.
Until now, sharing knowledge hasn’t been easy, fast, or fun. Documentation has been time-consuming, tedious, and thankless to make—and just as hard to find and follow.
Get SOPs out of people’s heads and into people’s hands
Whether it’s compliance, efficiency, or simply a matter of doing things right, we need standard operating procedures. But they often live in the brains of one or a few star performers.
To capture best practices without adding extra work onto anyone’s plate, ask your experts to record a Tango the next time they run through a process. They’ll get to cross off an existing task from their to-do list, and you’ll get documentation to share with the team.
Here’s how easy it is to create a beautiful how-to guide with screenshots:
And here’s what you end up with, after just a couple of clicks:
When you use Tango to create how-to guides, you can standardize the look and feel of your SOPs—and introduce a single system to offer help on ALL software and processes.
In a sea of different systems and tools, it pays to create a single format to help people go from Point A to Point B.
2. Onboard new agents, FAST
With support agent turnover rates hovering between 30% and 45% globally—and only a one-year average tenure for entry-level hires—you need a way to onboard new agents, ASAP.
Stopping to share your screen every time someone has a question isn’t the answer. And while creating a formal training videos may feel more scalable, new research suggests that videos:
Have extra fluff that slow learners down
Don’t make it easy to skip straight to a specific step
Aren’t great for showing how to do something (vs. explaining why)
Usually require special skills to make and maintain
Can’t keep up with the rate of business change
So what’s more helpful than ad-hoc screen shares and long videos?
Live, on-screen walkthroughs with built-in context and callouts. With all the curated insights you love and without any of the inefficiencies.
✨ Tango Tip
Avoid spending all your time teaching agents about your customers—and none of your time teaching them how to find information—with Guidance.
Help your team follow SOPs, without having to look for them
You want your team to follow your standard operating procedures, but you don’t want them:
Pinging half the team for answers
Wasting time looking through CRMs, knowledge bases, or learning management systems
Using fragmented, outdated, or confusing documentation (in 12 different tabs)
When you’re in get sh*t done mode, screen sharing, videos, and static documentation aren’t good enough. Guidance offers an entirely new way to capture operations and expertise, learn on the job, and get work done faster.
If an SOP has been captured in Tango for the website/SaaS you’re on, your Tango extension will light up to let you know Guidance can help.
Click the extension to browse the available Guidance options and surface the knowledge you need (without switching tabs!):
Access answers where and when they’re needed. No more searching, switching tabs, or interrupting.
From there, Guidance will walk you through where to click and what to do—right on your screen.
Here’s what the on-screen walkthrough will look like, when you have direct access to a workflow/workspace via invite:
Teach new hires while they work
Zendesk. HubSpot. Salesforce. Intercom. Drift. Slack. Grain. Zoom. WhatsApp. The number of tools and processes for Customer Support has exploded.
If you’re an entry-level agent eager to hit the ground running, this poses two problems:
Learning software is a prerequisite to doing your real job. (Which may also have a steep learning curve, especially in SaaS.)
The knowledge you need to help customers is spread across hard-to-use knowledge bases, learning management systems, and chat systems.
What you need is a way to learn and get better at your job, in the flow of work.Without having to set aside extra time to:
Break focus (👋, get sh*t done mode!)
Avoid time-consuming, frustrating searches across multiple systems
Ask more experienced co-workers if they can share their screen
Comb through static documentation and/or find the 10-second clip you need in a long video
With Tango’s guidance panel, you can find the knowledge you need, when you need it. And apply what you’ve learned, as you’re learning it—without losing your place.
What’s the result? Less time ramping up and figuring things out. More time delighting customers and doing meaningful work.
💡 Tango Tip
Instead of trying to memorize each step in a process or asking for yet another quick tutorial, use Tango to:
Learn how to execute any process on your browser or desktop once
Offload the instructions to Tango
Click "Guide Me" to easily replicate the outcome again in the future
Capture how your top performers work
While it’d be nice to simply clone your best agents, we haven’t come quite that far yet. But Tango gets you close.
Procedural knowledge detailing how to click through software is typically stored separately from tips from teammates about how to perform those processes at an elite level.
With Guidance, top performers can get new agents up to parity, sooner, with how-to guides that combine the science of steps with the art of insights.
Callouts from the best and the brightest will show up on-screen, in context, right next to the most relevant step.
You can choose from four types of Callouts to embellish individual instructions, each with different icons (✅ , ℹ️, ⚠️ , and❗) to catch people’s attention.
Use them to help ensure new hires don’t miss a step that makes the difference between success and failure—and take advantage of institutional knowledge in their moment of need (without interrupting anyone!).
✨ Tango Tip
Teaching people how to close a chat support inquiry?
Add a Callout to ensure everyone follows best practices:
✅ When you get to Step 7, ask the customer if they've joined our Slack community. Please share the link if they haven't!
3. Help your customers help themselves
You can’t jump on a call with every customer and give them exactly what they need, when they need it. But what you can do is something even better. 👀
So far we’ve covered mostly internal use cases. But there’s an even bigger opportunity to help customers self-serve.
You may be used to triaging your tickets using a system like this:
Tier 0 tickets → Are great candidates for self-service
Tier 1 tickets → Are quick to solve without much back and forth
Tier 2 tickets → Are best handled with a human touch
Tier 3 tickets → Are a true 🆘
To do more with less, you need to maximize Tier 0 tickets—the percentage that can be solved with self-service. And to create scenarios where the self-service experience is as good—if not better—than a human interaction, you need Tango.
Show—don’t tell
Not only can you embed step-by-step guides into popular help tools like Zendesk and Intercom, but you can:
Instantly provide live, on-screen walkthroughs of any browser-based tools, websites, and cross-application processes (without any code!)*
Show customers exactly where to click—without making them bounce between tabs
Reduce the number of Tier 1 tickets by turning them into Tier 0 tickets
Rebuild trust in your knowledge base and focus on closing Tier 2 and 3 tickets
Surface solutions to troubleshoot common problems with Automagic FAQs
*Note: To experience Guidance to the fullest, customers will need Tango’s free Chrome extension, a Tango account, and an invitation to your Workspace.
Exceed rising expectations with seamless experiences
Guidance offers the most engaging, modern, and convenient approach to self-service.
If you embed Tangos into your knowledge base, you can do more than help customers bypass the line.
You can also help people with questions:
Avoid running into the same issue multiple times
Breeze through an onboarding sequence built just for people following Tangos
Get all the benefits of a screen sharing session, without waiting for help or breaking flow
Save mental energy learning how to use new software on the way to their end goal
See an example from PakEnergy’s Support Portal here.
4. Increasing first contact resolution
When your team solves tickets on the first reply, response times go down.
And when your team has your entire knowledge base at their fingertips, they can answer customer questions quickly, succinctly, and most importantly: completely.
Figure out what is—and isn’t—working
If you’re a customer support supervisor, team lead, or manager, one of your jobs is to equip your agents with the knowledge, skills, and tools needed to resolve issues the first time around.
Most knowledge sharing systems offer limited data on the success/failure of training content. And when agents follow training content, they often only speak up when something is broken…or just look for another way to get help. (Hi! Can you share your screen for a second?)
So how can you access feedback to improve your processes—and inform more engaging documentation and better customer experiences?
With Guidance Analytics, you can see detailed information about every Tango you create.
Views in Overview shows how many hits your Tango has gotten over time. You can filter by viewing channel (e.g. workflow page, Embed, Guidance Panel, Guidance Live) and date.
Guidance Completion in Overview shows the completion rate (defined by how many people finish 100% of the steps in your Tango) and drop-off rate as well as a detailed breakdown of where people drop off.
Note: This dashboard is for Guidance use only.
Viewers in Viewer Activity showswho’s using your Tangos, and how often.
Lastly, Guidance Progress in Viewer Activity shows where people are getting stuck, so you can clarify processes as needed.
✨ Tango Tip
When you're creating a Tango: Go as far upstream to the original source of knowledge as you can.
When you get there: Ask your subject matter expert to use Tango to capture what they know. It'll take a fraction of the effort it would take them to record (and re-record) a video, type something up, or host a live training—and be much easier to maintain if/when things change.
Quickly distribute new knowledge to minimize escalations
It’s tough to nail a process on the first try.
It’s equally challenging to keep them current. Which is why so many insights go undocumented. 🫠
But with Viewer Feedback, everyone engaging with any of your Tangos can effortlessly improve the process from the bottom up.
When someone finds an issue with a step along the way—or has an insight that can help others perform the task better—they can add their insight as a comment and click send.
As the creator of the Tango, you’ll get notified instantly, and have the option to convert their feedback into a Callout in just a few clicks.
As a result, it’s easier than ever to:
Provide faster, better (crowd-sourced!) solutions for customers
Resolve inquiries without having to make multiple calls or send multiple emails
Help everyone get back to more interesting and impactful work
5. Outsource the most repetitive/easy tickets
Now imagine how much easier outsourcing would be—with the ability to quickly create and share SOPs, onboard new agents, improve self-service, and increase first contact resolution.
Before Tango, outsourcing customer support to cut costs involved:
Getting a group of strangers up to speed on your product/service—with all of its complexities and edge cases
Familiarizing your business processing outsourcer (BPO) with your SOPs, tech stack, and voice/tone (before turning them loose!)
Figuring out a way to collaborate across different time zones
Trying to use a snipping tool to level the playing field among people with variable skill sets
With Tango, you can do all of the above—and avoid those manual screenshots. 🙃
Increase your confidence in quality and consistency
Bringing on a high quality BPO is a great way to manage ticket volume, drive down cost per contact, and help your in-house agents maintain their sanity.
What else do you need to maintain? Your CSAT, NPS, and other feedback metrics.
Tango makes it easy to:
Equip outsourced agents with the knowledge they need to address issues as they arise (without compromising service quality)
Staff up for a busy season and provide evening, weekend, or 24-hour coverage
Reduce the need to meet synchronously to transfer knowledge
Provide accurate, interactive walkthroughs for every job
If someone has a question, chances are they aren't the only one. With Tango, you can make a tutorial once—and use it a million times.
Internal and external agents can both save any widely applicable Tangos in a shared workspace, and blur any sensitive information to help protect PII across customers.
Set your BPO up for success
What do you need as a BPO customer support agent?
Exceptional problem solving and communication skills. A sense of urgency, positivity, patience, empathy, and resilience. The ability to quickly pick up new skills, manage stress, and meet performance metrics. And an extremely efficient way to share knowledge.
With Tango, you can:
Get the 411 on the products/services you’re supporting, in far less time
Fly through repetitive tasks with less boredom and fatigue
Move beyond blockers with critical unlocks that pop up in the moment of need
Take rapid changes and major updates in stride
The bottom line
Tango offers a new way to give and get answers in the flow of work—and it’s a force multiplier for support teams, a big unblock for customers, and a boon for anyone who wants to get sh*t done.
Delivering a differentiated customer experience has also never been easier, with ways to:
Make how-to guides faster to make and more fun to follow
Pair procedural knowledge with personal insights
Guide people to success in seconds—with the right answers, in the right place, at the right time
Cut down on support tickets (and screen share requests!)
Help people spend less time getting bogged down and more time hitting their goals