With the explosion of social sharing through sites like Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram countless new opportunities have sprung up that allow IT departments from a variety of industries to supplement, in some cases even eliminate, many of the customer support techniques of the past.
The consumers of today are some of the most tech savvy individuals to date. When these same consumers come to a business or company seeking tech support or needing to voice an inquiry they expect the same turn-around times and speeds that they enjoy when they are engaged in similar activities with peers or other branches of the company. Effectively utilizing instant messaging, Twitter and Facebook with your IT department can be the missing piece that stands between your good level of service and great level of service.
The IT departments of old will use some form of IT help desk software that allows them to track, fairly well, their consumer or employee’s history of interactions with them and also, how these problems and concerns were answered. While this is great in theory, many tickets that are filtered in can be left sitting for days, sometimes weeks and do little to assure the individual on the other end that their problem is being handled.
An IT department should actively attract questions and inquiries rather than deterring them for reasons like long queue times, poor service or inadequate answers to questions. How does your department accomplish this? One word. Visibility. The visibility that is achieved through the use of social media and social sharing.
Think about it. If you happen to find yourself perusing Facebook or Twitter and you notice that one of your friends has engaged a company with a specific question and has also received a reply back how much more trust and confidence in that particular company or product has been observed? What if you are that person that sent the message? What implications does that have for brand loyalty? Brand trust? Do you see where I am going?
The BYOD Aspect
Part of being able to deliver up to the minute responses through social sharing relies on two things.
- Employees to be engaging in the BYOD movement (bring your own device)
- mobile apps that will allow them access to tools and resources that allow for effective management of tickets and concerns
The BYOD movement in a nutshell sees employees using their own devices for work purposes in effort to streamline user familiarity and mobilize a workforce that would have otherwise been made to conduct work in one static location.
Often times, employees will be readily able to answer most questions that come in due to being accustomed to similar inquiries made in the past and supplying an answer is done quickly. With BYOD in place, your employees will be able to engage and respond to your valuable consumers in real time and immediately.
Mobile apps are also another key component to this equation. Luckily, most help desk software for your IT department comes with mobile app integration which allows your IT department to properly file tickets and inquiries on the go so that they are readily available when they return to the office.
As we continue to plummet headlong into more sophisticated technology and increased usage of social media, how will your IT department adapt?
For more on IT management check out Business-Software.com’s IT Management Research Center page. Download our free Top 10 Mobile Device Management report for solutions geared towards managing BYOD offices.