Avoid These 3 Bad IT Service Traps

It takes a special kind of person to give great customer service. If someone can't pick up on social cues, or if they have a low tolerance for repetitive questions, they will end up offending a lot of customers. To assist our clients with their IT problems, we make sure to hire the most helpful customer service representatives that we can find.

Because Preferred spends extra time screening our IT technicians and training them on how to properly handle the phones, you can rest assured that you won't get stuck having mind-numbing phone call like in these three examples.

Being Read to Like You're Stupid
While it's important to be thorough and informative, reading straight from a prepackaged script is highly annoying. To make matters worse, some people have a way of reading that's a dead giveaway that they're reading, like using a monotone voice, not pausing between sentences, and using zero voice inflection.

Being read to during a support call is annoying because you know how to read, and thanks to Google Search, you can probably find the answer to your technology problem yourself. Yet, despite the fact that you know how to Google the answer, you still call tech support for assistance. Why? Because you want help fixing the problem. The last thing you want is to have to read an instruction manual. Therefore, it's counterproductive and frustrating when you call IT support and someone reads a manual to you.

Looking for an Excuse to Not Help You
"I'm sorry; we can't help you with that." -click- Technology companies can be very particular about which technologies they support and which ones they don't. Terms of technology support are spelled out in what we call an SLA, or Service Level Agreement. SLAs are the way that IT companies define the parameters of a service contract in order to not lose money by having to service technologies they don't support. For example, think how far you would get with Microsoft if you called them about fixing your iPhone. Microsoft would shut you down rather quickly because the iPhone issue would lie outside of the SLA.

To protect ourselves and define the boundaries of service, Preferred uses an SLA with our clients, but we see ourselves first and foremost as a solutions provider. This means that we won't immediately hang up when we discover that the the nature of the problem lies outside of the SLA. Instead, we will work hard to find a solution that both meets your needs and fits the SLA. At Preferred, we understand that people calling us about technology problems are looking for answers, not excuses.

Dragging Out a Phone Call to Make More Money
Some break-fix IT companies charge by the hour for their remote support. When it comes to this model of IT support, it's easy for the customer to be suspicious if the break-fix company is taking their sweet time to fix the problem, typically by giving the customer what's called "the runaround." This is a way for the company to leverage their expertise to intentionally lead clueless customers down a series of dead ends for the purpose of eating up expensive minutes off the clock.

At Preferred, we remove this suspicion by offering remote support with an all-you-can-eat approach. This works out best for both parties because we're motivated to efficiently find a solution to your problem, and you and your employees don't have to hesitate about contacting us to fix the problem for fear of running up a major bill.

In addition to all of this, our IT technicians are trained to be excellent customer service representatives, which means that you won't get frustrated working with a dud of a customer service rep. Taking advantage of remote IT support is a sure way to come to a fast and satisfying solution that won't leave you wanting toss your phone across the room. To receive excellent IT support from Preferred, give us a call at 708-781-7110.