The power of Chat in IT Support
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@Carnival-Boy educating customers pays dividends on the long term, right?
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@Carnival-Boy said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
Most of my users have learnt that tickets they raise themselves via e-mail tend to get resolved quicker than ones they submit verbally. Also, I often tell them to submit a ticket even when they're in my office, and explain that I might forget to resolve the problem otherwise with my terrible memory.
It's the interruptions though... If I'm in the middle of something and get interrupted by phone call or somebody stopping by, it will take me 5 to 10 minutes at minimum to get back into what I was working on.
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I am a one-man shop and I would not be able to utilize this because it would be inefficient. I could see where this would be great for larger help desks.
I personally love to use live chat (as an end user) to get certain areas of support for things like billing issues or ask some basic questions because I can also be on the phone or do other things while I chat.
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@Carnival-Boy said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
Most of my users have learnt that tickets they raise themselves via e-mail tend to get resolved quicker than ones they submit verbally. Also, I often tell them to submit a ticket even when they're in my office, and explain that I might forget to resolve the problem otherwise with my terrible memory.
I'm a big advocate of this approach.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
Live chat is on a best effort basis but quite a few end users love it.
What do you use for you knowledge base backend?
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Ticketing systems seem to work best for everyone in a high-user SMB with a small IT department... everyone wins. Issues get seen by the entire IT department, can be distributed appropriately, and users can track them.
A stop in the hallway only results in one IT tech being exposed to the issue, most likely interrupting them on their way to do something else, and most likely being forgotten.
I can see that chat could get just as distracting as door-knocks, walk-ins, and phone-calls.
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@Tim_G said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
Ticketing systems seem to work best for everyone in a high-user SMB with a small IT department... everyone wins. Issues get seen by the entire IT department, can be distributed appropriately, and users can track them.
A stop in the hallway only results in one IT tech being exposed to the issue, most likely interrupting them on their way to do something else, and most likely being forgotten.
I can see that chat could get just as distracting as door-knocks, walk-ins, and phone-calls.
At my last job, we used Chat mainly for internal communication between folks in the department.
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@Tim_G OK, got your point and see its validity. But what about when you are servicing multiple, remote SMB customers with a team of 3+ support guys?
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@bogdan.moldovan said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@Tim_G OK, got your point and see its validity. But what about when you are servicing multiple, remote SMB customers with a team of 3+ support guys?
If it's your job to take chat support requests, then great. That's probably better than tickets if it's not too busy, or if people aren't waiting too long for chat support. Chat would be good for resolving issues right away in real-time on a one-on-one basis.
But if you need to do other things, or actively focus on other tasks without a lot of distraction, then at least to me, tickets make the most sense.
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@bogdan.moldovan said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@Tim_G OK, got your point and see its validity. But what about when you are servicing multiple, remote SMB customers with a team of 3+ support guys?
We use Rocket.Chat. It's awesome.
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@scottalanmiller we are looking at it to integrate it with @axigen. Good product indeed!
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@scottalanmiller said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@bogdan.moldovan said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@Tim_G OK, got your point and see its validity. But what about when you are servicing multiple, remote SMB customers with a team of 3+ support guys?
We use Rocket.Chat. It's awesome.
For internal communicaiton. What about external with the clients.
That, I think, is the point of this thread. How useful is IM for the public facing side?
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We use skype extensively to chat as an organization and it's very valuable.
Having said that, Skype is a steaming turd after the last changes w/ account creation & management.
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@JaredBusch said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@scottalanmiller said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@bogdan.moldovan said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@Tim_G OK, got your point and see its validity. But what about when you are servicing multiple, remote SMB customers with a team of 3+ support guys?
We use Rocket.Chat. It's awesome.
For internal communicaiton. What about external with the clients.
That, I think, is the point of this thread. How useful is IM for the public facing side?
I would think it completely depends on your support model.
Do you have someone manning a desk for one-on-one chat support from start to issue resolved, creating a ticket to escalate it (to someone else, non-chat support tech or an engineer) if it can't be resolved in good time via chat?
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@JaredBusch @scottalanmiller uses the livechat feauture from rocket.chat for external customers.
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@bogdan.moldovan said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@scottalanmiller we are looking at it to integrate it with @axigen. Good product indeed!
Oh that's awesome.
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@MattSpeller said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
We use skype extensively to chat as an organization and it's very valuable.
Having said that, Skype is a steaming turd after the last changes w/ account creation & management.
Skype for Business or regular Skype?
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@JaredBusch said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@scottalanmiller said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@bogdan.moldovan said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@Tim_G OK, got your point and see its validity. But what about when you are servicing multiple, remote SMB customers with a team of 3+ support guys?
We use Rocket.Chat. It's awesome.
For internal communicaiton. What about external with the clients.
That, I think, is the point of this thread. How useful is IM for the public facing side?
Rocket is great for that. It's external exposure for clients is quite powerful.
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@wrx7m said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
@MattSpeller said in The power of Chat in IT Support:
We use skype extensively to chat as an organization and it's very valuable.
Having said that, Skype is a steaming turd after the last changes w/ account creation & management.
Skype for Business or regular Skype?
Regular vanilla skype.
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We use Skype for Business. It works well for us, if people remember to sign into it and use it.
Can't check out Rocket.chat at work because of IM. I hate AT&T firewalls.
