The 5 Levels of Tech Support

1. Technical Support

2. Introduction

3. The Difference Between Tech Support & Customer Support When people hear the word tech support, it’s easy to imagine people in call centers, dealing with unhappy customers who want to vent their frustrations over payment and delivery issues.  These types of issues will be handled by your customer support team, and not your tech support team. Where tech support differs is in the type of issues that are handled. Tech support teams are responsible for handling installation errors, user issues and any other technical problem that prevents the customer from using your product. In essence, tech support focuses on helping customers to use a product more effectively. A study from The CMO Council found that providing better technical advice and assistance to customers is the number one way companies can improve the product ownership experience for users.

4. By focusing on providing better technical advice and support to your customers, you will help customers use your product. Another notable difference between tech support and customer support is the number of support levels. Customer support has fewer levels.  The first line of support is via a customer service agent; the second line of support is via the customer support manager.

5. The 5 Levels of Tech Support As well as being available on a variety of platforms, a well-structured tech support system will also be split into 5 distinct levels. These 5 levels include pre-support, self-service, first line support, second line support and in urgent cases, a third line of support.

6. 1. Pre-support In the pre-Internet era, if people had a product question, they asked family and friends or, they referenced an owner’s manual. Today, your users will simply “Google” it. And this means that most of your customers will be browsing the web looking for answers before they contact you. Some of your users will be huge advocates of your products and offer incredible insight into how to get the best out of them, and help fellow users troubleshoot problems. But, it’s important to remember that for every good review, there could be countless customers complaining who haven’t had their problems solved and are all too keen to share their experience about it online. With this in mind, it’s important to see online forums, social media, and website comments as your first line of defence. As a company, you should be proactively seeking out these channels to control the conversation, guide users towards your own tech support system and help keep everyone happy.

7. 2. Self-service The next level in tech support is about allowing users to self-serve and is managed through self-help wikis, FAQs and knowledge bases. For many users, this is a quick and easy alternative to contacting a help desk and waiting for a response by email. Having a self-service level in place can resolve the most common queries and free up first of line support for more in-depth and complex questions.

8. 3. First line of support (human contact) Unfortunately, FAQs and knowledge bases cannot answer everything. Sometimes, your users need to speak to a human. For many customers, first line support is the first point of contact with someone from your company. First line support concentrates on the most common questions (which you can record, learn from, and use to update your knowledge base). Tech support personnel at this level have a basic to general understanding of the product or service, but may not always contain the competency required for solving complex issues. Nevertheless, the goal for this group is to handle 70-80% of the user problems before finding it necessary to escalate the issue to a higher level. Most issues here will be handled by email support, but as the issues become more complex, users will start turning their attention towards phone support. The more difficult the issues become, the more likely they will want to speak with a live tech support agent, as shown in the chart from the AMEX Consumer Service Barometer report below.

10. 4. Second line of support (Complex issues) At this stage, the issues are becoming more complex. Especially as end users are becoming increasingly tech savvy each year. In fact, the New York Times found that 73% of tech support managers said the complexity of support calls is increasing because customers have become more technologically sophisticated and can resolve simpler issues on their own. This means that the 25-30% of tech support queries that couldn’t be handled in first line support, end up here in the second line and are far more complicated. It requires staff with in-depth knowledge of the product to handle these support requests and provide technical guidance – and, the ability to talk to users over the phone to help them find a solution.

11. 5. Third line of support (custom support) This is the pinnacle of tech support for the vast majority of customers. Third line support deals with outlier cases that levels pre-support to second line could not handle, which means that third line tech support is likely to be managed by a designated super user, or even someone from your R&D department. Generally speaking, by the time a user issue gets to the third level of tech support, it’s become so complex that it likely involves custom work to solve it.