Making self service a beautiful thing

For as long as I have been in IT; I always been at one end of the support process either for the service I am building, migrating to or indeed running. By this I mean creating tickets looking for support, or answering them, providing support. I have long been an advocate of enabling end user communities to help themselves. There are countless benefits to his, and I am sure I don’t need to go into them; but in short: no hanging on the phone pressing buttons; the ability to present an immediate fix to the issue in hand and when it comes to service provision, the ability for customers to order what they need, pay, login and get on with their business.

v6, in its many forms has been working towards this very model for a few years and at last I can say, has everything coming together the way I have always wanted. Some years ago, we ran the Live project which was to bring the likes of ordering out to the internet and allow customers to order and change their existing orders online. This worked well; but still needed some human intervention to complete and check orders. Granted this was no bad thing as it gave us the opportunity to contact and actually talk to our customers; another service element I am keen on.

We have since moved the Live projects platform into a full service automation platform that will allow v6 to extend a great degree of flexibility in terms of commitment to customers, allow control of all messaging service elements and order anything new required in a matter of clicks. The new store will be launched at https://store.thinkv6.net, where upon our old eStore will be repointed to this address.

There will be some slight billing process changes; but we will write to those customers advising what needs to happen. It will be painless.

That will take care on the customer control and provisioning giving an almost ”as-fast-as-you-can-type” speed to provisioning.

On the support side, we will launch our new support application that will allow the viewing of tickets  online; will pick up tickets from our existing support@@thinkv6.com address as well as present possible solutions even before you have hit the submit button. We will also build up a Knowledge Base of FAQs etc that customers are welcome to browse etc.

All in all, we are heading for a better customer experience based on what we ourselves have experienced over the years in some of the world’s biggest companies) and now expect from our own vendors and suppliers. Naturally, we are still at end of the phone in the UK if you want to talk.

Oh and on the run up to the Festive Season; may wish our American customers and contacts a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Kenny,
Director, v6