Being a customer support rep in today’s world is hard. With people becoming accustomed to on-demand everything, from rides and food, to movies and dates, there is an expectation of instant gratification. There are more ways than ever for customers to contact support, through emails, chats, tweets, and good old-fashioned phone calls, but the tools used by reps to actually resolve customer issues are seriously lacking.

The Harvard Business Review had a great article in their Jan - Feb 2017 publication, called "Kick Ass Customer Service." A key takeaway was that as self-service options for customers have improved, problems that make it through to actual reps are inherently harder to solve, yet support teams are still largely using the same processes and tools they have been for decades. Support reps are getting fed up and quitting at an alarming rate, and the cost to companies for handling live service interactions has increased dramatically.

As new software products have emerged, departments within companies are increasingly getting their own purpose built platforms, instead of relying on single ERP systems to run the business. That’s great for those individual departments, but reps often have to interact with all the different tools used across the company. This usually results in having a ridiculous number of browser tabs open while manually copying and pasting data between them.

So what’s the solution? Well there are a lot of smart people trying to replace human reps with AI. Here’s the catch though: as AI improves, the issues that make it through both the layers of self-service and AI will be inherently even harder. If everybody’s working on AI, then human reps handling the inevitable escalations will be stuck with the same old processes.

There’s also the question of whether customers really want to talk to a bot when they’re trying to talk to a company. Contacting support for a company is different than asking Siri or Alexa a question; you bought something from that company, had a problem, and made the effort to personally reach out to them. What kind of message does it send from the company if it’s not worth having a person respond?

We believe there’s tremendous room for improvement in the tools support reps use when responding to customers. That’s why we built FlowEQ Sidekick, an app that gives reps step-by-step instructions on how to resolve customer issues, and comes with pre-built integrations to the other software products used at your company. Basically, it eliminates the need to flip between browser tabs or memorize processes, letting reps work quickly and efficiently, and focus on delivering that human touch to customers.

Support reps can make or break customer experiences for your company. Great ones can turn detractors into promoters, and help create lifetime ambassadors for your brand. We’re here to make that easy.