Overcoming the 7 Biggest Customer Support Challenges in Regulated and Complex Environments

The last few years have seen a decline in service and support, from understaffed personnel in shops to understocked shelves in stores. This decline even reaches support lines over the phone or email.

But was support ever that great to begin with?

You’ll answer “no” if you’ve waited on hold listening to too-loud instrumentals, continually checked your phone for automated call-back from support, or watched an ellipsis look like dial-up as you wait for the chatbot to answer your “quick question.”

“Most companies don’t even have a phone number to call!” The bitter complaint of one IT technician is not an isolated event. 

Compliance-Driven Challenges: Why Your Industry Needs Specialized Solutions

The challenges of customer support are amplified in regulated environments like healthcare and manufacturing, where poor service is not just a satisfaction issue—it’s a compliance risk. Customer support pain points in regulated fields stem from the difficulty of improving service auditability without adding excessive agent workload.

The big question is: how do complex, highly regulated fields track issues without overworking support agents? Your support system must solve core problems while simultaneously providing evidence of service. This demands features like help desk reporting for compliance and reliable workflow automation for issue routing.

This blog post explores how to overcome some of the top challenges customer support agents face:

• Lack of visibility
• Inefficient ticket routing 
• High unnecessary costs
• Reducing wait time for users seeking support
• Supplying self-learning resources like a knowledge base
• Curbing frustrations and keeping customers on board
• Convincing IT teams that the software investment is worth it

Overcoming Help Desk Challenges and Providing Superior Customer Support

Help desk customer support challenges vary from industry to industry. For instance, senior living resident support challenges often struggle with outdated spreadsheets when streamlining maintenance requests or resident complaints. A major challenge in manufacturing is designing the manufacturing support escalation process to ensure critical equipment downtime is addressed immediately. 

For highly-regulated, complex industries, there are several critical factors to monitor in order to maintain excellent satisfaction and compliance standards for customer support:

1. Zero Visibility into Issue Tracking

Highly regulated industries demand auditability and multi-site complexity in order to track compliance over issue resolution. For senior living and franchise operations,  for example, a lack of visibility means managers cannot track issues across different sites. 

How Software Gives Teams, Managers, and All Stakeholders Visibility into Issue Resolution

Issuetrak’s centralized issue hub solves this by providing site-specific and aggregate views, crucial for managing support challenges across multiple locations, such as across several senior living communities, multiple manufacturing production sites, or a series of healthcare centers. A centralized system offers clear overviews of how efficiently and effectively issues are getting resolved.

2. Inefficient Routing

Inefficient routing is critical to escalation and compliance in highly-regulated industries, especially in healthcare and manufacturing. An issue involving vital equipment, production quality, or a safety concern needs immediate workflow automation for issue routing.

How Software Provides Issue Routing and Ticket Protection So Nothing Slips Through the Cracks

The system must automatically trigger a priority ticket and notify the compliance officer for proper HIPAA ticket logging. Issuetrak covers all bases with several automation features, including:

• Round Robin ticket assignment to keep stellar first response time
• Task Manager check-ins to escalate a ticket along the pipeline
• Substatus rules to mark tickets by urgency
• Clear ticket assignment so teams are held accountable for resolving in a timely manner

3. High Costs

Generic solutions often charge per user, making it expensive to give every employee or resident access. In some cases, you can pay per day for "light users" - users that don't log in every day, but perhaps need a way to submit a request or issue.

How Software Reduces Unnecessary Costs 

Issuetrak eliminates this cost headache with unlimited free users, making it a cost-effective solution for large-scale reducing ticket backlog while maintaining broad access. For regulated industries that want to offer transparency or accessibility to tickets without allowing full system access, our unlimited free user pricing plan is the optimal option. Any number of end users can submit tickets without having to log in, free of charge.

4. Reducing Phone Wait Time

What is a reasonable wait time for a support member to get on the line with an end-user or customer? Issuetrak averages 30-seconds or less to answer phone lines, and as a result maintains a consistent 99% satisfaction rating. But we won’t claim 30-second wait times to be an industry standard.

In fact, not many SaaS vendors can tout good customer support. Zendesk receives poor reviews specifically about their lacking support, while others like Spiceworks don’t even offer a phone number.

Modifying your IVR trees (Interactive Voice Response Trees) to automatically issue a return call is one solution to honor customer satisfaction. Tracking the average time it takes to answer phone calls, resolve issues, or respond to email inquiries will help your team is another healthy way to address the wait problem.

How Software Helps Your Customer Support Team Answer Calls Faster 

You can easily and automatically log all customer information in a centralized software platform like Issuetrak, which is designed for your help desk. You also can measure trends to preempt similar issues from arising in the future, demonstrating to end-users and prospects how well you perform customer service. 

Outsourcing to a third-party support line during after hours ensures your customers always receive responses, too. If this is an option for you, again be warned that these external reps should be somewhat knowledgeable of your IVR tree options, as well as be familiar with the process of putting users in touch with in-house representatives.

⬇️ DOWNLOAD: Provide superior customer support. Download the e-book.

5. Providing Troubleshooting Documentation

Managers can easily feel overwhelmed when overseeing agent training for customer support teams, on top of their other duties. Furthermore, agents spend 2-4 hours more per day training customers on functionality that a knowledge base could otherwise quickly provide. 

Software Offers A Knowledge Base for Team Training and Customer Self-Learning 

A thoroughly documented knowledge base helps support agents familiarize themselves with operational SOPs and gives your team a leg up on providing quality support. They get to be more efficient (and have greater job satisfaction) because they have quicker access to knowledge base resources that answer and resolve queries.

An added perk is that general users (especially those who love independent troubleshooting) can and will access your knowledge base, too. Proper documentation allows users to solve their own problems, give users a chance to interact with your product, and cuts down on wasted support hours because users can answer the bulk of their questions in their own time.

       ⬇️ DOWNLOAD: The secrets to 5-star customer service. Download the infographic.

6. Keeping Customers On Board

Customers will steadily withdraw from your company due to annoyance, frustration, or not feeling like a valued customer—and you may not even see it coming if and when they decide to take their business elsewhere. 

Making your help desk user feel like the priority means you have to take time to hear their concerns. 

The drive for “people first” companies is growing, where supporting employee growth and well-being is a considerable factor in how well customers view your company. Well-supported teams are more likely to have greater job satisfaction and provide excellent support; your end-users and customers will be feel the difference, too.

How Software Supports Customer Retention

Customer support software offers audit trails through extensive reporting tools that build a thorough data profile of user issues—especially if a user has recurring issues. Issuetrak offers Scheduled Issues as a preventative measure, ensuring support teams tackle regularly scheduled maintenance to prevent issues from happening. Whether for school laptops assets or hospital equipment, Scheduled Issues ensure any potential problem is tackled before it becomes a problem.

Moreover, Issuetrak's Surveys make it easy to gauge customer temperament and satisfaction, helping support teams improve their products and services by really getting to the heart of any issue.

       SEE: Medium or Well-Done? Getting the Best in Customer Service

7. Convincing Your Boss and Team the Cost is Worth It

Support agents might feel restricted when it comes to convincing their superiors that investing in software is worth it. Many leaders worry that an added expense remains just that—a non-revenue-generating cost. And many employees worry about the added learning curve of adopting a new software platform.

Here’s the real question: Does the cost of outsourcing outweigh upsetting their help desk user’s experience?

The ROI of Software for Customer Support Teams

What teams quickly learn is that the added value of help desk software is irreplicable.

Customer support software provides expediency that contributes to both worker and customer satisfaction. Software helps teams measure a number of KPIs that build accountability:

• first-time fix rates
• net promoter scores
• average resolution times
• occupancy and agent bandwidth
• first contact resolution
• tickets handled per hour
• tickets solved per hour
• employee satisfaction
• customer satisfaction
• abandon rate
• cost per resolution
• customer effort score

Gathering data on each of the core KPIs help support teams build the backbone of a better business. End-users gain a sense of control. Agents balance their workload produce better services. Executives enjoy full visibility over a well-oiled, efficient support operation. Every member of a team can benefit from automation workflows and data measures that software offers.

        SEE: What Drives the Price of Help Desk Software?

Overcome Support Challenges For Good

How will you answer your help desk needs to satisfy customers, end-users, and leaders alike? Weigh the benefits of supplementing your service with software. You’ll get more done with greater speed and accuracy—and make more time to upskill your agents and improve business practices.