Over the last few months Enigin have undergone a systemization process to streamline the way which we handle our customer service. This has been driven by our Managing Director Ian, but all of the staff at Enigin have brought into the concept completely and can see how it’s helped to make our jobs easier, whilst also delivering a vastly improved customer service experience.
12 Months ago we had 4 business support staff who were on the telephone 8/9 hours a day, personally dealing with distributor enquiries. We found that the majority of the time was spent answering the same questions over and over again. Apart from being inefficient for us, it also meant that Distributors could only get answers to their questions during UK office hours and also they had to queue on the phone to get the support they needed. Since we operate globally, this was inconvenient to a number of our Distributors.
So we hit this issue hard in two ways:
1) We built a ‘Knowledge Base’ which contains 100′s of answers to common questions raised by distributors. The system was built using our IGLOO system and put together by the Enigin Developers. It is now fully maintained by our support team who add on average 2 articles a day. These new articles are emailed out to our distributors at the end of each working day so they can benefit everyone. We have recorded many ‘screencast’ videos for the Knowledge Base which have provided to be very popular. They say that ‘A picture tells a thousand words’, well, each screencast contains upwards of 4500 frames (pictures), so that’s 4,500,00 words! and all without actually speaking to us!
Result: Distributors now have access to our complete knowledge 24 hours a day to browse at their leisure. Repeat questions have dropped dramatically and it allows the support team the freedom to work on other projects.
2) The next area which needed attention is how we dealt with emails from Distributors. Historically, distributors have emailed each team member individually with their comments or problems. If the staff member was on holiday or out of the office then this email wouldn’t have been seen or replied to. It also meant that the Management team at Enigin had no idea about the volume of questions or which area of the business they related to.
Enter the ‘Ticket System’. An online application which allows us to organize incoming questions and enquiries by department and support member. This system had completely changed the way which we work and had improved our workflow immeasurable. Each staff member is alerted when a question is submitted which is in their department and they either answer it or delegate it to someone else who is more specialised in that area. It also allows our Management team to view reports on the questions answer, who’s answered them and which one’s are outstanding.
Result: Emails are handled efficiently by a member of staff who specialises that that particular area of the business. We aim to have all questions answered within a couple of days, and so far, we’re doing pretty well 
We have had so many positive comments from our Distributors about our changes and it’s always nice to hear that what we are doing is really helping them with their Energy Saving Businesses.
If you are an Enigin Distributor and would like to see a technical video about how our support team work then please visit the following link:
(You will need to have a Knowledge Base login.. if you don’t then sorry for now!)
Image by Light Knight (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lightknight/3394726696/)
