🔁 🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏼 👩🏻‍🚀 Telegram for tech support: tools and pitfalls 🧔🏽 🍭 🎪

Organizing a chat on Telegram for technical support is very easy. But it’s very difficult to really establish a full-fledged user support work in this messenger. We ourselves went this way, filled a lot of cones and developed rules and tools to cope with them. This article is about them.

The standard communication methods in the IT industry are telephone and mail. We also have these channels. But the phones with us are mainly used to escalate applications, and the mail - for the establishment of tickets. For tickets, we use Zendesk, in which each letter is assigned a number, the responsible employee, and a beating about the opened application is sent to the client. However, this is an industry standard, and there is nothing new.

Why messengers?

Popularity

Messengers are very popular and convenient to use. When we were just starting work on the market and we didn’t have so many customers (for reference - nowwe serve more than 3 million sitesin Variti ), then we could still afford to chat with literally every client. Then we just started a separate channel with him and continued correspondence there.

Responsiveness

The average time from the moment of writing a letter to the moment we receive a response is 15 minutes, and this is considered a very good result. For comparison, large companies and providers in standard support rates set 1-2 days. The chats are good because everything happens very quickly here, and very quickly comes the understanding of what the client needs. In the same 15 minutes we can exchange more than a hundred messages, and this will be just productive communication.

Why Telegram?

Initially, we chose between three messengers: Telegram, Whatsapp and Skype, since they are all very common in Russia.

Whatsapp has very poor functionality, at the time of review there were no bots in it and, in general, there were few opportunities for automation. In addition, working with different interfaces was important to us. Whatsapp works only through the phone, even its desktop version depends on the operation of the mobile device, and in general it is very unstable and constantly slows down.

In Skype, we initially started to maintain technical support chats, but then we refused them. Skype, firstly, loses a lot in usability, and secondly in automation. Bots appeared there in the end, but we already left there. Thirdly, the messenger had a big problem with notifications: for several months we suffered from the fact that the client wrote something to us, his message is marked as sent, but we did not see it. Fourth, such a factor as speed of work was important to us. Skype is a very difficult application for both the phone and the computer, as it eats up a lot of resources and is slow. Later, a light version appeared there, but it still lost in Telegram speed.

Telegram won not only in speed and usability, but also because it has a native desktop application for Linux (we have the whole department under it). It has a large set of functions and flexible notifications. In addition, we liked the speed of switching between chat rooms and very clear synchronization of message history between different devices. It is important that the dialogue started with the client is not interrupted if the employee moves somewhere.

We have a lot of processes connected with this messenger right now: internal communication, infrastructure monitoring, software monitoring, which developers are working on, monitoring applications from sites for sales managers - there are only about a dozen such purely “monitoring” channels.

Now we are also considering a messenger such as Slack, because we have come to the international market, where Slack is a standard and very popular corporate tool, and many of our clients and partners “sit” in it. In addition, it is even wider in functionality than Telegram. But for now, the blocking factor for us is its speed, since the work of technical support involves a lot of context switching and the need to simultaneously work in 5-10 chats and very quickly switch between them, toss and track messages.

Cons of chat support

“Help fraternally”

Our sales and account managers, of course, use a much larger number of instant messengers, including Skype, Whatsapp and Viber. Often there was a situation when they added a technical support specialist to a chat with a client in this messenger with a request to deal with a client’s problem or question. We had to severely limit this story, because the number of uncontrolled chats is multiplying (and remember about switching content). Plus, in the case of even a sincere desire to help, the technical support response was already perceived as an obligation included in the client’s tariff.

Informal communication

Efficiency and informal chatting are both a plus and a big minus. When a user writes a task in writing, he ponders the wording so that the employee has to ask as few clarifying questions as possible, and the problem is solved faster.

In Telegram, customers very often start a dialogue with “Hello”, “Are you all right?” or “But something doesn’t work for me” and waits a few minutes for a response before starting more constructive communication. An informal dialogue ultimately translates into a much larger number of messages than in other channels, since you have to ask a lot of clarifying questions. With a heavy load on technical support, this is essential.

“Anyone here at all?”

In chats, users expect a response much faster. With a standard response time of 15 minutes, in chat rooms we get the question “Where are you?” In half a minute, and after 5 minutes without an answer - the intention to complain to the management of the poor work.

Not everyone also understands that chat is a tool exclusively for communication and clarifying questions, and SLA compliance does not work here. Following an SLA on each of hundreds of messages is simply impossible. It is necessary to create a normal ticket in which all agreements will be respected.

Not 24/7

Chat is an additional convenience that is not included in the standard support tariff. Despite the fact that we always fix the message that only our phone and email work in 24/7 mode, people are still offended that at three in the morning their message remains unanswered.

It's hard It

takes a lot of time and resources to do this kind of operational support, so a large company, most likely, cannot afford it. Perhaps with the growth of our client base in the future, we will also have to abandon it.

The international market will not be happy with Telegram.

We are currently actively expanding into the European market, and it has its own characteristics. First of all, Telegram is not very popular there; of the messengers, Whatsapp and Slack are more developed there. Secondly, Western clients do not solve such issues in chat rooms, and the standard of communication with technical support is email, because for them it is equal to a ticket. Moreover, for them the letter is quite a legal document, and even in the courts the correspondence from gmail is used.

Therefore, for foreign customers, we will try to transfer communication to the mail to the maximum, and this is good, because more constructive communication takes place there. In addition, it is much easier to create reports and statistics on calls; there is the necessary data on the beginning of the problem, the end, and the reaction time. Telegram doesn’t.

Chat Rules

At the very beginning, we had chaotically formed a bunch of different chats in different messengers, where different people answered - from sales managers to developers (especially if the question was about customer integration). I had to monitor the composition of participants, notifications and other things in a large number of places. The remaining employees had the expectation that when they stopped talking on their topics with users, technical support would pick up the conversation and answer all other questions. Technical support, seeing that there was an active dialogue not on technical issues, self-relieved.

There was a separate story with developers in general. Previously, we attracted them to communicate with customers, it ended sadly. Firstly, developers are a very expensive resource to use like this, and secondly, they do not have a 24/7 mode of operation, which the client is not required to understand, by the way. Now we have excluded them from this process, and if we need something, then technical support creates a ticket in Jira, sends it to development, and itself communicates with both the client and the developer.

We had to create a number of hard rules. Firstly, no other messengers, all chats are transferred to Telegram and only to a channel with a name containing the words Variti Support. Secondly, only users and technical support communicate, and only to solve customer problems. At first, I had to behave sternly. For example, if a sales manager suddenly began to discuss financial issues in a chat, technical support specialists defiantly left the chat. Because it distracts us, and there is a risk of missing important messages and applications. In addition, unlike technical support, other employees do not have responsibility to the client and SLA. Fortunately, now everyone understands the rules, and it has become much easier to work.

For order, we also call chats in a special way, pin special messages and moderate messages - this helps to streamline the work. We also monitor the purpose of each communication channel. For example, a telephone is for escalation only. If you did not write a ticket, then no one will change your settings by phone. A chat is only for technical communication. If an application appears during chatting or a long process is going on, then we start a ticket in our Jira and write the number in the chat so that later we can refer to it, or we ask the client to register a ticket in Zendesk.

What tools did

We try to adhere to three channels - telephone, email and Telegram and build on top of this infrastructure to automate notifications, escalations, and so on. For example, we created a special bot with two sets of functions - for technical support employees and for customers.

One of the advantages of instant messengers is mobility, the ability to solve issues not only from the desktop at the workplace, but also from a mobile phone, say, on the road. Therefore, with the help of the bot, we did something for clients like a personal account in Telegram, where a user can log in and see their services, graphs that display, for example, monthly traffic, the number of requests and other statistics on their services. It is very convenient and helps to quickly solve small problems.

In addition, we automatically send various notifications to the client, for example, that the certificate is about to expire, or a new network is being commissioned and the settings need to be changed. The only thing is that we duplicate such messages by mail, because not everyone regularly reads Telegram channels.

For technical support employees, another functionality works. Firstly, certain automation, for example, the creation of text templates. The process of connecting a new customer to technical support is as follows: a chat is started and the sales manager in it necessarily describes this customer and the services connected to him so that we are already in the subject. If the user has a task to connect some new services, the bot sends a template with the desired order of actions, a list of networks, a description of the configuration. We have about a dozen such templates here and we, in order not to write everything again, give the command to the bot to send a specific template. This saves a lot of time.

The second functionality is tracking activity in chats. The bot is present in every chat with the client and monitors messages. For example, if a client wrote something and this message remains unanswered, then the bot will send us notifications and ask us to do something. When you have a dozen chats at the same time, it's very easy to forget about it. Even if the client simply wrote “thank you”, the bot will react, so we try to keep our message last, even if it is “please”.

In addition, we have a number of other notifications. Previously, they fell into our mail, or fell into a table on the web interface. But it turned out to be much more efficient to collect them in a separate Telegram channel. We always look at him, he is in our priority even before chats with clients, because this allows us to fully monitor.

In principle, these tools turned out to be enough for us, although we went to them for a long time and tried different options.

Technical support staff

At first we tried to take a support team on outsourcing. We chose a company that had experience of support via phone, mail and chat. Unfortunately, they only worked on scripts that we had to write with them. Any question, which even slightly deviated from the script, remained unanswered, in this case they could receive a maximum request from the client and escalate it further. Independently learning and learning about the work of the service in more detail was also not part of their responsibilities, so we parted.

Now we are recruiting people to staff. This was also a difficulty, because, taught by bitter experience, we did not want to take people at the level of call center operators. We immediately set the bar - this is the junior system administrator. Yes, our administration is not specific, but our technical support is engaged in programming, administration, monitoring, and many other tasks, so we needed a good beginner engineer. HR agencies later complained about us that we were conducting too complicated interviews, but we did not lower the bar and eventually found who we wanted. (In fairness, we pledged three times as much salary as the employees of the call center get).

But the engineers are able to understand the technical problem, they know how the Internet works, they understand the http protocol, they understand how to diagnose the network and so on.

As a result, we have very fast and really qualified support, and this is one of our market advantages.