How to Help Agents Deliver Faster, Better Service with Stonly

David Rostan -

As a support leader, you’ve got an impossible task: deliver support faster and faster, while getting better and better at it. To accomplish these seemingly opposing goals, you need to empower great people with great tools. Tools that help them understand issues more completely; tools that help them find resources more efficiently; tools that help them learn processes more quickly; tools that help them respond faster and pick the ideal responses more often every time. Stonly was built to help agents deliver outstanding customer support with guided precision. This article will show you how to use Stonly to make critical knowledge more accessible to agents and to reduce the time to administer and record great customer support interactions.

To begin: choose 2 or 3 customer issues that currently challenge your support agents

After you create your Stonly account give some thought to which customer issues are taking a lot of service time. Look to choose just a few at first. That will be enough for you to see the value in improved service speed and accuracy, to impact your KPI and to hear things from your agents like “it is so much easier to find the right information in the Stonly guides.” It is also the right amount for your guide creators or support trainers to experience how simple it is to create scripted guides and knowledge in Stonly.

How to choose the right issues for your first scripted guides

To have the most impact, look for the customer issues that are taking the most support time to serve. A combination of some of these will help you get several that will work:

  • Common customer questions that drive a lot of volume and would benefit from consistency and speed
  • Complex customer problems that require agents to check many different parameters prior to answering
  • Issues where questions asked by agents need to be precise so that data collection is consistent or ticket qualification is possible
  • Topics that you have to teach to a lot of your growing staff, like the ones given to junior customer support reps
  • Issues that often escalate and require precise knowledge of prior steps taken

How to make Stonly guides for your support agents

Chances are, you or your senior agents know the issues inside and out and the challenge is communicating it throughout your team, so just get started documenting what you already know - the proper steps to resolve the issue - in the stonly interface. If you already have documentation somewhere in article or long-form content, that’s great! Putting it into Stonly is simple. The key is to think like an agent and ask what steps would the agent take to arrive at the right answer for this issue, for each of the customer situations that could arise. Personally, I’d go to the whiteboard to think about it. Try to be as complete as possible, but don’t worry about being perfect. Ask agents to comment on steps as they use the guide and you’ll quickly crowdsource a perfect guide into place in no time.

Here are a few other secrets to success:

  • Make sure you add in each of the key customer situations (e.g. what operating system, where did they purchase, what product, etc.) as choices for your agents to follow
  • Think about the questions the agent must ask or information they must collect and offer those as choices. You can also use Stonly to have agents fill fields by adding inputs inside Stonly and making the data connection transfer it to any system you use
  • Consider materials, images, verbiage and links that you want your agents to use in their responses and lead them to find those and apply them in the right situations
  • Launch macros right from Stonly at the end of your guide, when a macro is required
  • Easily update guides everywhere they are used as processes or products change or as your agents comment on the steps

Connect Stonly with your support platform and trigger actions inside

Make your guides available for agents inside your ticketing or support tool with our seamless, native integrations with popular support desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom and Front. This speeds up everything by removing application-switching and you can even trigger actions inside those tools from the Stonly interface. When you combine that with Stonly’s powerful search, all of your knowledge will be at agents' fingertips and support actions will be far faster and easier to take.

Plus, when issues are escalated, those that follow Stonly guides in the support CRM have every action logged for the next agent to fully understand all prior steps and actions.

Choose your support platform here and see how to get set up.

Other ways agents can access Stonly guides

Invite your agents to Stonly and they will be able find and access guides in your account. Many of our customers also embed guides in their own knowledge management or wiki software, like Confluence, Sharepoint or Notion – all of your permissions in Stonly will still apply. Embedding is simple and you can learn how in our own knowledge base.

How to use Stonly to help your customers guide themselves

When you use Stonly inside your support CRM and you make customer-facing Stonlies for self-serve content, you get a truly powerful combination. You already know Stonly is great for step-by-step guidance, so why not use step-by-step guides to help your customers help themselves? Then, when agent help is required, all of the trouble-shooting, qualifying and help steps taken by the user are transferred to the agent to avoid frustrating repetition and really improve first response resolution. It’s perfect even when the user cannot self-serve as a way to simply intake information and qualify the issue to send the customer to the right support person. Learn more about using Stonly for the content in your help center.

We’d be happy to answer all of your questions and help you out. Schedule time to meet with our friendly customer success pros!