All too often, pride and ego keep staff from sending a case up the escalation chain when they should; we tend to be too proud to admit that we are stumped and pass it along to someone who knows better than us. This doesn't help anyone. The customer isn't getting the problem fixed, you look resistant to trying to get a fix, and the organization as a whole comes off as incompetent. While there might not be strict guidelines for when to escalate a case in your organization, it's as they say: "Know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em."
Know Your Market
Callers will sometimes be looking to get technical information to help them decide whether the item they are thinking about buying is right for them. It is helpful to be familiar not only with your own product line, but that of competitors as well. Then, if someone calls in to get this kind of pre-sales information, you can be fully informed to help them -- so long as your policy isn't to redirect those questions to a different department.
Open Direct Lines Of Communications
Do you keep stumbling across help desks that can't directly work with the next level of support? At best, they can leave a note in a ticket begging the next level to call the customer. To me, this is patently absurd. When a situation is blowing up for a customer, do they really want to hear, "I've left a note in the ticket requesting a callback" when the previous three notes haven't produced the needed call? Of course not.
Take Ownership Of Cases
There are two major reasons why you have angry customers: Either your product has made them absolutely miserable or your organization has bungled the response to their problems. In the case of the latter, the best strategy I have found is to reaffirm that while other technicians may have made mistakes or that the product in question is giving them problems, you are personally going to try your best to find a resolution. If you can't, you need to take ownership of the case and ensure that a resolution will be found. Then you need to actually deliver on that promise.
Understand Current Policies
It is hard to stay on top of policies in any organization. But it can really frustrate a caller to get inconsistent service from the help desk. For example, if Bob is willing to RMA a unit after one failure, but Pam insists on three failures, a caller can get pretty upset when Pam doesn't give the same quick fix that Bob will. The problem is that people are usually taught policies once during their training and rarely brought up to speed after that. This isn't the technicians' fault. But if they see that different policies are being applied to the same situation, they should ask a supervisor for clarification and alert them that there seem to be different understandings of the policy within the department.
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