Acing your technical support. Tips for brokers

Author: Albina Zhdanova

Technical support is important for any business, but it plays a critical role for brokers. There is always too little time, too much urgency, and virtually no patience. And although it might be a challenging task, it is possible to design a system and train the support team to provide A-level service.

Tools for Brokers pays special attention to technical support. It has always been one of the company’s key priorities. That’s why today, we wanted to share our tips and tricks that have helped us build a reliable and effective support system that our clients have grown to appreciate.

Multilingual support

Brokerages are rarely limited to only one region, with no plans of expanding overseas. Foreign clients may be put off if your technical support team only speaks English and one other language.

Track where the majority of your clients are based and keep in mind the company's expansion plans. Those two factors should give you a good idea of what languages should be adopted next. And if you’re still unsure, work on perfecting English, Spanish, and Chinese support.

Hire specialists with the respective language skills and encourage your existing support teams to enrol in a language course. If you want to control the learning process and speed things up, you can offer corporate learning and compensation for the expenses.

Don’t limit your support to just email and phone

Make it easy for clients to reach you.

Offer multi-channel support by adding messengers, live chat, and an internal client portal. It will mean more management overhead to you, but the ultimate goal is to simplify the process for your end-user, so it is worth the hassle.

At the same time, don’t spread yourself too thin either. Your system must stay manageable. An omnichannel platform can help unite all the communication mediums in a single interface.

Keep up with the demand

The famous phrase ‘less is more’ certainly does not apply to technical support.

Keep enough staff to maintain the SLAs. If you can’t get back to clients within a pre-agreed timeframe, they will only become more frustrated.

Look at your turnover statistics (ask the HR departments if you don’t have this information) and make sure you keep looking for talent to maintain the necessary headcount. Hardly any business wants to stay stagnant. So even if some of the staff’s workload will be lower for a couple of months, they will surely catch up as your client base expands.

Invest in your team

If you want to have a superb team, help them grow and improve.

It is helpful to schedule regular training and short education sessions. It helps employees stay up to date with the latest developments. Equally important, it refreshes their background knowledge, which tends to slip away if not used actively at work.

Make sure new employees get structured and comprehensive onboarding. Prepare detailed FAQs, ask experienced employees to share what was most tricky for them initially, and make sure it’s covered in training one way or another. After all, brokers can’t expect top performance from their teams if they are not ready to guide and educate them.

Encourage self-sufficiency

Work on creating content that will allow clients to solve issues on their own.

Create and regularly update the FAQ, prepare a detailed user guide, post articles regularly, and prepare short how-to and what-if videos. It is a resource-intensive job, but it pays off. Clients who can solve their problems independently and get educated through detailed documentation will reduce the load on your support team.

Work on soft skills

The support team must always be polite and friendly.

Remote communication is prone to misunderstandings, especially when it comes to fixing problems. Arrange training and prepare cheat sheets for the team. You might want to listen to their calls or check written communication to spot potential issues.

Use your analytics for product and service improvement

What are the top inconveniences that clients complain about? What features do they keep asking for?

Brokerages are in a continual race to keep their existing traders happy and onboard new ones. Technical support is a brilliant place to look for business insight.

If brokers pay attention to what traders are unhappy with or what they request the most, they can set data-driven goals and priorities for product development teams and get ahead of the competition.

Clients often tell us exactly what they want. We just need to listen.

Divide your support team into subgroups

It’s good to have technical specialists who can work on anything. Yet, your support team may benefit from a division into specific categories. If you have multiple products, you can group the teams accordingly. Or you can pick client categories or locations and create sub-teams responsible for particular clients only.

It is more productive to have 4 groups with 10 people each working on a few specific things than to have 40 people working on everything simultaneously.

That’s it for today! We hope that the tips we have shared will give you food for thought and help you build a more robust technical team.

If you are interested in more ways to upgrade, optimise, and automate your brokerage with the help of technology, please feel free to email us at sales@t4b.com for information on TFB solutions for retail brokers.