Swarm Support Model

In the fast-paced world of customer support, companies are constantly seeking new and innovative methods to meet the ever-increasing demands of their customers.

One such approach that has been gaining traction in recent years is the swarm model of support.

This revolutionary model of customer support harnesses the power of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and intelligent allocation of resources to provide a more efficient and effective support experience for customers.

In this blog, we will explore the swarm model in depth, its advantages over traditional tiered support, and its potential to revolutionize the future of customer support.

Tiered Support Model and Its Biggest Disadvantage

From a customer’s standpoint, it is always agonizing to wait for the resolution of a complaint about the product or service we have bought from a company.

We appreciate your patience as we have escalated your concern to our seniors.”

Let us switch to the other side of the table. Most organizations rely on a tiered approach to resolve an issue from a support perspective.

A service desk tiered method is simply assigning a customer to an agent based on that agent’s skill sets, knowledge, and experience.

The most qualified agent possible will talk to the customer in order of their necessary knowledge.

This approach is a direct implementation or a derivative of the three-tiered support model included in the ITIL framework.

This is usually a time and cost-effective way of serving customers. It centralizes all the questions relating to specific projects or tasks in one place, each one with a different level of importance.

However, this methodology poses a significant disadvantage of dwindling the First Call Response rate if not implemented correctly.

Swarming Model Explained

In contrast to the tiered model, swarming describes the simultaneous use of all available agents when servicing customers with issues/questions that may or may not be related, enabling more efficient handling of customer escalation requests.

Swarming is based on collaboration rather than escalation and follows a flat hierarchy.

Case swarming or simply swarming is a recent customer service industry trend gaining much traction.

Swarming is based on the idea that organizations can create value through increased agility by increasing information processing capacity.

This process is a hybrid of the principles behind crowdsourcing and agile team management, and it’s perfect for organizations looking to revolutionize their customer service.

Swarming refers to a team philosophy and approach that combines team communication, collaboration, and creativity.

It focuses on uniting disparate people with different skills but similar goals into a single group or organization.

Swarming can be described as a way for support managers to change their tactics to best suit the needs of their workforce, specifically when rising demands require additional manning resources.

It’s generally used when its number of staff members cannot meet an organization’s response time requirements at any given time.

Some Benefits of Swarming

Benefits of swarming include upskilling your tech staff, which will make them feel more empowered, resulting in a lower staff turnover or attrition.

Additionally, for the customer, swarming helps them with better clarity and transparency as they do not have to wait in limbo to know a clear time frame by when their issue will be catered to.

Prerequisites to Swarming

Well-written documentation (such as best practices) and well-organized tools are critical to implementing swarming.

Swarming tools allow people to work together on projects or tasks such as bug fixing, production support, or software development.

For example, utilizing an effective SEO service can significantly improve visibility and efficiency in managing customer interactions.

In addition, these tools make it easier for teams to collaborate remotely across geographies with different time zones while avoiding time zone-related errors like daylight savings periods.

“Swarming works best when you prioritize customer success and satisfaction.”

To enable swarming in your organization, you need to install a swarm intelligence platform, create swarms, invite people (or bots) into them, specify what they’re doing (known as tasks) and then engage in swarm activity through chat or email.

Motadata ServiceOps is an ITSM platform that helps you achieve just the right swarm ecosystem.

In addition, ServiceOps also provides a seamless chat experience with virtual agent capabilities offered through our chatbot in conjunction with incident management.

Finally, the intelligent Knowledge Base module is a blessing in disguise for the technicians working on a customer request.

Motadata ServiceOps comes with a robust reporting module allowing IT managers to see in a grid or chart layout how quickly and effectively several incidents are resolved in the first interaction with a service desk technician.

You can try ServiceOps free of cost for 30 days and see for yourself how it can transform your service delivery process.