Wolters Kluwer has a huge team of on-the-ground support members, helping clients in real-time answer challenging queries and support them through their compliance reporting.
We sat down with Hong Zhen, the Senior Technical Support Specialist for CCH Integrator, to discuss what a normal working day looks like for her.
Tell us a little about your role and what you do at Wolters Kluwer.
Sure. I'm the Technical Support Specialist for our CCH Integrator application. This means I assist CCH Integrator customers when they have any issues or questions about the platform. They all come to us as the first step and then we navigate or we escalate their questions based on the complexity of the issue. In short, we’re basically the first touchpoint.
What would a normal working day look like for you?
My working hours are slightly different, as normally I only go to the office on Tuesdays. In the mornings I prepare my daughter for school, feed my dog and then after that I drive to the train station. So unlike others, I start around 10:00am in the morning. It's a little late compared with my other team members, so normally I check my emails on the train to get an idea if it’s going to be a crazy day or not, based on the enquiries in my queue.
Once I’m in the office I’ll get settled to deal with all the tickets under my name, and sometimes I have sales team members and consultants come over to ask questions or update me on our customers.
But yeah, on Tuesdays it’s great because I’m interacting with everyone in person, but it also means I’m filtering a lot of internal questions!
That's nice, at least it makes the day like go faster.
Definitely.
Do you have KPIs surrounding how fast you need to respond to a customer enquiry?
Yeah, we do. We have a document that Nathan, my boss, prepared. We have a 24 hour window for urgent tickets, though we often aim to respond within the hour if it’s 9am – 5pm during the working week.
We do base the response rate on the urgency of the request. If it's a normal question, the maximum amount of time is 48 hours. That said, if there is a serious issue such as the application being down or someone struggling to lodge a return on deadline day, which is very rare, then we must reply and escalate within three hours.
What initially drew you to your role at Wolters Kluwer?
It’s a great role for my personality. I really like helping people and I'm fussy on troubleshooting issues. For instance, if I find something I can't understand or something isn’t working, I can't sleep and I must find out why.
I think that's made me fit into this job so well, because most of my job is to troubleshoot issues – it’s around finding out what the bugs are and resolving it. The customers are also lovely, and I get a real high when I’m helping clients and make me feel appreciated. Even after 7 years in this role, I still get excited and happy after resolving complicated issues for clients.
How do you handle unhappy customers?
If I’m honest, we rarely get unhappy or angry customers. People in our industry are pretty professional, and they can see we’re doing everything we can to handle their questions in a speedy manner, so it’s very rare to have someone outwardly unhappy. Of course, it has happened and you just have to ignore any emotional outbursts and just fix it for them. I think also being on the ground in Australia and working at a time that our customers work helps too, since the faster we respond the happier they are.
I also think another reason we often have happy customers is because we customise our approach, and never treat any two people the same. Everyone has a different request and is coming from a different place, and it’s reflected in how we communicate with them.
What do you like most about your job, and what do you like least?
I mentioned it earlier, I love solving problems and helping people. But in terms of what I don’t like, well we do work late sometimes to do urgent tasks. I think that's the only thing I don’t like, even though that's part of my job.
Our customers come to you with so many different requests each day. What types of questions or issues do they come to you with most?
The most common one will be lodgment related, because that's one big feature of CCH Integrator. They often ask how to prepare the return or lodge it. Also, sometimes people input their data wrong, and when they do and it comes back with lodgment or validation errors, they come straight to us and we help them figure it out.
What about the internal team?
Yes, so I'm a senior within the team, so I also get questions from our consultants and sales team very often. One example is the product team. Since we’re always speaking with the customer, they’ll occasionally come to me to get some feedback, such as “what do you think of this function” or “should we enhance or remove this application?” They want to know what our customers think, because at the end of the day every decision we make is to help the customer.
If you're getting a lot of questions around how to prepare or lodge a return, do you have any sort of collaterals helping to guide customers, so they don’t contact you each time?
Yes, we have a guide for people on the standard steps on what you should do to lodge, and troubleshoot. If they email [email protected] we can share it.
Can you tell us a story like about a complex customer challenge you had to solve?
I have an example, yeah. I have clients who sometimes raise issues with us on Friday nights, 6:00pm on the lodgment due date. One Friday night a client raised a ticket with support at 6:00pm, saying one of their returns had to be lodged that day, otherwise the company would get big penalty from the ATO. Apparently, the lodgment wasn’t working so I had to coordinate with our hosting and compliance team to get the issue resolved.
Long story short, we didn't get the issue resolved until 11:00pm that night. The reason for the issue was the client had, very early in their lodgment process, made a couple user errors. Working this late isn’t a big deal but that day was Chinese New Year as well, and that's so that's why I remember that day like forever.
So am I right in understanding that when a client has an issue, you’re working backwards and saying, alright, well, what have you done to get this error, etc. and solving it that way?
Yeah, I admit most enquiries are often errors from the client side, but we can't tell them that. We just help them solve the issue and work to educate them for next time.
My next question is around Wolters Kluwer values. Which ones do you try to embody each day?
I try to embody the WK value, “make it better” and “focus on customer success every day.” My role is to make the client happy and make their job easier every day. So that's what I embody.
Can you describe a funny or memorable moment you've had with a colleague?
A few years ago we had a day where we could bring our kids to work. There was one day both me and another colleague brought our daughter to work. The intention was for the kids to socialize and know what a working environment looked like.
But then we had to do a scrum meeting. So, we had this thought: We put our two girls in front of camera at the start of the meeting to represent us. That surprised everyone on the call because the scrum meeting has our offshore team members in India, etc. as well, who didn’t know what was going on! Once the team figured out what we were doing, they just started laughing and it just put everyone in the happiest mood for the whole day.
That’s really cute! So changing tunes a little, what advice would you give to someone starting new at our company?
I think for support, the one advice is do not get personal when you get a frustrated client. Don't take it personal and focus on resolving the issues first and then you can feel sympathy or apologise, but try to do that after and resolving the issue, because that’s what we’re here for.
Last question! If you could come up with a new company slogan based on your experience at Wolters Kluwer, what would it be?
We're always ready and we're here for you.