Whether you’re training to be a gold medal winning athlete or an integrated library management system (ILMS) Support specialist, there’s more to getting those elusive gold medals than just wanting one.

Softlink IC believes our Support team are gold medal performers. They rise to the highest standards we and our Liberty and illumin customers expect.

The desire to help others is, of course, essential. But what makes it possible for our team to be gold medal winners? Well, It’s not just a matter of being kind and helpful. Let us give you a curated list of the top requirements.

1. Knowledge

It’s all very well to really want to help people but you need to know how to help. To be able to help our Liberty and illumin customers our Support team members need to know the software inside and out.

Having deep knowledge of Liberty and illumin is not a static skill. There’s the need to keep up to date with changes, enhancements, and wonderful new features that are regularly made to our software. It’s a bit like being a champion athlete really. You might win the gold medal this year but if you don’t keep up the training and find new ways to improve your performance you won’t win it at the next competition.

2. The Ability to Communicate

It’s all very well to know our products inside and out, it’s another thing altogether to be able to communicate it clearly. The world is full of extremely bright people who, for the life of them, can’t pass on that knowledge to others. Some smart people wouldn’t medal at all.

If someone seeking support or wanting an answer to a question doesn’t have the faintest idea of the explanation given by a Support specialist, that’s hardly helpful. Which leads us to other skills our Support specialists have.

3. Listening and Reading Carefully

While winning is in the Support team’s DNA, jumping to conclusions and racing to a supposed solution is more hare than tortoise. Our customers rarely contact Support to report that something is wrong with our library management of research management system. Often, they are seeking advice or help on how to use a feature.

Solving a customer’s problem or giving them advice should not be a process that wastes their time because what they sought was not clearly understood. Our Support team members listen carefully if the customer calls, and carefully read the customer’s emailed or live chat questions.

If anything is not crystal clear, they ask the right questions to arrive at the correct resolution efficiently. Our Support team members are not hares who mindlessly start running then become easily diverted. That approach will not result in a gold medal, or any medal for that matter. Is there a medal for last place?

4. Thinking Outside the Box

Understanding our customers’ workflow processes is crucial. It enables our Support specialists to think outside the box to provide advice on how the customer can efficiently and more simply get the result they want.

Because our Support team are so familiar with our constantly updated software, they are also able to find more than one way for our customers to affect a successful outcome. It inspires our customers to be champion, gold medal users themselves!

5. Multi-channel Support

Without easy access to our Support specialists, having the above skills would be wasted. So, Softlink IC makes sure they can be reached in several ways:

• Phone
• Email
• Customer portal
• Live chat

Our customers never need to dread contacting us for help or advice because they know:

• They don’t have to wait on the phone for an hour waiting for a response.
• Their emailed question gets responded to quickly.
• They can choose to use our live chat feature; one that doesn’t make them go through several unrelated, standard AI generated questions before they can get any further.

Supporting Tools

Our team also has a variety of very handy additional support tools they direct or send to our customers, for example:

• Help guides included in both Liberty and illumin, as well as guides in the customer portal.
• The live chat feature that ensures an ongoing conversation trail rather than waiting for response emails that are easily missed in the shower of emails they get.
• Helpful videos of new features for each release to help guide customers through using the new functionality.
• Training, boot camp, and user group videos.

Softlink IC gets a gold medal for not just ensuring our Support specialists are the best, we make sure our customers find it easy to contact them and get attended to quickly! It is raining gold medals for us like it did for so many of those fantastic Olympic teams who competed in Tokyo!

While it might seem like we’re patting ourselves on the back, our customers have praised our support in reviews on Capterra and testimonials on our website. If you have any questions, why not contact us. One of our gold medal winning Support team members will be sure to help!