Practices, Resources & Other Suggestions for Cust. Support? 18
drshannon asks: "I have recently been placed in charge of our small Customer Support part of the company (just 2 people right now). I have never done any customer support before, and would like to ask the community about tools, policies, resources or ideas that work well for them. I'm sure there are a ton of resources, and most Google searches turn up specific help desks for companies, not ideas about supporting customers! What is a good CRM for a small business? How do you handle documentation to easily publish documents for User Guides, and for the web? What are common tools for a good customer support desk. We try and pride ourselves on good support, but we do need to improve, and can with your suggestions."
Problem Management Software (Score:4, Insightful)
Steer away from the market leaders like Peregrine and Remedy (or Heat, Quetzal, Helpdesk etc.) as they are vastly over complicated, over priced, opaque in use and just generally suck the fat one.
Get something simple, or get it developed in house. 9 times out of 10 you don't need the bells and whistles offered by a 'professional' system as these are just bundled in to make a weak product easier to sell. If you develop it yourself then you can at least add the bits you need later on.
Second, some kind of knowledge base. It needn't be a big whizzy database - you can get all the detail you need in a word document or html page.
Third, get headsets for your phones. You might think they are a bit wussy or funny looking at first, but you will soon realise how much more efficient they make you and your staff; you can actually type whilst on the phone. Which brings me onto...
Four: make sure you can all type at least 40 wpm. If you can't do this then you shouldn't be allowed to use a computer, let alone be an IT professional (who in their right mind would employ a developer at $80 per hour who can't type > 20 wpm - but it happens!).
This will make the whole experience a whole lot more enjoyable for both the customer and the operator.
Five: If you can't get technical experts for staff, get intelligent, pleasant people. Do not pay minimum wage and get people who want to move into IT from, say, shelf stacking. Make sure they know they need to be polite, considerate and efficient with all customers (note: this includes 'internal customers')
Running a support desk is hard work, but is also essentially a simple thing to get right - just keep thinking about customer service the whole time and your 3/4 of the way there.
Just my £0.02.
Re:Out of my personal experience... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know tonnes of people in support/service who only figured this out after 6 months or more on the job, and it makes the tech-support job a lot less stressful (which in turn makes finding solutions quicker, and happier customers). Customers are not your enemy, but a customer who has spent the last 10 hours trying to fix something will be stressed-out at least, and may be looking for an excuse to take it out on you. This is especially true when dealing with end-users or individual software licencees. Sysadmins, or those dealing with software on a network are usually a) more computer literate and b) know that there are things that go wrong, that one cannot plan for. These people are likely to be a lot more patient with you, and therefore you should extend them the same courtousy.