a little madness

Most software companies know that support is important. Many wax lyrical about the importance of the customer. Few deliver. If only they’d abide by some basic rules for support:

1. Be Honest: don’t try to pull one over your customer. If you made a mistake, or they have found a bug, acknowledge it.
2. Believe: no matter how far-fetched the user’s problem/claim, take it at face value. Think you’re certain it’s user error? Test it anyway. Nothing is worse than being fobbed off as a stupid user when you’ve found a real problem.
3. Respect: your customers are not idiots (they chose your excellent product, right?). There is no such thing as a stupid question: we’ve all asked “obvious” things at some time. Treat the request and the person with respect.
4. Respond: monitor support requests frequently, and respond as soon as possible. If a full answer will take a significant amount of time, respond to let the customer know you are on to it. Nobody likes to feel ignored!
5. Track: never, ever allow yourself to lose track of a support request. Use a proper tracking system to ensure all problems are stored and dealt with. Lose the request and you lose the customer.
6. Learn: don’t just solve the short term problem. Use support requests as a guide to improve your software and documentation. Getting asked a “simple” question a lot? Add an FAQ, or just improve the interface. Support is not just a time drain: it’s a valuable source of feedback.
7. Apologise: your customers shouldn’t have to bother with support requests, they just want things to work. Let them know you’re sorry that you’ve wasted their time. No need to grovel, keep it genuine.
8. Thank: many customers that encounter a problem will just walk away (probably to the competition). When customers take the effort to lodge a support request, thank them for their feedback. It’s just polite.
9. Follow Through: don’t pass the support buck from one employee to another. If you respond to the request follow through. Get advice where you need to, but take the issue to completion.
10. Be Certain: when you answer a support request, you must know what you are talking about. All but trivial requests will require real product knowledge. All employees (e.g. developers) should be available to help answer support requests.

Really, support is mostly about attitude: care about your customers. Understand that support, though time consuming, is helping you make your product better.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 2:59 am and is filed under Business of Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.