6 Qualities of a Respectful and Successful Technical Support Operation

This is the second post in my series on implementing respectful, people-focused practices in software development. The first, on developing respectful software, can be found here.

If your solutions are to help people achieve their full potential then the customer support you provide is essential to that aim. In this post I will present six attributes of technical customer service that need to be present for great customer service to happen.

A genuinely customer-focused technical support operation is:

• Customer focussed;
• Proactive;
• Consistent;
• Accessible;
• Knowledgable; and
• Enabling.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Customer Focussed

You must understand your customer before you can serve them. Providing technical support for software means you could be dealing with anyone from a consumer with no technical knowledge to an IT technician at a large firm. The support experience you provide needs to be tailored to the expertise and demands of the individual user. For example, an IT technician won’t appreciate a phone support experience where they are asked if all the cables are plugged into the computer — they will rather want to get to the point quickly. Your support processes should be designed with the customer in mind.

Proactive

Despite everyone’s best efforts, things will still go wrong with any system from time to time. Don’t be reliant on your users telling you there is a problem. In the worst scenario they won’t bother telling you anything before they take their business elsewhere. Invest the time and effort in setting up proper logging and monitoring systems for your solutions. There are a multitude of online services like Raygun, Airbrake and Crashlytics to assist with this now.

Consistent

Your customers should get the same support experience regardless of which staff member they engage with. Ensure this occurs by having simple policies that all staff know and follow; by regular training of staff; and through the use knowledge bases, etc.

Does this mean you should use a system where support staff read from a script and follow a strict workflow? Perhaps in certain situations that is valid but personally I prefer ensuring the support agent is well trained and able to deal with any situation that arises.

Accessible

At some point your customers are going to want to contact your for help or perhaps to suggest a new feature. Make this easy and transparent. Use one of the many ticketing systems available like Freshdesk. Give your users access to the system and perhaps even allow them to create a ticket from within your application itself.

Providing online forums or social media presence is another good way of making your support accessible. But these come with a warning. If you don’t have the resources and will to engage on these platforms then don’t offer them in the first place. It is extremely frustrating to find a support forum where dozens of people report the same problem but there is no response from the support staff. This does more harm than good.

Knowledgable

When a customer reaches out to your support team they want to know that they are talking to experts. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of spending time on the phone to support and knowing from the beginning of the call that the person on the other end of the line is not going to be able to help you. Avoid this by investing in your support staff and recognising their importance to your organisation.

Get your support staff involved in every aspect of the product development process and train them on every new feature of the systems they support — no one should know the system better. Make use of a knowledge base or use a ticketing system with powerful search capabilities so that staff can quickly identify similar problems. And make the product development team accessible to the support team, so that questions can be asked or issues escalated quickly. Everyone in your organisation should understand the importance of solving customer problems quickly.

Enabling

In many cases the best support you can provide is the kind that you don’t hear about. Help your customers to help themselves without needing to pick up the phone to call your helpdesk or to raise a support ticket. Start by aiming to produce intuitive, well-designed software that is easy to use. If you have separate development and support staff make sure the support staff are involved in the design of new features since they have a great understanding of your users.

Also consider adding meaningful contextual help into your systems and review this regularly. Again, your support staff are going to have a good handle on what the common questions are and may be good candidates to produce the help content. For more in depth support, produce an online knowledge base of well written troubleshooting and how-to guides. Keep this up to date. If an article written for v1 of your system still applies at v11 then add a note to the article stating this.