What is Good Support?
Most companies overlook the importance of good support practices when selecting a product or service that will become an integral component of their business.
I have heard many of times in my career “I don’t see the point in paying for ongoing support”.
I agree with every single person that make this statement, as I could tell you that every single person that make this statement has never experienced good support, or have had bad experiences with support in the past.
If I was paying for support, I would like to know exactly what I was getting before I spend our hard-earned money.
How to measure support
Measuring support in your business should be done as a risk assessment, what is the risk to your business if the product or service is down. This will directly influence the type of support you need.
If it is business critical and you are a 24/7 operations, 24/7 support becomes business critical, simple right.
If the product or solution has a critical issue, but it won’t affect your operation if it can be left until Monday morning to be fixed, basic 9-5 Monday to Friday support is all you need.
Sounds simple right?
What about tracking of issues?
Solution monitoring?
User experience monitoring?
These need to be considered to make sure you are getting the best support for your money.
Importance of ticketing systems
Tracking your support cases can be as important to you as the customer and the support provider.
Bring together data from every step of the customer journey, so the solution provider can understand and improve your experience and understand the whole support picture. This is a critical aspect of good support.
This is done exceptionally well in multi tenanted cloud solutions with combined ticketing systems. Trends can be identified from common support tickets and fixed before it can affect the whole community.
Application Monitoring
Monitoring every transaction, every push of a button or every data entry into the database can seem intrusive to some. But the importance of application monitoring for good support is of the upmost importance.
Solutions that allow you to track and log when your staff press a button to submit and monitor that transaction, all the way from the device to the final database.
This allows support teams to quickly diagnose and track issues within the system, without the need to recreate the bug.
We all know how painful it is when you can’t recreate it and the support person doesn’t believe you.
Application monitoring support helps your business in ways you will take for granted.
You might not even notice the process that was running slowly in the past get a sudden speed boost by a second, but every second counts.
It might even stop a hang up that you must call support about in the future.
User Experience
Everything I have mentioned above is completely worthless unless the support provider measures your user experience.
Without a way of measuring how the user interacted with the support, they have no way of changing their internal practices.
I must confess, I hardly ever fill out a user experience survey unless I’ve had a bad experience.
Good feedback is more important to a support group then bad experience.
Understanding what support are doing right versus what they are doing wrong can make the difference for your next support call.
Organisations with good support practices want to analyse how they can improve, what to train the support staff to do and not to do.
Understanding how, why or if the organisation measure user experience with support should be considered when selecting your solution provider.
If you would like to read more on the topic, please read the links below.