Effectively SupportingYour Customers

By Leon Harper

Communication Avenues

Telephone

Email

Social Media

Live Chat

Ticketing

Phone Support

• Most wanted by new customers in order to have a “real person” to look after them. Places undue pressure on support teams.

• Will be difficult to recruit high quality support staff.

• Time consuming, one issue can be dealt with at a time.

• Prevents technical communications.

• Insecure.

WordPress .htaccess file

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Phone Support

.htaccess with subfolders

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Phone Support

Email

• Solves some of the communication problems with phone support.

• Unlinked to a customers account.

• Very insecure on both transmission and authentication.

• Difficult to organise, log and categorise.

• Work is at risk of being duplicated with no “assigned to” function.

Social Media

• Arbitrary character limits.

• Public by nature (useless for sensitive information).

• Insecure

Live Chat

• Depends heavily on implementation

• Can be insecure.

• Prone to abuse and ”prank chats”

Ticketing System• Authenticated and secure (you know you are

speaking to the customer)

• All previous methods of communication can be combined with a centralised ticket system to be logged in a centralised location.

• Company wide visibility and simple escalation.

• The ability for any member of your team to answer support issues from anywhere.

• The ability for all members to “peek” a support issue.

• Allows template systems.

• Integration with host platform.

• Auto diagnostics.

Your Customers

• Professional and experienced

• Understand real world Limitations

• Provide useful and realistic feedback

• Communicate effectively with support

• Mission Critical site

• Will leave if you can't provide the required service

• Expect problems to be fixed without involvement

• High resource users

The Corporate

• Engaged customers

• Knowledgeable and passionate about technology

• Offer good quality useful feedback

• Able to work with support to resolve problems

• May evangelise your support on social media

• Require “bleeding edge features”

• Early adopters not suitable for mass market

• Request unstable technology

• High resource users

The “Web People”

• Single hosted hobby website

• Low resource users

• No longer has communication with their designer

• As a pure host they will see you as an extension of their designer.

• As a designer they will expect a fully managed service.

• Has unrealistic expectations

• Can be a huge support time sink.

• May demand 24/7 phone support.

Service Customers

Heads of the internet

Heart Internet Support Structure

1st Line Support

Ticket System

1st Line Support

1st Line Support

1st Line Support

Senior 1st Line

2nd Line

Development SysadminProduct

Management

Support Cycle and Feedback Loop

Customer Problem

Support Database Support Request

Resolve

Bug fixDocument

Managed vs Unmanaged

• Demands a high premium from the customer which in turn can increase profit per unit.

• Demands a large number of highly trained and costly staff.

• Risky.

• Opens you up to responsibility for perceived issues.

Managed Server Support

• Can be provided much more cheaply for the customer.

• Offers the ability to provide increased volume.

• Requires an up front explanation of what you are responsible for.

• Can hurt sales if your customers are not confident technically.

Unmanaged Server Support

• Answer all the questions that the customer has asked.

• Attempt to judge the technical ability of your customer and pitch answers accordingly.

• Does your customer understand their own problem? Patience can prevent a charged emotional situation.

• Just because you have heard the question thousands of times, they have only asked it once.

Don’t forget the obvious!

Thank you

Leon Harper