Since I do a fair amount of new product testing, I also spend a fair amount of time on the phone and emailing vendors' tech support folks, trying to get their products to do what I think they should be doing. And over the years I have found that this department is often neglected, under-staffed, or has limited resources. If you have neglected your own tech support department, it might be time to read Rich Mironov and Marcia Kadanoff's screed called Crowding out tech support, and taking heed of their excellent advice. While it is nice to have all sorts of online resources for customers to solve their problems, there is so substitute for hiring and keeping the best "people persons" around to help your customers solve their problems and win their undying loyalty.
David,
We have found that the best way to support our customers is not just with the right personnel (which is clearly important), or organizational structure (signifying importance of executive support) but by actually engaging much more of the organization then just the front line support professionals. Sometimes it works well to have others because a specific question might be known immediately by a person “outside” the traditional support group (and it gets answered immediately), other times it works as a “motivation” to the support team knowing that others in the organization are keenly aware of a client issue (putting internal pressure for response).
Of course, for that to work, you have to have a real time interface to the customer that allows a group to participate in the conversation. I know that can be a scary position for firms. Voice mail or fax are less threatening when you have an angry or confused customer. I, as CEO, can and do monitor client communications (in real time) exposing myself to personal IM’s, for better or worse. The overwhelming positive feedback I have received from customers is that they wish the big guys (we all know who they refer to) would offer the same type of customer support interface.
For Parlano, that (real time interface in the form of Persistent Group Messaging) is fortuneately what we have/do for a living. And our customer feedback on approachability and responsiveness is always very high. That doesn’t mean there are not software glitches, just means our customers expectations, and our own, about our ability to respond and solve a problem, are much higher.
As a result, we do a significant amount of repeat and expansion business, no doubt in part due to the way in which we interact with our customers in real time.