What customers want, more than anything else, is for your support to be effective. They want an answer their request promptly, they want us to understand the problem they are having, and help them fix it. Maybe they’d also like to understand a bit about it themselves. Oh, and could you make it so that this problem doesn’t happen anymore?

Tall order. But we all know this is right, because it’s what we all want. But it’s too expensive to deliver that sort of service to everyone, right?

Wrong.

Delivering effective support is more cost effective than any alternative. It solves problems the first time, eliminating call-backs and telephone-tag. It understands the problem, and takes the right actions to document the work-around, file the right bug report, and make the right change to the documentation. It gets that understanding built into the product, making the product better and more valuable.

You want the virtuous cycle, or the vicious one?

The key is to create a virtuous cycle of great support, product improvement, and customer loyalty & recommendations. It’s a virtuous cycle of good will. Here are the steps:

- Do a great job of supporting your customers and understanding their problems

- Build what you learn back into your product

- Repeat

This is simple, but it’s not easy. And this isn’t just the job of the support team. It takes a whole company focus.

What should you look for when hiring Tech Support staff? My answer to this may be a little counter intuitive.

Great Tech Support people are:
– Problem solvers
– Friendly and they like helping people.
– Communicative
– Confident enough to say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out”

This last point is very important, and too often overlooked. It’s critical in Tech Support to have a team that will respond well when presented with something they don’t know. Every one of them should not only be comfortable with it, but should relish the opportunity to figure something out.

Tech Support folks should also be friendly and like helping people. They should be communicative both inside the organization and with customers. Don’t just expect your team to “be professional”. That admonition is at the core of the wooden, scripted responses that frustrate customers.

“Knowing the answer doesn’t scale. Hire Tech Support people who can figure things out.”

Why didn’t I include something about technical qualifications? While a foundation of technical expertise may be important in your business, a candidate who is a better problem solver and better with people will still be the best choice, even if they lack experience in some aspect of your product or market. The best Tech Support people learn very quickly, and learn best while solving real problems.

Knowing the answer doesn’t scale. Focusing on “knowing the answer” is part of the “Quick Resolution Paradox” – it puts you on that treadmill that brings ever growing costs and support staff burnout. If you know the answer, you should be working to make sure you never get that question again, first by putting the answer at the fingertips of your users, and then by fixing the product so that this problem goes away forever.

Knowing the answer is a side-effect of providing good support, not its goal.

To make a great Tech Support team, the right hiring is critical. The right folks, with the right skills, will build your reputation with your customers with every call.

This recent research is shows the difference you can get when focusing on resolving problems:

The study found that customers from each company are generally satisfied with hold times, ease of reaching an agent and agent professionalism. In contrast, there was a significant difference in the percentage of customers who reported their problem was solved: 53% of Apple customers reported their problem had been resolved on the call, while 45% of Dell customers and only 39% of HP customers reported they were able to resolve their problem on the call.

[From Apple Leads in Customer Satisfaction in Vocalabs Tech Support Study | Vocal Laboratories Inc.]

Twitter is getting another big wave of adoption and many people are asking again what it’s for. How could short broadcasted text messages limited to 140 characters be useful? What utility could it possible have?

For tech support organizations I think it’s very useful, in two primary ways:

1. for “eavesdropping” on people who are talking about your company or product, and starting a conversation with them

2. as a signaling mechanism – a way to get a short, simple status message or announcements to an interested group.

For a tech support organization to actively go out into the world seeking customers with questions and problems may seem strange. Most support organizations work very hard just to respond promptly to the customers who are submitting their problems directly. But we all know that if you can identify a problem early, you can respond better and minimize both the work and, more importantly, the impact on customers.

Twitter is great for eavesdropping because of its format. The short comments in twitter make it a great vehicle for the quick response, or the snide comment. The re-tweet makes it easy for any idea to “go viral”, moving quickly through twitter to thousand of people and creating a wave of related commentary. A viral tweet is a good early warning for any emergent problem of course. But the responses may surprise you. Some of your customers may even come to your defense.

Good news is that Twitter allows you to be proactive in your support efforts as you can monitor/eavesdrop on different conversations and engage with these users, providing helpful suggestions and answering their questions.

This requires a lot of effort on a part of support team, as they need to actively reach out to the people tat mention you brand and find the right balance between helpful and annoying or even creepy (a lot of people don’t realize their Tweets are public and searchable).

[From Jure Cuhalev » Blog Archive » You should do Tech support on Twitter]

Tools such as CoTweet and HootSuite  are on the way to help you team be more effective at watching the twittering world and coordinating your response. Both are currently in Beta.

Tech support teams should also use Twitter as their own signaling tool. Think about what sort of notices would be useful to your customers. If you are an electrical utility, like PG&E, some of your rural customers may want to subscribe to outage notices for their area. If you are an ISP or web-hosting provider, it may be security notices or maintenance schedules. if you are running a beta-test of a new version of your software product, it may be revision release announcements to your beta testers.

Various integration tools available allow Twitter to even be useful to people who don’t use Twitter. You can connect Twitter to you organization’s blog or support website so that anyone with a computer can see the Tweets. You can make your tweets an RSS feed that your customers can receive with the tool of their choice. I’ll write more about some of these tools in the coming days.

So I’m curious. How are you using twitter now? What are your plans? I’ll be writing more on how to use Twitter and other tools, so where should I start?

Check out the post by Jon Mountjoy on the feedback request from Apple after getting his Macbook Pro serviced at the Apple Store. The folks at Apple have done a very nice job on this process. Compare it to what you do. How does your feedback process make your customers feel?

An interesting example is the feedback process for in-store support at the Apple Store:

… There was no logging in, no tedious filling in of silly details. I’m a community member (okay, a customer) – they have all that recorded and integrated with this web property. Awesome. Now I want to fill it in – after all I just had to push one button to get here. Nice touch in having the Genius name there too.

[From Get better at soliciting explicit customer feedback — Jon Mountjoy]

  Spam in Twitter is becoming a problem. Full 75% of my new followers yesterday were some kind of crass commercial, “I’ll show you how to twitter for money” or “check out my new multi-level marketing scheme.”

But some folks are using twitter for their business in some useful and interesting way. The latest I’ve learned about is a bunch of food twitters, including @chezspencergo, just profiled on sfgate.com:

Laurent Katgely of Chez Spencer (82 14th St., San Francisco) is taking his escargot on the road. Jumping into the fray of the street food craze, he’s turning a former taco truck into a mobile kitchen to serve his French fare at a few San Francisco locations.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for years. I love taco trucks and always thought, ‘There’s only Mexican food. Why not French?’ ” says Katgely.

[From Chez Spencer chef takes French food to the streets]

Laurent twitters about new dishes on his menu, and about where and when his escargot truck is serving. The way he uses twitter, it’s a useful service to those who follow him. If you like this sort of thing, there’s also @cremebruleecart, although he seems to be out of town for a little while.

Twitter, or any other new tool that seems interesting, has to be put in the context of your customers. What do they want? What will be of value to them? Have you seen a particularly well executed commercial twitter account? I’d love to hear about them!

My friend Ken wrote a nice piece a couple days ago about ROI and the role of the community manager. In particular, I liked this observation:

… The community is not a structured presence. You cannot simply pen in the community as they’re a wild herd of virtual voices. The skill of the community manager is their expert knowledge in finding these “voices” and listening to them.

[From Managing ROI for Community Managers | TheLetterTwo.com]

Darius says “Go read the whole thing…”

Last week I attended the VRM West Coast Workshop and one of the many impressive folks I met there was Joe Andrieu of Switchbook. In a recent blog post, Joe describes the The Identity Quartet – the key services that allow user to express their identity in online services. It’s one of the most clear descriptions of the identifier issues I’ve read. Joe even makes the point:

The Identity Quartet pattern isn’t rocket science. In fact, it makes things simpler when it comes to security, maintenance, and user control. The Quartet makes systems more flexible and more secure while giving users more freedom to manage how they interact and present themselves online. It is one way to turn user-centric Identity services of OpenID and Information Cards into truly user-driven Identity.

[From The Identity Quartet]

His post is recommended for anyone wanting to start understanding the issues of identity and security in internet applications and services. Check it out!

I’m not sure I like “4th party” as a description. We spent way too much time at the VRM West Coast Workshop wrangling over the naming of firs, second and third. But when you get past all that, this key idea is really something big:

VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also about building fourth-party user-driven (and within that, customer-driven) services, which make use of first-party enablement.

…

Fourth parties will provide many services for first parties. In fact, VRM should grow large new fourth party businesses, and give new work to large old businesses in the same categories. (Banks, brokers and insurance companies come to mind.) Native enablements, however, need to live with first parties alone, even if fourth parties provide hosting services for those enablements.

Fourth parties also need to be substitutable. They need service portability, just as the customer needs data portability between fourth (and other) party services. That way whatever they can provide can be swapped out by the user, if need be.

[From ProjectVRM Blog » VRM and the Four Party System]

The combination of service portability and data portability doesn’t just put the user in charge, it also makes the data better. Companies should be very interested in that.

Some things that seem to be good are actually failure.

I’ll use an example tech support pros will all know: A customer calls, you know the answer, you give it to them and it works, and everyone is happy. Simple, straightforward, case closed. Right?

No. This is a failure. Simply put, if you knew the answer then why did the customer need to call you for it? Why wasn’t the answer quickly available to them? Why wasn’t it already fixed in the product?
The answer immediately at hand for tech support tells you that something else has failed to work, or isn’t completed. Measure it, for sure, but you must drive those known answers out of your system.

In your business, what is it that looks on the surface like a good thing, but is actually an indicator of a more fundamental failure?