Customer support is helping end users use a product or service. Support engineers provide assistance when the user needs it, create documentation to prevent the need for assistance, listen to complaints and try to find a solution to handle the complaints, are the eyes, the ears and the face of the organization, and are always happy to help. Let's look a little deeper into these aspects of customer support.
To provide assistance when the user needs it implies that it is the user that initiates contact with the support department. The support has to be easy to find and needs to be available in forms that work for the user. If you provide telephone support, the number for the helpdesk should be included with the product and easy to find on the company website. If you provide email based support, the email address should be easy to find and a contact form should be on your website. Documentation should be easy to use as reference information and as a guide; do not expect a user to read the manual before using the product, almost no one ever does. If possible, software should be designed so that when a user encounters an error message, further information about that error message is referenced in the error message. Support should be designed with the user experience in mind. It is important to know that the user is only interested in support when he or she needs it. To prevent the user that has a need for support to become frustrated it is very critical to make sure it is easy for him or her to get in touch quickly. Not only does the information on how to contact you need to be available in all the right places, the response should be prompt and clear: telephone waiting queues should be minimal, email responses should be personal and answer all questions in the support request. Remember, it is a lot easier to help a user that is not frustrated by the process of getting in touch with you, because a user that is not frustrated is thinking more clearly and a lot more willing to work with you to find a solution.
Documentation is important for many users. A great number of users will not contact a support department even when they are experiencing serious issues with a product; they feel that it is a personal failure if they need the help of support to use the product they selected. For these users, reading through well written and easy to understand instructions is preferable, because they feel that they were able to figure things out for themselves. The group of users that does contact the support department provides crucial information of what common problems really have to be documented. This is why the support department has to at least provide feedback on the existing documentation and maintain frequently asked question lists. Even if a user has not spoken with a support engineer directly does not mean they did not receive help to use a product or service from the support engineer.
Sometimes the efforts of a company are just not enough. The user of a product is not satisfied. Perhaps the perceived quality of the product does not match what was expected from the sales process. Perhaps the user was mistreated by the company because of a broken procedure. Whatever the reason, sometimes a user of your product has a complaint regarding the product or the service surrounding it. A user that takes the effort to get in touch to file a complaint has taken the effort to give you feedback and is still willing to get the product to work. If the user was unsatisfied enough and did not care much about your product, he or she would have just moved on. Handling a complaint with care will bring the company great benefits. Support personnel are often the first to hear about a complaint and should take immediate action to resolve the problem and possibly reimburse the user for any costs they may have made. Complaint handling is a big subject that will be covered later in this book, for now it is enough to remember that dealing with complaints is an important part of support and the more broad area of customer service.
Contact with users is important for smart organizations. To develop the product or service provided by the organization it is very important to know what works and what doesn't. The support department has daily contact with the people that use the product or service; they are in an ideal position to provide information about changes to the product and to get feedback about these changes in a direct and indirect way. A friendly support engineer that is interested in the experience of a user can gather a lot of information at a very low cost, the customer will feel appreciated and the organization learns more about the success of their product or service. This is a true win-win situation. It is important to realize that as a support engineer you are indeed the eyes, the ears, and the face of the organization. The information you receive is valuable to the organization you work for, making sure this information reaches the right people in the organization is important for the user and the organization, because it will allow product and service development to be truly beneficial for both.
A support engineer should enjoy helping a user. This is not something you can learn. You can learn to feign a smile and you can learn how to communicate to sound friendly and happy to help. This is no substitute for an authentic smile and willingness to help. People are very adept at recognizing authenticity and quite allergic to feel manipulated. Be real, be honest, and don't force yourself to follow call scripts that you do not agree with, because it just doesn't work. At the minimum a user expects you to be helpful, if you are helpful and in a good mood that is a plus, if you are helpful and enjoy being helpful that is even better, but forcing yourself to appear like you enjoy helping is worth a lot less than just being helpful.
IT support is a specific type of support that deals with ICT related products and services. Support, as a part of customer service, has been provided ever since companies grew large enough to need a structured approach. The support employees were trained in communication and the product they were providing support for. IT support employees, often, do not receive training in communication. Hiring and selection procedures for IT support personnel usually focus mainly on the technical expertise of candidates. As a result, the average profile of an IT support professional is highly technical and, compared to support personnel of more traditional products, not very high on communication skills. Yet to help a user use a product, it is equally important to be able to communicate clearly as it is to have a solid technical knowledge of the product, if not more important. This book is about the specific area of IT support to target the common issues related to IT support based on the profile just described and to offer some specific techniques that work best in the area of IT support.