Technical Support Management

Fundamental to all service and support operations is an understanding of what the customer wants when they contact you.  They don’t want to have to need you, they want the product to work as expected without problems. We all know that isn’t always the case. When they contact you, they want to deal with a person who has knowledge in the area of their issue, and they want a fast, accurate answer. They have done some troubleshooting on their own, discussed it with friends and have reached the point they need help from an expert. They are experiencing an issue that is impacting their ability to get things done. They also will choose a method of contacting you that is comfortable or convenient for them at the time. The most common methods are telephone (800 Number), email or web submission. In the case of web site assistance chat is another alternative. The communication to research and actually resolve the issue may use all of the communication methods at one time or another.

To provide highly responsive customer service and support you need a staff that is well trained, experienced in troubleshooting, armed with research tools, and are good problem solvers. The challenge is getting the customer with the problem to the appropriate support person quickly no matter how the contact was established, and working to resolve the issue at first contact the majority of the time.  You also need a robust set of IT applications that will be covered in Infrastructure.

The purpose of this section is to provide the best practice processes to accomplish what the customer wants.