Support team is a very special one. Sales usually finish their work on singing a contract. Project team, including project and/or product managers, designers, developers and testers, is done when implementation is completed and system works as it was designed (or quite different if it works at all). The only team who doesn’t have a choice to leave it all behind and go to next task is support. After successful implementation your first line is your support and they’re responsible for everyday contact with the customer.
Depending on a class of system you’ve delivered type contact with the customer can differ. It can be just dealing with issues submitted by users, especially when a system is big and was designed for single implementation or deeply customized. Carrier grade solutions or big implementations of ERP or CRM systems are good examples here. On the other hand there can be great percentage of feature requests, opinions, queries etc, especially when a product is addressed to large amount of end-users and isn’t individually customized for any of them. All “from-the-shelf” systems, from office suite to web applications, are good examples in that situation.
The latter case requires more skills, because you play not only for keeping customer satisfied with the system, but also for keeping customer satisfied with quality of contact and support. Those skills include, but are not limited to:
• Some abilities connected with answering a phone call. Controlling a timbre of voice. Right self-introduction. Rephrasing questions. There are many of them.
• Controlling emotions. It’s the customer who can allow himself to grow in anger, not the support person. Nothing good can happen if support person will show her emotions.
• Ability to write correctly. You can laugh, but I’ve seen so many mails from support, which authors (and the company) should be ashamed of.
• Ability to beat about the bush. Yeah, I hear your laughter much better now, but telling to the customer “Your data is lost. We have a bug somewhere but don’t know where yet. Regards. Pawel, Support Team” isn’t the best idea I’ve ever heard.
There’re more for sure – feel free to add them. Most of those skills can be learnt but it requires some effort. However there’s one thing you can apply easily which works perfectly. Every time you get some input (e.g. feature request, opinion about your product) which isn’t easy manageable (like bug submission) say “thank you”. And when you say it – mean it. Mean it even when a request is the best candidate to win Most Ridiculous Feature Request of the Year prize. Mean it even when you utterly don’t agree with an opinion. Thank for sharing opinion. Thank for feedback. Thank for time the customer spent on contacting you. It’s a win-win scenario – customer’s satisfaction grows and you increase a chance that you’ll get more feedback. Maybe another time it’ll be less ridiculous.
I recall two cases when I (as a user) contacted support with my thought about systems I was using. I sent some advices into black hole of GMail support. I haven’t received any answer. It was more than a year ago, maybe they’ve changed since than, but I rather won’t try any more. I don’t like to be ignored. No one likes. Second case was with (my favorite) Pandora. I received my “thank you” answer within few hours. Maybe GMail team took my opinion into consideration, but they didn’t send this message to me, so I assume they don’t. Pandora team let me know they care and that I’m important for them (even if I’m not), so they can count on me in the future. Very small effort results in great difference with user attitude.
Thank you in advance for sharing any future comments on this article. I look forward to see any remarks either supportive or critical. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
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