Customer Support: Do It Properly

Every time a customer starts working with new software or requests some change in the application he needs support from the technical team to explain how new feature works. However, not everybody understands and accepts this approach, and so a customer may be very disappointed. Let us have a look at the common issues in the communication between the technical support team and customer, and see how to deal with them.

Misunderstanding Issues

The first group of issues relates to the way feature works. Customer may not fully understand what is the purpose of the feature, what are the business needs behind it, and how to use it properly. So, customer support’s responsibility is to explain it using simple words and terminology that the customer can understand.

The next common group of issues here is that the feature does not work as planned. In other words, there was a misunderstanding during the planning phase, and implemented functionality is not what the customer wants. There is no good way to deal with this situation, except for understanding the real needs and proposing the next best solution or a workaround.

Technical Issues

The most common group of technical issues is functional bugs. It means that there is a minor or major issue in the way functionality works, which partly or fully blocks the customer from doing his job. Customer support should collect all such issues, propose patches or workaround if there are any, and fix these issues as soon as possible. If the time limitation is very strict then it may be a good idea to propose an alternative approach to meet the same goal.

A customer may also face hardware or infrastructural issues. It can be lack of free space of a disk, limited hardware resources, unexpectedly high load, network latency issues, and so no. Easy solution is to find a bottleneck and try to fix it. If it is impossible — upgrade hardware and/or change infrastructure to adapt it to the new situation. After the issue is fixed need to find what caused problem and do everything necessary to prevent such issues in the future.

Business Issues

It may happen that when some functionality lost its business value during the implementation, and it is no longer needed. This is a tough issue to discuss as a customer received exactly what he asked, but it has no business value. Customer support’s task here is to understand is it really true, why it is no longer needed, and propose an alternative way to use the functionality to bring this value back. A workaround is also an option as long as it solves the main issue.

Another common situation when a customer’s business processes were changed since he requested the feature, and it requires an adjustment. The best way to prevent this situation is to have short meetings with a customer, discuss the feature, and adjust the requirements on the fly. Another way to deal with this situation is to predict possible changes in advance and make sure that the feature is flexible enough to cover them. However, if it already happened, the customer may need either a quick fix to make the feature work in a new environment or an alternative way to solve the same issue.

As you can see, work in customer support requires a good understanding of the business part, the technical part, and everything in between. It also requires an ability to explain to the customer the best solution in each situation without escalation of the situation. That is why customer support requires a flexible mind, great communication skills, and excellent organization to keep things running.