Here is some basic background, and I can provide more detail if desired. In essence, I work for a small software company with what I would call a manageable customer base (size wise). The software itself is a tool to create surveys (either paper or web based) and then do reporting on the results (think marketing research, HR employee surveys or customer satisfaction). There are 2 of us that do Tech Support.
In terms of the industry in general, I would say that we are radically better than most tech support that you would encounter both in terms of responsiveness and knowledge of the product.
The thing is that the company is going through some re structuring (i.e. canning a bunch of people) and so both of us will be taking on a lot of extra duties. As such, we sort of need to streamline support a bit.
In any event, what I am wondering is what makes good tech support for you. As things stand, it is a paid service (there is a individual, site or per incident fee). One of the problems is that there are a handful of pretty incompetent users that do have a license and they chew up huge amounts time. The impact of this will only get worse as we have more to do.
So, I am trying to come up with some ideas for policy. How do you create a system that captures all of the abusers of the system, but do so in a 100% even handed and fair way that will still have the maximum number of customers satisfied? I do want to aggressively avoid placing special limits on user X or Y based just on my judgment, as that seems doomed to be an issue if I just don’t like someone.
I work on a tech support for a government contract. We were getting crammed with a particular problem that the customer should have been able to see as an internal problem and not to call us over it. We eventually made a FAQ type of thing that the supervisors of the people that call in the tickets had to fill out before they could submit a ticket.
Lo and behold, they learned how to use their system. Maybe something like that could work for you. Good luck!
Not a bad idea, in general. However, we already have a knowledgebase with a lot of articles as well as a message board where folks can talk to each other. The other thing is that the folks that are abusing the system don’t really tend to have one particular common issue, they more tend to fall into the generally clueless camp.
I guess that what I am looking to do is to somehow cull these folks, or at least apply the breaks but avoid alienation the general population of users or punishing them because a hand full of fuckups are chewing up too much of my time.
With paid technical support on a small scale, I think you have two options: pruning out the problem users, or charging them hourly. If you make non-hourly rates high enough that you are indifferent about the customers who suck away your time, they will be too high for the individual who just has a few quick questions every so often.
If you can’t change the billing model, you’ll need a firm set of boundaries about what you support and what you don’t. For example, if your software/website isn’t working on their system, but you suspect a virus/spyware is the reason, do you help them troubleshoot that or tell them they’ll need to clean up their system first. Or if the same user has called three times this week to ask a question that is answered in the manual, do you keep walking them through the process, or put a note on their file that they should always be referred to the manual in the future.
You either have to be indifferent about the amount of time you spend helping anyone, or single people (or classes of people) out with whom you have to be firm with your boundaries.
If the customer base is small enough, that can help a lot.
It doesn’t have to be HUGE - a whole hour of work can often be summed up in one or two lines.
What I expect from CS is… well, support. I usually know whether the reason I’m calling for is relatively easy or relatively hard and I think I’m not much of a customer from Hell - but what I really appreciate more in any kind of CS is consistency and the ability to make me feel like a valued customer (as opposed to making me feel like I’m a waste of the valuable time of the CS person). Being able to differentiate between me calling to make a suggestion and me calling asking for help is also nice. Oh, and it’s nice when the response I get is actually tailored to my specific question, I have never gotten a cookie-cutter answer which really fit.