Practices, Resources & Other Suggestions for Cust. Support?

drshannon asks: "I have recently been placed in charge of our small Customer Support part of the company (just 2 people right now). I have never done any customer support before, and would like to ask the community about tools, policies, resources or ideas that work well for them. I'm sure there are a ton of resources, and most Google searches turn up specific help desks for companies, not ideas about supporting customers! What is a good CRM for a small business? How do you handle documentation to easily publish documents for User Guides, and for the web? What are common tools for a good customer support desk. We try and pride ourselves on good support, but we do need to improve, and can with your suggestions."

Comments

Publish everything you can....

[DNAGuy]

Whenever considering a new vendor or product, I always visit the customer service/support web site. It's important to me to be able to solve most of my problems on my own. Access to a knowledge base, user manuals, and other technical data over the web can save me hours on usenet or on the phone, especially if the product is not widely used. A good customer service site also tells me that the vendor is serious about customer satisfaction. The added bonus, of course, is that the vendor can save some serious dough for every customer who is able to solve their own problems. Win-win all around.