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.

Problem Management Software

[floydigus]

First, get yourselves a decent problem management tool.

Steer away from the market leaders like Peregrine and Remedy (or Heat, Quetzal, Helpdesk etc.) as they are vastly over complicated, over priced, opaque in use and just generally suck the fat one.

Get something simple, or get it developed in house. 9 times out of 10 you don't need the bells and whistles offered by a 'professional' system as these are just bundled in to make a weak product easier to sell. If you develop it yourself then you can at least add the bits you need later on.

Second, some kind of knowledge base. It needn't be a big whizzy database - you can get all the detail you need in a word document or html page.

Third, get headsets for your phones. You might think they are a bit wussy or funny looking at first, but you will soon realise how much more efficient they make you and your staff; you can actually type whilst on the phone. Which brings me onto...

Four: make sure you can all type at least 40 wpm. If you can't do this then you shouldn't be allowed to use a computer, let alone be an IT professional (who in their right mind would employ a developer at $80 per hour who can't type > 20 wpm - but it happens!).
This will make the whole experience a whole lot more enjoyable for both the customer and the operator.

Five: If you can't get technical experts for staff, get intelligent, pleasant people. Do not pay minimum wage and get people who want to move into IT from, say, shelf stacking. Make sure they know they need to be polite, considerate and efficient with all customers (note: this includes 'internal customers')

Running a support desk is hard work, but is also essentially a simple thing to get right - just keep thinking about customer service the whole time and your 3/4 of the way there.

Just my £0.02.