Ideas on good customer support
Joel Spolsky from joelonsoftware.com wrote a nice article with seven steps to remarkable customer support.
He wrote some ideas that are applicable to many different businesses - not just the IT. It's all about making your customers beeing surprised by the great support you deliver. Some of this thoughts are:
Fix every problem in two ways
I've also read that suggestion in the book "Practice of System and Network Administration" by Thomas A. Limoncelli. Limoncelli wrote it as "Fix a problem once - instead of fixing it again and again".
And I fully agree. If you can expect that a certain issue will happen again and again for some reasons, it's better to invest some more time to really fix it! Even if temporary fixing costs you only 15 minutes and permanent fix will take 4 hours - do it! It will pay out short after as your users/customers will not be bugged with the problem again and you will not be disturbed while working on other stuff.
Make customers into fans
There's not much to add to this :-) A happy customer is a returning customer (either by himself, or someone to whom your customer told great things about you).
I think it doesn't matter how you achieve this goal - but customer support is of course a perfect opportunity to make a customer happy! But I can also think of other things to satisfy a customer:
- Deliver at the time
- Deliver great product where no customer suppor is needed at all
- Come back to your customer after delivering your work, asking whether everything is fine (and fix potential issues as fast as possible!)
- Be reachable for your customer - there's nothing more disturbing as working with someone that does not answer to emails within useful time
- Send your customer a christmas card or something similar - stay in contact!
Take the blame
Of course we all try to make no mistakes - but hey, we're humans, and everyone of us makes mistakes.
If a customer finds out that you made a fault (for example by finding a bug in the software you coded), there's just one thing to do: Take the blame! Trying to blame someone else for your faults is the worst thing you can do.
But pay attention: Don't start to take the blame for all faults on earth. If it's clear that someone else has produced bullshit, talk to this person. Don't blame him/her, but offer help to fix that problem. That's what your customer wants to see: That you encourage yourself for his problem.
Don't take it personally
If a user or customer is complaining about the system or a service, it's human to react with defense. It's easy to take such a complaint personally and react angry.
Imagine a customer comes to you (owner or teamleader or colleague) and complains about one of the employees beeing rude at him. If you react angry and start defending, the customer will get even more disappointed. But if you answer like "Ok, I'll try to figure out what really happened and talk to the employee.", that customer will immediately feel better!
The point is that customers want that someone takes care of their requests!
