Support System In Practice
Looking back at the start of our business, customer support a heavy task. I introduced products, attractive products with high demand, before I understood the support needs, and the support requirements on our staff.
Incoming calls from customers filled much of the inside sales day. If time is spent on support time for selling is shortened. This cut our new account growth. Now some salesman like this easy talk with existing customers and preferred to hunting new business. These salespeople were reassigned or weeded out.
I put a support plan in place. Here are the pieces:
1. I built a support portal using open source available tools integrated to our CRM
2. I created a wiki page using a jumpbox and VMserver
3. I created a help desk documentation page on our website using Plone.
4. We encouraged customers to use Forums on our sites to post queries
5. We added a new pricing for phone support and use of the customer portal
This put a plan on paper. This plan was given to staff and to customers and defined during sales cycles with prospects. Here is what happened:
1. The customer portal, used by email address, published FAQs, a fast search box on the customer portal gave support answers.
2. The wiki is used as a Product info page
3. The documentation page is well visited and used.
4. The forums are getting there, we have not reached the tipping point yet.
Our new clients adopt to the support offerings, our existing customer base is adopting. Our incoming suppport calls have gone down. Our inside sales team has more time to sell. Support content is filling the FAQ with usable data. The wiki and the forums, still underused have the most promise. My goal is to continue to build the wiki and forum to reach the self-service tipping point for our customers.
