Regardless of how much effort we expend to plan for “unexpected” events, sometimes things happen that are simply out of our control. Last week in Seattle, for example, a failed network component at the local communication service provider’s data center forced a temporary outage of our voice and data lines at our technical support center. Fortunately, having multiple locations means we could do some creative magic and reroute our callers to different offices. This ensured that anyone looking for help could still talk to a live person; something that Help/Systems companies take pride in.

Although the outage was sporadic, it did mean that our call handlers sometimes had to seek other people when they couldn’t forward the call to a technical support employee. Rather than simply take call-back information, I fielded one of the calls myself, and I am extremely glad that I did. It came from a large customer located in Niagara Falls, NY, who initially was a little surprised that a director was answering level 1 support calls (perhaps their surprise was less about my title than the concern of a “pencil pusher” trying to help them!). I explained that the support team was not available, but that I was interested in knowing what their question was, and that I would do my best to address it for them, or escalate it as soon as Seattle came back online. As we worked through some troubleshooting steps, it gave me a great opportunity to visit with them.

I was very happy to hear that they are “huge fans” of the PowerTech security solutions, and frequent listeners of my weekly educational Webinars, but especially proud of how complimentary they were of the support team that they (normally) talk to if they call in. Regardless of whether they had an actual technical issue, or they were simply looking for advice or assistance on how best to utilize the solutions to secure their numerous systems, I was told that the support they had received had always been first class.

I started thinking about how quality technical support can make an enormous difference in a customer relationship. It doesn’t matter how good a solutions is, if at the end of the day the solution is not well supported. I think everyone at one point has purchased a product or service, and found that they had a question about its use, or needed some assistance with it. The instant a phone call is made to the vendor’s support number, there is a “Y” in the road that says whether it will actually increase the customers’ level of satisfaction, or make them question their purchase. In fact, I remember hearing a tale of a cellular phone company that deliberately provided a number of their customers with phones that were not working. This was done as an experiment to see if the way that the support calls were handled would have an impact on a customer’s perception of the company. Interestingly, the level of satisfaction after the issue was handled promptly and courteously was recorded as higher than even those customers who had received a working phone from the start! That is a powerful statement of the impact that good support can have.

Of course, PowerTech does not provide solutions that will deliberately cause issues to customers, but we do have the type of support response that gets praised frequently. That is good for the customer and good for our business. From my perspective, I wish to send my thanks to the members of the PowerTech support team, and also the professional services team that—based on the satisfaction surveys that pass my desk—do an equally superb job at making PowerTech look good. It takes a lot of patience and skill to help customers in a way that makes them thankful for calling.

I am going to be in Buffalo, NY, in February (for some reason, everyone laughs when I say that) to speak at a local user group, and to host a half-day IBM i security class. During that trip, I have arranged to stop by and visit with this particular customer. I want to thank them for their business, and also to have some discussion about how they use the PowerTech products. It is invaluable to us to hear customer insight about what security and compliance issues are important to them in their business, as well as features they would like to see us include in an upcoming release of one of our products. I think it makes us more of a security company than a software company.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I was able to resolve the question that the customer had called in about. My single call may pale in comparison with the volume of questions that the professionals in Seattle typically handle, but at least I can hold my head up high in the break room!

Watch for an upcoming blog and PowerNews newsletter interview with a member of our (real) support team.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 11:26 am and is filed under Other, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.