Musings on Customer Service

I've slowly come to some realizations about customer service....

While my group and I provide support on all levels to our clients, we are the clients of a good many vendors.

Much as many end users of computers and technical products are reluctant and anxious about contacting support, often times technology professionals have the same feeling about contacting their vendors for support because of a history of poor experiences with the vendors. Often times the vendors will make us, technology professionals feel as though we're bothering them and that they often treat us as rubes in working with deep technical areas of their products.

A couple of things on the above paragraph... It's a good reminder for technology and any other support group to treat the client as they would like to be treated.

The other thing that I've come to realize is that the better customer service companies tend to have a few things in common:

1) First call resolution--the better vendors tend to either have techs capable of answering the questions also answer incoming calls or there's some information gathering and the call is then transferred immediately.

2) The technicians are extraordinarily polite and capable, a relatively rare blend in a technical field. People with both capabilities cost more than people who are strong at one or the other (or neither!).

3) The products tend to be very good. They aren't always the best of breed but they're never more than half a letter grade away from the best. Half a letter grade but approachable and friendly and helpful are INFINITELY better than getting that half a letter grade unless you have internal personnel who are experts on the subject matter, IMHO.

4) The better support companies *tend* to want to hear how they've done. While I'm not a big fan of sending surveys out after every single support call (death by survey, as a friend of mine says), my top-rated experiences are followed up with surveys.

These are commonalities that I've found, maybe you've found others. One company that continues to impress me with every call we make, regardless of it being a trouble issue or a configuration question, is Barracuda Networks. These guys are on 24/7, super helpful, and super friendly.

I know foreign outsourced tech support often gets a bad rap but we had to call Computer Associates today and the call went to their Indian tech center, normally it goes to the east coast support but not today. Our experience today with the Indian support group was far better than what it was with the US based office. Go figure!

Some of the other good ones I've dealt with recently include Perceptive Software, HCSS, Sage.

N.B. I've not received anything free from any of these companies, but my experience has been very good or great with all of them.