I have had a recent issue where the company I was working with didn't believe that I had a real problem. The support department had been working on my problem for 3 weeks and I couldn't get the issue escalated to the developers. The people in the support dept had never seen the issue before, but the developers didn't believe that the issue I was having was possible and would not assist.
The attitude that the issue is not possible, is one of my pet peeves and an attitude that no software company should ever have. There is always an explanation for a customers software issue. Covering your eyes and ears to your customers issues only make a new customer for your competitor.
Unfortunately for many good software products, technical support is terrible and sales dip or dry up.
Good customer support keeps customers allows for additional sales to them and creates new customers.
Here is my short list of what characteristics a company needs to perform above average support.
Exhibit a "get things done attitude" - be the customers advocate internally. Good support organizations have the ability to escalate issues quickly and get others involved as needed without multiple layers of approvals
Patience with new customer questions. New customers don't know that the question has been asked hundreds of times.
Quickly getting to a root cause of a problem. This makes customers happy (not waiting for the issue to be diagnosed)
Automate support where it makes sense. I don't mean the 25 level automated support tree so that you know a customer has x version of the software running on y hardware. Automate with the following goals.
- Getting data to the right person faster
- Making it easier for the customer to help themselves
- Being able to data mine to identify subtle problems in the software
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