Your company has an innovative product, a flashy and attractive website, a bevy of investors on board, and a technical support staff consisting of one intern that you spent five minutes training via email. What’s wrong with this picture?

How Tech Support Affects Your Company’s Image

In many cases, your tech support representatives are your only employees that regularly interact with your customers. When your support reps also happen to be your lowest paid, worst informed and (understandably) most short-tempered employees, can you expect your company to build a positive reputation among your target audience?

Tech support is under-utilized. Far too many companies treat their tech support teams as a last line of defense between angry customers and imminent organizational failure, and consider the idea of sending their tech team leaders to management schools as completely ridiculous . You should have two primary goals for your technical support services, both of which will improve your company’s image when accomplished: Continue reading

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I have a confession to make… I am extremely harsh when it comes to customer support. I’ve spent quite a while being a tech support engineer, I know how much it matters in building a great relationship with customers. So when I make my decisions about certain products or services, the quality of tech support backing them up is extremely important.  Why? It is simple. Anything can crash. No one should look for guarantees they will have no problems, they should make sure they will have help solving them when they appear. And based on my fare share of customer support talks, chats, email exchanges, I thought I’d make a top of the best ways to drive customers away.

1. Don’t pick up when they call

Definitely, this is the fastest and never dethroned method to make sure your customers will switch you for any of your competitors quicker then lightning. Continue reading

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If there is something everyone loves about Open Source software (FLOSS) is that every issue ever discovered with it is known, there are no surprises. All incompatibilities, if discovered, are out there and anyone trying out the software knows what to expect before they begin. The main benefit of such transparency is that customers are never outraged by bugs. And let’s face it, there is no bug-free software, especially if you try to make it work on Windows

When it comes to closed source software, I’ve been in the industry enough to know the rule of “hush-hush” is the preferred business model. Known issues, bugs, incompatibilities? Keep them buried and hope no one finds out. The perfect plan to have everything blow in your face.

I thought a series debating all the aspects of this “hide it all under the carpet” strategy would help software vendors understand that transparency can actually be a great selling point. No customer likes to be bullshitted and asked to remove programs without any real explanation. That is why I’ve come up with a series focusing on how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry and what the lack of these values can lead to. Up to now, I’ve thought of 4 parts, but things might get more complex around the way:

1. How Much Do Sales People Know and How Much of that Do They Hide?
2. Should the Marketers and Communicators Care about What’s Wrong With the Product?
3. When Everything Goes Wrong, Do Support Engineers Eventually Come Clean?
4. Software Utopia: Transparency All the Way! Any Benefits?

This is indeed a large and complicated topic, so while posting each entry of debating the subject of transparency in the software industry, I’d love to hear your thoughts, your pleasant encounters and horror stories involving tech support, sales people and marketer in the software industry.

So stay tuned, and let’s start debating!

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