Online IT Support: Are You Failing or Succeeding?

When you’re in the software market, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, there is always one factor that users will judge you on very heavily – your customer support. Just take a look at the review for pretty much any popular application and you’ll always find at least one paragraph detailing the quality of the company’s support. If you fail in this regard, you might as well pull your product from the market completely – it will hurt your success a lot.

Do You Need a Dedicated Department?

Not every company needs its own dedicated support department to handle inquiries adequately. If your organization is small enough and you don’t have that many users yet, you may be able to get away with a few support specialists who also have other duties while they’re not taking calls. What’s more, you may be able to outsource your support completely, although you should be very careful with that, as it can quickly backfire on your productivity and customer impressions if you’re not careful. Nobody likes to deal with a detached, incompetent support representative who doesn’t even work at the company directly, and this can hurt your reputation very badly.

Specialized Tools to Accelerate Your Workflow

You should also look into some more advanced tools that can help you handle the typical workload of a support department with ease. SysAid’s helpdesk software is a good example, and you should generally look for an application that can allow you to organize everything in one centralized view, prioritize requests according to different criteria, and cross-reference information easily. This will all make the job of each support representative flow more smoothly, which in turn is going to reflect on the impression you make on each customer that gets in touch with you. When people know that they can expect a relatively short response time and an adequate resolution to their problems, they will spread the word quite fast.

Internal Support Matters Too

Don’t forget to set some resources aside for your own workers’ internal support! If you work with specialized applications that are not entirely straightforward to navigate, you should have at least a few people in place to assist your workers in case they run into problems with those tools. Internal support can usually be handled in a more relaxed, informal way, but make sure that there is still a clear air of professionalism surrounding the whole experience, otherwise, you might predispose your own employees towards a less professional approach in their work.

It’s not that hard to ensure that your support works adequately and is able to serve the needs of your customers, but it does take a little advance planning and a careful consideration of the resources you have available. Do that right, and you’ll be able to take off much faster than any of your competitors who’re only focusing on getting their product in the hands of consumers without thinking about the consequences too much. Establishing yourself as a reliable company, in the long run, is much more important than immediate sales.