How do software companies justify expending money for Customer Service?

The problem:
Let’s face it – if you are running a small to midsize software company, your resources are precious and they are best used in building a competitive solution; keeping it competitive with new features and functionality; and fixing the bugs that creep into the code occasionally. Add to that mix the resources necessary to market, sell and install your solution – and there are very few cycles left over for supporting your growing customer base. At first, this is not a large problem, but as your products mature and your customers become more savvy in using your solutions. You see more demands from your customers – more questions, more problems, more data to track – and things start falling through the cracks. You add more resources to customer support, but this doesn’t completely fix the problem. More and more you are having to use your development and implementation resources to stay on top of customer issues. What are you going to do?

The choices:
1. Well, you are a software company after all -- why not develop your own customer service solution? As you think about this several problems pop into your thought process – 1) it will take resources from your development team, 2) this is not an area of expertise within your company, and 3) it will continue to take away resources as it needs changes, fixes and updating.

2. You could outsource your customer support. After thinking about this for three and half seconds, you decide that this is not an acceptable answer.

3. You could purchase a customer support solution. You are reluctant to purchase software. You build software, you don’t buy it, right? Plus, the needs of a software company to support their customers are more specialized than what you are aware of being available. Then you get two calls in one morning from long term clients that are less than happy because of the lack of communication and responsiveness they are experiencing with issues that they had reported last week. You decide that it is time to make this a priority. You start looking at potential products. You are surprised at the number of customer support and help desk solutions that are available. Your hopes are buoyed. This turns out to be temporary euphoria, as your research shows that there seems to be a mix of either complex, expensive solutions or low cost, low function, inflexible products. It is very confusing.

The decision:
You decide that option #3 is your only viable choice. But, only if you can find a company that specializes in customer support; builds a flexible, but robust product; and will continually update it with new functionality. In other words, a company just like yours. You will let them be the experts in customer service, while you concentrate on keeping your clients competitive by enhancing your solution. And, if you can find the right company – one like yours – their product will make your customer service a differentiator. It will be one of the reasons that your customers choose you and stay with you. After all, that’s what your solution provides to your clients. You feel better.

Narrowing the field:
You’ve made your decision. Now all you have to do is find the company that makes the best solution for your business. You have found a few companies that seem to meet your needs as far as the functionality that you are looking for, but their features vary and their price tags are quite different. It is tempting to go with the low cost solution, but you want to be wise in making your choice since this is a long term commitment and you have decided that customer support will be an integral, strategic part of your business. You have an idea.

PhaseWare Help Desk Tips #2

PhaseWare Help Desk Tips #2

Time tracking is so important when working on a help desk.  When time is spent on any activity, that time should be tracked.  If the time can be captured in a system then it can be pulled into a report.  This is such a fundamental idea, but it amazes me how many help desk do not make this a priority.  These help desks work on customer issues as they arrive, but there is no way to tell if one customer is taking up more resources of a help desk than another.

Actions to take are to record every interaction with a customer and document how much time you spend with each customer.  Even if the phone calls is only 5 minutes.  The simple action of logging each call will supply data to management when the time comes to evaluate the need for additional help desk resources.

PhaseWare - Customer Information is power

PhaseWare Tracker - The power of Customer Information

With PhaseWare Tracker customer information is always available. While you are in an Incident you always have the Customer History, Contact History, Quick Customer Information and Quick Contact Information only a click away. We even have some quick information tabs at the bottom of the screen that you do no even have to click on to get information, all you have to do is hover your cursor over these tabs and information populates the tabs and pops up.

Having a 360 view of the customer that you are working with is critical to providing Excellent Customer Support. With Tracker your support team can have those tools that they need to make the customer feel that the support technician understands them fully.

-Hoyt Mann
Co-Founder PhaseWare, Inc.
www.PhaseWare.com

PhaseWare Tracker Knowledge Base Search

PhaseWare Tracker's Knowledge Base is based on Microsoft's SQL 2005 Full Text Search engine.  What this means in non-technical terms is that once you enter knowledge into the database it is easy to search and chances are high that you will find what you are looking for.  There is nothing worse that someone spending the time to capture valuable information on a topic and not being able to retrieve the data in a time of need.

Returning the search results in a "Google Like" results list helps find that small piece of information that could be critical in solving a problem.  This means that searches made to the PhaseWare's Knowledge Base are not performed on an exact patterned based match.  If you search on Printer, the results returned could be phrases that have the words, Print, Printer, or Printed.  This helps find more articles that could assist in solving the problem.

PhaseWare helps Software Companies take their Customer Support to the next level

PhaseWare helps Software Companies take their Customer Support to the next level, by Hoyt Mann Co-Founder of PhaseWare, Inc.

Being a successful Software Company takes 2 things; a product and a customer. The first couple of customers are not too hard to manage, but when the 5 customers become 50 or 500 customers, providing excellent Customer Support can become challenging.

PhaseWare not only brings disruptive technology to the Help Desk software market with products like Sentry, but also moves at the speed of a Software Company. Our technology continues to evolve at the same rapid rate that our customers are moving. Being able to stay 2 steps ahead of the competition helps PhaseWare bring tremendous value to our customers ultimately helping them be more competitive in their select industries.

The PhaseWare solution suite includes three complementary applications that work together to power total customer service across all phases of interaction.

• PhaseWare Tracker is the core application that integrates all areas of help desk support including creating tickets, service level agreements, creating custom reports, billing and maintaining your business process workflow.
• PhaseWare Sentry is our powerful event management tool. It works seamlessly with Tracker to take automatic actions based on business rules criteria you set.
• PhaseWare Concierge is a web-based user portal that lets your customers and employees log tickets, check the status of tickets and access the knowledgebase for self-Help.

All of these tools enable Software Companies to provide a higher level of customer support while reducing the cost of managing customer support requests. For more information on how PhaseWare can specifically help a Software Company become more successful please send an email to Hoyt@PhaseWare.com or visit our website for an online demo at http://www.PhaseWare.com/demo/ .