The Customer Support Process


Every service has a support process, whether formal or not. When people have problems or when they want to ask a question, they contact someone. That someone is customer support, regardless of whether they have that title. Sometimes the process is more formally organized than at other times, but there's always a process in place so that people's questions get answered (or, at least, collected).

In the best of situations, there's an organized system that collects questions and answers and produces statistics about them (how often a typical question is asked, the certainty of the answer, links to additional information, etc.). In the worst cases, it's just the memory of someone who is in the unlucky situation of having an accessible email address. Regardless of the system, there's a way to collect and categorize support comments.

It's instructive to follow the process by which people leave feedback to locate ways in which the process can affect the kinds of feedback that are left. What is the tone of the invitation? Is every comment followed up? Is there an automatic response mechanism? How are responses created? Is additional information collected or encouraged? Every feedback collection process biases the kinds of comments it collects. If it's really difficult for someone to leave feedback, then the feedback that is collected will only be from the most driven, persistent, clever and (by the time they figure out how to leave it) upset users, which will affect the kind of feedback they leave.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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