Software technical support best practices

When setting this up, remember our previous point on accessibility and make sure that these resources are easy to find for users. If your support team identifies common issues that your customers are having with your product or service, there should be strategies in place to communicate these to your product development team.

But for more complex and larger businesses, you might need separate support teams into separate categories. For example, you might have a team that deals with technical support issues and a team that deals with account and billing issues.

The goal is here is to optimize the effectiveness of your team by having them focus on specific areas of expertise. In this scenario, you will also want to categorize all your incoming issues and route them accordingly to the right team.

Speaking of customer support teams and staff, it is key that you hire the right support staff for your team. Since these will be the people that will interact directly with your customers when they most require your help. This is quite important when you consider that customer data is considered as the most valuable kind of data for any business.

The best way to do this is to implement and use a customer support tool that integrates into a powerful CRM platform. So, make it easy for customers to get to you after hanging up or ending their chat session. Encouraging customers to stay in contact following a fix assures customers that you are personally invested in fixing their issue. A huge part of this is the quality of technical support provided.

These seven technical support tips are only the start. Do you have any technical support tips to add to the list? Tweet us and join the discussion. How to be a tech hero: seven technical support tips. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Tech assumptions make an ass of your users. Are you eating your own dog food? Support agents should know the product and process in and out to solve customer issues.

Modern customer support software applications allow you to store data of all customers, as well as issues raised by them. So, whenever a customer calls in, your representative will have all his details in front of him.

What was the issue raised last time? Has it been resolved? With the details handy, the rep can solve issues more conveniently. Regularly post basic troubleshooting articles on your website. Also, publish FAQs online to promote self-help.

It will reduce their burden of calling for every simple issue. There are various ways to promote self-service. Apart from FAQs and troubleshooting guides, you can also post video tutorials to solve most common issues. Starting discussion forums on your website is also a great idea. Customers can interact with each other and get their problems solved in such forums.

But remember, self-help is the best help. The key to effective communication is active listening. This is especially true when it comes to hardware and software. That is why companies, if they want to stay in and grow their business, need to provide help to customers when things go wrong. And while no two products or problems are exactly alike, the best tech support departments share the following eight traits.