Customer Support Professional Blog

I’m starting a series of articles inspired by Getting Real book by 37signals. Chapter 14 of this book tells about customer support in software development. And guys from 37signals (creators of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) have some good points worth sharing.
In the restaurant business, there’s a world of difference between those working in the kitchen […]

This morning my ICQ client failed to connect to the network.
I tried another client and then meebo.com. Still the same. I asked my friends and coworkers who use ICQ and got the same response: ICQ doesn’t operate properly today.
What’s the cause? I don’t know. But as we use ICQ for supporting our customers it’s a real […]

Yesterday a nice article 6 Technologies to Provide Customer Support without Going Nuts was posted on VerusNova blog. Mike compares 6 approaches to provide customer support:

Email
Support forums
Knowledgebase
Live chat
VoIP Helpdesk
Helpdesk or trouble ticket software

From my experience I would tell that a live chat and a good support forum is the best combination if you want to find the […]

This is how you create loyalty folks. Time to step up the support efforts if you want to compete.

— Will Herman

How to tell a great customer support service from a mediocre one? That’s easy. Great is what goes beyond your expectations.
Will Herman shows the difference in companies attitude to customer support providing a very […]

Support over instant messengers is often used by small businesses. Typically those are one-man shops or companies having less then 10 employees where one person is responsible for supporting clients. Usually such companies decide on publishing this person’s preferred IM account name on the website. That’s nice but what if customers don’t use that particular […]

Sometimes it’s very interesting to look back into the past. Comparing what was available that time with the state of the art we can make inferences about future techology direction.
Back in 2000 Joseph Yue from the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote the article The Use Of ICQ In Providing Real Time Reference Services which […]

There’s a well known article by Meredith Gossland with a nice header CRM = Customers (don’t) Really Matter. In short it says that all software CRM systems can do nothing in customer retention and you should avoid using them in your company.
There’re a lot of nice points in the article and it’s very well written […]