Customer Support

Hi,

When “the customer” calls, very different things happen in various companies

You probably know this from your everyday life. You have a question about your mobile contract. So, you call the hotline. A computer answers. You press 1… then 3… then refuse to have the call recorded for training purposes, and finally, you end up with some employee in a call center. You explain your problem. The employee has a script in front of them and goes through it with you from top to bottom. If they’re good, you don’t even notice it.

Most customer inquiries can be handled this way. Typical Level 1 support.

And if Level 1 support can’t help? Then it goes to Level 2 support

This is where it gets interesting. How do you deal with a bug report? For example, what if a customer can’t log in anymore? For the customer, this is the absolute worst-case scenario. They can’t use the software. But what if it’s just a one-off case? Everyone else can log in. It seems to be a bug. Something is different about this customer, which is why it doesn’t work.

And now the question is, how do we handle it?

The instinct of support is, of course, to pass the request to the developers. They should take a look at it. But is that economical?

Every request costs time, of course. Time that could also be spent on development. So, is it more important to help this one customer? Maybe. They might be particularly revenue-relevant. In that case, it would be negligent for the business not to help the customer and lose them. But what if they’re just one of hundreds of thousands? If this one customer leaves, it won’t even show in the numbers. Over time, though, it could tarnish the brand - so it shouldn’t happen too often.

But sending the customer away is very difficult for many companies

It’s also an unpleasant conversation for someone to have. But I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. The development team gets flooded with support requests. They end up doing nothing else. And meanwhile, the time could be used to prevent such support requests from arising in the first place.

Instead, you end up looking at customer data every day, analyzing logs, and writing reports for support. Whether that’s economical needs careful consideration. And if it is, then it justifies building dedicated personnel for it. However, when you make the costs so concrete, most companies realize how uneconomical it is.

It’s best not to let it get that far

Such scenarios usually arise from data inconsistencies. And they arise because the architecture is not coherent. Every hour you invest in the stability of your system will pay off.

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus