In most software scenarios support is seen as a second tier process, generally assigned to second tier resources. As a small company without a second tier team, support often becomes a non-priority as developers much prefer building solutions over supporting customers.
I believe support should be a priority one task for any company especially if you are small. Small shops rely almost exclusively on referral and word of mouth for business which means you need a constant set of happy and contented customers.
What makes support seem hard to do?
- Requires strong social interaction skills
- Means to need to think like your customer
- Patience
- Distracts you from other development tasks
What good support gives you
Long and fulfilling customer relationships
While @ M7/Unspace I was often invited to customers office Xmas parties, employee going away parties and would always be the only contractor present. Before I left customers had going away parties for me, can you imagine that!A built in sales team
When you have strong support you stand out from every other experience customers have had with technology. They tell everyone they know how great you are. And it's not the VP's that matter, many of our referrals came from receptionists, office admin staff and assistants. Plus many of our new customers have come from when an employee from an old customer changes companies and upon arriving at their new employer wants to bring us along as well.Better Software
What better way to know what users need that by supporting them. It's the doorway that lets you into their office lives and connects you to their business.
So how can you give strong support and still have time to build great software?
Support Lessons Learned #1
At M7/Unspace we had a great take on the development cycle. There are many more reasons for the following approach but I will start with support. The following samples are for compare and contrast purposes only.
Traditional
The most powerful outcome of support is that by connecting you to the customer it bring our new and creative ideas about what the software needs to do. Most often these "wow" ideas only come when the software is actually being used, which in this case means it's much too late to change it. Again support an app built this way would be tedious since all you could do is say, maybe next version.
Agile (Not any particular methodology)
This is getting better, now we have integrated the support, testing and launches into the process thereby integrating a better feedback cycle and actually being able to take new customer needs into account. There is still one problem, customers are busy doing their jobs so with this pace there is not space for them to provide quality feedback and have the time to reflect needed.
M7/Unspace
By combining an agile style with a staggered schedule we give the project some breathing room, this means customers will have the time to test things out well and give their feedback early which results in software that not only have less bugs but required much less support because most issues have been resolved before the project finished. This method has allowed M7/Unspace to not have to write detailed manuals, run long training sessions or maintain onerousness FAQ's as the core users have been using the system for months before it's finished.