Originally posted on August 14, 2006
Support Personnel Are Being Called Upon to Support Products They’ve Never Seen
Support for the consumer is morphing. The reason for this is that, at least from a technology standpoint, the consumer is a much less distinct commodity than he/she was a few years ago. The business user today may be just as likely to be carrying an iPod as the next guy, and conversely, the consumer user may be just as likely to be carrying a laptop. The tricky part about this is that the laptop the consumer is carrying may be a “business” laptop. The guy may be putting together a home movie on it, but it’s still owned by XYZ corporation. Furthermore, when our guy goes home, he may link to his network and plug three or four “consumer” (don’t you wish “” were used around every adjective) electronics into it.
So when it comes time to support our man, who’s responsibility is it? When he can’t access his company intranet because his Linksys blocks the connection, who gets to support the Linksys? When he can’t load his pictures from his digital camera onto the laptop, who helps him out? The standard answers would be the company IT department for the intranet issue and the product vendor for the digital camera issue, but the definition is not clear. The problem with the Linksys is not a problem with the laptop or the intranet, and the problem with the camera may be associated with fourteen other issues that combine to make the camera invisible to the computer.
My point is that support complexity has increased as the definition around what you use for what erodes. Support for an employee is now support of non-company-owned technology as well, and support for a product is now support of the entire system around that product. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to silo support responsibility by the owner or creator of the technology in question. A support issue for a PC application might involve five different vendors, and even if the poor guy could get all five vendors on the phone to troubleshoot the issue, they would have to communicate with each other to solve the issue (and his conferencing feature would probably fail to work, adding a sixth vendor).
In the end, I believe that whether it is the product vendor, the content provider, or a third party support organization, you will have to have a single entity willing to take responsibility for the entire scope of the problem in question, not just the section of it that relates to their product or service.
This will mean a couple of things, only one of which I can help you with.
- Support personnel will require much more training to ensure that they understand at least the basics of the supported environment, not just the supported product or service. I have no suggestions about how you are to remedy this.
- Support personnel will require more direct access to the problems they encounter due to the increased level of complexity. For this, NetworkStreaming offers our SupportDesk appliance as a means of gaining remote control of any PC that your support reps need to support. Seeing the issue and fixing it yourself can make all the difference in the world, especially when you are troubleshooting a product that you have never seen before.
