On site technical support is almost always handled through independent companies and contractors, who set their own prices, terms and conditions. SELLmatix runs in 18 countries and 5 languages, and as the software developers we normally only call on sites when beta testing new versions, or training dealers in new countries. However we receive plenty of feedback from customers and tech support providers, and understand the issues that customers and support providers face.
The quality of technical support does vary, and on rare occasions we have had to terminate dealerships, however 99% of technical support providers really try to offer an excellent standard of service and support that is efficient, and costs less than competing systems.
Some retailers get exceptional results from technical support, for very low costs, even when the supplier is "ordinary". Other retailers find their costs are much higher than they expected, and the results disappointing, even where they use excellent technical support providers.
The single biggest factor in determining the cost and effectiveness of an installation is the site management. Whenever problems occur between a technical support provider, and costs start to escalate, the most likely cause is that the end user lacks an understanding of the commercial realities of providing technical support, and this leads them to inadvertently do things which dramatically increase costs.
Understanding these factors can dramatically slash your support costs, and make life very much easier, both for you, and also your technical support provider.
Qualified engineers, technicians and software support people draw high salaries. Much higher than is typically paid to staff working in a retail shop, bar or restaurant. In fact for the same money that a qualified technician costs, you would expect to get 5-15 hours of retail staff time.
Not only that, but they are in high demand, and can easily find other employment. Since they need to be experts at what they are doing, and need much more detailed product knowledge than an end user will normally need, it takes a long time to train them even where they are familiar with other systems.
Companies that provide technical support services have to employ sufficient support staff to meet demand, but they also have to pay their wages when demand for support is low.
In the retail or hospitality business the product being sold is merchandise on the shelves, food and drink. In the technical support business, the product being sold is time from a qualified and experienced professional. If the merchandise in a retail store does not sell today, it stays on the shelves and can be sold tomorrow. But if your support provider does not sell their merchandise, that hour of time won't keep until tomorrow, it is gone forever.
This means that the time of technical support staff has to be managed carefully. Similar to the way a retailer treats stock. Tech support providers can't afford to have engineers and support people sitting around waiting for customers to call, the way retail staff wait for customers to walk in the door. Tech support time must be utilized.
Therefore time needs to be scheduled and billed carefully. Sometimes supply exceeds demand. Sometimes demand exceeds supply. Sometimes emergencies arise which require immediate attention. Efficient scheduling of support time is one of the most important activities of a business providing technical support.
If you want technical support to respond immediately on demand whenever you want, the way to achieve that is by employing your own full time support staff. That way you get what you want when you want it, at the price of having to also pay those people for the time where their services are sitting idle.
If you want to save the costs and only pay for technical support when you need it, there are several things to keep in mind to get an optimal return:-
- In most cases, the time you are billed for begins when the technician walks through your door. In addition you will normally pay a call out fee. In other cases, the time you are billed for begins when the technician leaves their office, and includes travel time.
To avoid wasting your support budget, you should have everything ready for the tech support person when they arrive, so they can get straight to work. If the technician or support person has to wait while your staff have phone conversations, or look for the keys to gain access, or to find documentation like passwords etc., then you should expect to pay for the time you keep them waiting.
Tech. support calls are not social calls. The support person probably has a backlog of other calls to make where other customers are waiting. If you really want to discuss the football with them, leave it until after the job is done, or better yet buy them a drink after hours.
- Support staff availability is based on priority. On occasion, urgent support issues arise that need immediate attention and these take priority of less urgent issues. To minimize the impact on scheduled work, support people will generally do the minimum needed to handle the urgent issue quickly, and then schedule normal maintenance later.
If you contact technical support, and they have time available, they may completely resolve the issue immediately. But don't expect that, even if they have done so in the past.
- Wherever possible work needs to be scheduled in advance. The "time scheduled" means the time when you will be ready and available for the technician/engineer to start work. It does not mean the time that the support people are guaranteed to be ready, because there may be other urgent issues that arise with no notice, or additional issues may arise on on their previous job that cause delays.
- Some retailers insist that maintenance only be performed at certain hours of the day. With SELLmatix, there is no reason for doing so, since the design of the system means that downtime during maintenance is very short, and often no downtime is is required at all.
If you restrict the hours when maintenance can be performed, it may cause delays in scheduling, and in some cases increase the support costs substantially.
- If you cancel a scheduled service call with less than 48 hours notice, you will normally be charged the call out fee regardless. When an appointment is booked, the support provider holds that time for you, and will not book any other work in that time slot unless there is an emergency.
Not all jobs take the same amount of time, and most work can't be split up randomly. If you cancel your appointment and do not provide sufficient notice for them to utilize that same time slot elsewhere, their time is lost.
- If you cancel a scheduled service call with less than 24 hours notice, you should expect to pay call out fee as well as to pay for the time scheduled. At that point, you have used up that slot of time because it is too late to reschedule efficiently, so it is only fair and reasonable that you pay for that time.
If you want the same work booked again at a later time, you should expect to pay again for the rescheduled appointment. The result of the canceling and re-booking is that it is taking double the amount of support time, so you pay for double the support time.
- Once work is in progress, don't interrupt it. If the work is partly completed, and you decide to interrupt it so you can go to a golf game (or anything else), it WILL significantly increase the overall cost to complete the job.
- If training is part of the work being performed, you need to take notes, have mobile (and other) calls blocked, and then start using the techniques taught immediately.
If you don't take notes, have constant interruptions, or wait for a couple of weeks before you start to use what has been taught, and then discover that you don't know what to do, the problem is with you not the trainer, and you will need to pay again in order to be taught again.
- Start training a backup administrator on your staff, from the beginning. That does not mean that you have every staff member trained by a technician or trainer.
But you do need more than one person on your staff that can administer the system. If you only have one employee who can administer your system, and that person leaves at short notice, and you need to have a technician or trainer come back to re-train a replacement, the cost of re-training is not included in cost of the original training.
- Remember that if you have made arrangements for out of hours emergency support, that is for emergencies only. It doesn't mean that you can call up at 3-00am for a lengthy discussion about changes to the system, or how to generate a different type of report.
Typically the staff who take out of hours support calls, are able to get your system up and running again in an emergency, and in almost all cases they will triage the system and schedule routine follow up during normal office hours.
You probably think these points are obvious, and they are. Frequently, the technician or engineer will go the extra mile in an effort to help the customer. Sometimes a technician may do additional work without billing for the time, just to help out.
When that happens, then the technician is "comping" you, just the same as you might "comp" one of your customers with a free drink, because their time is the merchandise they are selling. If that happens, then make good, effective use of that time, and show some appreciation. But if you start expecting it as a right, or worst of all, wasting that time, you will find that those freebies disappear very quickly.
Because of the cost and time needed to bring in additional support staff, support providers usually want existing staff to be fully utilized and working plenty of overtime before new staff are hired.
The result is that support people often work extremely long hours, much longer than they would wish. Chances are they they are working with a list of 10+ support calls they have to handle, they have some degree of discretion about the ordering and sequencing of those jobs, and the amount you are billed is based on what they write on their time sheets.
Which customer do you want to be? The customer who was organized, helpful and efficient? Or the customer they curse as they drive home at 11-00pm thinking that they could have been home at 10-00, if they hadn't had to spend an hour waiting while you talked on the phone?
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