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Lessons Learned: Choosing your “contact us” method
After supporting an enterprise-wide service for a few years now, I have had the opportunity to test support via email, phone, ticketing system, and web-based forum. Depending on the service you’re actually supporting, the number of users, and the support model you feel most comfortable with, there are pros and cons to each.
Something you should keep in mind while making this big decision: In most cases, your goal should be to reduce the amount of support required. I am not saying to stop picking up the phone, or stop emailing people back, I am suggesting to figure out why people are calling in the first place, and make it so nobody will need to contact you for those reasons ever again. Each of the following sections will not only contain pros and cons of each contact method, but will also tell you how to use each as effectively as possible. Hopefully, by the end, you will have the answer to these simple questions:
- How do I want my customers to contact me?
- And more importantly, how do I want to contact them back?
