Strengthening the Customer Support

Hello All,

We have gone live with the Online Customer Support System as discussed in the last few posts. Here is the http://support.notionink.com/ (today its in the testing mode so stuff around might change).

I have spent last 4 months in trying to understand support systems of other companies including Dell, Apple, FedEx, Ebay and Airtel (Indian Telecom Firm). We tested their systems and have mixed feelings about all. I believed it was a good way to feel how our customers felt about our support. It took 4 weeks to replace the “in warranty LCD Display” from Dell, 3 weeks to fix the “Kernel Panic” issue on Varun’s mac (more time because of the heavy costs, since there was no “extended warranty” bought with the mac), FedEx tracking was easiest and got resolved within a week, Ebay constantly communicated through their automated emails (late deliveries, customer feedback form on purchase, etc) and it took forever to figure out why Airtel charged exorbitant amount for internet tariff if I was logged on to a data plan and using well below what was allowed to (and I still don’t have clue).

I have also gone through as many past emails as practically possible to read our customer’s response and comments. The experience is exactly what I wrote in the first para. This learning is what we accumulated and worked on the Support System which you can check. Unless we feel close to the firm from which we are buying products, we feel “something is not right”. Response time to customer was different in all the cases above, but feeling was not in proportion to it. For example some products took 3 weeks on ebay, but their constant communication made us “feel good”. I believe ebay has mastered their online sales methods.

The CSS (Customer Support System) which we have built is based on industry standard product called “Kayako”. Right now the 3 main features which are enabled are:

1. submit a ticket 
2. knowledge-base (KB)
3. troubleshooter

Earlier you all used to send emails if you had any issue (you would still be able to do that). But now you can also submit a ticket directly from the support site. Right now there is no need of registration for our existing customers and submitting a ticket will automatically generate a ticket number, and send you an email. Any correspondence can be followed up from your email (and later from your own portal on the support site which will host your shipment, tracking and other details as well).

Sometimes we just need to know something about the product. For example, “How do I update using NVFlash?” Questions like these and more are covered in the KB. You can go through this section (in expansion mode and you can also contribute) to learn more.

Third is the troubleshooter a step by step guide for simple jobs like “installing updates”. Most of our current customer probably know more that what is there in the troubleshooter section (thanks to TabletRom guys) but as we expand this section, it will gain its own importance.

If you find any missing elements or information, or some correction is required, or  if you feel “something is not right” you can directly submit a ticket.

I hope you’ll like it.

Regards

Rohan Shravan