When it comes to product life cycle, only one thing is sure to either benefit or hurt any software - service and support. Regardless of how intuitive and simple a developer believes a program to be, there will be an astounding proportion of users unable to successfully navigate software without the help of customer service and supplemental support options.
Beginning with supplemental support, the options include interactive tutorials, support documentation in the form of help files, support forums and online communities, and live technical support. Finishing with service, customer service is integral from making the sell to keeping customers so well serviced that they continue using your product.
Many greats of the past have suffered dearly from lackluster customer service and support. Subsequently, there have been companies with superior companies die off from a combined lack of service and support options (not to mention the revenue from service contracts!)
As a result, the emphasis in this article is a generalized overview of the various types of service and support that can be used to bolster the service and support of middle men users and end users. First and foremost, every program (even pacman and galaga in arcades) has to have some formal written documentation to support users.
Even though the vast majority of service and tech support calls could be eliminated by simply reading the documentation, there exists an immeasurable benefit of all the people who do actually find their answers in their program documentation without needing to contact customer service. Furthermore, support documentation allows users to solve their problems worldwide, in the modern global economy without the need to stay up 16 hours for the magical “9-5 Monday through Friday” somewhere across the world.
Secondly, support forums on the internet allow the “power users” to support novices with your product, essentially providing free technical service mini-centers on a wide variety of topics that no amount of due diligence could be reasonably expected to include in the official owners service manuals. Another service and supportive decision could be to implement online communities.
Beyond the scope of forums, internet communities allow service and support through more than sorting many posts. Users can register and befriend people on sites like myspace groups and target questions directly at people both on and off the topic of support for your products. This is a third potential area for a developer to embrace as an outlet for providing service and support.
Fourth, technical support is a mainstay offering of all developers. Technical service and support can be offered through one of several venues. It’s common for larger software programs to offer phone support, while almost all programs that cost money offer some level of email service and support. Additionally, it’s often possible to contact the software publisher for service and support by postal mail and nowadays even directly over the internet.
The options for contacting service and support via internet include the usage of email and web-based forms. Also, there are java, flash, and other plugin programs that allow for live text and in some instances, voice chat.
Finally, in addition to service and support options listed above, another area for offering service is to have part of your support team available to take orders by phone or mail, ship items that require it, and run the other miscellaneous happenings that are best suited by service and support desk people such as general receptionists and package handlers.
Through employing the right service and support personnel, every software developer can help maximize profit and build the foundation for future updates and releases while only using a modest amount of effort to identify customer needs and derive solutions on how best to run their business.