This blog post is to highlight the role of Tech Support in Software Development. Today’s is a world of communication. This can be a boon and occasionally a bane. Boon, because you get to listen and take feedback from end users for your product; bane, because there will be too much-unwanted chatter, with the potential of diverting focus from the core task of software development.
A tech support team can come to the aid of the software developers here. This is especially true for a software product in commercial use and used by many end users.
How can a Technical support team help the developers?
They can help in the following areas:
- Identifying bugs and prioritizing
- Filtering false alarms
- Identifying scope for product improvement
- Engaging the end user
Let us look at each point in detail:
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Identifying Bugs and Prioritizing
Isn’t there a team dedicated for this? Are software testers not supposed to be doing this? Why do we need the technical support team to interfere in the software testing team’s domain?
Tech support plays a complementary role to both software testers and developers. Both developers and software testers are working behind the scenes for the vast majority of their time – this is exactly what they are supposed to do. A tech support’s role is to interact with the end users, cushion their blows and tackle their banter. They play the communication link between the end user and the development team.
As a developer you may have created a software product exactly in line with the product specification and also created documentations in form of FAQs for the end user. However, there will always be some users who would try something weird and cause the application to crash. Tech Support can play a critical role here to interact with the customer and figure out the exact flow of events that caused the application to crash. They can do web meetings as well, wherever applicable, to check it out live. GoToMeeting and TeamViewer are some tools that can be used for web meetings. Logs can be obtained and analyzed and the findings can be shared with the developer to get to the bottom of the issue. This helps the developer focus more on software development, with the information gathering and initial debugging part being taken care of by the Tech. Support team.
Based on the number of support tickets generated to report a particular issue, tech support can help the development team prioritize the top issues affecting the customers. This helps the engineering team focus on what is really important for the end users and curb efforts in getting them addressed on a higher priority.
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Filtering false alarms
Not all communication coming from end users are worth the developer’s attention. Tech support’s role is to separate the wheat from the chaff. By doing this tech support facilitates the developer to focus on the real issues and not bother about false alarms raised by the end user.
Let me share a scenario here wherein the support agent was able to identify a false alarm:
A customer reported that he was not able to use the application and that it was buggy. It did not work at all for him when connecting from his home. He would get a message indicating that a component needed for the software was not installed. Even if the component is re-installed, he would still get the same message. He was very frustrated and was very critical about the product. Support agent started troubleshooting the issue and came to the conclusion that the problem was experienced only on his home Wi-Fi network because over a go-to-meeting session the issue was not recreated on the support agent’s computer. This pacified the customer. The agent’s next step was to identify the root cause. He suspected that the problem was caused most likely due to some issue related to firewall or it was pertaining to DNS resolution. The support representative finally fixed the issue by adding DNS entry to the “hosts” file in Windows.
As you can see, such issues when reported give you an impression that something is really wrong with the product. However, as observed here, it did not need developer’s attention to fix the problem.
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Identifying scope for product improvement
Tech support has one on one interaction with customers and on many instances they can get some valuable ideas from the end users for potential product improvement. It is a competitive world out there – the best of software today has to constantly evolve in order to stay in the race. It doesn’t take much time to be toppled off from a top position in the software world if you are not reinventing the product to keep pace with the times. Yes, this can be achieved by having an option provided to the end user to provide their feedback. The only problem here is that not many like to type lengthy details. Also, not many are capable of putting their ideas into written words. Even if we get a lot of ideas, analyzing them and figuring out the right one for the product could be a painful and time-consuming task. Tech support can come to the rescue here as well. Tech support knows the product very well. Typically, they get to test beta releases ahead of end users. They know the scope of the product. So, when interacting with end users, they are in a better position to catch that new feature which will enhance the product and notify the developers about it.
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Engaging the end user
A bug has been identified but it will take a time to get it fixed by engineering: End users are expecting a quick fix – they are losing patience. A tech support plays a very important role here in engaging the end users and helping them realize the challenges faced by the developer team and the reason for the delay. If they have interacted multiple times with an end user it helps develop a rapport which aids in pacifying the end users. They can set the right expectation with regards to the product. Social media these days can make or break a product. The wrong perception created about the product on social media can affect the brand value of a product. To prevent this it is very important to keep the communication channels open with the end user.
As you can see, a good tech support team can play a supportive role for the software development team. This may not be in the core area of software development itself, but in auxiliary tasks pertaining to software development.