Technology has grown to more than the expectations of great visionaries. This has made the high-tech products baffling to the end-users. Hence the inevitability of Technical Support. "After-sales support" being the key factor in today's reference driven business, to keep pace with the advancements, it is high time to move beyond the traditional technical support.
With the passage of time, the Support system is progressively gathering product knowledge. This rich resource can be used in multiple ways to deliver greater value to end-users.
This Infrastructure and product knowledge can be further leveraged by:
Insights from customer database helps in feeding the vital information like most used features, least used features, frequent failures etc.. back to product engineering team.
Interworking certification is one domain where there lately there is lot of focus. In the networked environment, the business solutions work with multiple partners' products at the end customer site. In such situations, it is imperative that the interworking aspect is verified and tested. The demand for interworking certifications is growing every passing day, with new developments, and new players entering the field. Besides, the multi-platform support (mobile, desktop, tablet, cloud, etc.) increases the need.
For performing Interworking tests, the product knowledge of both the client's solution and the partner's product and solid grip on the technology are mandatory.
Proactive support will be the future of Premium Technical Support, where we attempt to fix the issues before the impact is realized. Systems are monitored all the time and based on the incidents, remedial actions are performed. Support process automation and Self-heal tools also play a major role here. TAC proximity is key for these value additions to serve their purposes.
Tech support organizations which see these opportunities and equip themselves better to "give back value to customer" can only win the race.