At iMeta we take providing a fantastic support service to our customers very seriously indeed. We pride ourselves on the high proportion of customers who commission us to provide additional development for them, beyond the scope of what is originally delivered. This is in part due to the highly skilled, dedicated and experienced developers, testers and project managers that we employ, but equally important is ensuring that our customers are pleased, no, delighted with the support service that we offer.
My name is James Watson and I manage the support team at iMeta Technologies. I’m very fortunate to have a team full of dynamic high achievers to work with, however there are a number of things that we do to ensure that we maintain the exceptional level of service that we provide. Throughout this series of blogs, my team and I are going to try to share the secret of our success with you. Let’s start with the basics – know your customer.
By know your customer I don’t mean make them your best friend, go out drinking with them and send their children birthday presents, what I mean is know their business. You can’t clearly communicate with a customer on a support matter if you don’t know what they do, what their software does and what the consequences of what they are telling you will have on their business.
Make sure you keep up to date with each customer – this is easy with the customers that you speak with frequently, but much more difficult with those who you have very infrequent contact with. (I will discuss the need to maintain frequent contact with your customers in a later blog since this is very important for a number of reasons). It also helps significantly to know who you’re speaking with and where the fit within the organisation. A business user is likely to want a far less technical explanation of a problem than an IT administrator – it’s important to establish a rapport with the person that you’re dealing with and to give them what they need. (I’ll come back to this point later on too).
A number of our customers are large banks, insurance companies or businesses that provide fund and trust management services. Understanding the business of these customers can be a challenge due to the complex nature of what they do – can you explain to me what a non-default cash standing settlement instruction is? The more complex the customer’s business, the more important it is that you understand what they do and how they do it. This understanding can make the difference between providing an adequate service and a superb one.