Answer promptly and effectively. A client can contact you at any time throughout the day; if you hear that phone ringing you better get on top of it. Good luck

Answer promptly and effectively. A client can contact you at any time throughout the day; if you hear that phone ringing you better get on top of it. Good luck finding additional business streams if you get a reputation for keeping your clients waiting. I agree 100% with the first, disagree slightly with the second. You can be prompt and efficient at resolving your customer's problems and providing them with a quality gateway to the organization, but you can't do this if your support staff is innundated by the constant pressure of answring phones. Things will come to a head where hearing the phone ring starts to become a genuine fear of support reps and CSR's will start avoiding calls just to catch up. This comes from experience, having worked for an established software company that sold a great product, but had very unrealistic and unsustainable philosophies about support, not to mention a severely undersized team (four support reps and about 600 clients in four time-zones and one in the south Pacific) Don't take this the wrong way, I am not saying you should be shirking your customers, or trying to find ways to build barriers to accessing that first line of defense. However I am saying you also shouldn't just assume that because you have support personnel, any opportunity for self-help and self-education should be on the back-burner. What I mean is, if your organization already has tools to help customers find the answer they need, that should be on the forefront, in the customer's face and easily accessible. Then, and only then if your learning resources have failed, are too vague, or perhaps just doesn't answer the question in a way the customer can digest, that's when door number two opens up and it's time to contact the organization. And from there, I'm with you; be a shining beacon, be a smiling face and a welcoming gate keeper. You can learn a lot about your customer base as well as the quality of your documentation by following this strategy. If you want a qualitative and effective team, don't toss them into the middle of a category 5 hurricane, trying to answer phones and create tickets at the same time. This will erode quality AND effectiveness. Great post, otherwise!