Michiel . van Vlaardingen

As a small business we don’t have the luxury of dedicated support staff. This means that for some products I am both the creator and support desk at the same time.  So,  in theory  contacting the support desk should give you access to all available knowledge and answer any question.         Unfortunately, that’s not the truth.  There are always cases that  I do not have an answer to.

• Sometimes users want to know stuff we have never even considered (e.g. certain policies)
• Or I will have to dive deep into code or configuration to find an answer
• Other times I just don’t know (e.g. when a certain feature will be added)

If I can’t answer all questions about our product? How will support staff ever be able too?

Now imagine any company of reasonable scale.  Those will have separate support staff that is at best a user of their product. So the best thing they can do  is  answer problems that have been answered before. Which might not sound that bad, as similar questions keep being asked, as they have lots of customers. However, this is also what creates the dreaded queues and even more support staff, that is even further away from the product.

Now, recently I heard someone say that Google  does support right, so it must be possible.   Let me tell you,  Google does not do support right.  It is almost impossible to contact Google and get a timely response.  However, nobody knows about that, because almost nobody wants to contact Google.

This all leads up to a single conclusion: If you get the same question more than once, you’re doing it wrong.   You cannot fix the helpdesk, because a helpdesk is just repeating the same bandages over and over again. What businesses need to do is fix the product itself.      The only fix for a helpdesk is to render them useless.