Thanks Ilium for your continued excellent support.

As for a forum, we’ve tossed the idea around and weighed our resources. Right now we feel like spending the time answering every call and personally responding to every email is the best use of time from the point of view of helping the customer, but we haven’t ruled out a forum for the future! It’s certainly something we’re considering.

Those people who need to contact you get the good service but you have to rely on them to get positive word-of-mouth out to the community that you’re bankable guys. While you end up with a hardcore group of people with good customer service stories – it’s small. I’m surprised that you don’t have an active forum running where the customer service interactions could be observed by a much wider audience and you have the benefit of building a knowledge base that helps the broader community sort out their problems before needing to contact you directly.

For example, I’ve had really good forum exchanges with Softmaker about their PPC and Windows apps. Whether it’s an upgrade question or a technical issue they always have tried to work through the board first and then gone to private email (or phone) if the problem can’t be resolved there. But more often, I can simply search the messages to find the info I want without having to contact the staff directly. Happy customer – happy company.

This blog is a great channel to hear from your staff about what’s on their mind and the directions you want to take the company in. But to make the conversation more two-sided I’d strongly suggest you guys set up a moderated forum.

It takes time and you always run the risk of having to deal with cranky posters but it really is a great way to get immediate feedback from your users while demonstrating your commitment to customer service. (And heck, make it a closed forum that requires product reg numbers to join certain sections if you are worried about the warez kids soaking up the free support).

Thanks for listening.

I work in a NOC and while the majority of our support is done via email, I agree that sometimes you just need to pick up the phone and solve the problem 1 on 1.

As for training … try being the one on the other end of the line who has their hands tied or doesn’t have enough training. There’s nothing more frustrating for me than when a customer calls me for support on an array or a tape device and I haven’t been trained on the gear they are calling about. Drives me up the wall… and we’re talking about $50k+ devices. It’s never a good situation!!

So even though I didn’t need Support in the past, it’s great to know Kevin and Lee are available just to keep us happy customers! Thanks!

Just about every mail is followed up and if need be, forwarded to the right people.

Yes, support is important but heck, even if you guys would slack off for half of the time, you would still rock a lot more than 90% of the companies out there.