Do a good support

As I have done project for half year, I am working in an internationalization company, and supporting for global customers. I learned a lot during this process. It has many difference with the development work, as a developer, maybe you only need to do the develop, spent your effort to make the applications perfectly, and you will feel very happy of what you have done. Enjoy the application which design and develop by you.

But with do a support job, I am feeling that you need much more knowleadge, for my projects, you need to know Java, JSP, J2EE, Oracle, Weblogic, JBoss, Unix(shell script), Struts and so on. And the most important is that you need to know how to contact with customer, there is one word said that "The Customer is God!". We need to treat them as God, we need to made sure they understood that we care about them, we need to try out best to satify them. I think this is the rule for every indutry.

The customer might submit the request by using Web problem submission tool(like support center) or directly by telephone, then these requests will be logged in support center,one case number will be created for future with customer, and there are many experts who have been assigned with special applications or services. They will become the case owner for the cases.Usually you need to check the severity of the cases, and this will be the judgement of the priority of all cases. For resolve one issue, you may need help from some other teams, and you may need much more information from users. You need to do analysis for the cases, jduge the kind of cases, to estimate how long will it take. Sometime, the cases maybe a normal case, and sometime you need to make change to the code or the database, it will be high severity as you may need to change the code or database in production, every change will effect some other things, all these we need to do estimation for it.

For doing an good support for customers, we need to do:
1. Rapid response to the requests, then the customers will know that some experts have been given attention to his problem. This will make him feel good.

2. Do the high impact problems first, as there are maybe some cases with urgent or even business critical severity, we need to take these cases first.

3. Timely problem resolution. Give solution to customers timely, we need to resolve the issue within the expect closed date. Or else there will be escalation for your cases. If one case is pending for long time then they will feeling that you are good enough. For some special thing, we need to clarify with customers.

4. High quality of fixing the problem. You need to resolve the issue with high quality, if you resolve one issue and bring another to the system, or you are using wrong way to reslove the issue, then the customer will be very unhappy. The customer wouldn't like to ask you one thing for many times.

5. Be respect with your customers. This is much more important than others,the manner you are contact with your customer is important, the way you are talking with them, the way you are writing to them, the way you are email to them, all these will effect the satisfaction of customer.

There are a lot of things I need to learn for doing the support well, studying......