customer service and support

Customer Service & Support

Name: Anand Shah

• Find out missing letter

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Ice Breaker

D H I

G K ?

J N O

• What is Support and Service (SAS)

• Why do we need SAS

• Key Styles & attributes of support resource

• Examples & Activities

• Best Practices and standards

• How to improve SAS

• Challenges to SAS

• Summary

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Agenda

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Support and Service is not Everyone’s cup of tea!

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Honesty

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Customer is GOD

• In spite of the differences, the terms ‘customer service’ and ‘customer support’ are frequently used interchangeably. Even Google search does not recognize the distinction. It treats customer support and customer service as the same keyword string. Type in ‘customer support’ and you will get results for ‘customer service’.

• All businesses have an element of customer service but not all need customer support

• Customer service = give your customers value for their investment in your products or services

• Helps understand customer, define company, and impacts your bottom line. A typical business hears from only 4% of its dissatisfied customers

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What is SAS?

• At some point every member of staff is involved in customer service, whether it’s the designer improving customer experience; a developer fixing a bug or the front line support staff taking the calls, answering the tweets and replying to emails.

• customer support to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.

• Product (primarily one time cost) Vs Service (subscription with daily/monthly/yearly recurring cost)

• Support driven development - Injecting humility, accountability and responsibility into the development process by making sure the creators are also the supporters. If I’m going to build this, how does it affect me later when I have to support the user?”

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What is SAS?

• Accelerates Product Knowledge: Nothing can throw light on the strengths and weaknesses of your product better than a customer/user. As they are the people who use the product and analyse it keeping in view

• Helps Improve The Product: The collaboration between the maker and the user of the product makes it perfect. This is what Support Driven Development offers i.e. the collaboration.

• Makes The Developer More Active And Involved In The Product It is a normal human behaviour that when a person has to support his own work, he tries to give it the best shot and as soon as they know they are lacking somewhere, they find the way around to fix the issues coming up. These two factors together make the develop more active and involved in the product.

• Improvise Support Mechanism: Developers with the technical knowledge bring new ideas to automate support mechanism to the best possible level. This enhances the quality of support provided to customers and improve the ways of Support as well.

• Brings Happy Customers: With a constantly improving product, great attention, and quality Support, the Support Driven Development brings happy customer.

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Why Support Driven Development?

• Service

• Tata sky

• SaaS

• PaaS

• IaaS

• Support

• Aqua guard

• Mobile

• Car

• IT Support

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What is SAS Examples?

• Competitive edge

• Opportunity to interact with customer

• Capture valuable feedback

• Input to market demand and industry trend

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Why?

• ITIL

• COBIT

• CMMi

• SixSigma

• Lean

• Problem Management

• Incident Management

• Multi line support

• War or Implementation room

• Metrics management

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Best practices and standards

• Business leads technology and not vice versa

• Business goals must be centric of all architecture development and technology selection.

• Defense department cannot use non-secure or open source technology. They cannot have non-citizen working on the project nor overseas sub-contractor can work on the project.

• Mission critical system cannot afford to have downtime or low performance of the system

• Technology stack must be compatible with each other for seamless communication and transition

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Dos and Don’t example

• Understand support operation w.r.t. environment, downtime, Public Relation impact, Loss of Data impact, Security breach, SLA

• Acknowledge

• 24*7 access and communication channel

• Handbook, FAQs, Dos & Don’t

• Minimize manual activity on Live server

• Security Access control

• Regular Maintenance (Wardrobe concept)

• Release Management

• Troubleshooting decision tree

• Root cause analysis

• Decision analysis report

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Support operational efficiencies and effectiveness

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Challenges to SAS

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Why?

• Forward proactive planning

• Selection of right technology

• Improve Customer Experience

• Improve Business Benefits

• Right first time

• Value added service

• Voice of Customer

• Voice of Process

• Eliminating waste

• Heterogeneous Infrastructure

• Change control management

• Service level management

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Challenges to SAS

• Future orientation

Styles and Attributes

• Flexibility

• Out of the box


• Alternative Thinking

• Trial & Error

• Failed over & over and hence succeeded!


• Detailing

• Eye for detail

• Multiple View Point


• Win-Win

• Confidence


• Positivity

• Observation


• Listening

• Reasoning


• Questioning

• Passion


• Versatile

• Seize opportunity


• Clear our plate

HOW TO IMPROVE SAS?

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• Disciplined and focused approach

• Religious & detail reporting and logging

• Gain customer business domain knowledge

• Interact with customer/users who is using or knowing the system

• Look out for system improvement areas and present

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How to Improve

• Keep track of your ideas at all times. Many times ideas come at unexpected times. If an idea is not written down within 24 hours it will usually be forgotten

• Pose new questions to yourself every day. An inquiring mind is a creatively active one that enlarges its area of awareness.

• Engage in creative hobbies. Hobbies can also help you relax. An active mind is necessary for creative growth.

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How to Improve

• Avoid rigid, set patterns of doing things. Overcome biases and preconceived notions by looking at the problem from a fresh view point, always developing at least two or more alternative solutions to your problem.

• Be open and receptive to ideas (yours and others). New ideas are fragile; keep them from breaking by seizing on the tentative, half formed concepts and possibilities and developing them.

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How to Improve

• Keep your sense of humour active and ongoing

• Be alert in your observations. Look for similarities, differences, as well as unique and distinguishing features in situations and problems.

• Learn about things outside your specialty. Use cross-fertilization to bring ideas and concepts from one field or specialty to another.

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How to Improve

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Different types of SAS

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Different types of SAS

• Any input, feedback, questions?

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Roundtable

customer service and support

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