In the recent months, I have been making it a point to get out and build relationships with our clients. This does not mean sending an email, taking a survey, or talking over the phone. It means face to face meetings at YOUR location understanding YOUR issues and challenges. These trips have been a fantastic insight for me to understand how our current product and service offerings are affecting your daily work (good or bad). I believe the only way to truly understand the needs are to understand the big picture and the situations.
During these visits, I heard a very common “complaint” regarding our support team. The main complaint is this, “Why do you force us to submit an incident reference before calling your 800 number”? After explaining the scenario to the users I have met with, I think their mind set changed. While on the airplane, I decided to write a blog about this topic, not only to communicate our reasons, but to solicit feedback on ways we can improve.
Being a support center and a voice for the client at Fellowship Technologies, we require that any phone call, email, or conversation about our product be logged into our support management system. The main reason we require this is for the data. We like to understand what the hot topics are, are there any patterns to incidents, are most of these issues education items (if so, how can we do better in education), etc… It basically helps me communicate real data to our management team on how the product is performing and what the pain points are in the application. Secondarily, it holds our support team accountable for resolving the issue from start to finish by creating a tracking mechanism of your incident (kind of like tracking your FedEx package). We hope to continually increase your view into the steps for resolution of your incident. Lastly, it provides a work flow mechanism in which we can efficiently assign tasks to other teams should we rely on their service for resolution.
To answer the question “Why do you force us to submit an incident reference before calling your 800 number”? I can say that we DO NOT require you to submit an incident before calling (keep in mind that your current edition of Fellowship One may not include phone support). I do however; strongly encourage you to do so. My motivation is not one sided. The concern is getting resolution to your incident as quickly as possible. While I know we have room for improvement in this area, the idea is to save you valuable administration time on the phone.
Submitting an incident is a completely automated process from Fellowship One to our support management system. This means we simply match your information from your user record with that of our support management system programmatically. If your account does not exist, one is immediately created in a fraction of a second. If we create the incident for you, we must ensure your record currently exists or create a new record for you. There may be times when we can’t find your name because we misspelled your last name or your church name has changed and we did not have it on file. Any number of reasons could delay the time you are on the phone just in the administrative tasks of making sure we tie the incident to the correct user.
The most important reason we ask you to create an incident is for your own security. In the Internet world, we are all too familiar with the tactics a devious person can pursue just to get valuable information. If you submit an incident over the application, we are more confident that you are a registered and authorized user of your church’s database. Should we just create accounts for any user that calls in stating their name and church, we run the risk of mistaking their identity for a valid user of your system. We take the security of your data very seriously and want to ensure we only speak to active, authorized, and valid users of your church’s database. Phone verification and emails are not secure enough to provide that confidence to our support team.
If you are having an emergency in the system (check-in outage), I would not expect you to submit an incident before you call. We certainly will handle those issues and try to eliminate any administrative tasks you would have to perform so you can focus on the issue at hand.
If you do not have an urgent issue, but you still need to speak to someone fairly quickly, here is what I have suggested. Simply submit an incident, briefly state the problem, and let us know you are about to call. (e.g. when searching for a person, an error screen appears and I am about to call). Your incident will be submitted, you have a reference number to provide the support specialist for quick look up, and then you can just carry on your conversation describing your current road block. We are then confident we are talking to a currently active and authenticated user of the church’s database. You have also eliminated the time it would take on the phone to create an incident for you or create a new record if you had not previously submitted incidents though Fellowship One.
I hope I have provided insight into the reasons we ask for a reference number upon calling our 800 number. I have had experiences with other vendors where I could not even speak to a support team member until I have submitted an incident. We are not saying that you can’t call if you don’t have a reference number, these are simply the reasons we prefer you to have created one. So the next time you hear “Thank you for calling Fellowship Technologies, may I have your support reference number please?”, you understand the motivation for the question. I am open to and appreciate any comments you may have.