On Support From Tech Companies - Part II: Paid support

In our last post we talked about technical support for free products and services.

Image via  http://www.smallbiztechnology.com 

Today we'll talk about technical support for paid business products. 

If your business needs a software or hardware tool to function and you will lose productivity or money because that product is not functioning correctly, pay for support. This should be a no-brainer. If your business cannot afford support for the product, that means your business cannot afford the product - find and install a less expensive product. That's one of the services we provide for our clients. Your IT vendor or IT Department should be doing the same.

Without paid vendor support your business could be down for indefinite periods while you figure out how to get your business-critical product back up and running. 

If the business owner is OK with losing functionality in a technical product for hours or days while an employee or IT contractor figures out what's wrong, then this is not an issue. But remember the lost productivity of that employee - they are no longer working on the business, they're working on a distraction from making your business money. And it's wasting money on the IT contractor that should have been spent on critical vendor support. 

As I mentioned in the previous post, we spend much of our time finding the right technical vendors for our clients and then managing those vendors for our clients. We always include caveats that we require support contracts for the vendors we manage. They have the expertise. No matter how much we know about a product, we may not be up-to-date on the latest patches or fixes or glitches and how to quickly repair them. We facilitate the smooth operation of the products and ensure the right technical infrastructure is available for them, but it's always better if we or your IT department are working with a vendor, not on their own.

I have a long history of working with vendors and vendor support staffs. I've worked with some great ones, and I've worked with some that we never did get support and for the most part figured things out for ourselves. In the late 90s we would call Oracle Australia for support on the Oracle Financials ERP module because they were the only ones we found to be helpful. Our staff would work evenings to schedule those calls when the Australian Oracle staff was available. 

Two items in the Wall Street journal prompted this post. 

Google: Why We’re Not Going to Offer Professional Services

Google Apps Lacks Strong Enterprise Support, Says CIO


One of the reasons we are a Google Apps reseller and have moved away from Microsoft Exchange is that Google now provides telephone support for their paid products. That's why we tell every business - even if you're a solopreneur with only one Google Apps license - pay the $50 per seat so if you run into an issue you have a tech at Google to work on the problem. 


We've found Google support to be as good as any other vendors supporting our client products. They're quick to respond and knowledgeable. I'll be happy to throw them under the bus when they're not, but so far we've had nothing but good experiences with their support. 


The complaint of a lack of support from Google for Google Apps is old news - they've taken great strides in addressing those concerns and providing support, at least for the functionality in Google Apps. I haven't worked in the enterprise arena (Fortune 1000 companies) since the turn of the century. But I can tell you that I would have been pleased with Google in the 90s and they compare favorably to any of the enterprise vendors I was working with in the 80s and 90s. 

Visit On-Site Technical Solutions for information on how you can move to Google Apps or other Cloud Computing applications. Call us for all of your network computing and business IT needs. We can also help with your data security and mobile computing. Follow us online below. Call or text me at 1-949-212-2168.

 

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On Support From Tech Companies - Part I: Free Services

How much support is enough for a business application. What if the product is free? If the business is paying for the software?

One of the services we provide for our clients is Vendor Management. That means that we are the face of your company to your technical vendors. We've always found that our techs talking to their techs can get to the cause of problems and resolve them much quicker than a non-technical person talking to a tech. (This refers to technical problems - process problems with business line apps are usually best solved by the power user and the software company. We'll only intervene if needed and requested). 

We spend a significant amount of time and energy researching, working with, vetting and making recommendations for vendors in the small and mid-sized business market. We've found and work with some great ones, but we also work with some bad apples and steered our clients away from potentially unreliable vendors.  

These three links to articles, one from the NY Times and two from the Wall Street Journal, partly address this issue - unfairly to the tech companies.

Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind

Google: Why We’re Not Going to Offer Professional Services

Google Apps Lacks Strong Enterprise Support, Says CIO

Let's first talk about the lack of phone support from vendors providing free software addressed in the NY Times article: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I'm leaving out Quara because, well, it's a website and none of our clients use it or need us to manage their relationship with that website. 

We have two main reasons for recommending strongly against using free applications for critical business functions: 

1. They're free. This puts the customer completely at the mercy of the vendor.  Cool tool that's really helping your business? Oh, that's now gone because... 
2. Real-time support for free tools is usually non-existent.  

Should you use these three tools for you business? Absolutely. Should your entire marketing strategy revolve around these tools? Probably not. Even if the correct business decision is to rely almost exclusively on free tools for social media, always have a backup in place for specific functionality in the free tools and for the free tools themselves.

Because the tools are free and used by hundreds of millions of customers, expecting real-time, phone tech support is simply unreasonable. That's an unsupportable business model. Even providing live chat is asking too much of a vendor with that model and number of customers. 

I am much less sympathetic to vendors charging customers for their products, but even for some of them, my $4.99 a month doesn't really rate a live help desk. 

In the Times article, it took two days for the consumer to get his problem solved. Is that really unreasonable for a free product? From the social media consultant in that article:

“The phone users are getting left out,” said Mari Smith, a consultant who trains businesses in how best to use social media. She should know. Because her consulting company lists an 800 number, frustrated people call all the time, looking for help with their Facebook accounts. She eventually adjusted her phone message to callers to explain that she does not provide technical support for Facebook.

“I just got bombarded,” she said. “They’re just so desperate to reach a real human being.”

Ms. Smith said she believed that large Internet companies might someday return to phones to set themselves apart from competitors. “The ability to call up and get a real human being — the companies who can do that and go back to basics are really the ones that will be winning out and humanizing their brand,” she said.   

This points to a market for social media classes - but how many of the people looking for free support on a free product would be willing to pay even a nominal fee for a class? I would suggest that online companies that have products for which they can charge will need to have some kind of phone support at some point. But I'm not sure why the free ones will need to provide that same level of support.  

Even if it is unfair that these free products won't provide live support, don't expect them to trim their profits to suddenly set up enormous call centers to handle the volume of calls they would  field. 

If your business needs help with these tools either hire a consultant or use the help available. If your business is serious about social media, definitely hire a consultant or give someone in-house the time to actually manage your social media. We know some great social media consultants that can help any size company. If your business isn't serious about social media it may be better to stay on the sideline. I can put in contact with an expert who can help you figure that out. 

Next: Paid support for technical products. 

Visit On-Site Technical Solutions for information on how you can move to Google Apps or other Cloud Computing applications. Call us for all of your network computing and business IT needs. We can also help with your data security and mobile computing. Follow us online below. Call or text me at 1-949-212-2168.

 

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Google 24 x 7 phone support for all issues and all business customers

I've posted before about the importance of vendor support for business technology products. Back in March I talked about The Joy of Paid Support (from Google) encouraging businesses to use paid Google accounts to have support for their products. 


Google was sadly lacking in that area when Google Apps first launched. They got much better in the past year and now they've taken another step in customer satisfaction, at least for their business customers. 

To improve the experience of our customers, we now provide 24 x 7 phone support to small, medium, and large Google Apps for Business customers for all issues affecting the core services. Our customers may also receive support through our web-based support portal, online help forms, and online help center. All support cases are handled directly by trained Google Apps experts.

When using free technical products for a business, we're usually getting what we pay for... 

Official Google Enterprise Blog: 24 x 7 phone support for all issues and all business customers:

Visit On-Site Technical Solutions for information on how you can move to Google Apps or other Cloud Computing applications. Call us for all of your network computing and business IT needs. We can also help with your data security and mobile computing. Follow us online below. Call or text me at 1-949-212-2168.

 

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