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.
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:
- 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...
- 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.
