1. How To Build An Awesome Tech
Support Team
You might compare technical support to a team of jugglers. It requires a lot of
communication and teamwork to be able to handle flying bowling balls, knives,
flaming batons and pianos. For instance, you will need to know when a baton or
knife is heading your way, or who will be able to catch the piano. There are three
big processes to put in place in order to facilitate the communication required to do
this juggling.
• Decide on 3-5 levels of case severity and decide on service requirements for
each (how quickly you intend to respond and fix). If you already have priorities
defined in your maintenance contracts, try to use them. Discuss the plan with your
team and make sure they understand that top priority cases must be addressed first,
so someone must pay attention to incoming cases and prioritize them immediately.
• If you find that you don’t have the time to fix a problem so the customer
never sees it, an alternative is to publish the solution in order to allow them to
solve problems themselves. If you don’t have the time to provide all of the
necessary technical details, you can write up a rough version and copy-and-paste.
In order to make this work, you need to document the problem and solution
whenever you come across an issue that you haven’t seen before. Do it while you
still have all of the test sites in front of you. Eventually, if management allows it,
you might want to publish the problems and solutions in a public knowledgebase.
At Journyx, this has proved infinitely valuable for us. Our first knowledgebase was
a text document on a shared network drive, but now we have helpdesk software
with a knowledgebase feature.
• Software companies, take note: You need developers within your technical
support team. Asking the development team for bug patches frustrates both sides.
Developers don’t want to stop working on their new, fun codes, and you probably

2. resent that when you ask for a low-level design change, they give you a better error
message. Having your own developer eliminates this conflict, and he/she will find
and fix things you didn’t even know were broken.
Repeat After Me
Having the right attitude is integral towards a successful tech support team, so try
to encourage the following values among your people:
• I am responsible for getting this fixed, and for documenting the problem and
its solution.
• I understand that people are frustrated and angry, but I won’t take their anger
personally.
• I will empathize with the frustration that my customers feel, and tell them that
I understand and share their feelings. I will calm them down with my words and
manner.
• I will not accept abuse.
• I will not blame the customer.
Leading them by example goes a long way, so take them to lunch and tell stories
about how you handled various situations. Answer a few calls in front of them. Let
them see you embracing the right attitude and putting team values into practice,
and they will follow suit.
Baby Steps
Redesigning your team involves creating a game plan for progress. You do this by
setting short-, medium- and long-term goals for future improvement. Your current
state can be easily ascertained by asking yourself the following questions: How
many cases does tech support receive each week? How many are handled by other
departments? How many customer complaints reach the executive team?
Once you understand where you are, then you can decide where you’re going.
Short-term goals might be to get permission to go about rebuilding your tech
support team, choosing the tools you will use to accomplish this, and putting them

3. in place. Medium-term goals can be to handle all calls within the team and resolve
problems before customers become too angry. Finally, a long-term goal can be to
reduce support costs. You can do this by reducing costs per product line, product
launch, customer and customer attribute (e.g. market, size, industry, salesperson,
title of primary contact, etc.).
Customer data becomes viscerally important when you use it to make important
decisions for your company. For example, pairing customer attribute data with data
on income per customer will show you that some types of customers are more
expensive to support than others. This is useful information for senior management
to have when they are making decisions about such issues as product direction and
pricing.
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