Owning the support issue
Seth Godin has a great post (as usual) about Starting over with customer service. In it, he outlines an interesting approach to improving customer service.
One of his steps is using the right software:
It’s not like me to recommend a commercial product specifically like this, but I’m talking about Fogbugz because I think they’ve accidentally revolutionized a huge piece of management. What the software does is allow exactly one person at a time to ‘own’ a piece of a project, a bug, an issue. That person either solves it or pass it off. And the entire process is tracked and timestamped and tickled, so absolutely nothing is permitted to languish.
Those of us in the Clarify and Dovetail space have been used to this accidental revolutionizing functionality for a long time.
A support case (issue, trouble ticket, etc.) has one and only one owner. That strict ownership paradigm is built into the application. Everything that happens with that case has an activity log, tracking who did what and when. Cases can be assigned and taken from an individual, changing ownership. But it still has one owner.
Combine that with escalations (business rules, in Clarify terminology), and nothing can languish. 
- If the case is open for more than 4 hours, notify a manager.
- If the case is open for more than 8 hours, notify the manager’s manager.
- If the case is open for more than 12 hours, notify the manager’s manager’s manager.
- And on up the chain…
All of this applies to cases, change requests (bugs), part requests (RMAs), solutions (knowledgebase articles), and all other workflow objects in the application.
But even with great software, it still comes down to the people. People owning the issue. People taking responsibility. People being empowered to satisfy the customer completely, or moving it up the chain to someone who can. Spend all the money you want on great software (and being that I work for a software company, I certainly encourage that as much as possible), but don’t forget to invest in people.
