I work for a company that builds and sells bespoke machines (with me being mostly involved in the PLC side of things). At times things break or wear out. So our engineers spend some of their time on after sales support. As we are a small business, and our customers cannot afford long down times, we aim to resolve issues quickly and move on. A side effect though is a resistance to spend much time in tracking what issues we meet, how we resolve them, how we can improve future versions to prevent them to happen, how much time we spent on different kinds of issues, etc. Of course some errors can occur again at other clients. When more than two or three people handle support requests, it can happen that we spend a lot of time troubleshooting a similar problem more than once.
For now we either write a few things down on paper for each support request, or fill in a template Word document with symptoms, cause and resolution, along with date, client/contact details and a few more relevant facts. This is better than not keeping track at all, but there is a lot of room for improvement. E.g. being able to track previous support questions from same client to see patterns, searching all support requests for keywords, categorizing defects and keeping track of time spent on different types of defects, recognizing specific parts that tend to fail more often than others, etc.
Worst case I can start from scratch and build a database plus application for this (web or desktop). But surely some (many?) of you have gone through this before. Are there readily available approaches, off-the-shelf products that can help streamline this process? We are not looking for high dollar ERP systems, expensive bespoke software and the like. Plain, simple, readily available and either free or cheap are the keywords.
Your suggestions and any success or disaster stories are most welcome.
For now we either write a few things down on paper for each support request, or fill in a template Word document with symptoms, cause and resolution, along with date, client/contact details and a few more relevant facts. This is better than not keeping track at all, but there is a lot of room for improvement. E.g. being able to track previous support questions from same client to see patterns, searching all support requests for keywords, categorizing defects and keeping track of time spent on different types of defects, recognizing specific parts that tend to fail more often than others, etc.
Worst case I can start from scratch and build a database plus application for this (web or desktop). But surely some (many?) of you have gone through this before. Are there readily available approaches, off-the-shelf products that can help streamline this process? We are not looking for high dollar ERP systems, expensive bespoke software and the like. Plain, simple, readily available and either free or cheap are the keywords.
Your suggestions and any success or disaster stories are most welcome.