Customer support registration?

Toine

Member
Join Date
Nov 2016
Location
NL
Posts
387
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.
 
Surprised to see only one reaction so far, but it is a good one :site:


While I have vivid and bad memories of IT help desk staff and their bloody support tickets from a former life in big corporate world, the terms "help desk support ticket system" indeed are what I need to look for. Thank you for bringing that up.

Funny thing is that Mantis BT was named, a free and open source bug tracking system used by many software developers around the world. I have used Mantis before, and am actually considering using it again. Not for the support questions but rather for bug tracking. Some suggest it can also be used for tracking customer support requests, but I think it is better tailored for the software bug tracking world. Using it for "help desk tickets" seems like driving screws in with a hammer. While it could basically work, it is not the ideal tool for the job and under most circumstances it seems a more suitable tool would yield better results.

I will look into the systems mentioned in the article you linked and do some further research into available support ticket systems. Thank you VAN, your suggestion is indeed much appreciated.
 
Toine said:
...Using it for "help desk tickets" seems like driving screws in with a hammer.
Driving screws in with a hammer is what we system integrators do best!

(sorry I don't have anything useful to say, but I couldn't help myself ;))
 
While I have vivid and bad memories of IT help desk staff and their bloody support tickets from a former life in big corporate world, the terms "help desk support ticket system" indeed are what I need to look for.

I think most of this frustration comes from some of the draconian IT measures implemented in companies worldwide. While working in maintenance with off-site IT support, I would have to create a ticket to get someone to type in an admin password whenever I needed to do something as simple as install a printer or change a keyboard layout. It actually took far longer to get the ticket than it did to get someone to put in the password... and what was worse was that the tickets did not serve as a feedback for IT to improve their "safety" measures leading to this dreaded image of the IT support systems.

Having that Word document structured per machine/software module and everyone contributing/reading it is a good way to have everyone informed about what are the common problems. Having it in a database format would allow you to register which customers reported the problem and assign priorities to each problem.
A good thing about the Word document is that if you want to update operator/maintenance manuals, you'll just have to copy/paste a put some lipstick.
 

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