There’s a running gag in the TV comedy The IT Crowd where every call to the IT department is handled by a tape machine playing back the same answers to the same questions. The joke lands with IT professionals because it’s unfortunately accurate: if you run any kind of software development business, you should expect a lot of your call volume to be dealing with eerily similar problems. So what can you do about it? In-house IT support can only go so far, and either way, the IT professionals on your payroll are better used elsewhere. This is why you will want to develop a troubleshooting strategy to help your customers help themselves—and your IT staff will thank you as well.
What Is a Troubleshooting Strategy?
Broadly speaking, your troubleshooting strategy is the series of steps you take when a customer calls in with a complaint. It walks the customer through the steps to fix common problems with your product. The idea is to only escalate problems that actually require the personal attention of a developer or engineer, while still ensuring clients are cared for in a timely fashion. This allows you to save your in-house experts for bugfixes and feature refinement while you deploy the troubleshooting strategy with a virtual answering service.
Identify the Problem
The reality of cloud computing, and software development in general, is that customers are unlikely to understand or accurately convey what the real issue they’re having is. The Neolithic example is the customer who can’t understand why their computer won’t turn on when it isn’t plugged in. With any luck, your customers will be a little smarter (although you will probably have to deal with some pretty boneheaded queries) but with any software, you should expect some consistent user issues. The first step on your troubleshooting to-do list, then, is to figure out what bucket the user’s issue is in. If it’s something really wild that doesn’t fit in a predetermined category, that’s often a good cue to escalate. Otherwise, you can move on to the next step.
Identify the Solution
Once you know what bucket the problem is in, the line to the solution should be fairly apparent. To return to the extremely basic example: plug the computer in. For cloud IT support, you should expect and prepare responses to common issues such as configuration problems in the client’s deployment or authentication with your cloud service. Your response should be as idiot-proof as possible and involve a direct step-by-step walkthrough of how to fix the issue. Screen-sharing tools are very useful here. Ideally, you will be able to fix 90% of customer call-ins at this stage, without needing to use more advanced issue tracking like Mantis.
Track Known Issues
If you run into a problem that can’t be solved with a step-by-step walkthrough, your escape condition for the troubleshooting strategy is to walk the customer through submitting a written ticket. It’s important to hold the client’s hand through the ticket writing process to ensure you get the crucial information your software engineers need to address the problem. This will assist greatly in the discovery process. Your goal is to quickly determine the factors causing the issue, develop a work-around, and deploy the workaround in your troubleshooting strategy while your engineers solve the problem on your end.
In broad strokes, this is what your IT strategy ought to look like in the trenches. Your goal is to minimize the time your staff is fixing issues for clients so that they can keep working on developing features, improving security, or other objectives. Developing a proactive troubleshooting strategy and deploying it via an outside service will prevent headaches for you and your staff, keeping them productive and on task.
